An Igbo Joke Told in English

Conversations with the So-Called Secular

Porcelain Bowl with Mixed Fruit, a Silver Salver and a Glass of Wine by Juriaen van Streeck

WHAT’S THE WORD for feeling at home and displaced at the same time? I feel like this often—at home and displaced in Nigeria, the country of my birth; at home and displaced in the UK, which I have called home since I was four years old.

I feel it most when I’m sitting, or dancing, in a room full of my relatives. My people, the Igbo ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria, are unapologetically loud. We speak loudly. We get married loudly. We christen our children loudly. We die loudly. Our celebrations are marked with a level of exuberance that matches the importance of these rites of passage.

My people love words. When we gather—often in the late hours after a family event, when we have slipped off our shoes and taken off our tight gele head ties—we sit down to gist, and my uncles begin to tell their stories. They are long, stretched-out tales. They are jokes we’ve all heard before: poking fun at people from neighboring villages, spinning an unlikely yarn about what happened when the Igbo man met the lion, each caught somewhere between fable and gibe.

Some of the world’s greatest storytellers have come from among us: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, along with Chinua Achebe, who begins his iconic tale, Things Fall Apart, with this: “Among the Igbo, the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” We pride ourselves on it, this innate expression of truth and connection through story.

It’s in our blood.

THERE IS SOMETHING in the familiarity of these stories. I remember sitting at the feet of my elders as a young child, soaking in that atmosphere of storytelling. I would hang on every word, and when it got to the punchline, we’d all erupt in laughter—except me. The thing was, though the story was told in English, the punchline would often be delivered in Igbo, our mother tongue—that is what made it so funny. But I, not knowing the language well, would look puzzled, and then my parents or an aunt or uncle would try to explain it to me in English, but the joke lost its power in translation.

It was here at the foot of my relatives’ feet, sometimes in the sticky heat of Nigeria, that I felt both at home and displaced. I was at home with my family—people who looked like me, nestled within the comfort of resemblance—but an uneasy sense of displacement reared its head at the punchline or when conversations in Igbo swirled around me, and I felt like I did not understand an important part of me. Perhaps the most important.

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to a man in his language, that goes to his heart.” When I hear my mother tongue, it sounds like a long-forgotten memory; something buried deep inside me that wants to be unearthed. It feels both strange and familiar. It feels like home, albeit a home I have never lived in, and yet long to return to. It’s like that feeling I have when I leave the house and can’t shake the niggle that I have forgotten something—a part of me left behind. My mother tongue is my heart language, but for me and many first- and second-generation immigrants, this mother tongue is a language we don’t speak.

WHAT’S THE WORD for the moment when you just can’t remember the word you’re looking for, and you reach back into the annals of your memory, mentally running through a dark tunnel of letters and phrases until you find it illuminated? What’s the word for that feeling of relief when you remember it?

As I get older, or perhaps it was ever thus, I find myself grasping for temporarily forgotten words often, especially when I write. While writing this paragraph, I have already had to search my mind for the words annals, illuminated, and grasping. I have birthed two children, and I’ve read that a mother’s brain pushes out unnecessary information—like people’s names, colors, the names of kitchen utensils—to keep the important information in. Without the right language, though, we falter.

Earlier this year, I stood outside the gates of a 14th-century chapel in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris. Our party of three, two Brits and an American, were there to see the “Black Madonna of Paris”—also known as the statue of Our Lady of Good Deliverance—which had long been a focus of prayers by well-known pilgrims like saints Vincent de Paul and Francis de Sales. The statue is housed in the chapel of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Thomas of Villeneuve, but the sisters did not seem to want to let us in.

One of the nuns stood sternly at the gate to keep us out. Perhaps it was the language barrier that was the real problem. She was speaking quickly in French, and my rusty A-level comprehension could not keep up. We all looked puzzled—the sister communicating in French, and us trying to guess what she meant. Eventually, we sought the help of a passerby, an Australian who attempted to translate for us, and were soon let in. The language barrier was temporarily crossed, thanks to the help of a translator—a bridge for us to cross the chasm of misunderstanding.

WHEN IT COMES to communicating our faith, we need such translators to act as bridges between people of faith and those for whom the language of faith has become alien. What’s the word for a society that has lost this language of faith?

Many years ago, I sat with a friend over brunch, and together we attempted to articulate what each of us sensed was our calling from God. Mine was this: to communicate the good news of the Christian faith to a world that no longer understands it. This is what I have dedicated my life to. In all that I do—in my writing and speaking and storytelling—I want to act as a bridge between the sacred and the so-called secular. I want to translate the wisdom of Scripture for a “Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted” world, as Walter Percy writes in Love in the Ruins—a world that no longer speaks the language of faith, one for whom this language is lost.

I often think of Acts 17, where Paul at the Areopagus is attempting to speak the language of the culture to communicate the heart language of faith. Some listeners simply don’t get it: What is this babbler trying to say? Some are curious. Listening to Paul, they feel the pang of recognition of a lost language that connects them with the God in whom they live and move and have their being. A call back to something they had forgotten, that they couldn’t quite put their finger on, even amid a cacophony of Grecian deities.

I frequently think about this passage in my work leading Theos, a think tank attempting to tell a better story about the Christian faith to a world that often does not have the language to understand it. In the UK, much has been made of the 2021 census figures, which showed a significant decline in the numbers of people describing themselves as Christian in England and Wales. For the first time, this number is less than half of the population.

Perhaps the public’s comprehension is just a little rusty. Many older people were raised in the Christian faith—they know the words to hymns and can recite Bible passages they learned in Sunday school. Perhaps they never spoke the language of faith at all. Many of the younger generations find the church completely alien, as it was never been part of their experience.

The figures show, though, that people are still searching; they’re longing to converse in these ancient languages of faith. We see it through the numbers of nonreligious people, those who would call themselves “spiritual”—who seek after God in tarot and crystals and manifesting. Something within them is longing to reconnect with the heart language they never knew they could speak.

THERE ARE THOSE, young and old, in the Anglo-American world who feel the tug of the spiritual. Though they cannot put words to it, they feel it when they walk into a vast cathedral and sit in the stillness in the presence of the numinous. They cannot articulate why this place might feel at once otherworldly and yet also like coming home. Some might try to name this feeling with vocabulary that does not quite do it justice. Supernatural? Mystical? Magical? It feels just like retelling an Igbo joke in English—it doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Language fails us. The experience gets lost in translation. If I describe this thing simply as God, there may be a hundred different images running through another’s mind. There is a place for language, but sometimes language is not enough. Sometimes what is required to translate the heart language of faith is to show and not tell.

Sometimes, our task as translators is to make people feel what we are trying to say rather than tell them. Or perhaps it is essential to do both. That’s why we at Theos don’t just publish beautifully written reports, filled with insight and argument and statistics. We also try to engage the heart through photography and animation and music and poetry. The heart language is so often spoken through the arts. It’s here that we might find the vocabulary without words to communicate deeper truths. Paul knows this, which is why at the Areopagus he connects the truths he is trying to convey about God with the Greeks’ “own poets.”

This place, where Paul stands to tell truths about God, is a gathering of the governing council of Athens. It was where important people conversed and decided on how things should be. In traditional Igbo culture, we have our own Areopagus of sorts. The obodo is a space outside where benches are placed under a network of trees. It is in this place that people gather together to discuss community matters and tell each other stories. It is not a space for the elite, but for all.

I HAVE A DISTANT MEMORY of watching Tales by Moonlight, which took its name from the concept of an obodo, as a child in Nigeria. Though Sesame Street was much-loved in our house, it was this weekly Nigerian children’s program with its folk tales and fables that helped to teach me something of the importance of story: the communication of deep truths about what it is to be human. Here, I learned that truth and beauty are found in community.

I wonder whether the memory of the obodos of home were evoked when Igbo people, who had been enslaved and taken from our shores, met under the trees. It was in these spaces, away from the prying eyes of their slave owners, that their moonlight tales spoke of a God who could break their chains. It is here the Negro spirituals were created, putting words to the language of divine liberation.

I worry about the future of Igbo, about a distant time when no one will speak it. Just as religion is in decline, so are many of the world’s languages. In fact, it is thought that of the 7,000 documented languages spoken in the world, 1,500 languages may be extinct by the end of the century. Just as secularism squeezes out faith until fewer and fewer people speak it, almost half of the world’s languages are in danger of becoming extinct; squeezed out in favor of globally dominant languages. According to one study, a language is lost every three months—but this rate could triple over the next 40 years.

