What $18 Would Get You

In 1979, CT investigated deceptive Christians, made the case for psychology, and watched Islam with concern.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, CT Archives

CT made the tough decision to hike subscription prices in 1979. The cost of 22 issues per year increased from $15 to $18.

We’ve all been hit by inflation—25 per cent since 1975. But in that same period, the printing and paper costs for putting out Christianity Today have increased even faster. Postage has gone up an incredible 120 per cent! That’s a per unit cost; it has nothing to do with our circulation growth.

But the worst is yet to come. The post office has decided to greatly increase nonprofit publications’ rates. Talk about planned inflation. In the next three years alone, postage (second class) for mailing the magazine will increase another 160 per cent and for promotional mailings (third class postage) 190 per cent! The figures are so large one feels like rubbing one’s eyes or tossing the papers skyward.

The magazine also put more resources into investigations of conservative Christians. CT reported on ongoing questions about televangelist Jim Bakker’s financial management of PTL (Praise the Lord) Network. CT dug deep into the twisty stories of traveling minister John Todd, who said before he was saved that he was a Grand Druid high priest in the Illuminati. CT found his account didn’t match the facts, and the facts suggested he couldn’t be trusted.

Todd pleaded guilty to contributing to the unruliness of a minor and served two months of a six-month sentence in a county institution.

Todd’s police record shows that a felony warrant was issued against him in New Mexico for passing a bad check. He was arrested in Columbus in 1968 for malicious destruction of property. He was treated for drug overdose at an army installation in Maryland in 1969. A warrant for his arrest awaits him in Ohio, as does a judgment against him for $22,000 in a defamation case.

Todd claims many of the police are associated with Freemasonry, an Illuminati organization, and therefore should be considered enemies. …

Todd was given psychiatric examinations twice while in the army. His records indicate evidence of an unstable home background and possible brain damage as a result of beatings. The second examination a few months later labeled his malady “emotional instability with pseudologica phantastica.” Todd finds it difficult to tell reality from fantasy, says a medical report.

Editor in chief Kenneth Kantzer said it was “embarrassing” to have to report on such things, but necessary as part of CT’s mission to serve the church.

Several Christian leaders who travel the nation … tell us that Todd is the most talked-about topic of these days. Letters continually land on editorial desks, asking in effect, “Is what John Todd is saying true?”

No, it is not. …

We can learn too from the response to Todd. Some of us are altogether too gullible—too quick to believe negative reports about those with whom we disagree, and not quick enough to believe substantiated negative reports about people who tell us what we were already inclined to accept. Many unscrupulous individuals take advantage of gullible Christians who would not be duped by a Jim Jones, but then give credence to the claims of a John Todd.

The magazine also profiled several prominent Christian leaders who would go on to shape American evangelicalism in the 1980s, including Francis Schaeffer. CT introduced many readers to James Dobson, reporting his decision to prioritize time with his children.

Men should give their families first priority, said James Dobson last month at the Roman Catholic Religious Education Congress in Anaheim, California. “If the family is going to survive,” he challenged the males in his audience, “it will be because husbands and fathers again begin to assume the lead in the family.”

That being said, the noted pediatrician revealed that he would be taking his own advice. Dobson, who has been making public appearances for the last fifteen years, said this would be his last speaking engagement. He wanted to spend more time with his 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter.

On the staff of the University of Southern California School of Medicine and author of such child-rearing books as Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson cited a Cornell University study showing that fathers of preschool children on the average spend 37.7 seconds per day in real contact with their youngsters. In contrast, the study indicated that children watch television approximately fifty-four hours per week.

CT encouraged readers to be open to Christian psychologists, such as Dobson, and listen to their professional advice, as long as Scripture informed it.

Just as truth about God’s created universe may come through natural sciences like medicine, or physics, or philosophical logic, or the insights of students in the humanities, so can truth come by way of psychology, psychiatry, and other social sciences.

There is, of course, much within psychology that the Christian cannot accept. Some psychological conclusions about man’s nature, for example, some techniques used by professional counselors, and some proposals for altering our future are clearly contrary to Christian ethics and the teaching of Scripture. If we test our psychological conclusions empirically, logically, and against the inspired Word of God, however, we will discover that the psychological sciences contain much of practical value to the Christian seeking to serve Christ both inside and outside the church.

CT tackled marriage-and-family issues facing Christians in 1979, including dealing with singleness, divorce, and second marriages. A counselor wrote about pastoral care for divorced Christians struggling to follow biblical teachings about sex outside of marriage in “Sex and Singleness the Second Time Around.”

Based on 203 participants (146 women and 57 men), only 9 percent of the men and 27 percent of the women were celibate, although many noted the intimacy had been with only one partner and/or in a “serious” relationship. It is worth noting that 67 percent of the men and 58 percent of the women reported a conflict between their faith and sexual experiences. ….

The absence of clear, precise teaching frustrates most formerly married Christians. The large numbers of undisciplined Christians and the misuse of Scripture (by foes and advocates alike) fuels the debate between unbelieving realists and unrealistic believers.

If Paul did not flinch in addressing the behavior and attitudes toward sex, why are we so timid?

The magazine also reported a government study on the ethics of in vitro fertilization and research on “test tube babies.”

Since 1975, the government has banned any new grants for in vitro fertilization research because of the ethical and moral questions involved. … Some observers fear Huxleyan possibilities: manipulation of the reproduction process that would include surrogate mothers for hire. Prolife groups condemn in vitro fertilization as abortion, since fertilized eggs are often discarded in the experimentation process that leads to a successful pregnancy.

With these arguments in mind, the board suggested safeguards for in vitro research: that in vitro fertilization be made available only to married couples who volunteer (scientists promote in vitro fertilization as a means of enabling women with blocked fallopian tubes to have children); that research be funded only if it provides important information that otherwise cannot be obtained; and that research be limited to human embryos in their first fourteen days of development after fertilization—the period before implantation. The ethics board noted that in light of limited government funds more pressing health matters might take precedence over in vitro fertilization research.

Evangelicals were worried about Islam in 1979. CT asked a professor of Islam and world religions to write about the “renaissance of the Muslim spirit.”

The subject is of considerable importance to both the world and the church. Economically, the world is virtually dependent on Arab oil. Politically, many of the world’s trouble spots are Muslim areas: Iran, the Middle East, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Religiously, Muslims represent one of the great unreached peoples for Christian missions. Certainly, for the church of God, the world’s 700–800 million Muslims are one of the greatest challenges with which it must deal. Let us therefore try to catch a glimpse of the main developments of the fourteenth Islamic century, and their implications for Muslims today.

The last hundred years of Islamic experience have been the most startling and decisive ones since the religion’s founding. … A powerful mix of internal and external stimuli have brought about this Muslim revival. Granting that the influence of these factors is complex, I would like to suggest three major ones: (1) the influence of modern education, (2) the recovery of economic and political power, and (3) the pressure of Muslim laity for social reform. ….

It is the task of the church in the days ahead to achieve such a relation with Muslims and to communicate well his powerful message of love.

An old Arab proverb says: “What comes from the lips reaches the lips; what comes from the heart reaches the heart.” I hope that Christians in the coming century will be able to convey, from their heart to the Muslim heart, God’s message for all people everywhere, in every condition.

The collapse of the government of Iran and success of a radical Muslim revolution grabbed headlines. CT checked in with Christian leaders and missionaries with long experience in the Persian Gulf.

Syngman Rhee, missions official in the U.S. office of the United Presbyterian Church, said his denomination had no plans to evacuate its dozen U.S. personnel from Iran. Henry Turlington, a Southern Baptist who pastors an English-speaking church in Teheran, had sent word to his home office that he and his wife would stay. Other Southern Baptist couples, who were outside Iran during the worst of the violence early last month, were advised not to return.

No Western missionaries had been physically harmed. (An American oil executive was killed in Ahwaz in late December, however.) For the most part, anti-American reaction surfaced in “Yankee Go Home” graffiti on city walls, telephone threats, and letters of warning. But it was enough to send packing 20,000 of 41,000 Americans living in Iran, with more waiting to depart.

Anti-American, rather than anti-Christian sentiments, were behind most problems facing U.S.-based missions agencies and U.S. missionaries. “Although there has been a feeling of anti-Americanism expressed in various ways,” said Rhee in a news release, “there have not been any specific feelings expressed against the church or the presence of missionaries.”

Like many international observers, CT did not know what to expect from the new regime.

The role of religion in the overthrow of the Shah and the perhaps temporary rise of Ruhollah Khomeini is of particular interest to Christians. Our feelings are mixed. On the one hand it is good to see that belief in the transcendent is still very influential in human affairs. On the other hand, ideologically-based governments (whether rooted in a traditional religion or in communist faith) have been notoriously hostile to evangelistic ministries and even to the proper range of shepherding ministries for believers. The fact is that the record of predominantly secular governments, such as most of those in the Western world, is notably better than that of governments that have a close link with some Christian or non-Christian faith. …

Whether the successor to the Shah’s government in the long run proves less corrupt, less given to torture, less restrictive of certain personal and political liberties remains to be seen. As Christians concerned about freedom to evangelize and to shepherd the relatively few disciples of Christ in that overwhelming Muslim land, we certainly hope so.

