Government Shutdown Deepens Hunger Crisis

When paychecks and SNAP distributions stop, the food pantry line grows.

Members of the military and their families receive food from Feeding San Diego food bank

Sandy Huffaker / AFP via Getty Images

A month into the government shutdown, The Community Hope Center began to notice different faces at its regular food distribution in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

In an average month, the center serves around 4,000 households in partnership with the city. This month, people who hadn’t needed to visit its food pantry since the COVID-19 pandemic returned, and families who had never come for food assistance showed up for the first time.

“We are seeing a lot of new people come in and different people from all walks of life,” said Sharon Camacho Meakes, executive director of the nonprofit, which is affiliated with Seneca Creek Community Church.

Hunger ministries around Washington, DC, are navigating the second-longest government shutdown on record: More than 1 million federal workers are not being paid while Congress fails to pass a budget, and on November 1, the government will halt funding for food stamps, meaning more families that rely on federal assistance will turn to community organizations for help.

Capital Area Food Bank, which serves DC and neighboring counties, has scheduled food distribution days specifically for federal workers. The nonprofit partners with around 400 organizations as distribution sites in the area, many of them faith-based. Seneca Creek Community Church is one of those spots, and volunteers from the church showed up in full force on Wednesday.

Federal workers and contractors bundled up in coats and sweaters waited in a line that stretched outside the church in the brisk October air. Moms pushed strollers or wrangled busy toddlers, older adults came with adult children to help them carry boxes, and a few 20-somethings in business casual shivered in the cold.

Inside, volunteers handed out boxes of food and told workers about other ministries that could help, including one that distributes winter coats.

“I have a lady with a baby who needs help,” one volunteer in the food distribution line called.

“I’ll take her,” said a woman sporting a Capitol Area Food Bank black hat as she sprang into action.

The volunteers shepherded the mom, with squirming baby in tow, through the line and out to her car, where they loaded up a box of shelf-stable food and a box of produce, which include items like pasta, canned tomatoes, tuna, white chicken, beans, peanut butter, and cereal. The organization plans to continue the weekly food drives for federal workers until the shutdown ends.

“Thank you and God bless you!” Jackie Chips, a church volunteer near the end of the distribution line, said as she handed boxes to the federal workers.

“The need is great, and it’s going to get greater,” Chips told CT. “But prayer is powerful.”

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has instructed states to hit pause on sending out November Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments, and the administration has said it cannot use contingency funding to keep SNAP going.

More than 47 million Americans don’t have enough food or don’t know where their next meal will come from, according to the USDA’s 2023 report, the most recent data available on the topic. (The Trump administration did not release a report in 2024 and canceled future reports.) Over 7 million children live in households with food insecurity.

Many of them—42 million—use SNAP, and another 6.7 million women and children are on the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC). The availability of WIC funds beyond this month varies by state.

Some states are making up for the pause in federal funding: California plans to deploy the National Guard to help with food distribution and divert millions of dollars to food banks. Virginia declared a state of emergency to use state funds to provide SNAP to recipients. In Louisiana, the governor signed off on using state health department funds to replace lost SNAP funding for the first week of November. But some states are unable to cover the funds, and more than two dozen states are suing the administration and asking that it use reserve funding to cover the gap.

The looming cessation of SNAP benefits exacerbates already-strained resources at the country’s food banks, which saw a rise in demand as grocery prices continue to climb.

Heather Taylor with Bread for the World said the need could very quickly reach “catastrophic levels” that outpace food charities.

“A lot of folks who are on SNAP, they’re already struggling because the amount that they receive typically does not last until the end of the month. So they’re already stretching and leveraging charity, leveraging food banks,” added Taylor, who is managing director of the Christian antihunger organization.

“Our fear, from what we’re hearing and reading, is that people will take extreme measures, like parents not feeding themselves at all, to do what they can to have a minimal amount of food for their children.”

She said Christians have a moral obligation to help meet the needs of their hungry neighbors.

In Congress, Senate chaplain Barry Black took it up with the Almighty in full earshot of the politicians at the heart of the stalemate as he offered an opening prayer Tuesday.

“Lord, remind our lawmakers that no gold medals are given for breaking shutdown records, but a crown of righteousness is given to those who take care of the lost,” Black prayed.

The chaplain, who is a Seventh-day Adventist, has had the longest consecutive tenure among Senate chaplains. He’s used prayer during shutdowns before to highlight their impact on the vulnerable.

While many federal workers receive back pay, contractors for the government do not. They’ve already missed two paychecks, and one federal worker in Maryland, Stephanie, told CT she’s worried it will push back her plans to retire next year, since the shutdown has meant she’s needed to dip into her savings to pay her mortgage. “This might be a setback,” she said.

CT agreed to withhold last names, as workers were worried about employment repercussions for speaking to the press.

Stephanie is frustrated with what she sees as politicians “bickering.” “Why take it out on us?” The 66-year-old asked.

Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, is also praying for an end to the stalemate in Congress. Since the shutdown started, his church in Orlando, The Gathering, has fielded more requests for monetary assistance from its benevolence ministry. Church volunteers saw longer lines at last week’s food pantry.

“The pastors in our coalition, from Chicago to Texas to North Carolina to Florida to New York, they’re seeing those numbers are increasing,” Salguero said.

Salguero knows food insecurity firsthand. For part of his upbringing in New Jersey, he and his siblings relied on reduced-price lunch cards at school and went hungry at home sometimes, eating sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly or just mayonnaise and bread.

Those leaner years shaped his understanding of Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me” (vv. 35–36).

“This is not an abstract thing,” Salguero said. “We’re going to continue to advocate for both sides of the aisle to come together so that children and elderly people and the vulnerable are not going to bed hungry.

“For me, the church is always going to be the church. We’re not going to stop feeding people,” he said. But he is praying the government finds a way forward soon. “No matter how much we do, we could never cover the need that’s out there.”

“One thing that’s very clear is that nobody thinks that private philanthropy can patch the whole gap created by the sudden withdrawal of SNAP,” Galen Carey, vice president of government relations with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), told CT. He’s already hearing reports from Christians about nearly empty shelves at Salvation Army and other food pantries around the country.

NAE and Bread for the World support politicians passing a stopgap measure, like Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill The Keep SNAP Funded Act of 2025, or the administration using emergency funds. Some politicians have resisted efforts to pass stopgap funding on the grounds that it prevents lawmakers from feeling pressured to negotiate an end to the shutdown entirely.

“There’s an awful lot of churches who are just concerned about making sure that kids aren’t going to bed hungry,” he said. “They’re happy for that problem to be solved in whatever way it can be solved.”

At Wednesday’s food drive in Gaithersburg, Seneca Creek lead pastor Mark Tindle told CT that while the community has been hit hard, even some furloughed workers in his church have shown up to volunteer.

One federal employee in a food line told CT he felt “completely blindsided” by the shutdown. Tyrell, a Marine and father of three, said the pause was draining his bank account and he still had to report to work despite not being paid. He delivers for DoorDash at night to cover rent and medicine for one of his daughters.

“What happened to making America great again?” Tyrell asked. He said he’d thought about reaching out to members of Congress but didn’t know if it would make a difference. When asked who he voted for, his response was succinct: “Not this.”

Tyrell said he is leaning on his faith during the uncertainty. After he got through the line, he loaded the boxes into the back of his car. On the rear window, a white sticker spelled out “In God We Trust.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the National Association of Evangelicals.

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Pastors

Jonah in an Age of Outrage

Michael LeFebvre

The prophet’s lesson is also ours: We must recover compassion for neighbor and enemy alike, or our words will be hollow.

ZU_09 / Getty

Political discourse today is increasingly marked more by bitter conflict than by consensus. Evangelicals are often at the forefront of these contests. They confront social challenges on issues like abortion, gender, and immigration that seem to threaten biblical values. But in doing so, Christian leaders walk a precarious line between addressing society’s errors and succumbing to its acrimony.

Preachers especially, as much as ever, need to cultivate a prophetic voice with a prophetic heart—a heart of compassion. One important resource for that formation is the Book of Jonah.

Contrary to popular stereotype, Jonah is much more than a children’s story. Jonah is a prophet sent to confront injustice, but he lacks the compassion God wants from him. Through a series of lessons, God teaches Jonah—and he teaches us as we attend to Jonah’s story—the compassion God requires.

The story of Jonah offers timely guidance for proclaimers today to overcome their own feelings of bitterness and to speak truth with love.

At the beginning of the book, God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, but Jonah despises the Ninevites and refuses. Importantly, Jonah’s anger toward Nineveh is justified. It was a royal city of the Assyrian Empire, which was committing atrocities across the ancient world. The boundaries of the expanding empire had not yet reached Israel, but they were steadily approaching. Furthermore, for several generations already, Israel had been paying tribute to Assyria.

The oppressive tributes and the fearful conquest drawing near gives Jonah good reasons to desire Nineveh’s fall. And God himself is angry at Nineveh: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city,” God tells Jonah, “and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me” (1:2, ESV throughout).

God does not dispute Jonah’s anger. He shares it. The Assyrians are cruel, and Israel’s fears are justified. In the same way, believers today often feel anger at cultural evils. Such indignation has its place.