I worry about how to teach my children both my language and my heart language. I want them to learn Igbo, to know they come from a people who are proud, generous, hard-working, and who tell great stories. And I want them to speak the heart language of faith, for it not to become rusty or forgotten or cast aside, but for it to be a living, breathing relationship with God.

The lingua franca of the age has been secularism—at least in the global north. For some, the ideal is a society in which this is the dominant language spoken, while the languages of faith are privatized, pushed to the sidelines, spoken in hushed whispers. My children need us to translate, to pass on this heart language to them as they grow in a world that might lose the tools with which to speak about it unless something is done.

TO KEEP LANGUAGE ALIVE we must keep speaking it, even when it is easier not to. A few years ago, I stood in front of 800 people at St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London to deliver a talk, alongside other panelists and speakers, for the book launch of Ben Lindsay’s We Need to Talk About Race. As I stepped up to the podium, ready to deliver my 12-minute speech, I felt an overwhelming urge to sing the words of an Igbo worship song that I had planned to read out:

Imela, Imela (Thank You! Thank You!)
Okaka, Onyekeruwa (Great and mighty creator of the world)
Imela, Imela, (Thank You! Thank You!)
Eze m Oh (My King)

There was something redemptive for me in this moment, singing a song of praise to God in my heart language, my mother tongue, despite feeling rusty and inadequate, and like I wasn’t quite saying the words right—and to have done so in this vast cathedral, an iconic part of the London skyline. Perhaps it didn’t matter that I wasn’t pronouncing the words exactly right. What mattered was that I was saying them, practicing this language in conversation with the Creator God. Just like with our faith, in language, in speech, in conversation, in community, there must always be grace. And perhaps that is all that matters.

Chine McDonald is a writer, broadcaster, director of the religion and society think tank Theos & Author of Unmaking Mary: Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood & God is Not a White Man.

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Ideas

The Tithe That Binds

Myles Werntz

Contributor

We’re happy to tackle church disunity over age, race, and politics. But the Bible has a lot more to say about wealth.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Many pixels have been spent in recent years trying to sort out how and why American society—and American Christianity in particular—is so divided. In the church, a new cottage industry has emerged promising to help us mend our fences.

The usual suspects make regular appearances in our stories about church division: the boomers who never got on board with the seeker-sensitive movement, the white southerners who largely failed to heed the testimonies of their Black-church neighbors, the vehement partisans on both sides of the aisle.

In recent years, much work has been done to address these divisions over theology, race, and politics. But another source of division, one identified in Scripture more than any of these, has largely been ignored: wealth.

If we’re looking for what pulls American Christians apart—both throughout culture and within particular churches—we cannot make full scriptural sense of the problem without thinking about money. And our hesitancy to bring it up is all the more reason to do so, for the Bible is full of counsel about the divisiveness of wealth.

Before I continue, however, it’s important to name what I do not mean. To speak of money as a source of division is not to say we as Christians should feel bad about being able to pay our bills and provide for our families. Some Christians are called to voluntary poverty, sure, but not all. I’m also not suggesting Christians are uncharitable with our wealth. On the contrary, a growing body of evidence suggests that Americans who go to church (and other houses of worship) give more money to charitable organizations, and that generosity with time also corresponds to religious belief. Even after the tumult of the pandemic, Christian giving has mostly stabilized.

We should also recognize that the Old Testament—where wealth is often seen as a sign of divine favor—can complicate how we think about money. The wealth of Abraham marks him as blessed by God, for example. Job’s initial wealth is connected to his faithfulness (1:1–3, 9–10), and Ecclesiastes says possessions come from God’s hand (5:19–20).

But for every equation of material wealth with blessing, the Old Testament also gives us pictures of wealth creating division among God’s people. Consider Solomon, who oppressed his own people to build the temple and homes for foreign dignitaries (1 Kings 5:13–14; 9:24, 12:4), or David, rebuked as a rich man oppressing a poor peasant (2 Sam. 12).

The New Testament makes even clearer the temptations of wealth and money’s ability to divide God’s people. The Letter from James alone should give us serious pause: It links our desire for wealth to preferential treatment (2:1–7) and to murder, covetousness, fights, and quarrels (4:1–3). James warns the rich in particular that hoarded wealth corrodes, distorts, and leads to other sins, like defrauding and oppressing the poor (5:1–6). We should take note. And when Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us the story of a law-abiding man who did not follow Jesus because of his wealth, we should take note of that too (Matt. 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30).

The teachings here are stark and consistent. It is not that those with money are necessarily immoral but that wealth attracts tempting problems: prestige, power, luxury, flattery, the illusion of self-sufficiency.

In 1 Timothy 6:17–19, Paul identifies not just the love of money as an issue but wealth itself as a dangerous source of alternative hope:

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.

This sheds light on James’s wisdom of how wealth divides a congregation. Money shapes us, schooling us in how we hope, how we think of ourselves and others, what kind of lives we seek. This is how wealth can divide a congregation.

When early Christians pondered these passages and wealth’s power, some, like Clement of Alexandria, emphasized the disposition of the heart: Great wealth is not a problem, he taught, so long as one is generous, for the virtuous could not be hurt by their possessions. But Clement also recognized that, realistically, few are capable of this kind of virtue.

A more common interpretation was that of John Chrysostom, who preached six different sermons on Lazarus and the rich man to demonstrate the dangers wealth poses. And as eminent historian Peter Brown demonstrates, Chrysostom was far from alone in his approach. Early Christians frequently understood wealth to be toxic to the soul, and they encouraged rich to rid themselves of their wealth throughout their lives. As church historian Helen Rhee has shown, preachers in the early church warned of the dangers of riches for the sake of wealthy souls.

Evaluating this status in absolute terms is notoriously difficult: One can be manifestly poor in America and yet wealthy by global standards. But in any case, Scripture and the early church, in their warnings about wealth, emphasize persistent generosity and persistent use of our resources for the sake of others. To treat wealth as indifferent is to invite it to shape our loves, our practices, and ultimately, our ways of gatherings as the people of God. The point in these warnings is that wealth and the pursuit of wealth does work on us, and that the Christian should hold wealth loosely as a result.

So what do we do if wealth finds us? Sometimes this may happen to us as Christians through no fault of our own—inheritance, hard work, or skills that particular societies value may bring great money our way, like it or not.

Whatever the circumstances, the counsel of Scripture and the early church is clear: Wealth comes with danger. We may like to think we’ll be virtuous enough to handle it well, but if we are wise, we will doubt that instinct. The greater our wealth, the greater our folly to think we will succeed where David and Solomon failed. Sin, including division from other Christians, is more often than not how Scripture depicts such stories ending.

Looking at wealth as an explanation of divisions in the American church doesn’t require us to dismiss or downplay other factors like age, race, and politics. Rather, it helps us see a fuller picture. For example, older generations have typically been able to accumulate more wealth than younger generations. Partisanship correlates with income, too. White Americans have more wealth than any other Americans, and average incomes vary substantially among Christian denominations.

Wealth shapes who our companions are. We might not want to admit it, but studies consistently demonstrate the role wealth plays in shaping where we go to church, whom we befriend, who is beside us in the pews. And if we only attend to other sources of division, wealth operates unseen, an invisible influence over every part of our lives, a silent danger.

Thankfully, the guidance of Scripture and the first Christians still holds: Use wealth for good, and quickly.

Accumulation of great wealth is not an opportunity for license, for building bigger barns (Luke 12:16–21). It presents Christians with an obligation to prompt service and generosity. In the congregations of the New Testament, we see a mixture of rich and poor, of those with great means and those with less. The wealthy have responsibilities the poor do not. Paul fittingly names and thanks those who host the churches’ gatherings because they are the ones with the means to make those meetings possible—and often to cover the expenses of the church at large, to pay for buildings and the livelihoods of ministers and missionaries.

“Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Luke 12:48, RSV). As Henri Nouwen wrote in his little-read book on fundraising, the giving of wealth becomes a way for the giver to share in the mission of the church. Generosity redirects wealth to meet real needs, not least the need to avoid the grave spiritual risks of riches.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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News

Where Humility Leads to Lots of Home Runs

Emily Belz in Dallas

Dallas Baptist University is a small school with one of the top programs in college baseball. What’s the secret to its greatness?

The Dallas Baptist University baseball team celebrates a walk-off win.