At the end of the year, Iranians took 66 Americans hostage at the US embassy in Tehran. The crisis lasted 444 days and became a major issue in the 1980 presidential election.

CT failed to comment on President Jimmy Carter’s big address on what he called a national spiritual and moral crisis. (Critics called it the “malaise speech”). At the end of 1979, though, CT expressed general disappointment in his presidency.

Candidate Jimmy Carter, who publicly identified himself as an evangelical, won the nation’s highest office. He was the first evangelical in this century to do so. Yet thus far, to some observers, Carter has failed to demonstrate any significant Christian influence on the federal administration, in spite of his noble-minded human rights campaign and unquestioned personal integrity. The disillusionment of many over the President’s performance has cast a shadow on evangelical hopes of influencing American life from the top down.

While evangelicalism was thus failing to win the leadership of America’s political institutions, despite its momentary appearance of success, America’s political machinery was beginning to make definite challenges to evangelicals and their religious institutions. Indeed, the new evangelical involvement in politics sometimes furnishes the pretext for an expanded governmental interference with religion and the churches.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Theology

The Eternal Meaning of the Cup

John Anthony Dunne

Across the church, our Communion practices reveal a broken world and anticipate the one to come.

Still Life With Grapes by Edith White.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

Communion, also known as the Eucharist and the Lord’s Supper, is the most central Christian sacrament, yet it is celebrated quite differently in our churches. Setting aside theological debates about its meaning and the matter of frequency, we might examine the different beverages we consume: Some of our church traditions use wine, and others use grape juice (or a nonalcoholic wine).

Rather than seeking uniformity in practice, let’s more deeply reflect on this difference. If Communion is significant to the Sunday gathering, what is a good theological framework that accounts for the diversity in our common practice?

The presence or absence of wine in Communion does not simply reflect a church’s attitudes to drinking alcohol generally. Instead, I find it more helpful to think about this difference in terms of eschatology (or the “end times”). When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, he did so by directly linking it to a time of feasting in the coming kingdom when he will drink wine anew (Matt. 26:29; Luke 22:15–16, 18). If Communion is a foretaste of that future messianic banquet, then it is like an appetizer before the main course arrives.

Communion, as a present experience of the future banquet, occurs in a context mired with sin, evil, and death. Although the coming feast will celebrate the end of those things, the Lord’s Supper is a practice that communicates the tension between the two ages—what theologians call “inaugurated eschatology,” or “the already and the not yet.” The messianic banquet is already experienced in the present, but the celebration is not yet in full swing.

In this sense, both wine and grape juice are important aspects of our common practice as Christians, because together, in their discrete ways, they are witnesses to the promised banquet to come. When some traditions use wine in Communion, they are participating in the foretaste of the wine stored away for us all when God restores all things (Isa. 25:6; Amos 9:13–14; Joel 3:18). To do this is to lean into the “already” of the banquet.

When other traditions use grape juice, by contrast, they are saving up their appetites. They are compelled by the “not yet” of the banquet as reflected in the enduring brokenness of our world. Things are not as they should be (and will be), and so the forces of corruption continue to drag us toward death by way of addiction, abuse, and alcoholism.

Through this lens, one of these Christian practices is not better than the other, since the kingdom is both here and not yet fully here. Indeed, both practices together can offer us a balanced perspective so that we don’t mistakenly err on one side or the other. In both practices, we can see elements of celebration and lament when we come to the table amid our broken world and in anticipation of the one to come.

A dual posture toward the kingdom’s presence and absence is even mirrored in the diets of Jesus and John the Baptist. The crowds perceived both to be approaching food and drink inappropriately. They thought John was demon-possessed because he didn’t eat and drink like Jesus, but they also thought Jesus overdid it and so called him a glutton and a drunkard (Matt. 11:18–19; Luke 7:33–35).

Yet Jesus doesn’t say that his way was better than John’s. Instead, he says, “Wisdom is proved right by her deeds” (Matt. 11:19). In other words, there is wisdom in both approaches, and what demonstrates the wisdom of their respective approaches, even though they’re not identical, is the results that come from them (the “deeds,” or “children” in Luke). Both can be legitimate positions to hold with respect to alcohol.

But the wisdom of abstinence and the wisdom of moderation are not an inherent given. Both can be folly, if folly results from their approach. In context, these two positions also suggest an attitude toward the future messianic kingdom. John the Baptist abstained because the kingdom was near; Jesus feasted because the kingdom was here. They demonstrate the already-and-not-yet tension.

Although John the Baptist is not divine, the diverging choices of John and Jesus suggest that we should expect and allow for a similar diversity of expression when it comes to wine consumption in the light of the kingdom’s simultaneous presence and absence. And so, why wouldn’t that also apply to the use of wine in the Christian ritual that calls for it?

Some might protest that we should all try to imitate the earliest Christian practice, but the problem is that just about every contemporary Communion cup contains something very different from the earliest ones that Christians passed around.

Neither of our Communion practices precisely replicates the earliest Christian practices, because “grape juice” could only be made once a year at harvest in late summer and it would ferment very quickly. Nor was ancient Communion wine like the fortified wines deployed today by traditions that practice a common cup, because distilling spirits hadn’t been developed yet. In other words, we must acknowledge that our Communion practices do not precisely replicate the past (for more on the historical development of wine, see Paul Lukacs, Inventing Wine; Patrick McGovern, Ancient Wine; Hugh Johnson, The Story of Wine).

Wine was the primary Communion practice until pasteurization was invented in the 19th century, but even so, some early Christians used water or refrained from a cup altogether.

Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University has written the best treatment of this phenomenon in his book Ascetic Eucharists. Most of the groups known for wineless Communions were deemed heretical on other theological grounds, but they share the impulse against using an intoxicant in Communion with many contemporary Christians. Presumably, if those early Christians had access to today’s grape juice, they may have been happy to make use of it in Communion like many churches do today.

As we more deeply consider the practices of the cup, we can look toward Christ’s return. The fact that we practice Communion diversely as the global church with respect to wine and grape juice can be seen as two sides of our witness to each other and our common witness to the world.

John Anthony Dunne (PhD, University of St Andrews) is associate professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary (Saint Paul, MN) and the author of The Mountains Shall Drip Sweet Wine: A Biblical Theology of Alcohol.

- More from John Anthony Dunne

News

Palestinian Christians Prepare for Easter amid War and Settler Violence

Heather M. Surls

Many in the community have moved abroad. Those who stay are barred from visiting holy sites.

Christians attend Palm Sunday mass at the Catholic Church of Saint Catherine in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem on March 29, 2026.

Hazem Bader / Contributor / Getty

Looking east on a clear day, Usama Nicola can see Amman, Jordan, from his balcony in Bethlehem. Since Israel and the US jointly attacked Iran on February 28, the father of three has been able to trace the white smoke of incoming Iranian missiles during the daytime. At night, barrages streak across the sky like menacing shooting stars. Every morning, Nicola finds that the decorative letters spelling out L-O-V-E lining a shelf on his balcony have shifted from the impact of missile interceptions.

By the war’s second week, Nicola had deleted the Israeli early warning app on his phone since he could hear the air raid sirens installed in Israeli settlements surrounding Bethlehem. During an incoming barrage, all he and his family can do is shelter in their home. Unlike many Israelis, most Palestinians in the West Bank do not have safe rooms in their homes, and the Palestinian Authority has not provided public shelters for citizens.

“We are totally in the hands of God,” said Nicola, a Roman Catholic.

Now in its second month, the war has claimed at least 4,500 lives in more than a dozen countries and has sent global energy markets spiraling. President Donald Trump said that talks aimed at ending the conflict are progressing, though Iran denies any direct negotiations. Israel and the US continue to target military and nuclear sites in Iran, while Israelis and Palestinians shelter from an average of 10 Iranian missiles daily, a 90 percent reduction since the beginning of the war.

Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem number fewer than 47,000 and make up just 1 percent of the population. As they prepare for Easter, they find themselves under immense pressure as they face war alongside tightened movement restrictions and continual cycles of settler violence.

At this time of year, Nicola usually leads locals and tourists on hiking tours in the desert east of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. He finds the quiet of the desert healing. Small wildflowers remind him that even in harsh conditions, life continues. Especially during Lent, he enjoys walking in this wilderness—the same one in which Christ was tempted for 40 days—to listen for the voice of God.

This year as the Bethlehem governorate’s 23,000 Christians anticipate Easter celebrations, Nicola cannot go to the desert to relieve stress. Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government closed more of the desert to Palestinians, he says. New barriers and heavy fines deter them from entering previously accessible areas—though the land is technically part of the West Bank and still open to Israelis. Nicola says that Bethlehemites feel caged.

In addition to the Israeli-built security wall, checkpoints, and roadblocks, about 20 settlements and outposts built on the West Bank’s Area C confine Bethlehem’s residents. Bypass roads, which can only be used by Israelis, connect these communities. Nicola describes this system as a vast net thrown over the West Bank.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem house around 737,000 settlers, with 100,000 in the Bethlehem governorate alone. Though the Israeli government legally approves of the settlements, claiming they are necessary for Israel’s national security and are built on “legitimately acquired land,” international law considers them illegal. The UN describes them as built on expropriated land belonging to the future Palestinian state.