However, the marvel of God’s compassion is that, unlike ours, it is not quenched by anger. And God calls us, like Jonah, to face society’s evils with an indignation that is both led by and ready to yield to compassion.

As the book continues, God sends two experiences to cultivate compassion in Jonah’s heart. In the first, Jonah faces his own deserved judgment and rediscovers God’s compassion toward himself.

Upon being commanded to go to Ninevah, the prophet instead boards a ship for Tarshish to “flee from the presence of the Lord” (v. 3). But God sends a storm to stop the ship, threatening its destruction. The very justice Jonah wishes upon Nineveh falls upon himself. And Jonah knows he deserves it. “I know that it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you,” he confesses to the sailors (v. 12).

Jonah persuades the sailors to throw him overboard. And that is where the surprise of God’s compassion appears. Cast into the sea, Jonah is swallowed by a great fish. Initially, that fish seems to seal Jonah’s demise, but then it spits him out—safe and whole—back on dry ground.

Jonah’s heart is deeply moved to have escaped death. “The waters closed in over me to take my life,” he recalls. “Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (2:5–6).

That same awareness of God’s love is essential for proclaiming his Word today. We may warn of judgment, but we are not ministers of judgment. We are ministers of the gospel by which we ourselves are loved.

After the lesson at sea, Jonah obeys God and goes to Nineveh. He has rediscovered God’s love for him and goes out of obedience to the Lord. But Jonah still feels no concern for Nineveh. He has more to learn.

Upon arrival in Nineveh, the prophet preaches God’s judgment. Then he retreats outside the city to watch heaven’s wrath destroy it. He wants to see Nineveh burn. But God cancels Nineveh’s judgment; the people abandon their evil ways, so God relents. Now Jonah is angry with God for failing to follow through.

In that setting, Jonah’s second lesson begins. This next lesson expands Jonah’s renewed awareness of God’s love for himself to include compassion for Ninevites too.

God raises up a large, leafy plant to shelter Jonah from the sun. Jonah is “exceedingly glad” for the plant (4:6). Then God sends a tiny worm to eat its stalk. The plant quickly withers, and Jonah is left exposed to the desert sun. He is furious.

God chastens Jonah for showing care (hus) for the plant but failing to care (hus) for thousands in Nineveh, including children and animals (4:9–11). That Hebrew word hus is the capstone term for the book. It is an emotional word denoting the inner turmoil that leads to heartfelt compassion. God wants his prophets to genuinely care, with real feeling, about others—even Ninevites.

Jonah has no rebuttal. God’s rebuke silences him. His desert lesson shows that God wants his messengers, today as then, to condemn injustice but always with heartfelt love.

But there is more to these lessons. Further driving home this calling to love, there is another, surprising layer to Jonah’s experiences at sea and in the desert.

Toward the beginning of the book, when Jonah retreats to the ship’s hold during the storm, the crew works to save the ship from sinking—and they pray.

At first, each sailor cries out to his own god, but their own gods don’t respond. So they rouse Jonah. “Arise, call out to your god!” the ship’s captain urges. “Perhaps [your] god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish” (1:6).

Here is a great irony: The sailor calls the prophet to pray. And he expects that Jonah’s God is the one who will care, who “will give a thought to us.” These sailors show more urgency in prayer, more concern for life, and more awareness of God’s compassion than the prophet himself!

A similar twist emerges in the Nineveh episode of chapter 3. Jonah barely starts preaching when Nineveh’s ruler humbles himself. He “arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.” Then he calls the city to repentance. “Who knows?” the king declares. “God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish” (vv. 6–9).

Once again, it is the Gentile leader who comprehends heaven’s compassion. The Ninevite king responds with humility and public concern better than the prophet.

These may be the most convicting features of the story. When God’s people let bitterness quench their compassion, he awakens that compassion in worldly elites—putting his own people to shame. In this way, God humbles and transforms his own followers.

Is God doing this same work today? Christians should be known for love—welcoming immigrants (Lev. 19:33–34; Heb. 13:2); promoting relief for the poor, both personally and as a society (Lev. 25; Isa. 1:17; Matt. 25:35); and caring for creation (Gen. 1:28; 2:15). Yet too often, it is atheistic scientists, politicians, and celebrities who champion these causes, while evangelicals have become known for many things besides love.

One of Jonah’s key lessons is this: While God sends his church to confront society’s evils, he also uses the world to expose our failures. Wise prophets learn even from their opponents, and that humility fuels a heart of compassion.

The word evangelical once carried a reputation for social good—leading in the fight against slavery, caring for the poor, and building hospitals and schools. Today, it is more often tied to political tactics and culture-war battles than to Christlike love. The Book of Jonah offers a needed corrective.

Christians must not abandon their prophetic voice. But unless the church recovers the prophet’s heart—genuine hus, real compassion for neighbor and enemy alike—our words will be hollow.

Jonah’s preaching shook Nineveh, but the greater miracle was the change in Jonah himself. That same transformation is what the church needs today. If we want our voice to be heard, our love must first be seen.

Michael LeFebvre is a Presbyterian minister, a senior fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians, and author of a devotional study of the Book of Jonah from which this article is adapted, Loving the Other: Jonah’s Contempt Meets God’s Compassion.

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Church Life

Grassroots Efforts Bring Together Diverse Sects in Iraq

Jayson Casper

Interfaith group uses projects and dialogues to push for greater religious freedom.

Christian (left) and Muslim (right) women praying and studying in Iraq.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This is the third article in a three-part series about the problem of sectarianism in the Middle East and ways the interfaith group Adyan seeks to pave a new path in Lebanon and Iraq. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Three years ago in Iraqi Kurdistan, an adherent of the Kakai faith posted on social media that he had been called an infidel by a Sunni Muslim sheikh.

Kakai is a synthesis of Zoroastrianism and Shiite Islam, with between 110,000 and 200,000 followers in Iraq. Persecuted throughout their history, some Kakai consider themselves an independent religion, others a sect of Islam. But most Kurds are Sunni. The offending adherent felt a clear threat; some interpretations of Islam call for the killing of infidels.

Abdo Saad, regional programs director for Adyan Foundation, a Lebanon-based organization promoting interfaith dialogue and equal rights, reached out from his office in Erbil, Iraq, to the local ministry for religious affairs, alerting officials to the danger the Kakai follower may have faced. The authorities intervened and spoke to the sheikh privately. The Kakai man told Saad the issue had been resolved. But the ministry took no further action against the cleric.

Saad was not satisfied. In the honor-shame culture of the Middle East, it is often possible to resolve issues of religious freedom behind the scenes. Many converts to Christianity, for example, can live in relative peace if their Muslim families are not devout. Most authorities are not out to arrest believers.

However, if a conservative cousin publicizes the convert’s new faith, trouble may ensue. Wise officials may calm the situation, perhaps by relocating the convert to a different part of the city. They do not want Muslim extremists to discover the offense and call into question the religious legitimacy of a government that does not enforce the Islamic ban on apostasy.

Yet in the Middle East, only Lebanon allows a convert to officially register his or her new faith. For other nations in the region, religious scruples often trump religious freedom. Governments resolve many social issues along similar patterns, but human rights advocates lament that—as with the Sunni sheikh and Kakai Kurd—officials do not take a public stand.

Lebanon boasts one of the Arab world’s more robust expressions of political and cultural commitment to religious freedom. But Saad said the concept of rights-based citizenship has not sufficiently taken hold in any nation to enable a transition to a free and open democracy. He counsels Christians and Muslims to listen well to each other’s concerns so they can reform their nations together.

“I don’t have the answer for what this should look like,” he said. “I hope our grassroots work will push the leaders, but I don’t know.”

His uncertainty is warranted for Iraq as well. Under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, the nation had a nominally secular regime that integrated allied elites from different sects into its authoritarian governing structure. During the transition to democracy under US occupation, Iraqi political parties immediately organized along religious lines, and the majority Shiites captured power.

Sunni insurgencies followed, culminating in the creation of ISIS. Shiite militias backed by Iran joined the international coalition to defeat the jihadist threat but then kept their weapons and eroded national sovereignty. Neighboring Syria may witness a similar transition to conservative Sunni power now that a former al-Qaeda member has overthrown the Alawite-led regime.

Adyan registered in Iraq in 2022. An early project aimed to replicate the Lebanon success of Alwan, a school-based program to foster religious diversity and acceptance. Alwan means “colors” in Arabic. The Iraqi government welcomed the effort but insisted on calling it by the less kid-friendly name “Education on Active and Inclusive Citizenship,” as the original name made them think of the LGBTQ rainbow. Due to local sensitivities, the interfaith group accepted.

Other projects worked on social cohesion, Saad said. In a Chaldean Catholic city in the northern area of Nineveh, a Christian, Muslim, and Yazidi led joint efforts to renovate a public square damaged by ISIS. They restored electricity, installed benches, and held a public dinner. Some played backgammon long into the evening.

Similarly, in the southern city of Basrah, Iraq, with an overwhelmingly Shiite population, Adyan helped a Shiite and a Sunni lead a festival of diversity in the main city square. Artists and singers entertained onlookers, when a member of the minority Mandaean religion took the stage. He told Saad this was the first time he felt comfortable speaking publicly about his faith, in which John the Baptist is the greatest prophet.

