Jeffrey Epstein and the Myth of the Culture Wars

Columnist

Some leaders of different political stripes teach us to hate each other, but they’re playing for the same team.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Getty

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

People have almost given up on bridging the divides in American life. Republicans and Democrats cannot pass any bipartisan legislation or even watch the same Super Bowl halftime shows. And yet throughout the last two decades of polarization, one figure seems to have discerned the code for bringing both sides of the culture war together. His name was Jeffrey Epstein.

The Epstein files have largely been redacted, with parts of them hidden from us, but we’ve seen enough to know that Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell were two of the most corrupt and connected sex criminals in American history. Despite how much is still confusing, we can also see this: On at least one important point, the most outlandish theories were right. There really is a global conspiracy of wealthy, elite sexual perverts fleecing the masses. And many of them were people building a following by telling others that there is a global conspiracy of wealthy, elite sexual perverts fleecing the masses.

Reading through the names of those connected with Epstein, one can hardly believe the range listed there. Some were unsurprising: for instance, creepy filmmaker Woody Allen or the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. But even then, the scope is unsettling. Even the Dalai Lama had to put out a statement noting that he was never involved with Epstein. Just as incredible, many of the people listed were partying with those they spend a lot of time telling the rest of us to hate.

Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were apparently friendly with Epstein. The New Age syncretist Deepak Chopra is in the documents many times—often with shady, enigmatic phrases—but so are those who accused the pope of New Age syncretism. With Middle Eastern tensions what they are, still the files include both sheikhs and Israelis. All over the files are connections with both left-wing populist provocateur Noam Chomsky and right-wing populist provocateur Steve Bannon. Epstein makes fun of evangelicals yet recommends a James Dobson article.

How can this be?

Maybe one reason is that Jeffrey Epstein figured out the deep, dark secret of this moment: The people who fight culture wars often believe what they say, but the people who lead culture wars often don’t.

The heiress Leona Helmsley, when accused of defrauding the government, famously said in a moment worthy of Marie Antoinette, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Maybe the Epstein class is telling us, “Only the little people have culture wars.”

Chomsky, after all, spent a lifetime arguing that wealth inequality was a moral atrocity, that billionaires in their luxury were taking advantage of the working class. Whatever is later proven about his personal participation, or lack thereof, in crimes, we know already that flying on Epstein’s private jet was not much a problem for his solidarity-with-the-workers-of-the-world conscience.

A sign behind Steve Bannon’s seat on YouTube videos of his podcast reads, “There are NO conspiracies, but there are NO coincidences.” Yet in recovered emails, Bannon reportedly told Epstein how he could avoid accountability and put together a populist, nationalist, Catholic, and evangelical coalition—with the implication that it could end the #MeToo movement. He said this kind of coalition could “reverse Alabama,” presumably referring to the rejection of US Senate candidate Roy Moore over allegations of his sexual misconduct with girls.

Referring to the Hollywood-led Time’s Up movement, which argued that men should be held accountable for rape, harassment, and molestation, Bannon wrote to an Epstein already convicted for sex crimes: “This coalition staves off [‘]times up’ for next decade plus.” Even while those in these files sought to mobilize religious people to protect predatory men, Bannon and Epstein in emails reportedly discussed ways to discredit Pope Francis.

The main priority coming out of the Epstein revelations should be justice for the survivors and victims of these crimes and accountability for anyone who participated in them or covered them up. But perhaps we also ought to learn one other thing: that we have all been duped.

Some of the same people on the right who told us culture wars are necessary for sexual virtue and the protection of children could look away when they saw these problems in one of their own.

Some of the same people on the left who told us that the sexual revolution is about empowering women and girls and that the oppressed should be liberated suddenly lost their nerve when the predatory misogynist had their same politics—and a yacht.

Across their political and cultural differences, how can these sketchy figures—almost all of whom have contributed to our cultural state of seeing politics as a religion—pal around this way? The Bible already tells us: “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (Luke 23:12, ESV). Their real goal was not policy objectives or cultural well-being; it was power and money and anarchy of the appetite.

Predators know one of the easiest ways to go unseen is to change the moral calculus. As long as we define virtue and vice by a set of political or cultural or “worldview” opinions rather than character and integrity and behavior, they can avert accountability forever.

Holding opinions, after all, is easy. Once a person chooses a tribe, the brain easily adjusts to whatever set of slogans and shibboleths he or she needs to repeat. The pursuit of holiness or even simple human decency and accountability is much more difficult. As long as we can assume that whoever agrees with us on the “defining issues” of the day is good and whoever disagrees is bad, we end up with precisely what we have now: chaos, hatred, a fracturing public order, and the loss of institutions and norms.

People in your church have blocked one another on social media because of how life-or-death important a set of political opinions seems to be. But those who egg them on have not blocked each other. They are laughing themselves all the way to the poolside massage table.

We think we are in the middle of a future-shaping culture war, but the generals of that war are sharing emails making fun of their troops. People look to these titanic figures and assume them to be new George Washingtons or Winston Churchills or even Napoleon Bonapartes or Friedrich Nietzsches when they’re really just Caligulas. They teach us to hate each other on the basis of our red or blue jerseys, but they’re playing for the same team. They incite us to scream at one another over whether we like Bad Bunny or Kid Rock, but they’re listening to their own music.

And worst of all, they are discipling us. They are teaching us to evaluate whether we think fidelity is praiseworthy or weak or whether rape is evil or insignificant on the basis of who’s doing it. They are teaching us to evaluate which children’s screams are worth hearing on the basis of whose side it would help or hurt. The end result is that those who scream about the good of their team and the evil of the other stop believing in good or evil at all. All they come to care about is power.

No man is an island, John Donne told us. But a whole culture can be an island, and that island is Epstein’s.

We don’t have to live this way. We can choose another path. Our country hangs by a slender strand over an abyss. And it might just be that it did not hang itself.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Church Life

I Long for My Old Church—and the Tree Beside It

Nadya Williams

Leaving a beloved church doesn’t mean ever forgetting its goodness, its beauty, and the immense blessing it was in one’s life.

Getty / Edits by CT

There was a magnolia tree by a white church on a hill. It was a beautiful tree—tall and green and blooming every year with those massive flowers, so sweet to smell. More than this, it was a hospitable tree. Its branches, always sturdy, started low enough to the ground that even small children could climb up onto the lowest ones.

The less adventurous kids might stay there, sitting with a friend or two, dangling their legs just above the ground. But others did not stop climbing. From those lower branches, they could keep going, up, up, up, to the tippy top of the tree. The top branches would sway a little but still held firm, kindly supporting the brave children who reached them. The tree’s thick leaves and blooming flowers offered the perfect secret fort: An onlooker could barely tell, unless looking closely—or hearing the giggles—that children were up in this tree, growing alongside it, taller by the day.

Throughout Scripture, our story has often been intertwined with trees. Adam and Eve dutifully cared for trees as Eden’s stewards. What would their work have looked like in a garden so blessed that it required no hard labor resembling agriculture after the Fall? Perhaps gentle care was still needed even then. Occasional pruning, maybe, picking fruit in season, or raking leaves to keep paths clear for walking.

We don’t know for certain the nature of their work, but here’s what we do know: It was in the presence of these trees, a cloud of green whispering witnesses, that they met God face to face. And it was under those leaves that a horrible tragedy involving a specific tree resulted in their expulsion.

Ever since, people have cultivated trees with much labor: fruit trees for food, others for wood and shade and other practical uses, and some trees mainly for their beauty. Appreciating beauty is inherent in our nature as image bearers of God. He too, after all, delights in the beauty of his handiwork.

Delight, in fact, is the word that first comes to mind as I think of that magnolia tree by the church on the hill. Every Sunday, as soon as services ended, children would clamber into this tree, ever upward, while parents drank coffee and chatted with each other.

This was the tree that my daughter once climbed at age 3 without my knowing, her first and unexpected excursion of the sort. Once high up in the tree, she peered at the ground and realized she did not know how to come back down. As I scoured the church grounds in circles searching for her, another mom walked past the tree and heard my daughter weeping. She helped her back down to good solid soil, safe and sound.