Eddie Kelly / Dallas Baptist University

Coach Dan Heefner had a question.

It was the first week of school at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), and the August sun was hot over the small Christian campus nestled into the hills along a shimmering lake on the outskirts of Dallas. Heefner ducked into an air-conditioned meeting room near the baseball field and stood in the front. The room was packed with young men.

Unexpectedly for DBU’s size, these men form one of the best teams in college baseball.

“Who are you?” Heefner said.

They are student athletes. Baseball players. They want to go to the College World Series. But Heefner, head coach of the team since 2008, thinks it’s important for them to realize they aren’t just athletes.

“If your identity is that you’re a baseball player,” he said, “you’re going to need it: ‘I have to be drafted. I have to play. I have to be an all-American.’ You need it. That’s a heavy burden. You can be on top of the world, and you can crash fast.”

Then he started talking about Paul in the Bible—“a high-drive guy”—and how he was very successful at what he did but had to find himself, his real identity, in Christ.

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture and rose on the third day,” Heefner said, quoting 1 Corinthians 15 from memory. He kept going, rattling off the whole passage.

Then he had had another question.

“What are we trying to do here? What is the most important thing?” Heefner asked the room.

“Be present,” said one player.

“Be a man built for others,” said another.

It’s the kind of answer you learn by heart if you play for Heefner. Alumni of the small school’s baseball program repeat it frequently when asked to explain the success of the team, what it meant to them to play for Heefner, and how it shaped them. They say being a “man built for others” is about humility, and humility is a pillar of the program.

DBU is, in many ways, a humble school. About 2,400 students live on DBU’s campus, which is small enough that they can walk from one end to the other in just a few minutes.

But the baseball team is something else. The DBU Patriots have made it to the Division I playoffs 13 out of the past 17 seasons that Heefner has coached. In that time, the team has a remarkable .667 winning record. The only other teams to have that kind of success are elite programs at comparatively massive universities. Louisiana State University has an undergraduate enrollment of 33,000. Texas A&M has 61,000.

But this modest Christian school is a baseball powerhouse. It is one of the top ten schools producing major-league draft picks. Players come into Heefner’s program wanting to go to the major leagues, and many have made it to the top.

But he reminds them, over and over, that getting to the majors is not really what this is all about.

“A big verse for us as a program has been Psalms 115, which says, ‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness,’” Heefner told CT.

He recited the verse from memory, sitting in his office at DBU. The office is probably not that different from a lot of college coaches’ offices, with trophies from triumphs past and pictures of his family and former players. But the shelves are also full of theology books from Jerry Bridges, Tim Keller, and others.

“That [verse] brings up the next question: What does that mean, to glorify God?” Heefner said. He answered his own question with another verse off the top of his head, Isaiah 43:7, saying, “‘Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.’ He created us to glorify him.”

Glorifying God is reflecting God’s attributes, he explained.

“Should we be striving to be great on the field? Absolutely! Because we’re trying to imitate him,” he concluded.

Heefner himself played for Elliot Johnson, who is in the coaching hall of fame, and learned a lot from him about coaching and being a Christian. Today, Heffner is a remarkable coach, especially when he teaches hitting, alumni of the program said. Other schools have tried to recruit him away from DBU, but he has stayed because he likes how openly he can integrate faith into the rhythm of the team. You can’t talk to him for more than a few minutes before he’s weaving paragraphs of Scripture into conversation.

For Heefner, integrating faith into training is essential for a group of young men to be happy playing baseball together. He really cares about players’ friendships. Heefner thinks players listen to each other more than they do to coaches, so those relationships are key.

The baseball players live in townhouse dorms together. And most of them participate in a voluntary program called The Oaks—a spiritually focused group for the team led by players and former players.

Tom Poole, a senior and a slugger, said those were the things that drew him from Calgary, Canada, to play for DBU. He started out at a school that was not religious but then transferred to DBU.

The Christian discipleship aspect was new and “what I needed,” Poole said in an interview. Last season he was the team’s designated hitter and was very active in The Oaks’ study group, where he has found deep friendships with his teammates.

“I can’t get enough of it,” Poole said. “The baseball game is cool, but being with everyone else is way cooler.”

Part of what Heefner is offering his players is a vision of biblical masculinity that pushes them to be their best—and remain humble.

Heefner said there was a time when he was worried humility wasn’t a useful virtue in baseball. He said to himself, “We’ll stink if we have a bunch of humble baseball players.” But then he was convicted that the Bible talks about humility constantly and he couldn’t pick and choose what parts he liked.

Humility, in his view, is critical to being a team. The way Heefner talks about biblical humility to his players is being “others focused.” You can be humble and strive to be great. You can be humble and be part of a great baseball team.

“If we create an environment where you can reach your full potential, and then at the same time you’re totally sold out to being a great teammate, it’s an unbelievable place to show up to every day,” he said.

Baseball people might say Heefner’s a master of player development. But Heefner calls it discipleship. For him, discipleship should be players’ top priority, then their college education is next. Winning baseball games comes third.

Winning’s still important, though. The team attracts good players because of Heefner’s proven record of making them better. Nate Frieling, who was a coach under Heefner and is now senior associate athletic director at DBU, sees an evangelistic logic to this.

“If he … doesn’t help them get better at baseball, they’re not going to care what he has to say about his faith or the Bible,” Frieling said.

Players often find relief in Heefner’s Christian message. The pressure to please their coaches, their parents, their teammates, and potential big-league scouts is constant. But he tells them to “honor, glorify, and please God” and then “trust him with the results.”

It’s not the typical way colleges recruit top players. This is especially true now that NCAA rules allow players to transfer to different schools without penalty. Since athletes can also make money from their personal brands, known as their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and since NIL collectives have formed around big programs to recruit and pay players, bigger schools draw bigger funding, promising bigger payouts to potential players.

That’s a problem for small Christian colleges. What they have to offer, instead, is deeper relationships and spiritual discipleship. That’s always been the special ingredient at DBU. While DBU’s baseball program has a hot reputation, Heefner makes clear in recruiting that Christian discipleship is a big part of what the team does.

He’ll help players get better at baseball. But he’s also going to teach them the Bible’s answer to the question “Who are you?”

It worked for Matt Duce. He was a catcher on the team from 2015 to 2018. He was drafted by two major-league teams and played in the minors for the St. Louis Cardinals.

He said he noticed that many first-round draft picks didn’t have great relationships with their coaches or teammates. They always had the mentality that they wanted to move on quickly, move up to the next level. That wasn’t true at DBU. Duce had nine groomsmen in his wedding: One of them was his brother, and the other eight were DBU baseball players.

“When I got here at 18, I saw a coach that had pretty much memorized the Gospel of Matthew, and he was incredible coach,” said Duce, now the athletics director at DBU. “And it just clicked. It was what I had been searching for all these years.”

Alumni of the baseball program recite the same Bible verses Heefner does, like Psalm 115:1 (“not to us, Lord”) and Isaiah 43:7 (“created for my glory”).

Duce quoted John 15:5, where Jesus tells his disciples to abide in him.

“We should all just be having an abiding relationship with Christ,” he said. “And then, because of that relationship, you can go hit a ton of home runs and do so for a greater glory.”

He laughed and added, “It’s fun to be good.”

DBU will play the first game of the season against North Dakota State on February 14. The game will be broadcast on ESPN+.

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News

Wire Story

Wheaton Tangled in Online Spat Over Trump Appointee

Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

The college said “unchristian comments” led it to delete a message congratulating alumnus Russell Vought.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

On Friday, Wheaton College publicly congratulated Russell Vought, a conservative activist and architect of Project 2025 who attended the evangelical school, for his confirmation by the US Senate as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Within hours, hundreds of Vought’s fellow alumni had complained that Vought’s agenda contradicted the values they had been taught at Wheaton.

By Saturday morning, the college had deleted the post, and a new social media barrage, this time from Vought’s supporters, had begun.

The college has defended its original post, and its subsequent pivot, as “deliberately non-partisan,” as its institutional commitments demand.

“Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought regarding his senatorial confirmation to serve as the White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget!” said the now-deleted social media post on Friday.

One commenter responded that Vought was not only working at cross-purposes to Christian values but to his fellow alums: “The work that he is doing negatively and directly impacts countless other Wheaton alum who are seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this country and around the rest of the world,” the commenter said, per screenshots of the exchanges that were deleted along with the original post but obtained by RNS.