Within a sectarian society, good social relations are possible—even common. It is harder to put controversial freedoms on paper. Adyan therefore convened a three-year national dialogue with 33 civil society leaders from all sects to create an Iraqi roadmap of reform. The goal was to raise awareness of a plan away from sectarianism toward a political system of equal rights that encourages all sects to shape both local and national governance.

Recommendations were bold. The final document challenged corruption and proposed shifting power from the central government to regional authorities. It called for transitional justice for victims of violence alongside the wise reintegration of ISIS families. And it urged the disarmament of sectarian militias while granting extra rights to religious minorities to secure their role in building a new nation.

The roadmap chided the nation’s constitution for being “ambiguous” on freedom of belief. Positively, it said Iraq could set an example of an “open and tolerant Islam.” But there was no clear statement on blasphemy laws or the right of conversion due to the sensitive nature of the topic.

Saad said that while Iraq guarantees religious freedom due to its diverse society, such issues are the “devil in the details.” Recognizing the challenge, Adyan is careful in how it words its advocacy, aiming to be both progressive and “conflict sensitive.”

The stakes are high. One of the 33 leaders went on to become the minister of culture. Another leader, a well-known researcher and critic of sectarian militia, was assassinated, likely by a non-state militia.

A second example of sensitivity concerns underage marriage. Linda Macktaby, a Congregationalist pastor in the Union of National Evangelical Churches, is working with Adyan and the UN children’s agency to produce a manual for Lebanon on children’s rights. Using verses from the Bible and Quran, it addresses issues of education, violence, and exploitation. “Who would oppose these?” Macktaby asked.

But to ensure buy-in from religious leaders, the manual speaks only about the “risks” of child marriage, she said, and doesn’t include that the UN and other rights experts say it should be forbidden. While a prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric condemned child marriage as incompatible with human dignity, others rely on classical Muslim sources that tie family happiness to a daughter’s marriage before menstruation.

Macktaby said that in the Middle East, it is often best to address sensitive topics indirectly. One has to choose: address an issue on secular foundations and lose its popular appeal, or involve religious leaders for wider circulation by carefully crafting the language.

“Teach tolerance,” Macktaby said of her preferred approach. “If someone is different than you, accept them.”

Similarly, Saad said Adyan tries to help spiritual leaders see religious pluralism within their holy books. The language may not match human rights legalese, but the texts are at least familiar. One regional charter on freedom of religion and belief quotes from a robust representation of Middle East faiths, selected by clerics from five nations and nine sects.

And it is specific without being inflammatory. The first principle declares, “Faith is a Voluntary Choice,” before also addressing issues of noncoercion, human dignity, diversity, and justice. The signatories committed to working gradually for change but were specific in their condemnation of anticonversion laws. The abandonment of a certain religion, it said, should not be criminalized.

Recommendations to religious leaders, however, do not challenge the uniqueness of their faiths. Instead, the document urges them to a solidarity that “transcends all affiliations” and works for the common good. This includes standing up for minority traditions in need of help, as with the Kakai believer.

There are no easy solutions for solving sectarianism. Adyan members disagree all the time. But Saad and Macktaby said they stick together, as there is wisdom in their religious diversity. And when sectarian fear keeps many separated, grassroots projects can expand their base of support.

“We are very good at bringing people together,” Saad said. “And this is needed for a new social contract.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Church Life

Becoming Part of God’s Family

Carmen Joy Imes

Weekly participation in ordinary church life isn’t flashy, but it is radical.

Terren Hurst / Unsplash

Mom and I turned off the main road and onto the familiar side street, our eyes scanning the corner lot where we spent untold hours back in the early ’90s. The church seemed not to have changed much in 30 years—solid rock walls, the angular slope of the steepled roof, bottle-glass windows from the ’70s. The parking lot was cracked and aging, long overdue for repaving. The lawn was a tangled mass of cropped weeds that needed attention. The neighboring parsonage had been condemned, boarded up, and fenced off.

It was no longer a Foursquare church. The sign announced an Indonesian Seventh-day Adventist church worshiped there instead. It was Saturday, but our drive-by must have been too late to see any activity.

We attended New Life Fellowship Foursquare Church during my high school years. We were rebounding from the shock of our previous pastor’s moral failure at a vibrant charismatic church where we discovered the third person of the Trinity and found deep and unconditional love.

At that church, although we hung on through the transitional period under an interim pastor, eventually it was clear that closing the doors made the most sense. The church had been too tightly wedded to the founding pastor’s vision and charisma to easily disentangle itself. Too many people had left. The building was far too big for the remnant that remained.

With wounds still tender, we found New Life Fellowship. This congregation was open to the work of the Spirit but grounded in the Scriptures and part of a 70-year-old denomination that gave it more stability than the nondenominational church that had folded. We threw ourselves into it with abandon. When it came to church, our family was all in.

We showed up on Sunday and Wednesday and for workdays and special events. I joined the youth group and was soon helping to plan activities. My parents became elders. My dad ran the sound booth. I started a missions prayer group and began raising support for my first overseas trip. Our family was always the last to leave, so the pastor eventually gave my parents a set of keys so we could lock up on our way out.

Our congregation was a hodgepodge of mostly lower-middle-class families barely paying the bills (plus one doctor and one golf-course designer) and a disproportionate number of single moms. There was a woman with an alcoholic husband who only showed up intermittently to offer a moving testimony whenever he decided to sober up. A couple my parents’ age with an in-home daycare and teens who were always on the edge of trouble. A retired couple whose quiet presence strengthened the rest of us. A woman in chronic pain who liked to sit in the back so she could dance during worship, using her body to honor the Creator. On a good Sunday, maybe 60 people came.

But here’s the deal: We loved each other. I met regularly with Donna, 60 years my senior, to pray for missionaries. I recall vigorous discussions with the seven or eight teens in my youth group about what it should look like to follow Jesus. I spent hours talking theology with our volunteer youth leader, who was a plumber by day but found his real purpose in leading us. Bernice cooked dinner for the whole church every Wednesday so we could fellowship around the table before youth group and Bible study. The pastor appointed me “missions coordinator” and gave me the microphone during the service once a month to give updates about the missionaries our church supported.

The building wasn’t much to look at, but we were family. When I went off to Bible college, the church celebrated my graduation and sent me off with tears and hugs. Their words of blessing and generous gifts spoke of their investment in me as a person. I still have the bookends from pastor Jim in my faculty office, two spinning globes that signified both my love for learning and my love for world missions.

I returned home after my freshman year in the summer of 1996. I don’t remember whether it was his idea or mine, but pastor Jim gave me the opportunity to teach an adult-education class so that I could pass along what I was learning in college. I designed a course entitled Understanding Worldviews to help us have better conversations with our unbelieving neighbors.

Looking back, the thing that shocks me most is that he attended my class with his wife and required all the elders (including my parents) and other pastors (including my youth pastor) to attend as well. Our church had no formal mentoring program, but pastor Jim created opportunities for me to hone my skills. He saw that I had something to offer—never mind that I was a teenager—and he made space for me.

One of my favorite passages during that season was Paul’s exhortation to Timothy: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). I was indeed young, but age was not a disqualifying factor in God’s mission.

I have loved and been loved by many churches in my nearly five decades of life, and New Life is no exception. We were a ragtag group of ordinary people gathering to meet with an extraordinary God. To show up with one another week after week knit us together as family. The fruit of our life together had nothing to do with rebranding or casting a five-year vision or crafting a mission statement (although we tried that too). It had everything to do with our habit of meeting together.

The building was dated. The sermons weren’t unusually arresting. The music was canned. (As I recall, we sang to prerecorded “tracks” on the electric keyboard with the help of keys and guitar and a couple vocalists.) We wielded no political influence. We simply kept coming and connecting with others who were following Jesus.

This is the way. Ordinary followers of Jesus gathering to worship an extraordinary God, loving one another as best we knew how, and waiting for Christ’s return, just as Paul exhorts us in Ephesians:

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (2:19–22)

We (and our church building) may not have been much to look at, but together we became a holy temple for God’s presence. In an age when churches are so often in the news for the wrong reasons, it’s worth remembering the innumerable ordinary congregations like my childhood church that experience radical transformation in incremental ways.

Week after week we resist the temptation to sort ourselves into factions and exclude those who have no worldly power to wield on our behalf. We do this by gathering to worship and hear the Word while we wait together for Christ’s return. Let’s not give up this habit. The world depends upon it.

Carmen Joy Imes is an associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and an author. Her latest book is Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.

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News

‘Every Adoptee’s Worst Nightmare’

Isabel Ong with Jennifer Park in South Korea

The horrifying history of adoption fraud in South Korea has spurred Christians to finally care for orphans in their own country.

Photos from Kathryn Roelofs' adoption and childhood.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Kathryn Roelofs

All Kathryn Roelofs knows about her birth is that it took place in Seoul in 1984.

Her unmarried mother put her up for adoption right away. At four and a half months old, she flew to the US, one of five babies traveling with two individuals affiliated with Holt Children’s Services of Korea. The people these South Korean children would call their parents—a group of families from the Christian Reformed Church—waited on the other side.