This was the tree that my eldest son climbed more and more cautiously as he grew older, eventually no longer venturing past the middle portion, wisely judging that it might not hold his growing body. This was the tree too that welcomed my middle son, the most cautious of my children, who never went past the lowest branch but kept coming back to spend time under the leaves.

Whenever we’ve talked about the story of Zacchaeus at home, we remember this tree. Zacchaeus didn’t climb a magnolia, of course (Luke 19:4), but it was a tree much like this one, a good climbing tree, that held the “wee little man” who wanted nothing more than to see the Lord more clearly.

Two and a half years have passed since we moved away from Georgia, from where this tree grows beside the church we called home for seven years. I still cannot bring myself to unsubscribe from that church’s email list. I still read the weekly updates. And that was how I learned recently that, because of continued growth in membership, the church must undergo another renovation. As part of this renovation, the magnolia tree will come down.

Why do I feel this pang of sadness for a tree now 660 miles removed from my front door? Perhaps because my love for that tree is tightly bound up with my love for my former church, its people, and the memories of a life where it was an anchor for my family. We are who we are right now, as a family and as believers, in large part because of our beautiful, formational experiences in that church.

Lamenting churches past—and trees past—is right and good. Sometimes, people leave a particular church not because they needed something else but simply because they were called somewhere else. (Commuting 10-plus hours each way for Sunday morning worship isn’t very practical.) Leaving a beloved church, though, doesn’t mean ever forgetting its goodness, beauty, and the immense blessing it was in one’s life.

In his epistles, Paul writes to church after church that he has known, visited, and often even planted—and then had to leave behind, in some cases never to see again. Clear in each of those letters is his love for those believers and his gratitude for knowing them. Even separated, they continue to occupy his thoughts and prayers for the rest of his life.

“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now,” he writes in opening his letter to the Philippians (1:3–5, ESV). “For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints,I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers,” he reflects in writing to the church at Ephesus (1:15–16).

To be a member of a good church for a season, whether long or short, is a blessing that lasts a lifetime. We love our new church in Ohio, too. It is a cherished gift—a rich tapestry of believers who live out the very best of what the church should be each day.

Nadya Williams is a homeschool mom, a writer, an editor, and the interim director of the MFA in creative writing at Ashland University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Christians Reading Classics and is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy.

- More from Nadya Williams

News

Fighting in Nigeria Leaves Christian Converts Exiled

Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Muslim communities often expel new Christians from their families. One Fulani convert is urging churches to take them in.

A Fulani herder leads his cattle to graze.

Michele Cattani / Getty

At dawn one morning in the spring of 2000, Jibrin Abubaker awoke with a start to the voice of a street preacher speaking through a megaphone outside his window. The 23-year-old, who was on a business trip in Jalingo in Nigeria’s Taraba State, initially felt annoyed to have his sleep disturbed.

Yet he listened as Daniel Dangombe, then pastor of a United Methodist Church in Nigeria, declared that Jesus was the only sinless person to walk the earth. “I used to wake up every morning [of the business trip] to listen to him,” Abubaker recalled. “From his preaching, my conversion started.”

Abubakar grew up in a Fulani Muslim family in Daura, a town in Katsina State in northwest Nigeria. Like most Fulani men, he came from a family of farmers and cattle herders. Yet Abubakar’s father didn’t want his only son roaming with the cows, so he enrolled Abubakar in an Islamic school. Abubakar said the teachers there taught him to recite the entire Quran and hate Christians.

“They said it was wrong for us to offer Christians a handshake or eat with their plates,” he told CT. “They were unholy—relating with them was an abomination.”

No Christians lived in Daura then, according to Abubakar. He only began to understand Christianity after hearing Dangombe’s preaching in Jalingo and meeting two Christians, Tevi and Peter, when he searched for Dangombe but couldn’t find him. First, he saw Peter holding a Bible and approached him, then Peter introduced him to Tevi, a Christian evangelist who could better speak Abubakar’s language. Two years later, during another business trip to Jalingo, Tevi and Peter answered his questions about Jesus, leading him to become a Christian.

But changing his religion meant losing his community.

Fulani who convert to Christianity face “extreme discrimination and deadly violence” from their community, according to International Christian Concern. They also face skepticism and isolation from Christian communities. Because of the historical hostility between Fulani Muslim herders and Christian and animistic farmers, Fulani Christians often find themselves caught between their culture and their faith. Of the 17 million Fulani in Nigeria, 99 percent are Muslims—less than 1 percent are Christians.

When Abubakar converted to Christianity, he didn’t tell people about new faith right away. He explained the gospel to his wife, who also became a Christian, but otherwise kept quiet. Still, his actions exposed him. He said he stopped attending Islamic daily prayers and reciting the Quran and instead started attending Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), a new congregation of mostly out-of-town, non-Fulani traders and businessmen. He also quit womanizing and seeking revenge when others insulted him.

Abubakar said his in-laws demanded his return to Islam. When he refused, they took his wife and three daughters—then 7, 3, and 1. Abubakar recalled they married off the eldest girl at 12-years-old as the second wife of a Muslim man in his mid-20s. She died in childbirth at age 16. He said he recovered his younger two daughters a few years later but never saw his wife again.

The Muslim community “eventually took everything I owned. My wife, children, house, cows. Everything,” Abubaker said.

Abubakar’s father didn’t confront him about his conversion until members of the Izala society, a powerful Salafi (conservative, reformist movement with Sunni Islam) organization that fights against shirk (unbelief) and operates under sharia law, put pressure on him.

“The Izala guys saw me regularly attending the church,” Abubakar said. “They wondered why a Fulani was going to the church.”

One Sunday in 2008, the Izala whisked him away from church, locking him up in a small, dark police cell for five days. A non-Fulani Christian policeman snuck him bread through the tiny window at midnight, Abubakar told me.

The legal system didn’t protect Abubakar. The Izala took him to the chairman of the Mai’Adua local government area. The head of Daura village, Abubakar’s father, and two other men asked him to denounce his faith. He refused and instead preached the gospel. They then took Abubakar to a sharia court. The judge gave him three days to reconsider. Abubakar’s family and community labeled him an apostate.

Then Abubakar said a relative attacked and threatened to kill him. The next day, a neighbor warned his father of another pending attack, forcing Abubakar to flee to Jalingo with the help of ECWA church members. He sought refuge with Tevi, his Christian friend from the Tiv tribe, and stayed with him for seven years.

Tevi’s hospitality was an exception, Abubakar explained. Because of the violence many Nigerian Christians have experienced from Fulani herders and Islamic extremists, whether over farm resources or religion, Abubakar said many fear Fulani converts are spies trying to infiltrate churches and feed information back to those who wish to harm them.

Joshua Irondi, the senior pastor at International Revival Chapel in Aba, southeastern Nigeria, works with missionaries to the Fulani in the north. He said the gospel is for everyone—regardless of tribe—and that missionaries shouldn’t write anyone off.

“But with the way things are right now, you don’t just see someone on the road and feel comfortable with them,” Irondi said.

Though urban Fulani in Nigeria are more widely accepted and hold high positions in business and government—Nigeria’s late president Muhammadu Buhari was a Fulani from Daura—many Nigerian Christians see nomadic or seminomadic Fulani herders as entangled with terrorists.

Last June, heavily armed Fulani jihadists attacked Yelwata, a farming community in Benue State, slaughtering an estimated 100–200 Christian villagers. According to a 2023 study, more than 60,000 people died when Fulani herders clashed with farmers between 2001 and 2018.

Manasseh Adamu, pastor of an ECWA branch in Zonzon, Kaduna State, north-central Nigeria, has seen the trauma up close. He said residents are sometimes reminded of past pain at the sight of the Fulani herdsmen.

Still, Adamu calls for the church to open its doors: “When people come to us [and say] that they are Christians … we should accept them.”

Abubakar said some Christians began avoiding him when conflict between the Fulani herdsmen and farmers peaked in 2018, even though he had already been a Christian for 16 years by then. He acknowledges the violence perpetuated by the jihadists. Still, the stigma against Fulani Christians grieves him.

Abubakar encourages Christians to welcome them and first listen to their stories. He hopes that if more Christians understood the Fulani and built relationships with them, the violence could end and more Fulani would hear the gospel.