For many, life in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967, has become unbearable. Nicola says that every day, he hears about another Palestinian preparing to leave. In the last two and a half years, he estimates that Bethlehem has lost 10 percent of its Christians. Hundreds of families with centuries of history in the Holy Land have emigrated, seeking freedom, better economic opportunities, and a future for their kids.

“I know, personally, leaving is better for me and for my children,” Nicola said. “But I decided to stay because I feel that I am connected to the town of my faith because of the history of my family in this place, because of my church, because of my deep roots. Yes, we lose freedom … but my faith makes me stronger. I need to stay human under all these pressures.”

The steady stream of Christians leaving the Palestinian territories is not new. Statistics show that Bethlehem’s population was more than 80 percent Christian in 1947. By 2017, due to emigration and much lower birthrates in Christian families than in their Muslim counterparts, it was around 10 percent.

Fares Abraham left Beit Sahour, a town east of Bethlehem, in 1998 to study at Liberty University. He committed his life to Christ at a Rick Warren conference, then worked as a contractor for the US government.

Three years later, his family followed him to the United States amid heavy fighting between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian armed groups during the Second Intifada. Many nights, his parents and siblings had slept on the floor to avoid the bullets whizzing through their windows. Hours after they left Beit Sahour—temporarily, they said, until things cooled down—Abraham’s uncle called his father to say their home had been shelled by an Israeli tank.

In 2013, Abraham founded Levant Ministries, an international organization that disciples young Arab Christians and mobilizes them to reach their communities with the transforming love of Jesus.

Levant Ministries works with young people in Bethlehem, many of whom feel trapped. “When they can’t find a good paying job, when they can’t find land to build a house on, when they can’t access roads, when they can’t travel freely—that creates a huge vacuum and it creates … a sense of desperation caused by the Israeli military occupation,” Abraham said.

Abraham, who now lives in Orlando, Florida, with his wife and three kids, describes Christian Palestinians as the salt of the earth and the life of Christ’s body in the Holy Land. He believes Christians are poised to speak life and embody biblical principles and values in a conflict-ridden region. Therefore he finds the diminishing Christian presence in Palestine alarming.

A 2020 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Philos Project found that 60 percent of Palestinian Christians left the region for economic reasons. In Bethlehem, more than half of the city’s Christians work in the tourism industry, which was crippled first by COVID-19 and then the Israel-Hamas war. After October 7, 2023, the Israeli government revoked work permits for nearly 100,000 West Bank Palestinians working in Israel and Israeli settlements. As of July 2025, only 11 percent of those permits had been renewed.

But Palestinians’ concerns are more than economic. More than 80 percent of those surveyed fear settler attacks, deprivation of their civil rights, and expulsion by Israelis from their homes and lands. About 70 percent are concerned about “the endless Israeli occupation.”

“If you want to bless Israel, then bless them with Jesus, and the way you bless them with Jesus is by strengthening the Christian presence,” Abraham said. “For me it’s counter-gospel, it’s anti-gospel, if we support policies that diminish the Christian presence.”

Buthina Khoury, a filmmaker and Greek Orthodox Christian living in Taybeh, describes how some of these policies manifest in her village. With a population of around 1,300, Taybeh, located north of Jerusalem in the Ramallah and Al-Bireh governorate, is considered the last completely Christian village in the West Bank.

As Khoury spoke with CT, an Iranian missile exploded overhead. The war with Iran does not frighten her, she says, especially after watching Palestinians die daily in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas conflict. For her, the real fear comes from radical settler attacks and from Israeli forces controlling movement in and out of Taybeh.

As in Bethlehem, IDF checkpoints and road closures make travel in and around Taybeh extremely difficult. Before her father’s death, Khoury regularly drove him 11 miles to Ramallah for kidney dialysis, frequently getting stuck on the roads for hours. Her nieces and nephews who attend Ramallah schools must leave home at 5:30 a.m. to arrive for classes at 8.

Radical settler violence has pummeled Taybeh as well. Khoury says that sometimes armed settlers raid the village at night, shooting windows and breaking into homes. They’ve set fire to cars and graffitied racist messages on walls. In the fall, settlers shot at Taybeh residents trying to harvest olives in their orchards. Early in the Iran war, they stole her cousin’s horse and pony, which she said were valued at close to $10,000.

On the night of March 21, settlers launched a coordinated attack on Palestinians in 20 locations across the West Bank after a Palestinian-owned truck hit an ATV and an 18-year-old settler in it died. In Taybeh, Khoury says that around 30 settlers occupied a factory at a quarry a few kilometers from her home. They raised an Israeli flag and expelled the owner, telling him he could move to Egypt or Jordan.

Settler violence has skyrocketed since October 7. In 2025, there were 867 recorded incidents of settler violence toward Palestinians, according to The Times of Israel. The IDF and Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, believe that a group of around 300 radical settlers are responsible for most of the violence. Under far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, settlers are usually protected by the IDF or the Israeli police, and their crimes usually go unprosecuted.

Palestinians who try to defend themselves or their property against settlers are “shot at, killed, detained, injured, beaten,” Khoury said. Last month, Israeli settlers beat and sexually assaulted a 29-year-old Bedouin shepherd. They also attacked his children, relatives, and an American staying with the family, stealing their valuables and 400 sheep.

Khoury believes in living out Jesus’ commands to love her neighbor, love her enemy, and turn the other cheek. Yet she admits that the amount of violence she has witnessed in the last two and a half years makes her long for the injustice of occupation to be lifted.

“We cannot endure any more violence,” Khoury said. “We cannot endure any more humiliation. We cannot endure to be treated like animals, as they describe us. We cannot accept that anymore. We have paid a high price throughout the years.”

In the meantime, Khoury deals with stress by providing physical and emotional support to other Palestinians—Christian and Muslim—in Gaza and in northern West Bank cities like Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus, which have borne the brunt of IDF incursions in recent years.

“To be close to Christ, I have to be close to all those fellow Palestinians who lost their dear ones,” she said.

Traditionally, Khoury says that Taybeh’s Orthodox, Catholic, and Melkite Christians gather on Easter to pray in the ruins of St. George’s Church, built in the fifth century to commemorate Jesus’ visit to the town, then known as Ephraim. After a Lenten fast, Orthodox Christians wait to receive what they claim to be a miraculous holy fire from Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Khoury has not been able to visit the traditional location of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection since 2019. She laments that she cannot get an Israeli permit to go to Jerusalem and pray in the church, though tourists visit with ease.

Nicola’s visit to the Holy Sepulchre on Easter weekend last year turned traumatic. Israel granted Nicola and his then-eighth-grade son Yazan permits to enter Jerusalem, but not his wife and two other children. When the two returned to Bethlehem that evening, Nicola said his return was recorded but his son’s was not. Consequently, authorities blacklisted Yazan, barring him from returning to Jerusalem for months.

Nicola will not be able to worship at the Holy Sepulchre this year, though he considers visiting Jerusalem inextricably linked with Easter. After the war with Iran started, Israeli authorities closed the holy sites of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre indefinitely.

On Palm Sunday, Israeli police prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, and Francesco Ielpo, the guardian of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from entering the church. In response to international uproar, the police and church leaders reached an agreement on Monday that will allow Holy Week services to be broadcast to Christians worldwide—though access to the church will be given only to “representatives of the Churches.”

With shrapnel falling in the Old City recently, Israel calls these restrictions a security precaution. At the same time, Palestinian Muslims and Christians fear these closures set a dangerous precedent of restricting access to holy sites.

“I feel that we Palestinian Christians are still on the Via Dolorosa, at the stations of the cross,” Nicola said. “But we know that in the end, there is an empty tomb, there is a resurrection.”

- More from Heather M. Surls

Books

Review

We Need More Than Generalities About Beauty and Justice

Ashley Hales

Makoto and Haejin Fujimura’s new book aims to help Christians think deeply about how we live but falls short on details.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker

Haejin and Makoto Fujimura’s coauthored book, Beauty and Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage, posits that “beauty and justice are two sides of the same coin of the gospel.” Beauty by its nature will work toward justice, and justice is more than the absence of wrong: It is also beautiful. For readers who see beauty as less important than utility, or the work of justice as always exhausting or strident, the message that both are right responses of all who bear the image of God is welcome.

Beauty and Justice is the marriage of the authors’ vocations. Haejin, a lawyer and entrepreneur, shares stories of the humanitarian justice work her global nonprofit, Embers International, has executed in Indian brothel neighborhoods. Mako, a world-renowned artist, describes the intertwining of justice with his artistic process and the Fujimuras’ work with destitute children.

And the book is also personal. In the afterword, the Fujimuras include their wedding homily on Isaiah 61, given as a charge to them “to proclaim good news to the poor” and “to bestow on them a crown of beauty” (vv. 1, 3). Mako writes about the dissolution of his first marriage, the way he unexpectedly met Haejin in 2020, and their pandemic-era vows. They share glimpses of loss and pain—from Mako’s experiences at Ground Zero on 9/11 and his subsequent PTSD to Haejin rescuing trafficked children who live in despicable squalor. Yet these stories are often told from a distance.

As an observer, I get the sense that Haejin’s and Mako’s work and lives are better together than apart. But when reading a book on beauty and justice, I desire both an aha moment of realization and a story so well-crafted I can feel its beauty in both diction and syntax. While their painting and humanitarian work eminently show rather than tell, the telling in Beauty and Justice doesn’t quite deliver.