Roelofs grew up in Denver, a mostly white community where she rarely saw people who looked like her. Her birth mother had named her Tae Hee Jung, and her adoptive parents decided to keep Tae (pronounced “tay”) as her middle name. Still, with her traditional first name and Dutch surname, Roelofs struggled to pronounce or explain this nod to her background.

As with her name, Roelofs’s family gave her opportunities to learn about her Korean heritage. They loved and cared for her. She can see herself as a success story for international adoption. But Roelofs still holds lingering questions about her identity.

“Being an adoptee feels like wearing a garment that doesn’t fit quite right,” the 41-year-old said. She has never met her birth parents, and she doesn’t know if her father is even aware of her existence.

Adoptees tend to imagine their biological parents choosing to place them with other families due to circumstances, but a recent investigation uncovered that for some South Koreans, adoption wasn’t their choice at all.

According to a 2024 Associated Press report, the government conspired with agencies to take children to fill the overseas adoption pipeline—kidnapping kids off the streets and removing them from hospitals, where officials told parents that their newborns had died or were too sick to make it.

A Geneva-based adoption agency raised concerns about South Korea’s adoption practices being financially motivated as early as 1966, another AP report stated. A government audit in the ’80s found that adoption agencies had made illegal payments to hospitals after procuring babies from them, the same report revealed.

Horrified, Roelofs called the news “every adoptee’s worst nightmare come true.”

“If I think about the fact that a woman … gave birth to me and then I was taken from her and sold for profit and ended up in this life that I have now,” she said, “it’s almost too overwhelming to think about for too long.”

In interviews with CT, adoptees and advocates from South Korea grieved the adoption-fraud findings, which have spurred Christians in the country to reevaluate the church’s role in adoption.

Since the 1950s, South Korea has sent around 200,000 Korean children to families in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Adoption cases ramped up in this period after the Korean War as people sought to rehome war orphans, especially those of mixed-race heritage who were typically seen as outcasts. The government also viewed adoption as a way to reduce social welfare spending.

Adoptions later surged in the 1980s, with children from South Korea composing 60 percent of global intercountry adoptions in this time. The government began curtailing international adoptions from the ’90s after the 1988 Olympics drew negative attention to the country’s “baby trade” and caused national embarrassment. But thousands of children continued to be adopted overseas in the early 2000s.

From the 1970s, two-thirds of Asian children adopted in the US came from South Korea. But in recent years, international adoptions out of South Korea have decreased as Christian adoption agencies in the US like Bethany Christian Services cease international placements.

On October 1, South Korea announced changes to its adoption process. It will permit international adoption only in cases when agencies cannot find a suitable family in the country. Even then, the government must review each overseas adoption case and determine it to be in the child’s best interest.

The move corresponds with the nation ratifying the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention, guidelines for countries to protect children’s fundamental rights during adoption and to prevent abduction or trafficking. Earlier this year, South Korea admitted to the “mass exportation of children” that enabled adoption agencies to reap larger profits.

The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found 56 human rights violations among the 98 cases it investigated. Yet the commission halted its work in May, citing differing opinions among the commissioners and a lack of time to investigate.

Christian adoption agency Holt Children’s Services of Korea faces allegations of fraud and illegal adoptions, which the organization has denied. Holt International’s retired vice president Susan Cox—herself adopted from South Korea through Holt in 1956—told CT that adoptees and anti-adoption activists have unfairly labeled adoption agencies as bad. Holt split in 1977 to form Holt International as a separate US-based agency.

Founders Bertha and Harry Holt, an evangelical couple from Oregon, began the agency in 1955 after bringing 12 children to America. Eight of them would become part of the Holt family. Korean newspapers praised Harry as the “father of Korean adoption” while people dubbed Bertha the “Apostle of Korean orphans,” according to researcher Soojin Chung, who chronicled the history of Korean adoption.

When children arrived at an orphanage, Holt prioritized caring for them, making them feel safe, and providing them with food or medicine, Cox said.

“The idea of keeping records and all of the information—that just didn’t have the importance [then] because you were thinking of the moment. You weren’t thinking ahead,” Cox said. “As time went on, those records were much more complete. But [they were] not consistent.”

Adoption agency workers said there were no processes in place to verify a child’s background in the ’80s. Some agencies pressured parents to give up their children so they could lead better lives in the West. Some adoptees learned that their paperwork had been faked, describing them as abandoned when they had living relatives or had been taken from their biological parents.

After the commission’s report found the government responsible for adoption fraud, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung apologized in October for the government’s failure to prevent these abuses.

Korean evangelicals like Kim Do-hyun, founder of KoRoot, a Christian adoption advocacy ministry based in Seoul, had a more critical response.

Adoption fraud is a “state-driven act—an actual crime,” Kim said. “These false records erased the truth of [a person’s] birth and enabled abuse, alienation, and despair. The sorrow these individuals carry might never have existed if their records had not been falsified.”

In South Korea, the pressure to profit from adoptions abroad came alongside the social stigma surrounding domestic adoptions.

South Koreans were less likely to open their homes to nonbiological children due to cultural regard for familial bloodlines. Confucianist beliefs emphasize maintaining ties with ancestors, and families keep records to document their lineage across generations.

Korean adoptee Cam Lee Small saw the adoption stigma linger for decades. Adopted at 3 and a half, he boarded a plane to Chicago, where he met strangers of Caucasian descent who would become his parents. He ran back onto the airplane screaming for his mom.

Small, who grew up in Wisconsin and now lives in Minnesota, visited South Korea in 2011 to connect with his birth family. He sobbed in a taxi after his birth mom canceled their initial meeting. “Why did this happen? Where’s my mom, and when do we get to meet? This should have been my home,” Small thought to himself.

As Small wrestled with these questions, he knew he had to make a choice in what he understood as God’s divine purpose for his life. “That choice was: I believe that God is good. I believe there is some meaning I can take away from this to be used toward something life-giving,” he said.

The next day, the phone rang. The adoption agency worker said his birth mom now wanted to see him.

Small grew to recognize the stigma that his birth mom had endured as a single woman in Korea who carried the secret shame of having a baby out of wedlock. “I started to have more sensitivity for my birth mom, more empathy for her,” he said. “She was holding a lot of pain as well, and there was a lot on her heart that hadn’t been processed.”

Small hopes to continue eradicating stigma on a larger scale by increasing adoption literacy across the US, particularly among professional child-welfare workers, families, counselors, and organizations.

Other evangelicals want to galvanize changes to how South Korea’s government and churches engage negative perceptions of adoption.

Churches in South Korea often focus on evangelism over outreach to socially marginalized people, like single mothers, according to Kim, KoRoot’s founder.

Many single mothers relinquish their children because of familial and societal pressures and systemic poverty.

“The church’s failure to respond to the pain of women and the vulnerable shows how far we have strayed from Christ’s example, [as he] welcomed and embraced the weak,” Kim said.

KoRoot has supported organizations like the Korean Unwed Mothers’ Families Association, which provides emergency shelter and mental health care for single mothers in the country, and has urged the government to live up to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, which South Korea ratified in the early 1990s.

KoRoot has also been active in supporting Korean adoptees. It cosigned adoptee statements that called for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to conduct investigations on 367 overseas adoptions. And for two decades, it operated a guesthouse for overseas adoptees and their families to stay in while it helped them search for their birth families.

The guesthouse had a shared kitchen, men’s and women’s dormitories, and rooms for couples or families. It housed more than 5,000 families until it closed in 2023, when the nonprofit returned the property to its original owner, Kim said.

“Adoption is not merely a personal act of charity—it is a collective, missional task for the church and society,” Kim added.

Oh Chang-hwa, who leads Onnuri Church’s adoption ministry, J-Home, does not believe that adoption agencies forged or manipulated documents, but that adoption agencies faced many limitations in their work, like inadequate record-keeping infrastructure, in the ’70s and should not be judged by today’s standards.

“Korea was still recovering from war, with many children abandoned or left in orphanages, and agencies did the best they could within those constraints,” Oh said. “While acknowledging that some adoptees tragically suffered abuse or had difficulties, such cases should be treated as individual criminal acts, not as a problems inherent to adoption itself.”

J-Home oversees a network of adoptive families within South Korea and supports families who are interested in adopting.

“In Korea, the domestic adoption rate is tragic,” Oh also said. “That’s why we continue to emphasize that the essence of family and covenant is not blood but love and commitment.”

James 1:27, which exhorts believers to “look after orphans and widows in their distress,” led Oh to adopt his twin daughters in 2011. Adoption is a “divine command—an honorable and holy act of obedience,” he added.

President Lee supports legal abortion, and recent initiatives under his administration are “triggering a wave of activism” among Christian adoptive families and churches, Oh said.

Oh, who also serves as president of the National Adoptive Families Association of Korea, sometimes fosters infants, some left in baby boxes in Seoul. Jusarang Community Church installed the first baby box on its exterior wall in 2009, and the church has saved more than 2,000 young lives since then.

Two years ago, there was a sharp increase in the number of babies left in these baby boxes after South Korea passed an amendment to the Special Adoption Act, a 2012 law that mandated parents register newborn babies at birth, Oh said.

Oh strongly opposes the Special Adoption Act. Previously, a woman could proceed with adoption without registering her baby, but now that women must put their children’s births on paper, some opt to place their babies in the baby box rather than go through with the official process, Oh also said.