Olu Sunday, president of Royal Missionary Outreach International in Nigeria and Niger, told CT that weak government responses and radicalization have compounded deadly violence and cycles of attacks. He said missionaries are among the few willing to risk building relationships with the Fulani, adding that “they still have open doors in [the Fulani’s] hearts and communities.”

However, Sunday said the Fulani people’s traditional migration lifestyle makes evangelism and discipleship challenging. “Sometimes you get a convert; the next minute they are thousands of miles away,” he noted. “Follow-up is very difficult.”

Abubakar, now a 49-year-old church planter with Calvary Ministries (CAPRO), lets the Fulani come to him. He said he spends time during the week at a veterinary clinic where Fulani herders come to treat their ailing cattle. Herders ask him how he can be both Fulani and Christian.

“From there, a relationship begins,” Abubakar said. He shares the gospel one-on-one when he can.

On Sundays, Abubakar gathers with 12 other Fulani and Hausa—another primarily Muslim tribe—Christians in his church plant in Kishi, where they have created a new community after facing isolation and abandonment by many in their lives. Abubakar said that after losing everything to follow Jesus—only to face rejection and stigma from other Christians—many Fulani converts are tempted to return to their families and Islam to survive.

“The worst thing would be for them to go back,” Abubakar explained. “Sometimes that is the only option they are left with.”

- More from Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Ideas

New York Legalized Assisted Suicide. What’s Next?

Interview by Kara Bettis Carvalho

A conversation with physician and ethicist Lydia Dugdale.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul in Woodbury, New York on January 9, 2026.

Newsday LLC / Contributor / Getty

On February 6, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill legalizing medically assisted death, joining Illinois and 12 other US jurisdictions in allowing patients to take lethal medication under certain conditions.

“Our state will always stand firm in safeguarding New Yorkers’ freedoms and right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right for the terminally ill to peacefully and comfortably end their lives with dignity and compassion,” Hochul said. Although the US first faced this debate when Oregon legalized assisted suicide in the 1990s, such laws are becoming more common.

CT reached out to Dr. Lydia Dugdale, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University and author of Dying in the Twenty-First Century and The Lost Art of Dying. A New York resident and practicing internal medicine physician, Dugdale has followed the New York debates closely.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

My first question is just background on what happened for those who don’t know: What is this law allowing, and how will that impact the medical field? What’s assisted suicide versus euthanasia? And does this differ from what’s happening in Canada?

When it comes to MAID, which is the acronym people use for medical assistance in dying or medical aid in dying, there are two main routes. In the United States, the only route permitted in any jurisdiction where it is legal is lethal ingestion. That involves taking a cocktail of pills, crushing them, forming them into an elixir, and then self-ingesting.

The other route is lethal injection, which requires a health care practitioner to place an IV in the person who wishes to die and then administer a lethal dose of a medication that will ensure death. This is legal in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Colombia, and several other jurisdictions around the world. But it is not legal in the United States outside of the lethal injection that is used on death row for capital punishment.

New York State has been considering this legislation for about a decade. It’s come before the state government almost every year. When Governor Hochul agreed to sign the legislation in December, she said that it had to have certain amendments to enhance its safety. Those amendments were presented to the governor, who signed them last Friday, which means that in six months, the state of New York will become the next jurisdiction to perform so-called physician-assisted suicide.

The amendments that make it distinct from many of the other laws include a mandatory waiting period of five days between when the prescription is written and when it can be filled. Some jurisdictions have eliminated a waiting period altogether. Other jurisdictions, there’s a 15-day waiting period. Waiting periods were initially seen as a source of safety, and now they’re seen more as an impediment to easy access to these lethal drugs.

Hochul also added something unique out of all of the states where it is legal: An oral request must be made by the patient for MAID, recorded by video or audio.

She’s also requiring mental health evaluations by a psychologist or a psychiatrist of patients who are seeking MAID. I think many will see that as an impediment to access too, because nationwide, there’s a shortage of mental health professionals. But that’s a reasonable requirement, because we know that people who seek to end their lives often do suffer from depression. And if they aren’t being assessed, then we could be hastening death for people who have otherwise treatable depression and don’t really want to die.

The other thing that’s notable for the New York law is that MAID there is limited to New York residents. Vermont and Oregon have opened the doors so anyone who can get to those states could qualify for medical aid in dying.

Can you explain why assisted dying is seen as wrong from a Christian standpoint? The argument for MAID is often the compassion argument: We do as much for animals who are in pain and help them end their lives.

There are many good reasons to oppose assisted suicide.

Arguments in favor of it include the compassion argument, the take-control-of-your body argument—which I think is very, very strong—and an argument for the professionalization of the dying process. So much of our living and dying and giving birth is medicalized and professionalized, and this is just yet another example of that. I think many people don’t understand self-killing as suicide. They think of it as just the medicalization of death, of the actual moment of dying.

But this is killing or aiding a suicide. Every major world religion has a prohibition on the taking of human life, and this certainly falls under that.

But even if we were to get outside of religious arguments, we should have concerns about how marginalized and impoverished patients might feel pressured to end their lives. They recognize that they’re a burden on their family. They don’t want to be a burden. Why not just end it all? Actually, that’s a common question that patients raise even in jurisdictions where physician-assisted suicide is not legal.

Similarly, there are folks with disabilities who feel like they’re constantly having to fight to have the medical system realize that their life is worth living. They also may feel pressured.

There’s also this concomitant problem of an aging population, a lack of caregivers to care for that population, and the enormous costs for caring for the elderly, especially those with dementia, in the last year of their lives. There will be tremendous pressure to try to figure out how to handle these costs, and in jurisdictions where physician-assisted suicide is legal, we already know that people will choose to hasten their deaths rather than to live out their lives because of the costs involved.

So I think we will see, from a governmental perspective, a keen desire to make MAID more widely available and to reduce impediments to access to it to handle this so-called problem of an aging population.

There’s also a well-documented phenomenon of suicide contagion. This has been discussed going back to the 1700s, when it was called the Werther effect. We have seen that when there is a high-profile suicide, other people in a similar demographic will also pursue suicide. And people studying what happens in regions where MAID or physician-assisted suicide is legal find that conventional suicide rises alongside assisted suicide.

When the process of taking one’s life or hastening death prematurely becomes normalized, the culture shifts. People begin to believe it is acceptable to end your life. I’m not saying one causes the other, but there certainly is that correlation.

Another argument I’ve heard is that we should make palliative care more available. Is that something you see as a viable alternative to address these related issues with aging?

That’s a really tricky question. Palliative care is also a version of medicalizing the dying process. Now, insofar as it is available and used prudently, it is a wonderful gift to dying patients and their families because the focus is on holistic care, relief of uncomfortable symptoms, relief of pain. It’s bringing the family together, addressing spiritual needs, et cetera. That’s a wonderful gift. Palliative care is not available everywhere, even in the United States. It’s certainly not available worldwide, but it’s not available in much of rural America.

Historically, palliative care clinicians have been opposed to the legalization of physician-assisted suicide or MAID because they have taken a professional view that it is not their role to hasten death. They’re there just to accompany patients to a natural end. Unfortunately, in jurisdictions where MAID is legal, it is often through the palliative care doctors or in palliative settings, in hospice settings, where MAID is enacted.

And then you get into this difficult situation where patients who might otherwise want to have access to palliative services that focus on symptom reduction refuse those services because they’re afraid that these very same doctors will hasten their deaths. That’s a real problem. So kind of a complex answer to a complex issue.

In terms of the political situation, is this the end of the road in New York? Could this law be overturned, or should we expect a domino effect for other states?

Illinois also legalized about the same time, and they start in September, so I guess New York will beat them to it. But I don’t know that it’s a domino effect.

The reason why I say that is, if you look at a graph from the Lozier Institute of jurisdictions that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, at least 26 states responded to the legalization in 1994—when Oregon legalized its Death with Dignity Act—by passing legislation that made it more difficult to take one’s own life through a medically assisted death. So maybe there’s not quite a domino effect—at least not in more conservative-leaning states.