Perhaps the book falls short because, frankly, it’s hard to write about beauty and justice. Beauty always seems to catch us off-guard. It’s a feeling in the gut, an electric warmth, a mouth-agape moment that nails our feet to the floor. In a similar way, the longing for justice can feel like fire shut up in our bones: It can be hot, intense, maybe even full of tears. And when we try to pin down these words, they seem to slip away.

Mako agrees. He points out that beauty is “not so much a term to be defined but something to be experienced.” He mentions he’s tried to answer the question “What is beauty?” in all his books but has never felt successful. Even still, I applaud another attempt.

The couple’s vocations focus on what they call “generative living,” pursued in creating beauty and justice, that they define in five movements: genesis moments (creating into the future), grit, generosity, gratitude, and generational stewardship. Although the Fujimuras provide a general outline for this mode of living, echoing what Andy Crouch calls culture making, a reader looking for practical applications may expect more of a guided journey through the five g’s.

Because words like beauty and justice are so hard to pin down, the book kept circling around common themes. For those familiar with Mako’s previous works, much is replayed. Throughout the book he repeatedly returns to the concept of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken vessels with precious materials. Makoto championed the art and extended the metaphor to the Christian life over the last several decades, and it has since become ubiquitous in books and sermons.

Throughout, we read a plethora of abstract nouns. Beauty and justice “[require] imagination,” and they are “inherently relational.” “Beauty is a portal” that “can bring justice into our bodies.” Sometimes the images are even combined in one sentence: Haejin says we should believe that we are a new creation, “a winged horse that can and will fly, a Kintsugi vessel that is more beautiful and valuable because of its scars, not despite them. Therefore, we must grow our wings and train them to fly (our new wineskin).”

It’s understandable for writers to keep searching for adequate language for concepts as resonant as beauty and justice. I understand the words’ slipperiness. But at some point, we need stories and concrete language that not only tell but also show us how to make these concepts a reality in our own lives. The sentences in the book sound nice, but ultimately, I’m not sure what they look like on the ground.

Even though the book did not forge new trails, much of it is entirely correct. We read of the redemptive arc of creation, fall into sin, redemption, and unification of beauty and justice in the new heavens and new earth. The authors make thoughtful connections and write true words (“Sacrificial love leads to generative fruit.”)

But at the end of the day, what am I supposed to do with a sentence like that, standing in my kitchen on a Wednesday night with my elbows in dishwater? How do I make the connection between my ordinary chores and sacrificial love, and how do I imagine “generative fruit”? That’s what many Christians want to know.

The challenge for writers is not only to see and do but also to communicate in fresh ways what they have seen and done. One of the most affecting scenes in Beauty and Justice involves Haejin narrating the work of Embers International. Because of the Sahasee Embers Center the nonprofit runs in an Indian slum, a young boy whom Haejin calls Amir has received hope through an education outside thearea. As a low-caste child, he did not have a birth certificate and would have been educated in ways that affirmed generational poverty. Yet Embers International helped him obtain a birth certificate, an education, and a loving community.

On one of Haejin’s prayer walks, a volunteer at the center invited her to see Amir’s home. The stench was overwhelming. Approximately 1.5 million pounds of waste were dumped daily in the nearby landfill. Down a corridor, Haejin saw Amir’s home: a public toilet he shared with his alcoholic father. She knew that aside from Amir’s days at a private school, with both bussing and afterschool care provided by the Sahasee Embers Center, his days were as noxious as the systems that oppressed him.

Haejin, wiping away her tears, made a pinky promise with Amir where he promised to say hello to her the following day at school—she was doing all she could, while giving him dignity, to ensure he would keep coming. His chin glued to his chest in shame, he still grasped her pinky. The authors write, “From the public toilet to a private school to Sahasee Embers Center and back to the public toilet, Amir experiences heaven and hell every day.” I wish the book had more of these stories.

Make no mistake, I am a fan of the Fujimuras. Mako has an illustrious career and has remained faithful to the gospel. I have marveled at his works in person, lingering over their layers. They are breathtaking. My family has a copy of his illuminated Four Holy Gospels on our coffee table. Haejin’s systematic thinking combined with her compassion is a force to be reckoned with—and one of many reasons I wanted to read the book.

Although Beauty and Justice fails to deliver adequate language commensurate with its titular nouns, I commend the attempt. For what else might an artist or advocate—or any of us—do but try to show and tell of the goodness we’ve seen? We all fall short. Gratefully, we’ve got all eternity to witness to the inexplicable reality of both.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

A Case for In-Person Voting

By Chris Butler

Contributor

As a volunteer at a polling station, I saw what we lose when we choose convenience over communal participation.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from the Mosaic newsletter. Subscribe here.

This month, I volunteered as a poll chaplain in Chicago. Illinois residents were casting votes in primary elections for gubernatorial and congressional candidates, and I went to help at a polling place near my home on the city’s south side.

When I walked in around 5 p.m., the election judge at the check-in table was working through a pile of walnuts with an old metal nutcracker. She looked up, slightly startled, as though she hadn’t expected anyone to walk through the door. When I asked about turnout, she told me it was “pretty good.” But if it had been any slower than what I was seeing, I figured she must have had a lot of walnuts, because the place was eerily quiet.

What I saw was far from what I expected. I’m a pastor, and clergy like me sometimes serve as poll chaplains—a role for leaders who want to be a calming presence at polling stations during elections. I had come prepared for the last hectic hours of a contested primary, some of which I vividly remember from my days working in Chicago politics. I expected conflicts to defuse, people to pray with, and maybe a long line of voters who needed encouragement to stay the course. But none of that was needed.

During the last two hours at the polling place, only ten people came in to vote. Outside, there were no campaign workers on the sidewalk making last-minute pitches for their candidates, nor were there political organizers who stopped by carrying hot beverages for faithful precinct workers as they did back in the day. It was just one woman, alone with her walnuts, holding down the machinery of democracy.

The irony is that by every measure, a lot of people were voting in Chicago. On the morning of election day, city officials told a local paper that turnout through early and mail-in voting had outpaced that of from recent midterm primaries. Some 400,000 votes had been cast by that evening, and total primary turnout hit 26 percent (a modest but decent amount) with more mail ballots still to count. Yet the polling place felt abandoned.

This is a paradox I now often see with voting. We have made the process more convenient, and in doing so, we are making democracy a more independent and less communal experience. This is a problem, and Christians can understand something about it that our secular neighbors might be more likely to miss. Throughout Scripture, we see there’s something powerful about presence, physically showing up and being there with people. And extending that awareness to how we see democracy might be one of the greatest contributions we could make to our broader civic life today.

Being among others is most profoundly demonstrated in the Incarnation, which was a statement of God’s presence and closeness. Jesus showed up in a body, in a specific place, and among a specific people, to accomplish redemption. He was tired, hungry, and inconvenienced. Still, he was there, and we imitate him when we gather with other believers every week to display that we are indeed one body.

The church is not America, but the principle that there is something good and dignified about being physically present in meaningful moments, including elections, is not something we can easily set aside. Gathering to vote in person with fellow citizens can foster community and bipartisanship and allow us to carry out simple and unexpected acts of ministry. It shows our democratic way of life is not primarily an idea. It is a practice: local, sometimes inconvenient, communal, and irreplaceable. By reducing it to a transaction—fill out the form, seal the envelope, drop it in the mail—we might be preserving the mechanism while hollowing out its deeper meaning.

That said, independent forms of voting do present some benefits worth acknowledging. A 2020 Stanford study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most rigorous analyses available, found that universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall turnout by roughly 2 percent and has no apparent effect on either party’s share of turnout. But the same research found something equally important: Voter interest, not convenience, drives civic engagement. This means most people who vote by mail would vote in person. What mail-in voting changes is how, and with whom, they participate.

That distinction matters, especially for Christians who see their involvement in the democratic process as their type of ministry. Marsha Washington, an African American woman who volunteered to be an election judge in Chicago in the past election, told me she’s been volunteering in the role for more than 20 years. A typical day doing the job, which pays a small stipend, involves fixing broken equipment, dealing with provisional ballots, and enjoying moments of genuine human contact—including assisting people to vote.

During the election this month, Washington told me, she helped a middle-aged man with an intellectual disability who needed help casting his ballot for the first time. She read the ballot to him, which Illinois law allows, and helped him participate in the democratic process. Marsha, who is a Democrat, also told me that when she says goodbye to voters, she makes a point of saying, “Have a blessed day,” so people know she’s a Christian. That kind of civic ministry can happen between the parking lot and the ballot scanner, but it can’t happen through the mail slot.

Nationally, when and how we vote has become the subject of intense debate. On top of the recent Republican-backed SAVE Act, which would stiffen voter-identification requirements and make mail voting more difficult, President Donald Trump’s well-documented but perhaps less-than-principled opposition to mail-in voting (he and his family voted by mail in a special election this month), has created a landscape in which skepticism of mail-in voting feels like partisan territory. But the Stanford research makes clear that this type of voting has virtually no partisan effect. And my concern here is about our participation in the democratic process and whether we are weakening the very thing we claim to value.