Roelofs, who works as a worship consultant with Christian ministries, continues to struggle with the “rosy metaphor” of adoption that she finds prevalent in Christian conversations. Often, she says, the identity that an adoptee leaves behind appears “inherently bad or sinful” while adoptive parents are regarded as saviors.

As she searched Scripture for words that would give voice to the pain of adoption that she felt, she landed on Romans 8:18–25, which talks about creation waiting with longing and groaning.

“Jesus knew something of that suffering and of that trauma [that adoptees feel],” she said. “I find great comfort in that.”

Another source of comfort: her Korean name, which a friend told her means “May she have joy.” Her birth mother gave her a name with hope, Roelofs realized. “It’s like a prayer, right?”

In 2006, Roelofs traveled to Seoul in hopes of meeting her birth mother. At Holt Children’s Services of Korea, a caseworker opened a file in front of her, and the first thing she saw was a photo of her adoptive family in Denver. The file also held little information about her birth parents.

Seeing that photo gave Roelofs a sense of finality and quelled her curiosity toward searching for her family origins, although every time she celebrates her birthday she wonders whether her birth mother thinks of her.

In her adoption case file, Roelofs decided to leave behind a photo of her college-aged self alongside her contact information. In her eyes, it’s her way of telling her birth family, “Hi, here I am. Here’s all the ways that ‘May she have joy’ has come to fruition.”

This story has been updated to clarify Oh Chang-hwa’s position on adoption.

- More from Isabel Ong

News

NBA Betting Scandal Highlights Need for Christian Voice on Gambling

The Bulletin with Isaac Rose-Berman

Churches have a role in protecting vulnerable young men.

A man pulls a slot machine lever.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source image: Envato, Sora

Last week, an illegal gambling probe exposed the NBA’s Terry Rozier, a guard with the Miami Heat, and over 30 other individuals in professional basketball and beyond. Since sports betting became legal in 2018, sports leagues have developed close relationships with gambling companies. In these connections, problematic behavior can thrive.

The Bulletin sat down with editor at large Russell Moore and Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, to discuss smartphone betting, the most popular form of sports gambling today. They talk about why Christians are quiet and how the church can step up for vulnerable young men attracted to this vice. The entire interview can be heard in episode 195. Here are edited excerpts.

A complex matrix already exists in professional sports as it relates to player safety and profit margins. How does sports betting complicate the situation?

Isaac Rose-Berman: The NFL and other sports leagues make a lot of money off of sports betting, whether it’s via the advertisements that you see every time you run a game, the data that they’re able to license and sell to operators, or revenue sharing agreements with these companies.

Of course, when DraftKings and FanDuel are making money, people are losing money. People in sports are now asking whether making that money in the short term will have long-term consequences.

Think about kids growing up now. Are they NFL fans? Are they DraftKings fans? For the league, in the short run, that can be good. But if someone is not actually attached to a team and they’re just attached to betting on that team, that might not be so great in the long run. How sustainable is it for people to keep losing a lot of money for the long term? We’ve seen revenues from gambling go up so much, so quickly. Is this really sustainable? No one really knows the answer to that yet.

How have Christians traditionally viewed gambling?

Russell Moore: Many early Christians saw the gambling over the cloak of Jesus at the foot of the cross as an example of human depravity (Matt. 27:35–37).

Much later, in American Christian life, opposition to gambling often merged the liberal-fundamentalist divide about whether our problems are fundamentally personal or social. Conservative evangelicals were concerned about the personal vice that happens with gambling. Liberal Christians were concerned about the social effect of what happens to families and communities through addiction.

Add to that smartphones, and you have the same thing that we saw with the move of porn from interstate video places to the ubiquity of the internet. The algorithmic push of smartphones creates a dopamine rush that brings a whole new level of complexity that Christians haven’t faced before.

Rose-Berman: Once, it might have been man or woman versus vice. Now, it’s man or woman versus vice combined with billion-dollar companies with incredibly intelligent algorithms that are motivating you to place more bets and lose more money. Online and mobile sports betting is male dominated because younger men are more likely to be on their phones. Men want this rush, especially if they’re sports fans. The consequences are really concentrated among those people who have serious problems.

These companies target losers. If you are gambling daily on a site like DraftKings or FanDuel and you take a couple days off, you’ll get a push notification saying, “Hey, come back now. Your next bet is on us.” Even though gambling has been around for millennia, it’s this new iteration that’s really scary.

You can’t escape the advertisements for gambling. Even if you were to give up your smartphone, you wouldn’t be able to watch sports without being inundated with these ads. If you go to a game, you see DraftKing’s ads in the stadium. If you’re listening to the commentator on ESPN, they’re talking about the betting lines.

I used to go to baseball games with my father, and I was a big baseball fan. Today, if you’re a 10-year-old there with your dad, he’s probably placing bets on the game while you’re not looking. Young men are growing up in a society where this is normalized. They see celebrities telling them that it’s cool to bet, and there’s no pushback.

Does the US have legislation to limit these addictive and harmful apps?

Rose-Berman: There’s not much federal legislation at the moment. One bill, the SAFE Bet Act, doesn’t seem likely to pass in its current iteration. Online sports betting is a state-by-state issue, and different states have different regulations and different resources available. In some states where online sports betting is legal, there are only like four or five addiction counselors in the whole state. Their hotlines are overwhelmed.

Is there any way to gamble responsibly?

Moore: I don’t think so. Even if there’s a small percentage of people who are drawn into addictive behavior, those people are disproportionately poor.

The church ought to talk about this, but often people don’t want to feel legalistic or fundamentalist. You have this entire category of people’s lives where there’s no consideration of virtues that need to be cultivated. We are responsible to the vulnerable poor and to their families.

Rose-Berman: This is a battle that has been fought by Christians and Protestants historically in America, and it was lost. Battles against state lotteries, bingo, and casinos—these were battles that were lost. When that happened, Christians said, “This is not a winning issue. We’ll focus on other things—abortion or pornography—where we might have wider support.” I do think that is changing now. People are realizing the consequences here are disastrous.

How can men in the church support young men tempted by online sports betting?

Rose-Berman: This is a rigged game. That’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate. You’re not going to have young boys go tell their friends about this big slot win they had, because everybody recognizes that if you win big at a slot, it’s all about luck. Whereas in sports betting, it taps into the male ego, and everybody wants to feel really smart. When you place that long-shot parlay and you predict all of these things, you feel like a genius. And there’s nothing better in the world than that feeling.

A lot of times, people make the mistake of saying sports betting is just like all other forms of gambling—the house always wins—when that’s actually not the case. It is possible to make money on sports betting; but the caveat there is, if you know what you are doing, these companies will kick you out.

I have gone to schools and talked to kids, and that’s the message I give them. Look, if you are still able to bet, it’s because these companies have deemed you to be a sucker. You have to appeal to their ego and say, “You are not actually good at this.”

When you look at the surveys of young men, something like 70 or 80 percent of them say either that they are winning money or that they’re not losing money. What we really need to do is combat this delusion, because if you go on social media, you think anybody is posting about their big losses? No, they’re only going to post about their big wins.

We need people to understand that, actually, this is a rigged game, and you, as an 11-year-old boy with your hunch about who your favorite quarterback is, are no match for the million-dollar algorithms and analysts these companies are employing. Even if theoretically you were really good at this, they would show you the door. So play if you want, but don’t actually expect to win.

- More from The Bulletin

Culture

The Bigfoot and UFOs Podcast Introducing Listeners to Christ

Interview by Jacob Zerkle

“We want to make a space where people can scratch an itch about the weird stuff they’ve encountered, but our heart for this is for people to encounter God.”

Lukas Rogers (left) and Nathan Henry (right), the co-hosts of Blurry Creatures.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Blurry Creatures

Saying you believe in Bigfoot is sure to get a laugh, especially in Christian circles. It’s like saying you believe in the boogeyman or the Easter Bunny—just too crazy.

But the Bible routinely tells stories that could fairly be characterized as paranormal, supernatural, or in some way beyond the realm of human understanding. And beyond the more familiar miracles, Scripture includes strange and murky stories: Who are the Nephilim described in Genesis 6? Are the other gods the Israelites too often worship in the Old Testament real beings or simply idols of their own making? Exactly who or what are the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” of Ephesians 6?

Reading these stories as a modern Westerner, I’ve tended to take the least mystical, least crazy-sounding interpretation on offer. But a year ago, my brother introduced me to a podcast that challenged my assumptions from a distinctly Christian perspective.

Nate Henry and Luke Rodgers are the creators and hosts of Blurry Creatures. They love Jesus and have spent the last five years digging into supernatural stories in the Bible, as well as present-day paranormal experiences. They spoke to me about their faith, work, and goals for the podcast.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

For those Christianity Today readers who aren’t familiar with the Blurry Creatures podcast, tell us a little bit about the show, its origin, and the topics you cover.

Luke Rodgers: There’s a lot of paranormal conversations and a lot of paranormal podcasts out there. There’s a lot of things that happen. People experience; people see things. These also become trending topics in mainstream media—things like UFOs and aliens or the Bigfoot phenomenon.

There are a lot of spaces out in the ether where people talk about these things, but the church itself doesn’t address a lot of them. What we’ve created is a platform where we talk about weird things that people experience and weird things in the Bible—but all from a biblical worldview.