SAD! https://t.co/TaXfiuWHc1
— Russ Vought (@russvought)
SAD! https://t.co/TaXfiuWHc1
— Russ Vought (@russvought) February 8, 2025

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 8, 2025

After deleting the post, the college backpedaled, writing, “On Friday, Wheaton College posted a congratulations and a call to prayer for an alumnus who received confirmation to a White House post.” On Saturday morning, it wrote, “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government. However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online. It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute.”

In an email to RNS, Wheaton College spokesperson Joseph Moore said the deletion of the initial post was “in no way an apology for having expressed congratulations or for suggesting prayers for our alumnus.”

“The social media post led to more than 1,000 hostile comments, primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought, in just a few hours,” wrote Moore. “It was not our intention to embroil the College or Mr. Vought in a political discussion or dispute. Thus, we removed the post, rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction.”

The decision, however, led to further backlash from conservative alumni and activists. Wheaton alumnus Eric Teetsel, chief executive officer of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank founded by Vought in 2021 and credited for advising on Project 2025, called the decision an “act of cowardice.”

“Nothing about (the school’s) behavior was biblical or resembled the values Wheaton purports to stand for, and by deleting the post and apologizing the school has—yet again—compromised instead of standing firm for what is good, right, and true,” wrote Teetsel on social media site X, citing recent appearances at the school by Christian figures who oppose Trump.

Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, is listed as an author of Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term in office, and has recently spoken about his desire to traumatize federal workers and to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica. Last week, The Atlantic reported that while Project 2025 called for limiting USAID’s funding, the president’s actions to shut down the agency and freeze foreign aid went beyond what was included in the proposal.

Vought has also been a behind-the-scenes leader in opposing critical race theory in churches and school boards and has openly supported forms of Christian nationalism.

One Wheaton graduate who has worked on foreign assistance inside and outside the federal government said she agreed with Wheaton’s decision to delete their congratulatory post. “There are Wheaton alumni out there who really do follow Jesus’ teaching in the gospel, but they aren’t always the ones who are powerful, and so it’s incredibly frustrating to see those who, I think, don’t necessarily embody the gospel taking power in the Trump administration,” she said.

As an example, she cited Vought’s support of freezing foreign assistance and decision to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from predatory practices, as “deeply against the letter and spirit of the whole biblical witness.”

- More from Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

News

Died: Wayne Myers, Missionary Who Taught Mexican Evangelicals to ‘Live to Give’

Livia Giselle Seidel

Through fundraising for small congregations and building roofs for churches, the American embodied generosity during his 75-plus years of ministry.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Ministerios Cash Luna, Flickr

Wayne Myers, who boosted church construction for thousands of congregations and promoted a culture of giving generously throughout his 75-plus years of ministry in Mexico, died peacefully at his home in Mexico City on February 1 at the age of 102.

Known for his motto, Vivir para dar y vivir para servir (“Live to give and live to serve”), Myers built relationships with pastors of megachurches, midsize churches, and tiny village gatherings, frequently guest preaching at and leading fundraisers for them. Through partnerships with church leaders, he cared for widows and orphans, distributed food in remote parts of the country and in Indigenous communities, and organized weeks-long evangelistic campaigns.

From the pulpit, Myers always smiled at the congregation, praising God regardless of his circumstances. He frequently exclaimed, “¡Aleluyita!,” adding his own Spanish customization to the common praise. Known for the moral and financial integrity of his ministry, Myers often proclaimed that a life of faithful obedience to the Lord is “dulce como un mango” (“sweet as a mango”).

Myers touched thousands of Mexican evangelical churches, a reality he often acknowledged through self-deprecation.

“We have not raised 6,000 churches; we have helped to build them up,” he once said. “If I had raised 6,000 churches, Paul the apostle would ask for permission to leave heaven to study my methods.”

Many local leaders saw him as the most influential missionary in Mexico in the last hundred years.

“Paul said that he had on himself the marks of Christ,” Efraín González, senior pastor at Centro de Avivamiento Naucalpan, said at his memorial service last week. “Mexico could very well say that it bears the marks of Wayne Myers’s ministry.”

William Wayne Myers was born on August 31, 1922, to farmers in Morton, Mississippi. He gave his life to Christ as a teenager when his cousin, who was serving as a missionary in Argentina, shared the gospel with him during a visit home. His cousin also advised his new Christian relative to attend a local Baptist church.

“That church took me to the foot of the Cross,” Myers later recalled. “But they left me there!”

During World War II, Myers enlisted in the US Navy, where he served aboard the USS Enterprise. During his 19 months on what would become the country’s most decorated ship, he was struck by the faith of some of his fellow sailors.

“I saw a small group of believers full of the Holy Spirit. … They prayed hard!” Myers later shared. While at first intimidated by the group that prayed so loudly that “their prayers could be heard from the stern all the way to the bow,” he eventually joined them.

One night, in the middle of a prayer session with the group, Myers said he encountered the Holy Spirit for the first time.

“During five hours, that glory that resurrected Jesus from the grave washed all over me, revealing Jesus to me in a whole new dimension,” he later recalled. “He called me to serve him.”

After his military service, Myers attended a Bible college in Pasadena, California. There, in addition to attending 22 hours of classes a week, Meyers began to pray anywhere between 4 and 15 hours a day. During one of these times, “[God] told me in an audible voice, ‘Son, I’m calling you to Mexico to serve my whole body, not to raise a body for yourself,’” he said.

Obedient to his calling, Myers left for Mexico, unable to speak Spanish and without a specific destination. “I had one thing going for me when I went to Mexico,” he later remarked. “I knew that I knew nothing.”

During his first years there, Myers floated from city to city, serving in various churches’ children’s ministries and organizing small evangelistic events. He helped fundraise for local pastors who wanted to share the gospel on the radio, work he continued throughout his life.

In the 1960s, Myers befriended Gordon and Freda Lindsay, the evangelists and missionaries behind Christ For The Nations college (CFN) in Dallas, joining forces with them on their church infrastructure projects. After Gordon passed away in 1973, Myers continued partnering with Freda, accompanying her on overseas ministry trips to promote CFN missions projects. In 2023, the ministry even named an award in his honor.

Though Myers’s preaching and personal faith had strong charismatic influences, he never aligned with a particular denomination and served alongside churches across the theological spectrum. In the beginning of his ministry, Myers mainly served with Assemblies of God and independent Pentecostal churches. But as nondenominational churches became more common, he extended his counsel and resources to the Mexican evangelicals planting these congregations.

“I abhor sectarianism because it is born of a spirit of superiority, and this is the opposite of the spirit of Jesus Christ, who came and served us even to the death on the Cross!” he said.

When Myers was preparing to move to Mexico, he said he heard God give him clear instructions regarding the financial support of his ministry. He could not disclose personal needs, he could not buy anything on credit, and he could not borrow money from anyone.

These calls for financial faithfulness shaped Myers’s family life and ministry. Miguel, who Myers and his wife, Martha, took in at age 12, recalled how Myers once pawned the family refrigerator in order to fulfill his financial pledge to help a small congregation.

Myers frequently preached on generosity. He believed without a shadow of a doubt that “we only own what we give away,” explaining that what Christians gave away was an investment in heaven. He also taught that not giving to God according to income forced God “to reduce our income to match our giving.”

Despite his willingness to preach at churches like Casa de Dios, controversial pastor Cash Luna’s $44 million state-of-the-art congregation, Myers never wavered in his messages on Christian financial charity.

Beyond Mexico, Myers supported orphanages in Central America, Asia, and Africa and founded an initiative to help pastors’ widows. Myers also helped fundraise and build connections for missionaries who translated the Bible into various indigenous languages in Mexico and across Latin America.

Over time, the church construction ministry that Myers had started years earlier added 6,000 roofs to congregations in Mexico, as well as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. Myers kept a handwritten log of projects he believed God had asked him to support. (Some said the number had surpassed 10,000 by the end of his life.)

As he grew older, Myers struggled to slow down. When he was 90, his doctors told him that his heart was only working at 50 percent and advised him to radically reduce his ministry commitments. Nevertheless, Myers continued to preach up to four times a week, and at the age of 101 he was still preaching one-hour sermons, inviting those present to give their hearts to Christ if they had not done it before.

“We honor the legacy of a true hero of the faith,” wrote Marcos Richards, pastor of Comunidad Olivo, one of the largest churches in Ciudad Juárez and Myers’s close friend. “An example like few others of generosity, integrity, and dedication to the gospel.”