The most important loss we suffer when we stop showing up together is the further untethering of Americans from each other. Some of the volunteers I met in Chicago know this and are doing their best to contribute in a meaningful way. Nathaniel Stuart, a 27-year-old man who lives on the south side, told me he became an election judge four years ago and keeps doing it despite unpredictable days, occasional conflict, and very little pay. Why? He said, “It’s a way of expressing love for my neighbors and my community.”

During the most recent election, Stuart watched a teenager come in to cast his first vote in a primary. The election judges in the room were excited and cheered for the teen, who will likely remember that experience for some time to come. Stuart, who is a Republican, also told me he sat next to his Democrat counterpart, a retired Chicago Sun-Times reporter, during the length of the election day and talked about their neighborhood’s problems. By the end of the night, the two were discussing the possibility of starting a local chamber of commerce to help businesses in the area.

“The more we leave behind in-person voting, the more we forget that our personal lives are located within neighborhoods and around people who have real concerns, who have real fears,” Stuart said.

While I am critical of any system that makes communal experiences feel less essential, there is certainly a need to accommodate voters who are sick, soldiers serving our country overseas, and people who are less mobile or lack transportation. We can’t totally discount convenience, and it’s good to explore other communal paths to increasing turnout, such as creating a federal holiday for voting, expanding polling locations in underserved areas, or otherwise ensuring people have the time to participate. Democracy is a team sport, and the benefit of our current system—a 2 percent bump in ballot returns—is simply not worth the further atomization of our civic life.

This year’s primary season runs through September. If your state has not yet voted, there will soon be elections to determine the candidates who will stand for the general election in November. Both the primaries and the general election represent opportunities for more than simply casting ballots. They are opportunities to remind ourselves that our destinies are tied together as neighbors who inhabit the same community.

You can vote by mail. But you can also choose to show up. However, showing up is so much more than voting in person. You can serve as an election judge. You can volunteer on a campaign for a candidate you support. You can come as a poll chaplain, or a poll watcher, or simply as a neighbor willing to drive someone to vote. You can bring your kids and let them watch what democracy looks like from the inside—not the broadcast or mail-slot version but the walnut-cracking, provisional-ballot-filing, cheering-for-a-teenager version. That’s democracy at its best.

Chris Butler is a pastor in Chicago and the director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity & Public Life. He is also the co-author of Compassion & Conviction: The And Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement

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Ideas

What’s the Fix For the Affordability Crisis?

Compiled by Haleluya Hadero

Baylor University students tell us what they think about Zohran Mamdani, Ezra Klein’s Abundance, and the rising cost of housing.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

The Syllabus is a column that features student opinions on timely national and international topics. We aim to highlight how evangelical students in the US are thinking about important issues and how the Christian faith informs their worldview. Students should use this link to submit a response for April’s prompt: “How do you think about AI use, and how are your peers using the technology? What, if anything, do you believe the Christian faith has to say about how we use AI?” Responses are due by April 20.

For this column, students were asked, “Politicians and pundits offer different ways of solving affordability issues in the US. What do you like—or dislike—about the approach taken by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, center-left writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and the techno-optimist vision of “sustainable abundance” by Elon Musk? Is there another option, more free-market oriented or not, that you believe could help your generation with housing and other costs?” Here is what they said:

Let’s Listen to Klein and Thompson and Build More

A good way to think about housing is the classic example of pricing snow shovels during a storm. Most people feel it is unfair for a store to raise prices when demand spikes, but economically, higher prices help ration limited supply and signal that more inventory is needed. If prices stay too low, a few people can buy everything, leaving others with nothing. It is not perfect, but it helps balance the market.

Housing works in a similar way. This is why the government forcing prices down to make housing affordable for everyone is not a real solution. It only makes shortages worse by reducing the incentive to build and thus limiting supply.

High prices feel frustrating, but they signal that there is not enough supply. We need to build more, and a big part of the problem is that we have made that too difficult. This is the problem Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson highlight, and it’s why their “abundance” approach to make housing more affordable (by building more) makes the most sense to me.

That said, there are important caveats. Real estate moves in cycles, and if too much supply hits at once, you can get rising vacancies and falling profits, which can slow future development. It also matters what we build and where we build it. So the goal should be strategic abundance, reducing barriers and regulations while still being thoughtful about timing, location, and scale.

Lucas Escamilla, senior, Baylor University

Americans Need to Learn How to Save

Affordability is one of the biggest buzzwords. Open a social media app, and you’ll see headlines declaring that Gen Z will never afford health care, let alone a house. People think sticking taxes on the rich and getting handouts is going to get them out of the hole. But those who climbed their way out of poverty and are now able to afford the unaffordable didn’t expect politicians to solve problems for them. They acted themselves.

My family immigrated to the US from El Salvador and lived a life where affordability extended far past housing and health care into everyday necessities. Rather than sitting around and passing the torch to politicians, they solved their issues quite simply: They worked. Ask Americans ranting about affordability what their dream jobs are; I doubt any would say working at Taco Bell. It might not be luxurious, but that’s what my family did. They lived minimally, saved, and let their earnings slowly accumulate.

In the book Mere Economics, economists Art Carden and Caleb S. Fuller encourage readers to save money so they can “bake a bigger pie next year.” Working hard is also straight up biblical. The apostle Paul writes, “Mind your own business and work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11). The real way to address affordability is to stop passing the blame to others and make it happen for yourself.

Paige Demosthenes, junior, Baylor University

Our Housing Dreams Are Doomed

It’s not hard to see that affordability in the US is becoming the plot of a dystopian novel, where basic needs grow increasingly out of reach. Shelter shouldn’t be a luxury. But in our current political atmosphere, I don’t see a solution for rising housing prices.

Most of the proposals offered thus far feel like chapters in the same dystopian story rather than actual exits. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s vision offers the relief of rent control for rent-stabilized housing and the prospect of building more public housing, but it’s just a Band-Aid. On the other hand, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s fight against the vetocracy—by trying to reverse an entire system of housing permitting laws—makes sense on paper. But it is essentially a losing battle against a system designed to say no. A lot of people, for example, don’t want more apartment buildings built in their neighborhoods, and their preference is our downfall.

Then there is Elon Musk’s techno-optimism, which feels the most dystopian. He thinks we would be living in the most optimal world when artificial intelligence and robotics have generated so much economic output that scarcity disappears entirely.

None of these paths feels like a real way out. Between Band-Aid fixes, never-ending fights about permits and zoning laws, and a lifeless robotic future, a true solution seems hopeless.

Tabitha Dalton, senior, Baylor University

Mamdani’s Long-Shot Plans Are Good

Zohran Mamdani’s approach to affordability stands out to me because it directly targets everyday costs. He thinks housing, transit, and food are public goods and wants to implement policies like rent freezes, free buses, and city-run grocery stores to help solve the issue in pricey New York City. Instead of relying on markets to gradually lower prices, he aims to immediately reduce costs for working people in a very clear way, which I appreciate. However, he does face major hurdles. Many of his proposals require state approval or billions in funding. So even though he has a strong vision, I do think his plans are not that feasible, at least in the short term.

By contrast, writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson emphasize increasing supply, especially of housing, by reducing regulations. I think their approach is more pragmatic and arguably more achievable, but it can feel slow and less responsive to the immediate challenges people face. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tech-fueled, no-work-needed vision is appealing in theory, but it lacks concrete short-term solutions and assumes technology alone will fix structural inequality.

So if I had my pick, I would say Mamdani, but he faces an uphill battle.

Tyler McKinney, senior, Baylor University

The Government Is Making Things Worse

Mamdani, Klein, Thompson, and Musk each identify a real part of the affordability crisis. Mamdani is right to treat high housing costs as urgent. Klein and Thompson are right that scarcity, red tape, and blocked construction drive prices higher. Musk is right that innovation and growth can help. Still, these views miss a deeper problem: Affordability is also about government discipline, misplaced priorities, and a system too often run by career politicians with little incentive to reform it.

Policymakers expect young Americans to accept high rents, delayed family formation, and a lower standard of living even as Washington spends tens of billions of dollars on foreign aid. At the same time, it keeps expanding promises without showing the discipline to manage programs efficiently, reduce waste, or address long-term obligations like Social Security before a crisis forces painful cuts. Good stewardship means using limited public resources responsibly, because affordability is not only an economic issue but also a matter of human dignity and flourishing.

A better answer is a free market with guardrails. Policymakers should make it easier to build by cutting zoning barriers, shortening permit timelines, and reducing fees that discourage new housing. They should encourage competition and supply rather than relying on new public programs first. Congress should also adopt term limits. America should not be governed by lifetime federal politicians who face too little pressure to challenge failed systems. My generation does not need bigger promises. It needs more housing, more accountability, and leaders willing to let markets work while governing with restraint.

Jose Tamez Villarreal, senior, Baylor University

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Books

Excerpt

American Presbyterianism Was Born Amid Chaos

D.G. Hart

An excerpt from Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, University of Notre Dame Press

Francis Makemie is sometimes called the father of American Presbyterianism, and he earned that status thanks to two episodes during the last two years of a life that ran from 1658 to 1708.

The first, in 1706, was his organizing the Presbytery of Philadelphia, a grassroots effort of six other pastors that created structures for ordination and church discipline. It lacked oversight from any Old World ecclesiastical body and owed its New World existence to both the exigencies of colonial existence and the religious freedom that Pennsylvania—a colony founded by Quakers—afforded to Protestants from all over Europe.