But many states have passed bad legislation over the years, and here I think specifically about sterilization laws in the early 1900s. Those same states have chosen to overturn what they now consider to be bad decisions. So should New Yorkers move to a position where they recognize the harm that is coming from hastening so many deaths? Yes, it’s always possible to reverse the legislation. I think we always hold out hope.

Last, are you already hearing from doctors or Christians in general about how to respond?

I’ve heard from lots of people just in the last few days, anticipating this as it’s moved through the country and in Canada. Ewan Goligher, my colleague in Canada, has published with CT, and he has a book now that he wrote for the church, How Should We Then Die. And the Canadian context, of course, is more difficult, but I would commend that book to anyone who identifies as a Christian and is trying to make sense of this.

But look, the reality is that mortality is 100 percent, right? All of us will die, and most of us live out our final days engaging the health care system in some way. That means we all will likely have to reckon with the question of legalizing assisted suicide, whether for ourselves or for our loved ones, if we live in jurisdictions where it is legal.

So I think the church needs to read Ewan’s book and do some serious thinking and teaching about this issue. And not just this question of hastening death but, more broadly, how to live and die well. My own work focuses on this, which is really critical for all of us.

For physicians, there’s a lot of trying to make sense of it in real time: How will this be implemented? What conscience protections will there be? Even some people who might not be opposed, necessarily, because of their view on bodily autonomy will still be concerned about what it means to be involved in hastening death. So yeah, there’s a lot of concern right now.

And just since Friday, health care leadership like hospital administrators are trying to think through what this will look like once they’re required by law to provide access come August. Originally, Hochul had said groups that were opposed could opt out, but now the law only says religiously oriented home hospice providers can opt out. So that’s concerning.

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

Ideas

We Become Our Friends’ Enemies by Telling Them the Truth

Justin Giboney

Contributor

Our corrupt political and racial discourse teaches us to judge by identity and ideology instead of honestly testing the spirits and assessing the fruit.

Cristina Quicler / Contributor / Getty

Sometimes it seems our opinions on the most polarizing issues have been decided for us before we can examine and reflect.

When a tragedy or cultural rift appears, each faction in American public life rapidly latches on to a consensus opinion. Like smoke from the flaming trash heap of our toxic political and racial discourse, these reactions smother the search for truth well before all the facts are available.

Unaware or unconcerned about the angles our algorithms and cultural biases are hiding from us, we see the complicated as easy and the unknown as obvious, all conveniently aligned with our preconceived notions about who’s good or evil, oppressed or oppressive. In a flash, we’re foolishly convinced that we know what we cannot know—or at least cannot know yet—like who initiated a stare-down, whether the election was stolen, or if someone deserved to die.

And thou shall not get caught on the wrong side of whatever issue is virusing through social media! Even commercial products like Super Bowl halftime shows can become high-stakes litmus tests where one must assent to a meaning assigned by the mob. Don’t let your tribe take any blame. Always accuse the other side of the most sinister motives. Suppress your deeper questions. Accept lies if that’s what it takes to keep your status in your group.

What does this system of perverse incentives, stereotypes, and partiality look like in practice? It looks like conservative officials and influencers conflating protests with riots and dismissing protesters’ causes out of hand. It looks like progressive custodians of culture comparing every other conflict to Jim Crow and daring anyone to question it. It looks like downplaying the violence done by us to exaggerate the violence done by them. It looks like only selectively recognizing immorality and injustice.

Or ask Beth Moore, Russell Moore, and J. D. Greear what happens when you refuse to condone colorblind and MAGA myths moving among white evangelicals. We become our friends’ enemies by telling them the truth (Gal. 4:16). In some circles, having the right politics or the right race narrative has become more important than right doctrine and right ethics. Religious heretics may be condoned, but cultural dissidents are unforgivable. We pronounce right and wrong according to identity and ideology instead of honestly testing the spirits (1 John 4:1–3) and assessing the fruit (Matt. 7:15–20).

John the Baptist took a sledgehammer to this kind of thinking. “Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God,” he exhorted his people. “Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones” (3:8–9, NLT).

Here, John was engaged in righteous but dangerous business. He was knocking down a pillar that upheld his people’s sense of uniqueness—maybe even supremacy—to reveal a truth they did not want to see. Telling the descendants of Abraham that their lineage didn’t make them right with God was cultural blasphemy, and in saying it, John modeled the very kind of courage we need. He put himself squarely outside what C. S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring,” instead choosing truth over ease and “conquer[ing] the fear of being an outsider.”

Anything less would have been cowardly, uncaring, and courting corruption. For, as Lewis knew, “Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

Are we willing to follow John’s example? To be shunned and forgo prominent associations to give useful lies a public death? Only by telling the whole truth and enduring the blowback can we effectively do God’s will and be known for our love for one another.

In the 1960s, Rep. Shirley Chisholm provided a model for us too. Chisholm rejected false and self-serving claims from all parties and all races. When she challenged Black militants, they reacted by calling her a sellout—among other things. “The easiest thing for anybody to do is to label you,” she answered. “I’m not concerned about labels. I’m concerned about what my behavior and my actions indicated to the Black people … [and] whites in this country. I see myself as a potential reconciler on the American scene.”

Last week, I wondered aloud whether conservatives would try to justify President Donald Trump’s demeaning social media post about the Obamas. Some did, but I was encouraged to see conservatives like Sen. Tim Scott, Sen. Katie Britt, and commentator Erick Erickson take a principled stand against such vile behavior.

It’s tempting to reduce reality to self-serving narratives the size and depth of bumper stickers. It makes our arguments effortless and our opponents easier to hate. But the breadth and depth of Jesus’ grace and the universality of human sin must always complicate such convenient story lines. The fact is our worst enemies are always redeemable—and we ourselves are never free from mixed motives and prejudice.

To renew our public discourse, love one another, and hold ourselves accountable, we must risk ostracism from our own tribes to seek the truth with patience, diligence, and mercy. In the church and politics alike, lying may be the cost of some associations. Bold truth is the cost of discipleship.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.

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Theology

We’re Not Made to Outlast Time

Bohye Kim

At the Korean Lunar New Year, everyone turns a year older. Psalm 103 frames aging as a sign of God’s sustenance.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye

I remember the first time that celebrating Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year, felt strange to me as a child. That morning, after I ate tteokguk, a soup made with thinly sliced rice cakes, at the family table, the adults around me smiled and said I was now a year older.

But it was not my birthday. There was no cake, no candles, no sense of having earned anything. Yet something had changed.

On February 17 this year, more than 50 million people in South Korea will grow a year older all at once. The logic is not as strange as it sounds: South Koreans traditionally count age not only by individual birthdays but also with the arrival of the first day of the Lunar New Year.

Seollal’s way of marking time finds a parallel in Psalm 103. The psalm neither interrupts time’s movement nor treats it as a problem to solve. Instead, the psalm depicts how time meets people who are already living inside a God-given mercy that has carried them this far.

Many of us begin a new year by seeking to make the most of our time. In this framework, time becomes something to manage well or risk wasting. We look for goals to set, habits to form, or problems to fix.

Yet days slip by as we measure them in unfinished to-do lists. When plans fall short, the feeling that follows this realization is often less like motivation and more like guilt.

We also struggle with time because it rarely stays abstract. Signs of aging appear in ordinary places: faint lines around the eyes or gray hairs that no longer feel temporary.

“Seeing time as a scarce resource makes us desperate; minutes and hours slip through our fingers,” CT editor Isabel Ong writes in a review of the TV show 3 Body Problem. “Even the best moments of love and connection are fleeting.”

Psalm 103 also describes our lives as brief and fragile: “The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field;the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (vv. 15–16).

The psalm acknowledges what Seollal assumes, that time moves forward whether or not we are ready. Days accumulate. Years pass without waiting for us to catch our breath. Yet the psalm treats time not as an obstacle to overcome but as the environment within which finite lives unfold. Grass grows where it is planted. Flowers bloom according to their season. Neither is asked to last longer than it can.

Eating tteokguk as a symbol of turning one year older during Seollal reflects Psalm 103’s understanding of time as a precious gift we ought to receive in gratefulness to God, rather than a condition with which we wrangle out of fear or despair.