Myers is survived by his three biological children, David, Rebecca, and Paula, along with Miguel and several grandchildren. His wife, Martha, died in 2021.

- More from Livia Giselle Seidel

Books

Review

Ross Douthat Bets on Belief

Brad East

The Catholic journalist’s new book updates Pascal’s wager for our secular-yet-spooky age.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Something is happening. Christianity is having a moment. Our culture is shifting. Whether this change will be minor, temporary, or tectonic, we cannot know. Nor can we know where it will end—or even whether it will be good.

What we can say is that much that was certain is now up for grabs. Much that seemed settled has been shaken up. Old orthodoxies are under assault. Will new ones emerge? Or will the real article, orthodoxy proper, reemerge as the only viable answer to the restless longings of human hearts?

Time will tell. For now, we should be keen to read the signs of the times. Intellectuals are converting. Atheists are softening. Agnostics are hungry. No longer are believers on the back foot, defending alleged irrationality before a hostile consensus. Crystals and hexes, seances and saints, meditation and manifesting, angels and aliens, goop and God—the whole syncretistic bundle is out in the open now. Religion is afoot in the public square.

Not that it ever went anywhere, except underground. It’s true that measurable, institutional forms of religion have been in decline—and not only in Europe, where the loss is most pronounced, but also here in the US, where religiosity has always been more spectacular, entrepreneurial, and grassroots, reveling in its disestablishment.

Scholars like Phil Zuckerman are right to hold Christians’ feet to the fire on this point: Narrowly defined, the secularization thesis is demonstrably true. Millions of people in the West now live lives devoid of formal religion and default to supposing the supernatural is of no relevance to their daily concerns. This is genuinely new in human history.

But the secularization thesis is often overextended into a false story of inevitability and materialism. As it turns out, post-religious people are not thoroughly disenchanted. They may not attend church or pray, but they’re quite open to a spooky cosmos. Indeed, many appear to take it for granted. And because living with Mammon for a master is as soul crushing as Jesus long ago warned, materialism has its discontents. We were made for more. We were made, full stop.

Why everyone should be religious

Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for The New York Times, has written a new book in response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat makes a Pascalian pitch to the curious among the post-secular crowd.

Blaise Pascal was a French thinker who lived 400 years ago. His too was a time of religious and technological upheaval, one straddling the end of the Middle Ages, the Reformation’s fresh divisions of Christendom, and the beginnings of “enlightened” modernity. In such a time, and in response especially to religion’s cultured despisers, Pascal wrote that the first task for Christian thinkers is “to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.” This is just what Douthat sets out to do, and he likewise follows Pascal in stressing the existential urgency of religious questions and the necessity of placing one’s wager.

“It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” as Pascal put it. “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” And though we may (or may not!) have more than a week to live, inaction is impossible. You cannot choose not to choose. Your life is your seat at the table, and you must play the cards you were dealt. Declining to play is not an option; folding is itself a play.

Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Douthat doesn’t quite take this tack, but Pascal’s confidence and resolution, his unwillingness to let the reader off the hook, are present on every page.

This approach to religion is present in all Douthat’s writing. As a conservative Catholic writing for a liberal audience in the Times, Douthat is an expert at fine-tuning tone to topic and readership. In his previous books and columns alike, Douthat is cautious, coy, patient, and pleasant, ready to present different perspectives or to challenge the assumptions of whoever is reading his words.

Matters of first importance, though, Douthat doesn’t soft-pedal. Morally and politically, he plants his flag on abortion and same-sex marriage. Theologically and philosophically, he refuses to budge on the shortcomings of secularism and the strengths of theism. Atheism and scientism aren’t merely vulnerable to criticism; they’re absurd. The existence of God—indeed, of angels and demons and the whole spiritual realm—isn’t simply plausible or probable. It’s far and away the most rational interpretation of the evidence.

Back in 2012, responding to New Atheism’s cultural influence, Francis Spufford wrote a wonderful book called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. For Douthat, there is no “despite everything.”

A rational argument for mere religion

To understand Douthat’s method, recall a scene from the end of the third Indiana Jones film. Indy is faced with a choice: Let his father die or take a leap of faith. The leap in this case is literal, a physical step into a chasm with nothing to hold him up. He takes the step, and by a miracle of movie magic, doesn’t fall. There was a bridge in front of him all along, invisible to the human eye.

For some, this is a picture of true faith: a passionate, even reckless jump into the unknown, based on blind trust, not reason. Douthat demurs. As he writes, “Joining and practicing [some faith] is fundamentally a rational decision, not just an eyes-closed, trust-your-friends-and-intuitions jump.” You can and should consider the case in your mind.

Moreover, whatever the social benefits of church—and they are many!—they aren’t the place to start. They’re a byproduct of the thing itself, and that’s of interest only if it’s true. That’s why Douthat opts to “start with religion’s intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.”

This is not a case for mere Christianity, then, so much as “mere religion.” Though Douthat ends the book with a chapter explaining why he is Roman Catholic, his aim is to clear the ground for religious commitment in general, to show why Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews as much as Catholics and Protestants are not exotic residue of a superstitious past.

“Reason still points godward,” he writes, and you don’t have to be a scholar to see it. Douthat’s self-described “unsophisticated” argument begins by showing why a religious perspective on reality is reasonable, then pushes the reader to grasp why that matters.

His goal isn’t to get readers to Mass. But it is to get them somewhere. Moving from a vague agnosticism to a vague theism isn’t going to cut it. Ambivalence is the enemy. “Life is short and death is certain,” he writes at his most Pascalian. Readers who are spiritually asleep must wake up. Only once they’re awake can they come to considered judgments about the reality they finally see.

Weird religion in an enchanted cosmos

It bears repeating that Douthat is not primarily writing to Christians or even to members of other religious traditions. He is writing to atheists, to agnostics, to open-minded but decidedly nonreligious seekers. More than anything, he is offering a permission structure, from one reasonable modern to another, for people to take their first steps toward the supernatural without feeling as if they are betraying their class, their education, their own minds. And he’s trying to capitalize on this odd moment for as long as it lasts, while strict scientism is in retreat and a broad spiritual openness is on the rise.

If Douthat were preaching, I’d be the choir. But he’s not, so the question is whether he succeeds for a reader who isn’t a Christian, much less a theologian. He does, for at least three reasons.

The first is the modesty of his goal. He isn’t demonstrating with certainty that God exists, in the manner of William Lane Craig or Edward Feser. He’s standing alongside readers, directing their gaze to a transcendent explanation for their own observations and experiences. There’s an audience for precise logical deduction, but the audience for this kind of argument, rooted in ordinary features of daily experience, is bigger by far.

Second, Douthat’s interreligious generosity is unfeigned; he really would prefer a reader embrace a religion other than Christianity than remain irreligious, agnostic, or noncommittal. And Christian convictions anchor this preference: For Douthat, the truth of Christian revelation is not an all-or-nothing affair. Neither the Shema nor the Nicene Creed requires the total falsehood of every idea, text, and practice of every other spiritual tradition in the world. Much good and many true things may be found there, and adherents are not wrong to prize them.

Further, Douthat believes in divine providence. A step toward Christ outside the church is nonetheless a step in the right direction. In this he takes Christ at his word: “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:8).

None of this is to suggest Douthat is nonchalant about idolatry or the dangers of the demonic. On the contrary, he warns readers about excessive interest in the occult and defends belief in hell, the Devil, and exorcism. Yet he sees the spiritual lethargy of hard materialism and the listlessness of agnosticism as the true enemy of our time. The same Christ who promises to meet every honest seeker face-to-face also promises to vomit the lukewarm out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). Douthat wants readers of his book to be hot or cold by the end, with no one left in between.

The last strength of Douthat’s case is his steadfast willingness to be weird. For this he is unapologetic. Jacques Vallee popularized the term invisible college to describe people who take the UFO phenomenon seriously. In effect, Douthat believes there to be a similarly unseen and equally disreputable society of believers in the uncanny, the ecstatic, the inexplicable. After all, “When intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.”

It is here that conversations among Christians about enchantment, or “re-enchantment,” are most relevant. As scholar Alan Jacobs has argued, it is not necessarily better to live in an enchanted society than in a disenchanted society. Moderns, for all their faults, do not cut out living hearts to appease the gods, while the enchanted ancients were often dominated by bloodthirsty demons. The gospel announced by the apostles, then, neither enchanted nor disenchanted an otherwise pagan cosmos. It went to war against pagan gods under the banner of Christ. It proclaimed the end of their tyranny and deployed the power of Christ’s Spirit to prove it.