Our mission is really to find better answers for the unexplained and to do that through a biblical perspective. And it’s our belief that our faith has big-enough fences. There’s enough in the Bible to provide better answers for a lot of the things we don’t have answers for.

When we started this podcast, the first episode was on Bigfoot. That was where we began. It’s the gateway drug. It’s the most-seen cryptid. Everyone’s familiar with it—it’s Americana at this point. But what do we do with this thing that people see?

The biblical scholar Michael Heiser, whom we had in episode 34, his book The Unseen Realm has been a seminal piece of the worldview that we talk about in this show. And his whole thing was, there’s this unseen realm. Our faith is very supernatural. There’s a supernatural aspect to our faith—it’s in the Bible.

What Heiser said in our show was that if just one of those thousands of Bigfoot accounts every year is true, then it breaks the paradigm, and you have to figure out a way to make space within your understanding of reality for this creature—or for the UFO phenomena or for better understanding of demonology and angels.

So our goal is to have conversations—to have more academic conversations, talk to the experts who have spent 10,000 hours on their subjects—and discuss something that’s very niche in a lot of ways but also something that’s very relevant to being a Christian. We have a very supernatural faith, and our thing is trying to put the supernatural back into our Christian faith and talk about weird stuff within that context. We hope that people come for the weird conversations and the weird stuff in the Bible and, whether they’re believers or not, that they have an encounter with the gospel inside of all of this weirdness.

Nate Henry: Yeah, Luke and I had been in rabbit holes of Bigfoot and giants and Nephilim and ghosts—paranormal stuff. He had a sighting in a cemetery when he was younger. I saw something as a kid that I couldn’t explain. And then when I was about 30 years old, I got really into listening to stories about Bigfoot.

We grew up in the church, and a lot of the other shows about this stuff don’t really give you answers. They just kind of stay in the spooky and the weird. And I thought, well … As a Christian, I think there should be some sort of answer to these things. So maybe we can marry these two things: the paranormal conversation and the theological conversation. Kind of put them together—and the Bible has all that in there already, but the church seems to tiptoe around it or not really give you a data-driven perspective on this stuff that people are experiencing.

What we’ve found is over the years that people of all walks of life have a story or three, sometimes a lot of stories they can’t explain, and they’ve found there aren’t many people they can talk to about these things, especially in the church. But I think we Christians should be the most open-minded to this stuff.

It’s interesting how God took me to this more theological route—those Bigfoot stories I’d been listening to didn’t have a Christian perspective. But I realized there’s this Christian overlap here and thought, Someone needs to have a podcast about this. So we got started in 2019, and the name Blurry Creatures came out of the frustration of whenever there’s a photo of a cryptid, it’s blurry.

God’s done a few things in my life where it’s like I get this flash of a vision, almost, that I don’t even understand, and then later it all makes sense. And I think in the last few years, now that we’re doing this full-time, it’s cool to look back and feel like that’s what happened here. It feels like a confirmation. This has become a lot more than I anticipated. It’s been a moment to trust God and see what happens.

Rodgers: We didn’t even have a website until episode 30. We didn’t come out of the gate with a polished show and a way for listeners to support us. We didn’t know whether anyone would listen to this. But these were the fun conversations we wanted to have, and by about episode 30, people were reaching out, saying, “We can’t find your website.” “Do you guys have any T-shirts for sale?” We didn’t know what was happening. Nate had wanted it to grow, but it wasn’t like we architected that.

I’ve started companies before, but I’ve never had a project where I felt like God was so involved that it seemed like he was kind of moving it. We didn’t have to push the ball up the hill every day. There’s a ton of work involved, but it has just kind of taken off.

Part of that is we had such great timing—we got going right before 2020, when everyone had their paradigms broken in a lot of ways. And then people started saying, “Well, what are we meant to believe? What do we think about all these things now?” And then 2022 comes along, and we’re like, Should we talk about aliens? I really didn’t want to. But this became mainstream, so we decided to talk about how you contextualize things like aliens if you’re a Christian. We started talking more about the Bible, and we were like, We’re kind of like Christians in a band, not a Christian band, but this is who we are, so let’s lean into this.

Henry: We didn’t market ourselves as a Christian podcast as much as it was a creatures podcast with two Christian hosts, if that makes sense.

And I don’t think we want it to be cheesy. And there’s a lot of Christian media that’s marketed badly. It’s cheesy. It’s kind of PG. And the conversations we have are not PG. They’re about hardcore, weird, strange stuff—like a Christian saying, “I’m an alien abductee, and I believe in Jesus, but I also have this stuff that comes and takes me out the window every night.” And it’s like, Okay, what do I do with that?

Your podcast doesn’t claim to be systematic or biblical theology of the supernatural. You interview guests with all kinds of backgrounds and experiences. Do you ever worry that some listeners may become so fixated on the stories that they lose sight of maybe the gospel or other key elements of the Christian faith?

Henry: I don’t. With all the propaganda that goes around, you can’t really control anything like that these days. I think we’re going to make mistakes. We really try not to make mistakes, but we’re going to. Not every pastor preaches 100 percent accurately about everything at a church either.

I think if people are kind of rogue, they’re always going to be a little strange and they’re going to get into this stuff anyway, whether we’re the gateway or not. There’s so much weird stuff on TikTok—it’s heartbreaking that people don’t have a better filter how to disseminate information. But in this internet age, even with the conspiracy theories that I would say are more likely to be true, people go off the rails.

We present stuff with a lot of caveats. And we say listeners should spit out the bones. We share people’s stories, and we know their interpretations aren’t always 100 percent accurate. People see stuff, and they don’t necessarily know what they’re looking at. We don’t sort of present things as entirely black and white, and we mix up the topics enough to try to prevent people going crazy.

Rodgers: We also try to find a balance in the voices. We have everything from a Reformed pastor, Doug Van Dorn, who speaks about giants, which is a rarity in his tradition. But then we have theologians like Heiser. We’ve had Catholic and deliverance ministers from the Protestant space. We’re trying to find a balance of voices within Christendom because I think we’d do listeners a disservice if we made everything too narrow.

And then we always tell people, “Hey, use discernment and test the spirits.” This is all biblical stuff. And a lot of times we’re in the realm of conjecture, and we’re doing our best to hypothesize, but we’re not hypothesizing about the gospel. The gospel is what it is.

Henry: A Christian archaeologist is digging up everything. He’s finding all kinds of things. And I think in some ways we do that too. We’re digging up the past, digging out these stories, and trying to see what the world looks like.

In some cases, people who aren’t Christians are actually coming up with better answers to these questions because the church has its hands tied when it comes to the paranormal and strange.

I’ve had many people approach and be like, “Isn’t it dangerous what you guys talk about?” And I say it’s dangerous notto talk about it, because you have all these wild groups springing up because they’ve got compelling UFO footage or they’ve had an abduction story, and they know something the church doesn’t want to talk about. They think the church won’t talk about it because the church doesn’t have any answers, so they develop all these theories instead. That’s why I think Christians do more of a disservice if we’re not talking about these things.

But also, as a Christian, we all have different interests. We’re not just reading the Bible and praying 24/7. We all have jobs and hobbies. And I personally like these conversations. I think they’re fun and interesting. Sometimes we just interview a guy who’s had a Bigfoot experience. We say, “Tell us what it looked like. What did it smell like? Where were you? How does this eight-foot-tall beast go undetected?” Anybody can be interested in that if they’re just a curious human.

I’m sure you also meet Christians who might be inclined to dismiss these stories, especially the stuff outside the Bible. What would you say to those people who are instinctively skeptical, perhaps partly because of their faith? How would you encourage or speak to them?

Henry: I would just start with their belief in the Bible, which is full of supernatural stories, from Philip magically transporting from one place to another, to the prophecies of the Son of God being born into humanity, to Jesus transfiguring on a mountain. These stories are all throughout the Bible.

So I would start there and suggest that it’s not actually strange to think that supernatural stuff still happens today. Many Christians tend to think, Well, that happened in the Old Testament, and then it got a little tame in the New Testament, and it doesn’t happen anymore. But that kind of thinking is relegated to certain places like Western culture.

The rest of the world … Man, we went to Peru, and people were telling us wacky, wild stories. We talk to a lot of missionaries on the show, and they say, “Man, this supernatural stuff’s like a daily run for us.” So I think Christians in the West just live in a cultural pocket, and you kind of get ‘em out of their heads and go from there.

Rodgers: What we try to hammer in our shows is that we have a very supernatural faith. Everything from the Immaculate Conception, to an incarnate Christ, to a resurrected Christ, the talking donkey, to the Red Sea splitting, to God wrestling with Jacob, to the Lord coming to eat with Abraham, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to earthquakes swallowing up people—you can’t open up a Bible and not find the supernatural.

As Nate said, we live in a post-Enlightenment paradigm in the West, and this is really an anomaly in human history. I don’t think ever before in human history have we had the luxury to separate the natural from the supernatural or the luxury not to believe in anything.

This is totally a Western paradigm. Atheism is a new Western paradigm. And what we’re trying to do is say, “Hey, the human authors of the Bible and the people in the Bible, not only did they not separate the natural from the supernatural; their worldview said those two things were inherently intertwined.”