This simple bowl of soup does not mark a personal achievement or a completed milestone. It marks arrival: You have made it into another year, as everyone else at the table has.

Eating this soup does not cause time to pass; it acknowledges that it already has. This is why Koreans have traditionally joked about measuring age in bowls of soup. Each bowl represents a year crossed, not earned. Age accumulates not through individual progress but through a simple, shared ritual. You eat, and the year counts you in.

This perspective of time and aging disrupts our modern-day penchant for control over the length of our days on earth. In Psalm 103, we recognize that God does not evaluate lives in terms of output or accomplishment. Rather, God sets human brevity alongside divine endurance.

Psalm 103 declares, “But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts” (v. 17–18).

Here, one generation makes room for the next. What lasts is not speed, effort, or careful planning but God’s steadfast love that moves from generation to generation. Human lives remain short, but they are held within a faithfulness that endures beyond any single lifespan.

Scripture returns elsewhere to this pattern of recognizing time as God given and God ordained. Genealogies move forward without commentary. Scripture offers no explanation, no evaluation, no pause to interpret their meaning. Name follows name, generation gives way to generation, and the list continues. Lives are recorded not for their achievements but for their place within a larger, ongoing story.

Biblical festivals operate similarly. The Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths return each year by God’s command, not human consensus, and gather people into remembering God’s faithfulness whether or not they feel ready.

Like genealogies, these festivals assume continuity. They locate individual lives within rhythms that precede them and will continue after them. They show how meaning often emerges not through explanation but through faithful return.

Seollal is also marked by family rituals observed by many Korean households, including Christians. Younger family members bow to elders in sebae as a sign of respect, and elders give sebaetdon, or New Year’s money, typically placed in small envelopes and accompanied by brief words of blessing.

Like the biblical festivals, these practices repeat each year at Seollal with little explanation. They are meant not to motivate personal improvement but to remind people that they belong to a familial story that did not begin with them and will not end with them.

Wisdom literature presses this understanding of time further. Proverbs 16:31 calls gray hair a crown, not because age guarantees virtue but because it bears witness to endurance. This proverb does not romanticize aging. It recognizes that our lifespans, with all their physical and physiological constraints, testify that God sustains all our lives year after year.

Seollal teaches Korean Christians to mark the passage of time as this proverb does. Aging is not an individual achievement but something that occurs communally. The year turns, and nothing about your life is neatly summarized or resolved. You sit at the same table with people who have known you longer than you have known yourself. These people remember versions of you that never make it into your own account of who you are now.

Year after year, parents, aunts, and older relatives use the same titles for me: daughter, niece, the youngest. While the years pass, the way they refer to me does not change. There is a comforting familiarity in these conversations, in how we relate to one another in ways that withstand the test of time.

By beginning with togetherness, Seollal also gives tangible form to this biblical vision of God sustaining life. The festival unfolds over several days, often three, during which schools, offices, and businesses close, making room for families to gather and return home.

In this way, we don’t experience time alone. Years gather meaning as we live them alongside others and as we remember and name each other within our shared lives.

Time does not single out anyone at Seollal. It brings people back to the same table, making visible what is usually easy to forget: that everyone has been carried forward into a new year together.

Psalm 103 gives language to this moment when it says God remembers we are dust (v. 14). The psalm recognizes human life as finite and formed, explaining why mercy frames God’s response to us: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him” (v. 13).

This year, when I eattteokguk again, I will not feel older in any dramatic sense. What I will feel instead is a solid, secure sense of place. God has given me another year, and he has carried me into it with my family (and millions of other South Koreans).

Psalm 103:14–18 helps me to name my experience of Seollal by offering a different account of time. Time is not an achievement measured by progress or productivity. It is a shared gift we receive within the ordering faithfulness of God, who holds human life within time with full knowledge of its limitations.

Time is not a test imposed upon human life but the medium in which life unfolds under a prior divine recognition of finitude. Within this framework, our brief, frail lives are not conceived as self-contained units competing against the clock. As Psalm 103 shows, God draws us together and carries our lives forward in time. That is something we can celebrate and rejoice in as the people of God.

Bohye Kim is a postdoctoral research associate at the H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies.

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News

Shutting Down an Addiction Supermarket

Marvin Olasky

Even in San Francisco, some change is possible: The Tenderloin neighborhood is improving.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

With all the bad news around, here’s one piece of good news: A contender three years ago for the worst neighborhood in America has improved.

In 2023, San Francisco’s historic Tenderloin, an area just blocks from City Hall, sported homeless encampments with addicts openly inhaling fentanyl through straws. As I walked through the area during a visit that year, I had to navigate around catatonic users, their bodies and arms twisted in the “fentanyl fold,” a position they might hold for 20 minutes or more. Dealers tried to sell me drugs.

Many users were missing teeth. Some were missing pants. Two government-funded “harm reduction” workers came by pulling what looked like a Radio Flyer wagon, calling out in singsong, “Harm reduction! Need anything?”

It was bizarre. The purported harm reducers seemed like Good Humor ice cream sellers with circus music, except bearing gifts: foil, straws, glass pipes, clean needles, granola bars, bottles of water, and naloxone to counteract the overdoses they were enabling.

Last month, when I visited again, the Tenderloin was different. Although the results of the San Francisco January 29 PIT count (its biennial survey of homelessness) isn’t published yet, my January 25 Tenderloin count showed only a few dozen men on cardboard, particularly on Jones Street between Ellis and O’Farrell. Some blocks still displayed feces and dead mice but no restless sleepers. Six San Francisco police cars displayed their “Safety with Respect” slogan.

Homeless men were no longer in front of the bar at 501 Jones with its “Anti-Saloon League San Francisco Branch” sign—it was a speakeasy during the 1920s—or across the street in front of the Golden Gate Cannabis Co. Nor were any in front of Brenda’s French Soul Food on Polk, with its “Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women” sign.

Caveat: Come spring, drug sellers and users might migrate back. But public tolerance of them fell in 2024 as even London Breed, then the ultraliberal mayor of San Francisco, declared that “this compassionate citymakes it too easy for people to be out there on the streets using drugs.” She said she was moving out of her “comfort zone” while “thinking about those who died for drug overdoses.”

The big move came last year when Daniel Lurie, a Jewish heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, viewed in San Francisco as a “moderate Democrat,” became mayor with 56 percent support in San Francisco’s ranked choice voting. His campaign pitch: “We’ve been too lax. We’ve been too laissez-faire. There are families, there are kids walking down these streets every day seeing people openly use—and, frankly, die.”

Lurie as mayor pushed forward a Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance that the city’s ruling Board of Supervisors approved 10–1. He ordered anyone city-paid not to distribute fentanyl paraphernalia: “We stopped freely handing out drug supplies and letting people kill themselves on our streets. It is not a basic right to use drugs openly in front of our kids.”

The Board of Supervisors said the city drug policy’s is “the cessation of illicit drug use and attainment of long-term Recovery from Substance Use Disorders.” Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former drug user, spoke of “reversing years of perverse incentives that have done more to exacerbate problems than solve them.”

The end to “harm reduction” on the streets did not increase harm but did not lower deaths either: The numbers of fatal drug overdoses in 2024 and 2025 were similar. San Francisco voters have supported the new measures, with 58 percent passing a measure requiring drug screening for city welfare recipients and 64 percent voting for felony charges and increased sentences for possessing some drugs if a defendant has two prior drug convictions.

With support from the supervisors, Lurie also strengthened proof-of-residency requirements for homeless people who receive monthly city payments of $714 (for adults without children). His goal is to stop San Francisco from being a “drug tourism” destination and “magnet for the homeless.” (In better days, the Tenderloin—which in 2008 received a spot in the National Register of Historic Places—was instead a magnet for musicians: It had a famous jazz club, the Black Hawk, at which Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others recorded live albums.)

Lurie said his administration would “fundamentally transform The City’s health and homelessness response and break these cycles of homelessness, addiction, and government failure.” We’ll see: Mary Ellen Carroll, director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, equated the changes in homeless and addiction to a wildfire—“when we sort of contain an area and we see that there’s movement to others.”