The second episode that framed Makemie’s reputation was his defiance of British colonial policies in New York. On the way to Boston during the summer of 1707 to recruit pastors for Presbyterian congregations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, Makemie stopped in New York. He and his companion, John Hampton, received a cordial welcome from the colony’s governor, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury. Makemie’s meal with the governor never suggested that Presbyterians were unwelcome in New York.

Makemie had no awareness of restrictions on worship and accepted an invitation to preach in a home of local well-wishers. Because Makemie lacked a license, his preaching was against the law, as Lord Cornbury interpreted it. Local authorities had him arrested and imprisoned. Both Makemie and Hampton were in jail for 46 days. When the case went to trial, Makemie mentioned that Quakers and “Papists” had worshiped without penalty. He also appealed to England’s laws of toleration.

An intriguing angle on this claim was whether the Church of England’s prerogatives applied to the colonies as much as to England itself. These arguments were sufficient for the jury to find Makemie not guilty.

That did not clear him for court costs. In A Narrative of a New and Unusual American Imprisonment of Two Presbyterian Ministers and Prosecution of Mr. Francis Makemie (1707), the pastor (who also conducted trade in the Caribbean) itemized his legal fees. Between jailers, justices of the peace, sheriffs, and travel, Makemie was forced to pay more than 81 pounds (the equivalent of almost $25,000 in 2023).

Born in 1658 in Ramelton, a town in Ireland that boasts the oldest Presbyterian church on the island, Makemie’s roots went back to obscure Ulster Protestants who settled earlier in the 17th century. His family’s Presbyterian convictions were no match for either Oliver Cromwell’s government or the Restoration.

As an outsider to the Church of Ireland, Makemie could not attend Trinity College in Dublin, but he enrolled instead in 1676 at the University of Glasgow. Ordained in 1681 by the Presbytery of Laggan in west Ulster, Makemie left for North America two years later with a commission to plant churches among Presbyterian settlers.

When he left Ireland, prospects for Presbyterianism either in Scotland or Ireland were not encouraging. Nothing in Makemie’s subsequent career, however, suggests an attachment to the cause of Presbyterianism either in Scotland or Ireland.

In fact, the young pastor’s movements within England’s North American colonies indicate a strategy of fitting in more than advocating reformation.

The Presbyterian pastor also aligned himself with the Reformed churches of Geneva, France, Scotland, and England. A few years later, during a business trip to Barbados, Makemie lost the polemical edge that had been a trademark of Presbyterianism. He did so in a pamphlet written in 1697 (published in 1699) to defend Reformed Protestants from claims by Anglicans that Presbyterians were a fringe group of Protestants.

Makemie argued that Presbyterians were in fact the “truest and soundest part” of the Church of England. At the same time, he constructed an “ecumenical bridge” between the two British Protestant rivals. Makemie objected to using “Presbyterian” or “Puritan” as epithets. One important reason was that Presbyterians agreed with the Church of England “in all points of Faith, and Divine Ordinances, or parts of Worship.”

The only differences were in “Ceremonies, Government and Discipline.” Did the colonial setting take some of the edge off Presbyterian zeal?

Whatever the demands of his environment, Makemie’s attempt to find a common cause with other British Protestants was indicative of Presbyterians in the English-speaking world after the Glorious Revolution.

By the 18th century, Presbyterians were recalibrating ecclesiastical ideals to gain a foothold in the emerging structures of liberal society. How central Presbyterianism was to other sectors of national life was the question that church officers and members on both sides of the Atlantic needed to answer.

Two hundred years later (1906), leaders of the Presbyterian Church USA, the communion that sprang from the presbytery that Makemie had organized, gathered in Accomack County, Virginia, to unveil a statue that memorialized the colonial pastor.

Henry Van Dyke, professor of literature at Princeton University, composed a poem for the occasion, “Presbyter to Christ in America.” The Dutch American feted the colonial Ulsterman in American cadences:

To thee, plain hero of a rugged race,
      We bring a meed of praise too long delayed.
      Thy fearless word and faithful work have made
The path of God’s republic easier to trace
In this New World: thou has proclaimed the grace
      And power of Christ in many a woodland glade,
      Teaching the truth that leaves men unafraid
Of tyrants’ frowns, or chains, or death’s dark face.

Oh, who can tell how much we owe to thee,
      Makemie, and to labors such as thine,
      For all that makes America the shrine
Of faith untrammeled and of conscience free?
Stand here, gray stone, and consecrate the sod
Where sleeps this brave Scotch-Irish man of God!

Makemie’s life, and his time in prison, became an easy narrative by which to prove American Presbyterianism’s stake in American independence. But reading Makemie’s life forward into American independence misses the revolutionary politics of the 17th century that shaped the Presbyterian’s life and ministry. Makemie himself belonged to a generation that was still recovering from revolutionary wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 1640s and 1650s, which culminated in the beheading of Charles I.

The Ulster Presbyterian was also living with the fallout of another revolution, this one Glorious, which provided a constitutional framework for the English monarchy. As much as Makemie may have inspired American patriots, his career embodied the religious and political uncertainties that characterized the English-speaking world between 1558 and 1689.

Published with permission from Notre Dame Press, excerpted from Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution. D. G. Hart is professor of history at Hillsdale College. He is the author of Protestants and Patriots, among other books.

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News

Supreme Court Says Schools Can’t Hide Kids’ Gender Transition

The Bulletin

Q&A with attorney Adele Keim on the landmark ruling for parental rights.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

On March 2, the Supreme Court voted in a 6–3 decision to allow California parents the right to be informed if their child chooses to socially enact gender transition at school. The Bulletin sat down with Adele Keim, legal counsel at the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, to understand more about this landmark case, not only for parental rights regarding their children’s gender expression but for religious freedom more broadly. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation in episode 263.

What was argued in Mirabelli v. Bonta, the case brought to the Supreme Court?

This case was originally filed by two teachers and two families in California. All of them were Catholic. The parents had gone to their children’s schools and said, We think something’s going on with our child. Have you socially transitioned them? Have you changed their name and their pronouns, and are you treating them as a boy instead of a girl?

In both cases, the teachers and principles said, No, we would never do that. We haven’t done that. Years went by, and, in both cases, the two children had severe mental health crises that resulted in hospitalization and suicide attempts.

The parents discovered upon the hospitalization of their kids that the schools actually had lied to their faces. Their children had been transitioned socially and were being treated as the opposite of their biological sex—girls being treated as boys. Teachers had actively worked to conceal this from the parents throughout years of parent-teacher conferences. They did false paperwork so the parents wouldn’t catch on and then refused to answer questions, stonewalled, or lied when the parents asked the question.

The California law actually required school districts statewide to engage in this pattern of concealment from parents unless a student affirmatively told the school, I want you to tell my parents about my experience of gender incongruence, about the fact that I’m using different pronouns and a different name at school, that I’m going to the boys’ bathroom instead of the girls’ bathroom.

Because the California law required the school districts to conceal actively from parents, the parents sued to challenge that law. They proceeded along with two Catholic teachers who said, We have a religious obligation to be truthful and to not lie in our jobs.

There was a lengthy trial proceeding with expert witnesses from both sides and testimony from the parents, families, and administrators. In December 2025, the district court judge ruled in favor of the parents and the teachers and issued an injunction that said California could no longer enforce this law. After this injunction, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals tried to pause the ruling and allow California to continue its concealment practices while the case went on. Federal court cases can take years to complete.

The parents and the teachers went to the Supreme Court and asked for the policy to be paused while the lawsuit continued. The Supreme Court, unusually, reached out and agreed. In that 6-3 decision, they said, We think this is outrageous, and we’re not going to let California keep parents in the dark while this case is litigated.

What argument does California make for why concealment is necessary?

On the legal side, one of their primary arguments was that children have a constitutional right to privacy under the California constitution, and the state needs to protect children’s right to privacy from their own parents. The district court and the US Supreme Court rejected that argument. The supremacy clause in the US Constitution overrides a contrary state law. Even if the contrary state law is very popular back home, the federal Bill of Rights controls. That’s why Jim Crow was overturned.

California doesn’t think they’re doing evil or harm here. They say they are motivated by a concern to avoid child abuse. The state has said throughout that they do not want children who disclose to their parents that they are feeling gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, that they want to transition, to face child abuse at home. It is important and legitimate that the state is concerned about avoiding child abuse.

The US Supreme Court said that, while their concern was fair, the state has an entire child abuse enforcement system in place to adjudicate cases of genuine child abuse. All teachers are still mandatory reporters who can report potential abuse through the right channels for proper investigation and, if substantiated, for child abuse charges. There’s a whole process for protecting the child while protecting the integrity of the family, seeking changes in the family, and eventual reunification if that’s possible or removal if it’s not.

The Supreme Court took great pains to say those processes still apply. California still has all of those tools because the state does have a legitimate and important interest in preventing child abuse. But what the court did say was that the state can’t presume that parents will abuse their children and therefore protect them from their parents.

The Catholic parents in this case testified that their beliefs prevented them from letting their children go through social transition. They said they would get their children counseling and help and support them. They would show them love and acceptance but would not facilitate their gender transition. The court below and the Supreme Court found that that is not child abuse—that the parent has a fundamental right to raise their child in their faith and the state may not knowingly and deliberately interfere with a parent’s efforts to raise their child in the faith.