Sometimes in the West, we do separate these two things. We sometimes make church a TED Talk or a feel-good, self-help talk. Right? This is a sad reality. That’s not every church. I don’t want to paint with a broad brush. But I think if we examine our faith, if we actually open up the Bible and read it for ourselves, we might be pleasantly surprised or shocked at the amount of miraculous things that happened in both the Old and New Testaments.

We talk about things outside the Bible, obviously, and I don’t think we need to be afraid of that. The writers of the New Testament and the Old Testament certainly weren’t afraid of reading things that were outside of Scripture. Everyone who wrote the 66 books of the Bible, they were well read. They weren’t dummies.

Heiser said that the Bible was written for us, but not to us. It was written to a people, to a culture that had nuances and knowledge we don’t have. The Old Testament was written to an ancient Hebrew people who had a worldview that we don’t have. So we’re trying to say that the things people experience now can be explained, and maybe they’re not new things—or maybe they’re old things, very old things.

How do we talk about angels? How do we talk about demons? How can we make sense of UFOs and other creatures? Maybe we should talk about giants and why every culture in history has giant stories—and so does the Bible. As modern Westerners, we dismiss that as a sort of fairy tale. But we should ask ourselves, Do we really believe the Bible when we read?

Switching gears just a little bit, my understanding is that not all your guests or listeners are Christians. Can you describe the responses you’ve received from people outside the church? And have you ever worried that sharing your faith would limit your audience, especially early in your podcast?

Henry: We’ve actually won over a lot of people who I don’t think had ever considered some of these things. There are a lot of people in the truth-seeking world who feel welcome here, and they feel like they can have these conversations with us. Just like anything else, I think that you can build a bridge, sometimes just with respect and listening and asking questions. You can do that with a friend at work who doesn’t know what you believe. We do it on a podcast.

We also teach other people how to have hard conversations. Luke and I are in our 40s, and perhaps we couldn’t have done this in our 20s. We wouldn’t have known as much, and we would’ve had an attitude. In our conversations, we treat people like adults, and so far, it’s been good.

At the beginning, when we released some overtly Christian stuff, we kind of thought it would turn off the paranormal crowd because they wouldn’t like a more definitive answer to some of the paranormal questions. But then the opposite happened.

Rodgers: We debated whether to go full Christian, even though that’s who we are. But now we get a couple of emails every week that say, like, “Hey, I found your show, and I didn’t want to listen because I thought it was Christian, but I decided to go back to church.” Or like, “I gave my life to Christ.”

Or one said, “I got so burned by the church, but I listened to your podcast and was open to answers that I was looking for, and I read my Bible for the first time in 20 years.” And that’s incredible. This is why we’re doing it.

And that kind of response changed everything. This is a vessel God is using to reach people who may be disenchanted with the church or with answers that they’ve gotten at church or with Christians. We want to make a space where people can scratch an itch about the weird stuff they’ve encountered, but our heart for this is for people to encounter God, encounter Jesus, and encounter the gospel.

Five years in, that’s it. That’s what makes it worth it. This is what makes all of it worth it. And yeah, is it a job for us? It is now. But is that more important than having people encounter the gospel? Absolutely not.

I want God to use this as long as he wants to use it. And if he decides tomorrow that he’s done with Blurry Creatures, then we want to be done too. But if he wants to continue to use it for his purposes, then that’s what we want. And as long as he wants to do it, this has been the coolest gift, I think, in a lot of ways.

Nate and I just don’t want to get in the way of whatever God wants to do with this. We do our best to steward this thing honestly. And it’s wild. It’s wild to get people saying that they found Christ through this tongue-in-cheek Bigfoot show. But man, isn’t that a cool thing that God’s deciding to do?

- More from Jacob Zerkle

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What Would a Liberal Democracy in Lebanon Look Like?

Jayson Casper in Beirut, Lebanon

An interfaith group created a Youth Mock Parliament to imagine a nonsectarian government.

Shiite shaykh Rabih Koubayssi caring for both Muslim and Christian dead in Tyre, Lebanon.

Images courtesy of Rabih Koubayssi.

This is the second part of a three-part series about the problem of sectarianism in the Middle East and how the interfaith group, Adyan Foundation, seeks to pave a new path in Lebanon and Iraq. Read part 1 here.

In September 2024, when Israel escalated its bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite sheikh Rabih Koubayssi was one of the few clerics, Muslim or Christian, to stay in the targeted southern region. He was needed to bury the dead.

His first Islamic duty was to wash the bodies, which were often charred or missing a limb. He laid the body on an elevated table, turned it to face Mecca, and washed each part three times. Then he wrapped it in a burial cloth. Finally, he recited a Muslim prayer for Allah’s mercy. Assistants enclosed the body in a green bag, the color of Islam. He wrote the person’s name on the outside with a black marker.

On one occasion, a woman clad in an all-black abaya tossed flowers onto the hospital gurney carrying her dead father and brother. On another, Koubayssi discovered the body belonged to one of his students at the Islamic university.

Then on October 9, 2024, a Christian body arrived. Israel had bombed a civil defense center in the village of Derdghaya, damaging the church next to it. The strike killed five emergency workers, including Joseph al-Badawi, who had sent his parents and wife to safer areas while he remained on the job.

“How do I respect a Christian body?” Koubayssi asked himself.

The sheikh, a member of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council of Lebanon, called Marious Khairallah, a Catholic priest in a village near Tyre who had also stayed behind during the war. The two had worked together in the local Forum for Religious Social Responsibility, run by Adyan Foundation, a Beirut-based interfaith organization.

Although the Christian cleric was only 10 minutes away by car, he could not come because of the bombings. Instead, he reassured his friend that Christians do not have similar rituals and that he should take care of the body as best he could.

Koubayssi wiped down Badawi’s body, leaving on the tattered clothes. He struggled to enclose the corpse in nylon as rigor mortis had steeled the right arm in a raised position above the head. Eventually, during a pause in the bombing, the sheikh and priest arranged to deliver a Christian coffin from a nearby Christian-Shiite village. Koubayssi also found a cross, which he laid inside.

The sheikh then coordinated with the Lebanese Army and Red Cross to ensure safe passage to Khairallah’s church, where the priest led Christian funeral rites. Badawi’s family watched over video, and Koubayssi added a Muslim prayer.

On October 26, Adyan honored the cleric during the group’s Spiritual Solidarity Day, which it celebrates annually on the last Saturday of the month. The interfaith group sought nominations to vote for who best demonstrated religious unity during the war, and Koubayssi won handily.

“[Muslim and Christian] blood mixed together,” he said of the Lebanese killed. “Allah created us all and wants us to support one another.”

Established in 2006, Adyan won the 2018 Japan-based Niwano prize, informally known as the Nobel Peace Prize for Religions, focused on peacemaking through interfaith cooperation.

Many consider the Lebanese south as a stronghold of Hezbollah. Koubayssi is a member of the more secular Shiite Amal party, working in its cultural department. He is also the secretary of the Committee for Muslim-Christian Encounter in Tyre, engaging with bishops and priests for religious harmony in the overwhelmingly Shiite region. He enrolls his children in a Catholic school, and sent them and their mother to seek shelter in a monastery during the war. A missile struck his apartment complex on the last day before the ceasefire, damaging his fourth-floor home.

Koubayssi favored proposal to fix Lebanon’s corrupt political system: Eliminate sectarian voting completely, and elect politicians based simply on merit. Currently, the president must be a Maronite Catholic, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a Shiite Muslim. Parliament’s seats are assigned proportionally by sect.

Yet many Lebanese believe change isn’t that simple, as the problem is demographic. When Lebanese leaders first established their political system during the colonial-era French mandate (1920–1946), it reflected the nation’s slim Christian majority. They gave Christians slightly more than half the parliament seats as well as the presidency, which held dominant power over the other branches of government.

But in 1989, to end a 15-year civil war, the Taif Agreement amended the distribution to a 50-50 Muslim-Christian parity, with numerous executive powers shifted to the prime minister.

While there has been no official census since 1932, many believe Muslims now represent 55–70 percent of the population. Some estimate Shiites as the clear plurality.

With sectarianism eliminated, Christians would likely lose many levers of political power. Lebanon is the only nation in the Middle East with a Christian head of state, symbolizing for many Arab Christians their historic legitimacy and presence in the region.

But various Sunni and Shiite leaders also oppose a straightforward one-person, one-vote republic. A secular government might cost them religious privileges. Or worse, a drastic reduction in Christian political power could upset the inherent checks and balances in a sectarian system, putting Sunnis and Shiites increasingly at odds. Lebanon has suffered a civil war already. Would liberal democracy spark further conflict?

Koubayssi argues that a representative government would empower all citizens regardless of sect. He believes Christian emigrants who left the country to escape corruption for better economic opportunities abroad would even return to their home country. Many of their villages in the south are empty of most but the elderly. Build a branch of the national university in Tyre and connect it with reliable roadways and public transportation, Koubayssi argues, and Christians would not seek work abroad or in the capital of Beirut.