One justification for the laissez-faire approach Lurie decried is “respect for personal autonomy.” Yet if we understand sanity as the capacity to think and act rationally, fentanyl users are insane. They don’t want to die, but the desire for another hit is strong enough to overwhelm sane behavior, even though the high might lower them into a grave. Instead of offering the tools for suicide, Christians and others should intervene to promote real harm reduction.

Three years ago, walking around the Tenderloin, I often saw notes like this one posted on lampposts: “Mimi—5’, 100 lbs.—we miss you terribly. Please call any family member. Please call [phone number].” I saw no such notes last month.

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News

At least 18 Christians Killed in Crackdown of Iran Protests

Jill Nelson

Iranians hope for US action after the regime in Tehran killed thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–last month.

Iranian protesters gathering on Enghelab (Revolution) Street during a demonstration in Tehran, Iran, on January 8, 2026.

SOHRAB / Contributor / Getty

When 42-year-old Mohsen Rashidi saw the Iranian security forces shoot his friend, a two-time national powerlifting champion, he didn’t hesitate. He rushed to his friend’s side. Regime forces rushed there too—then beat Rashidi, forcing him to retreat to safety.

Some witnesses said millions flooded streets in 4,000 locations across Iran on January 8–9, including in Isfahan Province, where Rashidi—a Christian convert and father of three girls—joined the protests. At the same time, the government shut down the internet, cutting off Iran from the rest of the world.

After security forces temporarily retreated on January 9, Rashidi returned to his friend, who lay dead on the street. “Then he tried to carry the body,” said Mansour Borji, director of Article 18, a London-based organization focusing on religious freedom in Iran. Borji said families have reported that authorities refused to release bodies unless relatives paid large sums of money.

As Rashidi attempted to retrieve his friend’s body, security forces shot him in the leg. Several protesters took Rashidi to a hospital, but regime agents refused to grant him entry, and he bled to death, Borji said.

Rashidi was one of 11 Iranian Christians whose deaths Article 18 has confirmed in the wake of bloody crackdowns against protesters last month that rights groups say left more than 6,000 people dead. Borji has also heard about the deaths of at least 7 Christians among the Armenian community in Iran. A weeks-long internet blackout prevented many Iranians from sharing the atrocities they witnessed, but as partial connectivity returned, Borji noted, graphic images and details about the deaths emerged. Two officials of Iran’s Ministry of Health told Time that the actual death toll could be more than 30,000, although reporters could not independently verify that number.

If it is accurate, this was one of the worst killings “not only in Iranian history but perhaps in modern history, in just two days,” Borji said. Meanwhile, Iranian officials put the death toll at about 3,100 people.

What began on December 28 as large-scale protests against Iran’s economic collapse quickly snowballed into a nationwide movement calling for the end of the regime. Reza Pahlavi, the former shah’s son, who spent most of his adult life in exile in the United States, urged Iranians to take to the streets “to fight for their freedom and to overwhelm the security forces with sheer numbers.”

On January 8, US president Donald Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that if state forces begin killing people as they have during past protests, “we’re going to hit them very hard.” On January 13, only days after Tehran’s massacre of protesters, Trump posted on social media, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING. … I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” The president said the regime’s “killers and abusers” would “pay a big price.”

Iranians are still waiting for help from the United States. “That’s probably one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole situation right now,” said Shahrokh Afshar, founder of Fellowship of Iranian Christians. He now pastors an online congregation with Farsi speakers from six countries, including four Christians in Iran. He believes Iranians took Trump’s words literally and anticipated an imminent US attack on the regime’s assets.

“Everyone was hoping he would do something,” Afshar said. Some analysts believe the Trump administration is delaying an attack in order to reinforce air defenses in Israel and at US bases in the region. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three warships arrived in the Middle East last week amid heightened tensions. On February 3, a US fighter jet shot down an Iranian drone approaching the carrier.

Yet the Trump administration appears to be pivoting toward negotiations, engaging with Iranian officials in talks on Friday about ending Tehran’s enrichment of nuclear fuel. “What sort of deal do you want to make with a government that is as bloodthirsty as this?” Borji said. The two countries made little progress toward a deal but agreed to meet again at an unspecified date.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said negotiations with Iran must also include discussions about the regime’s ballistic missile program, support for terrorist groups across the region, and attacks on its own people.

Meanwhile, Iranians are attempting to find their loved ones and communicate with the outside world. Reports by locals described bodies piled on top of one another, family members missing, the possibility of mass graves, and security forces shooting the injured inside hospitals.

According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, the regime has arrested more than 50,000 people and severely injured at least 11,000. One of Afshar’s church members in Turkey was concerned about her nephew, whom authorities detained more than two weeks ago. They released him last week, and his father took him to a local doctor, afraid he may have been poisoned in custody. Some unverified reports claim security forces have poisoned protesters before releasing them. Borji said authorities are arresting doctors treating the wounded and lawyers representing protesters.

Afshar said he hadn’t heard from his four church members in Iran for nearly a month, but the Iranian Christians finally connected with each other over local phone lines last week, and two members left Afshar voice messages on Telegram letting him know all were accounted for. “That’s the best they could do,” Afshar said, noting that Tehran continues to limit internet access. One church member told him the regime is arresting Christians and accusing them of spying for Israel or the United States.

According to Borji, Christians are doubly vulnerable when they attend protests. Iranian authorities already target Christians and have sentenced some to ten or more years in prison for participating in or leading house churches. In 2025, security forces arrested 254 Christians—almost double the number from the year prior. Borji said most of the arrests took place after the 12-day war with Israel in June when the regime was looking for scapegoats.

Of those arrested last year, 57 Christians served sentences of imprisonment, exile, or forced labor, and 43 were still serving their sentences at the end of 2025, Borji added. Others remain in pretrial detention.

The arrests have continued into 2026, Borji said. “What is shocking is even during this time, the Ministry of Intelligence is still arresting and sentencing some of these Christians,” he added.

Borji said Iranians are more united in their calls for the US to strike the Iranian government than they have been in the past due to the regime’s increasingly brutal crackdowns. This has created some theological debate among Iranian Christians about civil disobedience and whether Christians should protest their government. Borji said many Iranian Christians have become more outspoken, and he has heard reports of pastors and priests attending protests and expressing solidarity with victims.

Still, the risks loom large. Afshar said his church members in Iran are understandably worried given the recent bloody crackdowns and ongoing arrests, yet their faith is resilient. One church member told Afshar, “I get on the street and share God’s love with whoever I come across, because the people are desperate and that’s the best I can do. That’s the only thing I can offer them.”

- More from Jill Nelson

Books

Excerpt

Undragoning the Imagination

Justin Ariel Bailey

An excerpt from Discipling the Diseased Imagination: Spiritual Formation and the Healing of Our Hearts.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker Academic

I have always loved stories about dragons. Much of my fascination owes to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose legends of Middle-earth tell of dragons like Ancalagon the Black, Glaurung the Golden, and Smaug the Impenetrable. In the tradition of Norse mythology, Tolkien’s dragons are insidious and bewitching, cunning and cruel, living embodiments of the lust for domination and destruction.

We are drawn to stories of dragons because they tell us something true about the world. Indeed, dragons (or something like them) also appear throughout the Bible. They fall into the category of “chaos creatures” and may be found in the depths of the sea, in the wilderness, or in the heavenly places.

Although originally a part of God’s good creation (since nothing is evil in the beginning), these creatures come to represent evil’s rebellion against God as the story continues. It is not for nothing that the book of Revelation names the devil as the “great dragon” and the “ancient serpent” who “leads the whole world astray” (Rev. 12:9). Dragons remind us that we must reckon with evil.

We are also drawn to stories of dragons because they teach us that dragons can be defeated. In Tolkien’s stories, Smaug is killed by Bard’s arrow, Glaurung is slain by Túrin’s sword, and Ancalagon is cast from the sky by Eärendil. In Scripture, the enormous red dragon is identified primarily to assure us of his defeat (v. 2). We are promised that despite the power of evil, it is not strong enough to stop God’s work in the world (v. 8).

Although that is good news, we wonder what it means and what it will take to subdue the dragonish impulses we feel inside us. The way of the dragon is manifest whenever we see our neighbors as obstacles or objects, things to devour or possess. We feel it in our pride and wrath, in our deceit and despair. We find it in the craving for glittering things, the obsession with our own reflections, and the longing to sit atop the pile in the place of God. Who will rescue us from the dragons within?