That’s a really important thing for Christian parents to hear out of this decision. There are ways to be a loving parent that do not involve facilitating a gender transition when you believe, as a Christian parent, that is not in the best interest of your child.

The district court said in its ruling for the parents that, if parents didn’t know what was going on, they couldn’t help their child. All the experts agree that kids whose parents are working together with their therapists to address their problems do much better than kids whose parents are not working with their therapists. Unless parents are involved, the child is essentially left on their own. Schools cannot arrange therapeutic intervention on their own; parents need to be involved. Concealment doesn’t serve the child’s interest on any level.

Is this concealment by school districts happening in other places beyond California?

This is happening nationwide. Around 2016, right at the end of the Obama administration, these policies started to be rolled out and recommended by advocacy groups as the gold standard for accommodation for transgender students. They were often introduced with nondiscrimination policies. Schools could not discriminate against students on the basis of their transgender status. If the student asked you to, you concealed their social gender transition from their parents. If the student and their parents disagreed about transition, you sided with the kids over their parents’ objections. Those policies have been around for 10 years, and estimates say about 1,200 school districts have them. Some are imposed at the state level.

How would parents know that’s going on in their particular school district?

You could look up rights for transgender students in your district. You could go in and talk to your kid’s teachers. If you have a good relationship with teachers or administrators, you can say, “What do you do in these situations?” And you can put them on notice. You can say, “I really care about my kid. I want to get them all the help that I can, so I really want you to let me know if my kid is expressing discomfort with their gender identity and wanting to transition. Please tell me.” You can bring it up in parent-teacher conferences if you feel comfortable, reminding them that you are your kid’s best advocate. You are the one who knows your kid best and loves your kid best. You can do it in a winsome way, but you can also do it knowing that the law is on your side.

Parents have the right and the duty to raise their children in the way they see fit. The Supreme Court case law here goes back a hundred years. That’s a fundamental constitutional right, and that overrides your school district’s policies. Any school district officials that now continue to conceal gender transitions from parents are in violation of clearly established constitutional law. It means they’re personally liable for monetary damages.

We want a pluralistic society. That’s what it means to be an American. What is the limiting principle for how our education system should address these ideologies as they emerge in our culture?

The Mirabelli case went back to 100-year-old case law that existed at the height of American xenophobia, where Nebraska tried to enact laws that banned German Lutherans from having Bible classes in German, in their parochial Lutheran schools, and Oregon tried to outlaw Catholic schools. Both laws were designed to shore up support for the nascent public school system, but they required you to send your kids to public schools only. The Supreme Court said 100 years ago that the child is not the mere creature of the state. It is their parents who have the responsibility, the right, the high duty to prepare them for their future life and their responsibilities.

Those principles are still true today, and they apply in the most contentious questions that educators and parents are dealing with today. Parents are still the primary educators of their kids, and the public schools do not have the right to deliberately interfere with parents’ efforts to bring their kids up. This is important for Christians, but it’s even more important for members of religious minorities.

Protestant parents who do not wish to have their child enrolled any longer in a public school may find a Protestant school nearby. It may not be ideal. It may be costly, but you may also have a homeschool co-op nearby that you can join or a private school you can go to. You shouldn’t have to do this, to be clear, but there are options out there.

If you’re a Muslim parent in Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, there are no good options for you other than sending your kid to a religious school that’s not your faith. If you’re the parent of a disabled child who needs a lot of special support, there aren’t good options for you outside of the public school system.

When Christian parents step up and say, This is woven into our constitution, and you can’t take this away from us, it actually has an umbrella effect. Our advocacy advances the common good for our Muslim neighbors and for others who are, for some reason, locked into the public system and don’t have a way out.

- More from The Bulletin

Books

Review

The Meaning of Your Life Can’t Rest on You

Matt Reynolds

Arthur Brooks’s new book is enjoyable, smart, and often wise, but a search for true meaning must bring us to Christ.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Portfolio

When discussing the biggest problems in life, Christians are understandably eager to present Jesus as the solution.

Sometimes this looks like basic fidelity to Scripture, which depicts Christ as the source of all wisdom, the one in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Regrettably, it often looks more like the dreaded “Jesus juke”—an awkward, heavy-handed, or manipulative attempt to shove faith into a conversation. (Yes, I worry about the Iran war. But in the end, I’m more concerned about the war to win souls for Christ.)

I fought mightily to restrain this altar-call impulse while reading Arthur C. Brooks’s newest book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. A Harvard University professor and leading expert on happiness, Brooks specializes in social science, and his book leans on insights from this field as it investigates why so many people enjoying outwardly enviable lives struggle with loneliness, anxiety, and aching dissatisfaction. But as much as I long to answer such existential worries with Jesus’ self-attestation as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6), I wanted to honor Brooks’s expertise and his chosen analytical framework.

And it’s not as though Brooks ignores the place of Christianity in illuminating life’s meaning. Far from it: He writes candidly about his own Catholic faith and often bolsters social-scientific findings with complementary strands of Christian wisdom, alongside samplings from other theological and philosophical traditions.

Still, the further I read, the more trouble I had quieting my inner Billy Graham. I can understand why Brooks issues a generous, inclusive invitation, proposing pathways to deeper meaning that anyone can pursue, regardless of religious beliefs (or lack thereof). There are virtues to mapping out the good life with ecumenical expansiveness. Yet I’m loathe to settle for anything less than acknowledging Christianity as the map itself.

Before plunging into those waters, let’s back up a little. The Meaning of Your Life addresses a specific dimension of the social crisis playing out in parts of American society. Many researchers have studied the mental health burdens weighing on younger generations, raising alarms about their disordered attachments to smartphones and social media. Others have dug into data concerning Americans without college degrees and steady paychecks who fall away from family and community, get hooked on drinking and drugs, and succumb to premature “deaths of despair.”

Brooks aims his appeal at the high-achieving end of the bell curve, toward members of America’s “striver” class. Blessed with superior gifts and unceasing energies, these strivers are continually scaling mountains of personal, educational, professional success—always pushing, in the words of one interview subject, to earn “the next gold star.” But Brooks observes a void in their lives. As their accolades and material wealth pile up, they wonder whether their labors amount to anything worthwhile, especially after counting the cost in strained relationships, harried psyches, and punishing daily grinds.

Brooks sees these tendencies in his Harvard students. He sees them in personal and professional acquaintances. And he sees them, perhaps most profoundly, in himself. An incurable striver from childhood onward, Brooks excelled as a classical musician before pivoting to triumphs as a professor, nonprofit boss, and public intellectual. He resonates on an intimate wavelength with misgivings about workaholic zeal crowding out deeper questions of meaning. Much of his happiness research, he admits, doubles as an avenue of “me-search.”

With that record, Brooks might seem like an insufferable showoff, custom-engineered to arouse envy in mere mortals (like me). But I think regular Joes will find his manner disarmingly down-to-earth. The book features the same genial, plainspoken, and self-effacing style on display in his advice essays for outlets like The Atlantic and The Free Press. For anyone seeking practical, relatable guidance on happiness, I can imagine him making a delightful conversation partner.

Such guidance abounds in The Meaning of Your Life, in which Brooks distills decades of research and reflection. The “problem of meaning has vexed me more than any other in my career,” he confesses, “and this is the hardest book I have ever written.”

Early on, Brooks recounts a conversation that provided a flash of conceptual clarity: One anxious striver described feeling trapped in a “simulation” where cheap, two-dimensional stage props replaced the rich architecture of authentic life. That image struck a chord, and subsequent interviews echoed a similar refrain: “Life felt unreal,” Brooks reports, “full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.”

Eventually, Brooks concluded that what “was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life.”

As Brooks observes, strivers can often identify and lament this absence of meaning. But they’re tempted to respond in counterproductive ways, soaking up the screen-based diversions of our digital age. Time and again, the book introduces fine specimens of on-the-clock industriousness who fritter away their leisure hours with aimless scrolling. The ensuing dopamine briefly numbs their discontent, but their sadness returns soon enough, piling guilt atop their weary souls while leaving the fundamental problem unresolved.

Escaping this “doom loop,” Brooks argues, is the first step toward getting a firmer grasp on what life is all about. Yet what strivers need most, he suggests, is an awakening jolt to parts of their neural circuitry too often stuck on sleep mode.

As Brooks theorizes, the people most adept at climbing ladders of power and prestige tend to operate within the brain’s analytical centers. What they often lack is a receptivity to signals sent from the brain’s opposite hemisphere, a fertile soil for ruminations on mystery, beauty, divinity, and other proverbial staples of late-night dorm-room debates. This is where meaning dwells most richly, Brooks suggests, in the “numinous” realms that defy rational explanation.

How do you open new passageways to these neglected regions? This question guides most of Brooks’s chapters, which offer concrete strategies for “ignit[ing] the right hemisphere of your brain” and training it to recognize what matters most.

He asks readers to make regular assessments of the coherence and direction of our lives, invites us to pursue romantic love and committed friendship, and calls us to look beyond our own needs, cultivating an openness to spiritual realities. He teaches us to orient our working hours to something beyond money and our leisure hours to something beyond fleeting or trivial pleasure. He encourages us to immerse ourselves in natural, aesthetic, and moral beauty. And he reminds us that our suffering, while inevitable, need not be in vain.