We neither can nor should want to return to a world before Christ’s victory over the powers. But we must recognize that ours is a world still spiritually contested, and Believe does this well.

If, as the church teaches, the arid machine of the materialist universe is false; if, as Jesus’s life and ministry show, angels and demons populate this world; if, as Scripture and tradition hold, spiritual reality is far stranger than even most Western Christians want to admit—then we already live in an enchanted cosmos. Our words and deeds, our preaching and worship should reflect it.

We should, that is to say, live in the real world, the world the gospel claims to describe truthfully. We should not seek a false shelter in the spiritual vacuum of secularism. There is no such thing. Every God-ridden place turns out to be haunted, in one way or another.

Douthat advises: Wake up and look around you. That eerie presence you sense or suspect is not a fiction. Whether a human ghost or the Holy Ghost or something else entirely, it is all too real. Accepting that is the easy part. The hard part comes next: Place your bet.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

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Ideas

Church in the Antisocial Century

Carrie McKean

Contributor

Working at my church has me there beyond Sunday morning. Our building is always bustling with care, an ever-rarer respite in an isolated age.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

“Is Pastor Steve available? I have an important question for him.”

She hadn’t offered her name, but I knew the woman’s voice on the other end of the line. In fact, I could picture her customary pew, the spot where she’d shuffle slowly every week, undeterred by the fact that the service had started ten minutes ago and we’d already gotten to the prayer of confession. Father, forgive me for getting exasperated at the disturbance of latecomers.

“No ma’am,” I said. “He’s not in at the moment. Could I take a message?”

I don’t typically answer the phone at my church, where I work as the communications director. But I was covering the front desk that day, and as it turned out, it wasn’t only our receptionist and lead pastor who were out of the office just then. Most everyone the caller needed was gone.

“Well, what about Pastor Walter? Is he there? Or Pastor Charlotte?” Her voice sounded a little urgent, and I worried something might be wrong.

“I’m sorry, they both just left for lunch. They should be back in about an hour. Is there something I could help you with in the meantime?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Maybe so …”

Faced with the lack of other—more pastoral—options, she forged ahead with her urgent question.

“How do you spell Mary Magdalene?”

I’ve been a part of our church staff for nearly a decade now. My office is near the reception desk, so even when I don’t answer the phone, I’m within earshot of the daily comings and goings of our busy downtown church.

Not everything is as amusing as the spellcheck of biblical proportion. There are the people calling from hospital parking garages with devastating diagnoses still ringing in their ears—and the ones calling to share the news of miraculous recoveries. There are proud grandparents who stop by to share their new grandchildren’s photos, and heartsick parents who come for prayer for wayward children. We get calls from people who need help with their electric bills and calls from folks who just need to ask another real, live person if we truly think God exists.

When most people think of church, they envision Sunday mornings, full pews, soaring music, and nicely dressed families. But I’ve grown to deeply love seeing my church over the rest of the week.

I love being at church on Monday morning, when homeless people come in for cups of coffee and a clean bathroom. And I love it on Tuesday morning, when a troupe of preschool children wearing backpacks two sizes too big comes traipsing up the sidewalk, jostling for the privilege of pushing the big handicap button that causes the heavy glass door to swing open like magic.

I love midafternoons when the “stitchers” arrive, sitting in a circle and chatting while they make prayer shawls to drape over the wooden pews in our chilly sanctuary. I love seeing the older ladies who stop by to check for prayer request cards in our prayer closet, and the delivery drivers who grab sodas before continuing their routes, and Pat, who stops by most days to read the morning paper. I love seeing the hundreds of students from the public high school across the street who come by each Thursday for pizza at lunch, and the families who gather on Wednesday night for an all-church dinner.

I could go on and on. Our building is rarely quiet. The custodians are constantly setting up and tearing down—always preparing to welcome the next wave of people. Music fills the halls as different choirs practice and our organist plays the same stanza over and over until she gets it just right. Behind the joyful cacophony of it all, the bells in the steeple chime out the hours every ordinary day.

In 1991, sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the need for “third places,” informal public gathering spots that he argued were essential for the healthy cultivation of communities and democracy. A church building is first a house of worship, but when opened to members and the wider community throughout the week, outside of services, churches still fill this important niche in our digitized, atomized world. A church is a third space, a retreat, a haven—a sanctuary.

Even three decades ago, Oldenburg worried about the long-term negative impact of the decline of third spaces. When neighborhood restaurants, stores, theaters, libraries, and public squares disappear, we lose the semi-mythical Cheers-like places where everybody knows our names and the problems of life can be solved (or at least shared) over cups of coffee or pints of beer. We lose the opportunity to rub shoulders with the guy who posts obnoxious (to us) political comments on Facebook but would offer to jumpstart our cars in a heartbeat.

There’s no shortage of Starbucks locations, of course, but in our transient and fast-paced society, they’re unlikely to have the kind of regulars you need to achieve the Cheers model. They’re also businesses, which means they aren’t for everyone. You have to buy something—to be able to buy something—to be there.

The church doesn’t work that way. It values people as more than consumers. It ought to have a place for everyone, no transaction required.

In his sweeping recent cover story for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that we are living in an antisocial century. Profound and rapid changes to the ways we interact with each other and the world around us are not a passing fad. We have been rewired.

As Thompson documents, the signs are everywhere: Kids would rather play video games with friends online than meet them at the mall. Restaurants’ takeout stations are often more crowded with bags than their bars are with people. You can see a personal trainer, counselor, or doctor without leaving your house. Convenience and comfort reign supreme, yet in making our homes our castles, have we inadvertently made them cells of solitary confinement?

Of course, comfort feels good. But as Thompson notes, we as humans aren’t always good at discerning between our needs and our wants. “Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety,” says Thompson. “And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.”

What we want is not always good for us, and what we need is each other.

Thompson is agnostic, but his observations could come straight from a pulpit. And as Christians, we have a resource others lack in this antisocial century: a tradition that insists on intentional, regular presence with one another.

This is one of the earliest lessons of the church. In Acts 2, shortly after Pentecost, as the early church began to grow in number, the believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship” (v. 42). Growing up, I pictured a church potluck after Sunday services each time I read that passage. But the Greek word for fellowship here is koinonia, a word that means much more than hanging out and passing the casserole. It is the word we translate as “communion.”

Koinonia implies joint participation: a giving and receiving of fellowship. It necessarily involves a certain amount of obligation and responsibility, a connotation even more obvious in Aristotle’s use of the word when he wrote about koinonia politike, a concept often translated in English as “civil society.”

Before she died, my 104-year-old great-aunt gave me a hand-stitched “make do” quilt topper that her grandmother—my great-great-grandmother—made in a sewing circle when she was a homesteader on the plains of Texas. It’s a delightful kaleidoscope of color, texture, and pattern, and when I look at its careful stitches, I imagine women sitting together, sharing scraps of fabric, offering what they had as they carried one another’s burdens and forged new lives for themselves and their families in windswept prairies far from the established communities they left behind.

While the men built fences and plowed pastures, the women made quilts. They were as necessary as a bountiful harvest for the survival of these families when winter cold crept through the chinks in their mud dugouts. In those sewing circles, in their conversations and fellowship and mutual care, they stitched together a new society too.

A century later, the patchwork of civil society still covers every institution we rely upon and each social contract we make. But we have not kept it mended, and as it grows more threadbare, taking our social trust down with it, we are losing a functioning society. Civic cooperation among free and equal compatriots can protect against both anarchy and despotism, but it doesn’t just happen. It must be deliberately created. Koinonia—communion, the active giving and receiving of presence and fellowship—is our responsibility. It is our holy obligation, as citizens of both heaven and this world, to practice the spiritual discipline of showing up.

That duty won’t be easy to people so increasingly accustomed to living alone. It may feel like a burden at first. Yet as we faithfully persist, with time it will become second nature. It will transform us from lonely members of an antisocial century into koinonia practitioners. It will transform our individual lives and bear much fruit in our communities.

Hebrews 10 offers instruction for fraught and complicated times like ours: “Let’s consider how to encourage one another in love and good deeds, not abandoning our own meeting together, as is the habit of some people, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (vv. 24–25, NASB).