Think of the incorrigible Eustace Scrubb in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Eustace happens on a dead dragon’s horde and decides to keep it for himself. Falling asleep in the dragon’s cave thinking “greedy dragonish thoughts,” he wakes to realize that he has become a dragon.

The dragoning of Eustace offers a powerful image of the danger we are in. We too live in a world of dragons, and unless we are vigilant, we too may fall asleep in the dragon’s lair and be conformed to the “pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2).

Can our dragon-sickness be healed? One remedy, Tolkien believed, is to read dragon stories that expose us to the truth. Similarly, Lewis tells us that Eustace might have known better than to fall asleep in a dragon’s cave if he had been raised to read “the right books.”

Both authors held that exercising the imagination with fairy tales might help readers recover their health, training their powers of discernment and cleansing their souls with mythic truth. When we fail to care for our imaginations, stronger medicine is required, an intervention like the undragoning of Eustace. But how do we undragon our imaginations?

Early in my academic journey I was encouraged by a mentor to find a foundational question to orient my vocation, and it didn’t take long for me to find it: What does it mean to disciple the imagination? I became convinced that the imagination is at the heart of discipleship: What we imagine must be transfigured and trained by the true and beautiful story found in Scripture. For the last decade I have been trying to understand how the imagination works and how theology can nurture the imagination for cultural discipleship.

I am still convinced of the value of my keystone question. But in recent years I have started to wonder whether my research question assumes too much. My working model of discipleship was a training regimen composed of gospel truth and spiritual exercise. This is a common thread in books on spiritual formation: We preach truths and prescribe practices in hopes that both will take root in our hearts.

And yet, many well-intended plans for spiritual growth devolve into information transfer and behavior modification. When they succeed, they reinforce our sense of mastery and control; when they fail, they produce frustration and shame. Something has gone wrong.

My new book, Discipling the Imagination, has been borne out of a deep sense of lament at my own failure to be formed, a failure shared by the church more broadly. Why does it seem like so many devout believers have been unable to escape the gravity of more powerful cultural, political, and economic currents? Why are we unable to imagine better futures for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for the places we live? Are our imaginations too diseased to be discipled?

I’m convinced that if the imagination is to be discipled, it must also be healed. Healing and training are not necessarily opposed. But much depends on whether we view discipleship from the perspective of an elite athlete training for a triathlon or an accident survivor relearning to walk. Both kinds of training require discipline and self-denial, but the second kind of training is truer to the overarching story of Scripture.

The imagination enables humans to live creatively in God’s created world. It is precisely because the world is full of possibility that we are always using our imaginations, filling in the gaps so that we can live more securely in the world. The imagination is active when we plan a vacation, rehearse a presentation, or hear a noise late at night. It’s engaged when we listen to a story, read a novel, or exercise empathy in relationships.

I grew up reading the King James Version of the Bible, and like anyone accustomed to its style, I knew that the translators consistently rendered the imagination with negative associations, consistently speaking of human imaginings as “evil” (Gen. 6:5), “wicked” (Prov. 6:18), and “vain” (Rom. 1:21). These passages highlight human creativity gone awry, the way it goes when we ponder the possibilities of life without God. Detached from its anchor in God, the gift of imagination becomes a curse. It misdirects human imagining toward idolatry and injustice.

The prophetic hope is not just for individual renewal but so that one day the nations will no longer walk “after the imagination of their evil heart” (Jer. 3:17, KJV).

We might say that these idolatries are dragonish enchantments, spells that enslave us to evil powers. This brings me to a key term that shifts us from a magical metaphor to a medical one: the diseased imagination. I learned this phrase from Willie Jennings, who invokes “diseased social imagination” when describing how Western Christians constructed the category of race and the institution of race-based slavery.

Racial hierarchy was an imaginative fabrication; it offered an expansive story to justify the colonization and enslavement of nonwhite people groups under the guise of improvement and evangelism. Jennings’s analysis is sobering, especially for someone writing a book about Christian imagination.

It is devastating to read his account of Christian societies imagining, producing, and justifying diabolical practices and institutions. It makes plain how our lust for power and control compels us to embrace the way of dragons, to accept the domination and destruction of others as ordinary, simply “the way things are.”

If slavery seems like a distant example to some readers, let me offer one closer to home. I am a mixed-race, Filipino American man with skin that darkens considerably in the summer months. I grew up in suburban Kansas City, and although I felt different from my peers, I rarely felt unwelcome. In college I became interested in dating a girl who happened to be white, and it was a painful awakening when I heard an argument for racial separation—my separation—on the basis of Scripture for the first time. God made the races, I was told; there must be a reason. So stay in your place.

I would later learn that these lines of interpretation were taken for granted by previous generations, leveraged mostly against Black Americans. I do not for a moment believe that I have borne anything like the burden carried by my Black brothers and sisters. I share my experience to give a personal edge to the diagnosis, to testify to the inability of Christians in the dominant culture to imagine joining their lives with cultures unlike their own.

I do not believe this imaginative failure is exclusive to Christians in general or white Christians in particular. Rather, it represents the enchantments of power and comfort and the way we resist anything that might disrupt our perch at the top of the pile. Dreaming like dragons, we have become unable to imagine anything significantly different from what we have already seen and known.

We must reckon with the severity of the diagnosis before we can be healed, and Jennings tells us the truth: Christians can suffer from a badly diseased imagination. When the light in us is darkness, how great indeed is the darkness (Matt. 6:23)!

But although the diagnosis is painful, it is also a gift for three reasons. First, if the imagination is diseased, then we know that something foreign has taken it captive. Perhaps what has been learned can be unlearned; what has been taken for granted can be called into question.

Second, the diagnosis may make us more hesitant to wallow in shame. This does not mean we have no reason to be ashamed; “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). There is evil we have done and good we have left undone. But tracing sin to a diseased imagination may lead to a more careful, compassionate, and comprehensive approach. Yes, we have sinned. But we have also spent our lives in toxic ecosystems, consuming poisonous food and drink.

Like Eustace, we have not been reading the right books. Enchanted by Mammon and other idols, we no longer see a true image of ourselves, our neighbors, or the places we live.

If the imagination is diseased, the humbling truth is that we cannot fix ourselves through sheer willpower. If sin is more like an addiction or an enchantment, if we are slowly turning into dragons, it will not be enough to say, “Stop it.” We must have help from outside ourselves.

Our great hope is that God is healing all creation.

I have started praying like this: “O God who heals my diseases, heal my diseased imagination.”

The wonderful news of the gospel is that while we are still stumbling in the dark, God comes and finds us. He knows the sickness of our hearts and what we are doing to ourselves. Though we are turning into dragons, God moves to rehumanize us after the pattern of Jesus, the true human.

One of the most beautiful passages in the Narnia stories is when Eustace recounts meeting the great lion Aslan and getting undragoned. Eustace tries to peel his scales off by himself, but no matter how hard he tries, he finds that he is still a dragon. And so he must lie still and submit himself to Aslan’s claws. The lion peels the dragon skin from Eustace, layer by layer, then throws him into the water, signifying a sort of baptismal rebirth. Eustace is undragoned as he embraces a pain that goes “right into his heart” that also ultimately heals it.

Although the healing process is painful—in the Narnia stories and in our world—the amazing thing is that the healer makes sure that the worst of it falls on himself. Despite our failure to see, hear, and feel, the Lion who is also the Lamb (Rev. 5:5–6) shows up all the same. His great act of grace is stronger than the power of dragons, and it is the heart of our hopes to be set free from the way of the dragon. For “by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

Justin Ariel Bailey is a professor of theology at Dordt University. He is the author of Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture and Discipling the Diseased Imagination. Content taken from Discipling the Diseased Imagination by Justin Ariel Bailey, ©2026. Used by permission of Baker Academic.

- More from Justin Ariel Bailey

Culture

We All Want to Be the Right Kind of Parents

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Correspondent

Parenting books—even Christian ones—capitalize on fear and longing, sometimes making promises that don’t hold true.