By and large, this is wise (and sometimes urgently needed) counsel. If you’re struck in a metaphysical rut, you can hardly go wrong hearing an orchestra, hitting a hiking trail, taking someone on a date, catching up with a friend, or—who knows?—even darkening the doors of a church. I have my quibbles with certain arguments and illustrations, as anyone might. But Brooks’s core recommendations seem broadly congruent with basic Christian teachings.

Speaking of which … uh-oh, here it comes. Let’s call it a Jesus juke lite. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Scripture, of course, doesn’t say much about the brain’s precise cartography or the happiness principles that flow from diagramming it rightly. But it says plenty about what makes meaning genuinely meaningful.

Drawing on a definition proposed by psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, Brooks pictures meaning as a cord of three strands: coherence, purpose, and significance. You’ll notice the glaring absence of any anchoring in objective realities or moral truths. Plenty of false religions and grotesque ideologies check these three boxes. Perhaps their adherents enjoy a secure sense of meaning, but it rests on a foundation of illusions and lies.

In his determination to liberate meaning from the cramped perspective of rationalistic strivers, Brooks risks liberating it from anything solid and stable. At one point, he approvingly cites psychiatrist Carl Jung, who wrote, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.” Which requires getting comfortable with philosophical and experiential loose ends, rather than demanding some program or paradigm to tie them together.

But Christians believe the Bible spells out both our greatest problem (sin and alienation from God) and an efficacious solution (Christ’s death and resurrection). Yes, our faith embraces mystery and transcendence. It proclaims realities so unfathomable—a triune God, a divinely ordered cosmos, a virgin birth, a kingdom that has no end—that our puny minds can scarcely comprehend them. But it tethers the sublime grandeur of redemption to decidedly non-numinous claims of historical fact.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives them a workmanlike rundown: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve,” and then to a further succession of disciples and apostles, including Paul himself (vv. 3–8). If these statements are untrue, he insists, then our “faith is futile,” and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (vv. 17, 19).

If Brooks’s conception of meaning lacks a firm grounding in objective truth, it also lacks a firm grounding in the binding stories, communities, and traditions that have structured lives and shaped consciences for most of human history. In other words, it lacks a firm grounding in the authoritative meaning we inherit, rather than the subjective meaning we find and choose for ourselves.

Even as Brooks exhorts us to look outward and forge relationships of reciprocal care and concern, the book’s overall thrust remains curiously individualistic. It’s right there in the title, which speaks of the meaning of your life, not life in general. Words like search and journey get heavy workouts, suggesting more of a lonely quest than a baptism or initiation into an established community.

In fairness, Brooks does include a moving epilogue tied to his experience walking the famed Camino de Santiago with other Christian pilgrims. Here he stresses how meaning can find us rather than us finding it. For most of the book, however, the onus seems to fall on individual seekers, who need only drop their phones and reprogram their brains by doing “what your grandparents did in the course of their ordinary lives.”

In fact, I was surprised that Brooks didn’t pay more attention to broader trends of institutional and communal decay. If people today are starved of meaning, perhaps that’s because an atomized society isn’t satisfying their hunger to belong.

Here, again, is where Christianity helpfully enlarges the frame. Scripture doesn’t deny the subjective dimension of meaning derived from relationships, responsibilities, talents, and callings that vary from person to person. But it weaves those threads into a single all-encompassing story of redemption showing all people, in all ages and places, as well as who they are, where they’ve come from, and where God in Christ wills to take them.

There are lots of things worth saying to anyone doubting the significance of their life and work, and Brooks says many of them clearly and effectively. But here’s what I’d like to say most: Step into the story of redemption. Put your trust in its author and perfecter. Look forward to its consummation in the new heavens, the new earth, and the multiethnic multitudes gathered to worship Christ forevermore.

Discovering the meaning of your life, of all life, really is every bit as simple—and infinitely, gloriously complex—as that.

Matt Reynolds is a writer and a former CT editor. He lives with his wife and son in the suburbs of Chicago.

- More from Matt Reynolds

News

1,000 Kenyans Fought for Russia in Ukraine. Many Were Duped.

Pius Sawa

False advertising lured Africans to Eastern Europe for jobs, then recruiters pressured them into the army.

Families of Kenyans recruited illegally to fight for the Russian army in the Russia-Ukraine war hold photos of their missing relatives on March 05, 2026.

Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

Ian Simiyu was struggling to find enough day-labor jobs to provide for his family in Eldoret, Kenya, when he came across a Facebook ad last April recruiting Kenyan citizens to work as cleaners in Russia. His younger sister had taken a job as a housemaid in Qatar, so the idea of working abroad and earning more money to send back home appealed to him.

The ad said the company would provide a Russian work visa and an airline ticket. Excited, he worked to get his passport, but the paperwork and fees bogged down his efforts to go abroad.

What he didn’t realize was that other Kenyans had responded to similar ads and traveled to Russia to work as drivers or security guards only to find themselves coerced into joining the country’s army.

Several months later, as Simiyu waited for his passport, he saw a video released by the Ukrainian army of a 36-year-old Kenyan man—identified only as “Evans”—appealing for release after being captured and detained on the frontlines. Evans said a sports agent tricked him into traveling to Russia on a tourist visa, only to force him into the Russian army. Shocked by Evans’s story, Simiyu realized the job he had been hoping for was likely a scam.

A February report by Kenyan intelligence officers estimated more than 1,000 Kenyans have fought in Russia’s war against Ukraine—some voluntarily and others, like Evans, tricked into it. The intelligence officers also alleged corrupt Kenyan and Russian officials colluded with recruitment agencies to fraudulently press unsuspecting workers to join the military. After an outcry from the families of the duped Kenyan recruits, foreign minister Musalia Mudavadi met with his Russian counterpart this month. They agreed Kenyans would no longer be able to join the army.

At least one Kenyan, Charles Waithaka Wangari, has died in the war, while 39 have been hospitalized and 28 are missing in action. The Russian Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, denied accusations of embassy officials’ involvement and called such reports propaganda.

Human rights group Vocal Africa alleged individuals connected with the Russian Orthodox Church in Kenya promoted work opportunities in Russia. In recent years, the Russian church has expanded in Africa, growing to 350 parishes across over 30 countries. A professor of ecumenism said the church is part of Russia’s “soft power” in the continent, as the church aligns closely with the state.

Yet a Russian Orthodox priest in Nairobi told Religion News Service the church sends seminary students to Ukraine only for religious studies, and it warns them that military recruitment can happen there.

Most church leaders in Kenya contacted by CT declined to comment on potential recruitment by the Russian Orthodox Church until reports receive further confirmation.

One Christian, Justus Wazlala, said, “If … the Russian Orthodox Church was involved in this human trafficking, then it is high time the government started monitoring foreign churches in country, just like it is with Islamic groups.”

According to Ukraine’s February estimates, Russia has recruited over 1,700 soldiers from 36 African countries, and reports of fraudulent recruitment have surfaced in other nations, including South Africa and Zimbabwe. The daughter of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former prime minister, resigned from her position as a member of Parliament after accusations that she helped fraudulently recruit Africans into the Russian army.

Human rights advocate Stephen Lempaa told CT that high unemployment and poverty in Kenya leave young men susceptible to recruitment into foreign armies. The Kenya Poverty Report of 2022, released in 2024, shows over 20 million Kenyans lived below the poverty line. Unemployment and poverty in Kenya have forced many to look for work abroad and have made young people prime targets for recruitment by terrorist organizations like al-Shabaab.

In one case reported by The Kenyan Daily Post in early March, a man named Dennis Mokaya Mong’are left Kenya in November and traveled to Moscow then Belarus for promised work as a cleaner, only to have his passport confiscated after arrival. Mongare said he was forced to sign documents in Russian before military personnel sent him to the frontlines. After sustaining injuries in a February 5 drone strike, Mongare reportedly pled with the Kenyan government to rescue him and others coerced into joining the conflict.

Lempaa said desperation also influences voluntary recruitment. Some jobless young men searching for purpose end up fighting in Russia or other African countries—such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. Lempaa said many Kenyan youths have fled the stagnant economy at home with a common slogan: “I [would] rather die of a bullet than die of poverty.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests social media may influence some youth to consider foreign army service, especially in Russia. In late February, when Kenya’s National Intelligence Service arrested Festus Arasa Omwamba—a prime suspect in Russian recruitment of Kenyans—young men on social media asked for information about joining the Russian army.

“How do I reach this man for greener pastures[?]” wrote a user named Baraka John Mwas, a single man from Nairobi, Kenya.

“Please I need his contact,” wrote Bamah Emzo from Cameroon. “I want to go fight for Russia.”

Senator Okiya Omtatah from Busia County, Kenya, pointed to a June 2023 government initiative to increase youth employment abroad and questioned whether the program was used to deliberately send Kenyans to Russia. He called for the government “to come clean.”

Ian Simiyu said he believes God prevented him from taking the job offer in Russia. Instead of going abroad, Simiyu decided to farm a two-acre plot of family land. Now he grows kale and onions, selling them to urban markets and hotels. His profits bring in enough to feed his family, help his younger siblings, and give a tithe to his church.

“God has opened me another door,” said Simiyu. “I don’t know if I would be alive, had I gone to Russia.”

- More from Pius Sawa

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