In a business, the receptionist’s primary role is to move people along to wherever they’re supposed to be. At a church, that’s only part of a receptionist’s job. Our receptionist is Cathy, and her real ministry isn’t answering the phones. It is a ministry of presence.

She practices hospitality from the reception desk (Rom. 12:13), greeting preschoolers and parishioners and passersby with warmth, attention, and the love of Christ. Sometimes, I’ll hear Cathy get up from her desk after listening to a heart-wrenching story and ask, “Can I come around and give you a hug and pray for you?”

The visitors’ earthly problems may remain. As a church, we may or may not be able to meet their physical needs. But in that moment, they are seen and known by Cathy. They are reminded that they are seen and known by God. The gift of her attention may seem small and simple, yet it is profoundly countercultural. Like the widow’s mite, it’s enough.

“The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation,” Thompson writes in the Atlantic story. “We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.”

We may not have consciously realized, but as followers of Jesus, in a sense we have always known. Our faith warns us of the dangers of being amputated, of being cut off from the vine, the God of life (John 15).

To flourish, we must abide in Christ, and since God is Lord of our whole being, surely this is not intended merely for our spiritual well-being. We must remain connected with God and others in this isolated world—on Tuesday afternoon as much as Sunday morning—and, in doing so, make known exactly how much is lost when we lose koinonia. And with each unexpected connection, we repair the severed threads of our fraying civil society. We stitch the lonely, hurting, and isolated back into community.

Here is the church and here is its steeple, I remember reciting in my head as I sat in the pews of my childhood church, going through the hand motions while I waited for the sermon to end. Open the doors and see all the people.

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

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Ideas

How I Lost My Faith in Atheism

Ross Douthat

A career arguing about faith has made religious disagreement easier to understand—but outright atheism more unfathomable.

Jan Reichelt / Pexels

Late in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus confesses his crisis of Catholic faith to a close friend. The friend asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen responds, “but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism—charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, when I was just a bit younger than Dedalus’s age in James Joyce’s novel. I read the book soon after my conversion, and while lamenting the main character’s loss of faith, I had a convert’s sympathy for his formulation of the religious options: that the intellectually serious choice was Catholicism or atheism, the Church of Rome or nothing.

Alongside Joyce, I had good intellectual company in this belief, from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America envisioned an eventual religious “division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome”—to Herman Melville, who predicted that “Rome and the atheists” would “fight it out,” with “Protestantism being retained for the base of operations sly by Atheism.”

When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion—especially when you’re sitting down to write a general case for faith, as I’ve done in my new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That change has carried me well away from Stephen Dedalus’s young man’s formulation. I am still a believing Catholic, and I would still urge a Protestant friend to swim the Tiber. But I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future—as far as we can see it—will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out.

In part, that reflects a greater understanding of critiques of Catholicism, and a stronger expectation of Protestantism’s resilience. But equally importantly, it reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism.

The first shift has a moral, a theological, and a sociological component. Morally, the experience of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, which broke a little while after my conversion, gave me a clearer sense of why a reasonable Christian might retain faith in Jesus Christ while doubting the hierarchical order of the Roman church. Theologically, the shift from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis has revealed an instability in Catholic doctrine, a lack of synthesis between the church before the Second Vatican Council and the church after, that was less apparent in my youth. (Once you have found yourself crossways with the pope in public disputation, it’s hard to be too triumphalist about Catholicism’s advantages.)

And then, sociologically, Catholicism has remained extremely successful at winning intellectual converts. Yet it is weaker as a mass religion than it was when I joined the church—and Christianity is not supposed to be a faith just for the intelligentsia. One need only look around the Christian world, whether at church attendance patterns in the United States or at the growth of charismatic and nondenominational Protestant churches in Africa and Latin America, to see that the future will be shaped powerfully by a kind of a Christianity that is neither Roman Catholic nor simply a stalking horse for secularism.

So in all this, I find it easier to understand how someone can be Protestant or Eastern Orthodox than I did as a new-minted Catholic convert. But at the same time, I find it much harder to understand how someone can be a convinced atheist.

I never exactly believed the Stephen Dedalus implication that strong Christian claims are ultimately an “absurdity” relative to hardheaded materialist alternatives. But once I took for granted that there were some good reasons why so many of my fellow overeducated Americans took God’s nonexistence for granted, and that the Christian was sometimes in the position of Puddleglum in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, professing belief against the evidence, I determined to be “on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.”

Twenty years later, I’m still searching for atheism’s solid reasons. I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine. But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism—I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.

I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. (The attempt by atheistic intellectuals to find refuge in the theory of the multiverse, which casts our universe as a rare life-supporter among trillions of dead ones that we can never actually observe, seems similar to the epicycles attached to the Ptolemaic system when it became clear it couldn’t accurately describe reality.)

I don’t see how anyone can believe it given the resilient mystery of consciousness and the ways in which it seems to be integrally connected to the basic order of the universe—both in our reason’s ability to explore and comprehend level upon level of the system, heights and depths far beyond anything linked directly to the evolutionary needs of early hominids, and in the mystical-seeming link between observation and reality, the mind’s eye and the material, that quantum physics has revealed.

And I don’t see how anyone can believe it given that religious experience, all the weird stuff of mysticism and miracle, has not only persisted under supposedly disenchanted conditions but even revealed itself in new ways (near-death experiences, for instance) because of the ministrations of modern science. We have done away with the cultural rule of religion, the institutional structures that many Enlightenment-era atheists believed imposed supernatural beliefs on a credulous population. And yet those beliefs have persisted, and in some cases even spread, because it turns out that supernatural-seeming experiences, intimations of transcendence that fall on nonbelievers as well as on the faithful, are just a constitutive part of reality itself.

At the very least, it seems clear to me at midlife that a religious perspective on reality, a basic assumption that all this was made for a reason and we are part of that reason deserves to be the serious person’s intellectual default.

It’s a perspective that makes coherent sense out of multiple features of reality, multiple converging lines—the evidence for design, the distinctive place of human consciousness, the varieties of religious experience—that atheism struggles and fails to reduce away. It’s the parsimonious answer to a set of overlapping questions raised by very different features of the human experience.

And if that answer opens into further questions, further debates, I expect those debates to be different than just a clash between my own Catholic Christianity and the heirs of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins. Not just because the debates among different kinds of Christians will go on, but because the weakness of atheism means that eventually—and, in fact, soon if not already—the main alternative to Christianity may be something quite different from Enlightenment rationalism, something that blends the pagan and promethean, seeking supernatural as well as natural power.

In that case, Christians of all kinds will be facing a spiritual rival, not a secular or atheistic one, in the contest for the human soul.

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist and the film critic for National Review. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of books including The Deep Places, The Decadent Society, and, most recently, Believe.

- More from Ross Douthat

Culture

‘Going Outside’ Hasn’t Found Me My Person

Morgan Lee

But getting off the apps is still important for my Christian witness.

Illustration Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty / WikiMedia Commons

“Touch grass.” It’s the command social media users bark when they want to underscore just how out-of-touch they find others’ takes. Ditch your screen, walk out your front door, and inhale reality. Presumably one breath of blue sky and a front lawn under your feet will cure you of your internet radicalization.

More recently, I’ve heard a gentler version of this dig applied to dating advice. I belong to a generation with record numbers of unmarried people, people whose romantic and sexual relationships have been primarily initiated through apps. Though we can’t presume every one of us is dissatisfied with this state of affairs, there’s a significant number yearning for an alternative to the swiping.

Perhaps you’ve seen that viral graphic. Fifteen years ago, it illustrates, online dating became the No. 1 way American couples meet. In fact, more couples are likely to connect on Hinge or Bumble or Tinder than by any other means combined, including at work, in college, via introductions by family and friends, in their neighborhoods, or at a bar.

The apps increasingly feel like shopping on Amazon. There’s an overwhelming volume of options you worry aren’t actually any good—and yet online dating is an unavoidable facet of modern life, putting our happiness in the hands of for-profit companies that don’t have our best interests at heart.

Hence: “Get outside.” It’s simple advice, this new mantra of influencer discourse. It feels refreshing. Put down your phone and meet someone out there in the “real world.”

I’m excited by this turn away from Tinder. I agree with it. I love “being outside.” My weekly routine includes hula lessons, hiking the Oahu ridgeline, and a running group. I’m a natural extrovert. But I’ll also confess: Nobody could tout me as a “success story.” For a decade and a half, I’ve put together a robust calendar of athletics, arts, and dinner parties. They haven’t brought me marriage, much less a serious relationship trending in that direction.