Vince Fleming / Unsplash / Edits by CT

Professor Harold Hill had to create a problem to sell a solution. The shifty protagonist of the musical comedy The Music Man knew this fabricated dilemma had to be a problem that the parents of River City, Iowa, would care about. They had to care enough not only to listen but also to invest their time and money in the absurd solution he was about to propose: a boy’s marching band.

“We got trouble, right here in River City!” he cried, pointing to the billiard parlor, where a newly installed pool table threatened to send young boys down the path of crude language, beer, and ragtime. Hill’s rousing appeal to unwitting customers was that the boys were at risk of becoming hooligans, and he had the perfect solution.

After he established the enemy (the new pool table) and the danger (hooliganism), he turned to the crowd of mothers and fathers and said earnestly, “Now I know all you folks are the right kind of parents …”

The right kind of parents. Almost every parent wants to be the right kind of parent. Not just a good parent, but the best parent they can be. And every parent can relate to the feeling of taking an infant home and, amid the joy of bringing a new life into the world, sensing a crushing weight of responsibility. This unrelenting pressure sends parents to books, podcasts, blogs, and influencers. To be sure, not every parenting expert is a crook or scam artist, but even the most well-meaning self-appointed writers, coaches, and teachers may sometimes exploit parental fears.

Many new parents worry trouble lurks everywhere, that every day with their baby is an opportunity either to get it right or to fail. As their kids grow, they feel constantly at risk of being too permissive, too authoritarian, too involved, or too hands-off. And many experts, both Christian and otherwise, convince readers that parents are tragically unprepared for what lies ahead.

The most powerful figures in the parenting-advice niche have long built their influence by addressing spiritual, social, even political concerns. They place the day-to-day, relational work of parenting in the context of a larger social project. Discipline, behavior, and even sleep training become proving grounds and indicators of whether one’s family is helping move society in the right direction or contributing to decline.

The stakes feel especially high for Christian parents. We may not be explicitly taught that children—their behavior, health, or salvation—directly reflect our own spiritual goodness, but some come to believe it. Fear and a fervent desire to be the right kind of parents can make people desperate for answers, promises, and a guarantee that their kids will be okay.

Fear and longing make it easy to sell things to parents, too. The runaway success of Baby Einstein is a perfect example. In five years, the company grew from an in-home video project to a multimillion-dollar business, selling to Disney for more than $25 million in 2002. The promise of Baby Einstein was right there in the name: Einstein, shorthand for genius. Even though it turned out there was no evidence that these products were actually better for babies’ brain development than other toys on the market, the promise alone was enough to get parents to buy, just in case there was any truth in those too-good-to-be-true claims.

When I was a new parent, I was particularly susceptible to the marketing of aesthetic baby accessories. Like many other millennial moms, I was drawn to muted color palettes, matte silicone teethers and food trays, creamy beige muslin and linen, and wooden toys. Instagram and its endless stream of targeted advertisements were really good at telling me what motherhood was supposed to feel like. These brands weren’t selling me products by highlighting practical needs. They were selling me a little piece of aspirational motherhood, a filtered image of what my home should look like.

Marketing to parents almost always includes these kinds of promises. Any list of best-selling parenting books reveals the top-of-mind parental concerns of the day: baby brain development, helping children become resilient, kids and diet culture, working during pregnancy, sleep difficulties, or dealing with screen time and mental health. Christian families add their children’s eternal salvation and spiritual health to the list. Many Christian parenting books heighten parental anxiety by suggesting that parents cannot trust their own instincts and need to carefully navigate an ocean of information to find the right formula for success.

In his 1948 bestseller, Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote his now-famous admonition to anxious mothers: “Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.” But Christian parenting content has often had the opposite message: Don’t trust yourself. That’s helpful for anyone trying to sell a parenting book, if not actually helpful for parents. Nor is it resonant with the full biblical witness, which teaches that we and our children are sinful and fallible—as many Christian parenting books emphasize—but also that God entrusts our children to our care with the clear expectation that we are capable, with his help, of raising them faithfully, patiently, and compassionately.

As a result, many Christian parents, especially evangelicals who faithfully read books like James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline or Tedd Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, have come to believe they cannot trust their instincts.

Most parents will admit they often do need tips on how to get a toddler to stay in bed. They don’t necessarily even have an “instinct” when it comes to dealing with picky eating, so they go looking for help. But many Christian parenting experts go beyond offering suggestions. They claim to have the right answers, universally correct for every child in every circumstance. Dobson bolstered his work by assuring parents, “I’m drawing on somebody else’s ideas and that somebody doesn’t make mistakes.” Secular authors, however confident, can’t similarly claim divine providence for their sleep schedule and infant feeding tips.

Pick up any Christian parenting book, new or old, and you will likely find this verse from Proverbs somewhere inside: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6, KJV). Many parents in the thick of raising young children read this passage as a command. My job is to train up my child in a certain way, they think. Devout parents of older “prodigals” might see in this promise a sliver of hope that adult children who no longer espouse the Christian faith will someday return to the fold.

Christian parenting resources depend on promises made to parents: If you get it right now, then there will be desired results—if not immediately, then somewhere down the road.

As my coauthor and I interviewed sources for our book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, we were struck by how many parents regretted having put so much faith in parenting books. They trusted authors who claimed secular advice would lead them astray, and who argued that if they didn’t treat parental authority as the first principle of the home, their families would descend into chaos. We spoke to adults whose parents had delivered prolonged spankings to “break the will,” leaving bruises. Many felt deceived.

What does it mean to be the right kind of parent? The difficult but perhaps freeing answer is: No author can tell you. No author, however popular, knows you, your child, your family, or your community the way you do. Applying principles from Scripture to daily life raising children is a long, persistent practice, and there aren’t many hacks to make it easier. And despite what some books lead parents to believe, there is no correct application of biblical wisdom that will give them control over their children.

It’s instructive, perhaps, to look at some of the Christian parenting books that came before Dobson’s best-selling Dare to Discipline, which framed parental authority as a remedy for the social upheaval of the late 1960s. For example, Clyde Narramore, a Christian psychologist who founded the magazine and radio show Psychology for Living and helped establish the Rosemead School of Psychology, published Discipline in the Christian Home in 1961.

Compared with the best-selling Christian parenting books of the 1970s and ’80s, it’s rather boring. Narramore doesn’t connect discipline to social order or a moral panic. He qualifies his advice and recommends flexibility on the part of the parent. By the end, a reader might wonder: That’s it?

By the end of the 1960s, many parents were looking for more strident advice. They were alarmed by social and political upheaval, and the message of Dare to Discipline seemed to meet the moment, as did Larry Christenson’s best-selling The Christian Family (both were published in 1970).

In our current era, the success of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is further evidence that parents want to hear from people who address their worries and confirm that something is wrong. Parents are understandably concerned about the effects of ubiquitous screens and social media. Haidt’s message affirms that this is something to be worried about. That’s not to say that every author or influencer who positions themself this way is a grifter. Haidt and many others offer convincing evidence that our screen-dominated world is harming children. But the fact remains that fearful urgency sells.

It may seem ungenerous to compare parenting authors to The Music Man’s charlatan Harold Hill. But the parallel highlights how foolish it is to allow fear and urgency to dictate parenting decisions—and how someone eager for influence and profit can manufacture panic. It’s harder to generate enthusiasm for parenting advice like “Consider your child’s point of view” or “Hold firm boundaries, but be flexible when it seems reasonable.”

In an era of endless influencer content, books, and op-eds, parents can choose to be more attentive to the particular needs and quirks of their families than to societal concerns voiced by talking heads often far removed from our communities.

We can look first to the example of Christ—how he responded to children and adults, patiently teaching the same lessons more than once. We can strive to be more like him each day. We can resist seeing our kids as pawns in a culture war or avatars of whatever transient public discourse about “the kids these days” happens to be unfolding at the moment. We can respond to the children who climb into bed with us in the morning, pray for wisdom, and trust that with God’s help we are capable of cultivating authentic, connected relationships

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. She is a coauthor of the book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and writes broadly on Christian music and the intersection of American Christianity and popular culture. This essay is adapted from the first chapter of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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We All Want to Be the Right Kind of Parents

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