If pining for a valentine catalyzes volunteering at a soup kitchen, joining a kickball team, and working in the church nursery, bring it on.

But I’m also aware that building relationships, romantic or otherwise, isn’t as easy as joining a book club, adding one more commitment to the calendar. As our dating patterns have morphed in recent decades, so too have our entire lifestyles. Seemingly innocuous decisions like investing in a quality home entertainment system, opting to order in instead of eating out, and buying our groceries online have meant, especially for those of us who are single, we’re increasingly alone—not just on Saturday nights when we could be at the bar, but in all the interstitial periods of our weeks.

This aloneness hasn’t stressed all relationships, maintains Derek Thompson in his recent Atlantic cover story on “the anti-social century.” Thanks to text messaging, families talk to each other more than ever. We communicate with broad affinity networks we could never access before the internet, whether that includes discussing the latest episode of Abbott Elementary with a Facebook group of fans or live-tweeting the NFL playoffs.

But our general prioritization of convenience and our loss of third spaces means we’re more isolated, even when we do manage to “get outside.” The cost is borne in our relationships with our neighbors, the local librarian, and the barista, “wreaking havoc on the middle ring of ‘familiar but not intimate’ relationships with the people who live around us.”

Thompson argues that the demise of these relationships has contributed to the political polarization we experience today. And it’s clear to me that our antisociality also impacts our dating culture in deep ways no influencer can fix with a list of tips.

This shift toward digitally mediated solitude presents a particular tension for Christians, for whom the miracle at the center of our faith is incarnation. Throughout the Old Testament, God dialogues with humans: His confrontation with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, his many conversations with Moses, the back-and-forth banter and lament expressed by the major and minor prophets.

But Jesus doesn’t arrive as a series of messages. He comes physically, embodied, a baby. God shares meals, hangs out with little kids, and turns the water at a wedding into wine.

Many of us have learned to feel socially satiated through a bloated diet of texts and videos, social media distractions and push alerts. These bursts of communication work sometimes: Think of the well-timed meme! But most relationships will starve without in-person interaction, and new ones won’t get off the ground. That matters not just for our dating lives, but for our witness.

Jesus gave us a mandate to “go into the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15). His final words before the Ascension echo his charge earlier in his ministry, when he sends out the disciples two by two. “Going outside” may not be a quick fix for romantic problems. But living our faith seems to require it as a nonnegotiable.

Opting to build a life on a foundation of conveniences like front door drop-offs, internet porn, and movie streaming severs us from the world God loves and the people Jesus came to save. Living a life cocooned by these amenities also discourages us from taking relational risks, be it introducing ourselves to our neighbors after ignoring them for eight months or approaching someone to ask for a phone number.

A couple years ago, my holiday card asked my friends to set me up with someone. Nobody—I sent the card around the world—took me up on this. I write this to say, I’m at as much of a loss as ever when it comes to finding “my person.”

But God made outside and called it good. Let’s open our doors and walk out.

Morgan Lee is the global managing editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Morgan Lee

Culture

A Genesis Series Inspired By Anime

J. D. Peabody

‘Gabriel and the Guardians’ trades “Sunday school characters” for ziggurats and proto-Canaanite gods.

An animated fantasy where heroes do battle in make-believe realms may seem an unlikely art form for communicating the truths of Scripture—but that’s exactly what the creators of Gabriel and the Guardians hope to achieve. The first episode of this epic, anime-inspired project begins airing February 12 on Angel Studios, with the remaining 12 episodes of the first season arriving later this year. Producers believe it’s the first anime-inspired series to be crowdfunded into existence.

Jason Moody, the mastermind behind the series, recently spoke with J. D. Peabody, author of the children’s fantasy series The Inkwell Chronicles, about the making of this ambitious project. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

For those who have not yet seen the trailer, how would you summarize Gabriel and the Guardians?

The show is a loose interpretation of the Genesis narrative set in a fantasy world inspired by ancient Hebrew and Mesopotamian culture and ethos. In Tolkien language, think of it as a Silmarillion to the biblical narrative.

By that, I take it you mean you’re building a broader backstory?

Exactly. I spent two years diving deep into Genesis culture, along with other texts like the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. I began to imagine this narrative set in an antediluvian, ancient Mesopotamian setting, with ziggurats and Sumerian mythology and proto-Canaanite gods—which is not how I pictured Genesis growing up, with Sunday school characters made from felt.

You’re talking about some pretty high concepts. Was the idea a hard sell?

From early on, the response was really positive from industry executives at Angel Studios. But they encouraged us to lean even further into the fantasy aspect, making Gabriel more of a parable about the Old Testament rather than a literal retelling. The more we thought about Jesus’ use of parables, that direction felt in keeping with tradition—to tell beautiful truths through “once upon a time.”

So how does a pastor’s kid from Ohio end up creating a TV show like this?

I wanted to be a lot of things when I was growing up, but the primary thing I wanted to do was make animations. I had sketchbooks with me all the time. As much as I was a fan of shows like X-Men and Superman and ThunderCats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I always wanted a way to express my faith values through the medium. The concept of a show about spiritual battles had always been an idea in my mind.

When I was first out of school, I tried getting into the world of indie comic books. After about two years of going to conventions and promoting my books, I found there was no money in it. At that point I was married with a kid on the way. I pivoted into e-learning. I worked at JPMorgan Chase for 15 years in their interactive video training. Outside of work, I became heavily involved in leading worship.

Then COVID hit. Work got super slow, we weren’t gathering as a church, and I had all this creative energy and headspace. In that vacuum I started sketching again.

I came upon the BibleProject podcast with Tim Mackie and just fell in love with it. He’s all about Genesis. You start diving into it, and it keeps opening up. That’s where the idea for Gabriel and the Guardians began to spark and I started sketching characters.

What made you think it was time to revisit your dream and actually do something with those sketches?

It crystalized in a moment with my daughter. She was around 15 at the time and very much into anime, which I was, too.

She saw the characters I was drawing and said, “Dad. If the Bible was told like this, I’d be interested in the show.” And I just felt the thumb of the Lord on my back. I think he’s looking for a new generation of storytellers and creatives, people who truly honor and believe the message of the Bible—not Hollywood trying to cash in—who aren’t afraid to try something new.

And for the uninitiated, what do you mean by “anime”?

Anime is any animation originating in Japan. Gabriel and the Guardians is what you would call “anime-inspired” since it isn’t produced in Japan. But our show is traditional 2D animation, paying homage to classic anime style, with each frame drawn by hand.

It’s risky, isn’t it? The anime fanbase is huge—but also pretty savvy and particular when it comes to their standards for quality.

From the beginning, I said, “Whatever we do has to be excellent.” There can’t be cracks. We were able to get connected with Tiger Animation, which is behind some of the biggest modern animation franchises out there. They brought an authentic quality to the production.

You’ve attracted a pretty all-star cast, too, which helps with the credibility.

We’ve got some of the biggest names in anime voice talent: Johnny Yong Bosch, Cristina Vee, James Arnold Taylor, Matt Lanter.

Do you see this show aimed primarily at a Christian audience, or is it for everyone?

It’s for both Christians and general audiences. Think about the painting The Last Supper. Lots of people are moved by it. It has caused millions of people to reflect on their faith. But da Vinci wasn’t necessarily a “Christian painter”—he was just a painter. And you don’t have to have faith to appreciate his work. The Last Supper isn’t “Christian” art—it’s just art. We want what we’re creating to prompt questions, because that’s what good art does.

That reminds me of Andrew Peterson saying the Wingfeather Saga animated series wasn’t intended to moralize, but to work on hearts at a deeper level as a story.

We don’t see this as a platform for teaching of any sort. But we do think there’s a value to representing these ancient truths in art. I’m not trying to lead you to any decision point in your faith. I don’t think this would be the kind of show that would replace a Sunday school lesson. But if you’ve got a group of kids in the youth group that love anime, you could have a movie night and analyze it afterward.

What I hope Guardians does is cause you to read about the real characters in Genesis and ask questions—questions the characters themselves are facing, such as “What lengths would your Creator go to in order to restore you?”

That could generate some great follow-up discussion.

J. D. Peabody served as the founding pastor of New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington, for 22 years. He is the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind as well as the children’s fantasy series The Inkwell Chronicles.

- More from J. D. Peabody

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