Nuanced ideas abound. Some suggest eliminating sectarianism through a federal system that allows religiously similar areas to govern themselves. Others propose the creation of a sectarian senate to represent religious communities in major national issues and balancing it with a nonsectarian parliament responsible for regular legislation. These ideas can also be found in the Taif Agreement, which mandated the creation of a national committee to study ways to eliminate sectarianism. Yet the government never formed the committee.

What would a nonsectarian parliament look like?

In 2018, Adyan began a six-year Youth Mock Parliament (YMP) project, which was interrupted by COVID-19 before restarting. The YMP concept is simple: Recruit participants and voters ages 18–35, instruct them in the new, nonsectarian rules of the game, and see who they elect and the policies their representatives enact.

“The message to the real parliament is that reform can work,” said Alexandre Adam, Adyan’s executive director.

YMP eliminated the mandated 50-50 division of seats between Christians and Muslims, allowing participants to organize themselves into political parties as they wished.

The mock parliament also lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 for anyone with at least one Lebanese parent. Current law restricts passing citizenship rights through the mother to prevent franchising Palestinian and Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunni Muslims. The government fears that could further imbalance sectarian demographics.

YMP also instilled electronic voting to address the difficulty of current requirements, which mandates citizens to vote in their original family village, many of which reflect only one sect. Critics say the law reinforces citizen ties to the politics of their religious community. Whereas online, greater anonymity permits individual thinking.

The first round involved 264 candidates—made up of youth connected to political parties and involved in civil society groups—and more than 11,000 voters. Fadi Badran, a Greek Orthodox Christian and Adyan’s projects manager, administered the mock elections, meeting with existing political and nonprofit groups to encourage their younger members to participate. There were a few hiccups, as Shiite parties didn’t engage and Christian parties boycotted the idea of a nonsectarian parliament. Participation was greatest in the Sunni-majority north of Lebanon.

These realities skewed the results. Sunnis won 60 percent of YMP seats, with the rest roughly evenly distributed between Shiites, Christians, and Druze. But in terms of political parties, the Sunni-led Future party only claimed one-third of the seats, with one-third won by the Change movement of independent nonsectarian activists. The remainder divided between smaller political affiliations.

Once seated, the mock parliamentarians elected members into leadership positions and committees to mirror the national body. In six general assembly sessions, they debated issues and passed 48 bills. These included the provision of mental health services in the social security program, the banning of underage marriage, and the disarming of all militias in the country.

In the second election cycle completed this August, participation rose to 17,000 voters, though the results were similar. The main difference was the real-world collapse of the Change movement, replaced by independent youth candidates who had grown disillusioned with the failure of senior politicians to make a difference in the real parliament. The 2025 legislative session is underway.

Badran described positive interactions between all elected delegates. But not all were on board with the majority agenda. Some slouched in the corner when debates went against their sectarian interests. Others were uncertain how to engage with members of different religious communities. Yet some gained valuable experience and ran in last May’s municipal elections, with a handful of members winning seats. Others joined the staff of their local representatives.

“I think they have changed,” said Badran. “I don’t know how effective they will be in their sectarian communities. But we are planting a seed.”

Can that seed blossom within another generation and influence the actual Lebanese parliament? If the idea is to implement Koubayssi’s vision of a sectarian-free political system, one of Badran’s colleagues, Abdo Saad, does not think the country is yet ready to try.

For Christians to accept losing their political privileges, there needs to be a wider understanding of what citizenship entails, said Saad, regional programs director for Adyan. This is lacking among all sects, he believes, even though the country has long had a robust civil society. But as a resident of Kurdistan, his job is not focused on Lebanon but on transplanting the nonsectarian seed to Iraq.

Part three will describe his approach, including how Adyan addresses—or avoids—the sensitive topic of religious conversion.

- More from Jayson Casper

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Brazilian Evangelicals See God at Work Among the Working Class

Franco Iacomini

Small Pentecostal churches across poor peripheral neighborhoods fuel Protestant growth nationwide.

Franco Origlia / Getty Images

Anderson dos Santos’s Saturday nights are busy. After working all day balancing wheels and fixing tires at an auto repair shop, he walks a mile home, takes a shower, and spends time with his family. Then he heads out again.

Santos makes several stops on his way to the Assemblies of God church on Rua da Horta in the city of Ilhéus. At each house, a child or teenager joins him.

The church in northeastern Brazil sits in a dangerous area, surrounded by rival neighborhood criminal groups. But Santos and his young friends tread the dimly lit streets together to the weekly youth service without fear. “Everybody knows us around here, so we can walk safely,” Santos said.

While major cities in Brazil feature megachurches drawing thousands to vast auditoriums, churches like Santos’s dominate the peripheral neighborhoods. These smaller Pentecostal congregations—led by bivocational pastors evangelizing amid poverty and crime—represent the most widespread face of the gospel in the country.

The proliferation of peripheral churches, most with around 50 members, is a defining feature of how evangelicalism developed in Brazil, taking off among poor populations in the outskirts of urban hubs. “In Brazil, more than half the population earns below the minimum wage, and churches reflect that same social profile,” said theologian Tiago de Melo.

Often working informal jobs or self-employed, these church leaders are scrappy and committed. Researchers say they bring an entrepreneurial spirit that has contributed to recent evangelical growth.

“These are people who come from an economic and social environment marked by precarious work,” like unemployment and odd jobs, said anthropologist Jefferson Arantes. For the past three years, he has interviewed pastors in the Campinas region of São Paulo State as part of his research.

“They are people deeply committed to God but not necessarily to denominations and institutions, which is why many end up turning their congregations into nondenominational churches,” Arantes added. “These conditions make the landscape very difficult to map, because these are small churches and many are autonomous, with no ties to denominations.”

Evangelicals—including Pentecostals and those in other Protestant traditions—now make up 26.9 percent of Brazilians over the age of 10. The country already has more than 597,000 religious buildings, and estimates suggest a new evangelical church opens every six days in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

In his research, Arantes recounts how one small-church leader summed it up: “Can you imagine if there weren’t churches, man? We’d have to build 500 million asylums because people would lose it. Church helps people so much.”

But while neo-Pentecostal groups such as the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God preach prosperity theology, peripheral churches like Santos’s tend to offer congregants more traditional gospel teaching closer to classical Pentecostalism.

The churches still feature personal accounts of overcoming poverty, but only as a side effect of gospel transformation. After converting, people stop wasting money on drinking, gambling, and vanity and dedicate themselves more to studying or working. As a result, they can testify to their congregation—and their neighbors—how God has changed their lives and helped them leave poverty behind.

“The discourse of financial prosperity is present in the periphery, in the music people listen to, in the influencers they follow on social media,” Melo said. “In Brazilian Pentecostal liturgy, it shows up in testimonies, which are present in almost every service.”

Churches welcome participation from all segments of the community, including the elderly and children, and hold time for testimonies each week.

“The Pentecostal church, with its discourse and practice aimed at reducing the distance between leaders and laypeople, brought the solidarity that already existed among the poor,” said pastor Marco Davi de Oliveira, author of a book about black Pentecostals in Brazil. “The poor came to see themselves as coparticipants in God’s work on earth, no longer the rejected ones who could not read or write.”

The typical face of Brazilian evangelicalism is female, black, and Pentecostal, as shown by data from the research institute Datafolha in 2020 and 2024.

In the outskirts of cities like Ilhéus, the responsibility of being coparticipants in God’s work makes young people unafraid to walk at night through the hills alongside Anderson dos Santos.

The church’s schedule is full and so is Santos’s. In addition to the Saturday night gatherings, church members meet for Sunday school in the morning and then for an evening service. They hold house meetings on Mondays and street evangelism on Wednesdays and Fridays.

“For the kingdom, we must always be available,” Santos said at the close of a Sunday service.

The next morning at 5 a.m., he would begin his work again.

- More from Franco Iacomini

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‘Drug Boat’ Strikes Prompt Questions about Human Dignity, Executive Power

The Bulletin with Elizabeth Neumann

When the president exercises lethal force without congressional authority, we all lose.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source image: Midjourney

Since early September, the Trump administration has struck suspected drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea, provoking Latin American nations who see the attacks as a direct affront. Thus far, the administration announced, US forces have attacked ten boats and killed at least 43 people. Last week, the administration expanded its purview, attacking two boats off the coast of South America in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

After the first boat strike, The Bulletin sat down for two conversations to see how Christians can consider this news through the lens of human dignity—one with senior contributor Mike Cosper and editor at large Russell Moore, the other with homeland security expert Elizabeth Neumann. Neumann formerly served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism in the first Trump administration.

Here are edited and condensed excerpts from those discussions.

Americans are rightly concerned about the drug trade to the United States. Do these actions from the Trump administration signal a desire to do something decisive about drugs and addiction?

Russell Moore: I do think President Trump has a genuine concern about addiction issues. He often references his brother, who succumbed to alcoholism after many years of struggle. There was, at one time, a moral disapproval of anyone who had a drug problem; but today, almost every segment of American life realizes we have a nationwide problem with drugs, opioid addiction, and fentanyl deaths. Almost everybody also recognizes there are some external forces here that are taking advantage of people in pain.

Mike Cosper: If these boat strikes constitute a war on drugs, there’s no precedent for this. The president is authorizing lethal force without the approval of Congress. In contrast, there is precedent for the navy or the coast guard to interdict these vessels, raid them, and arrest the people aboard. I have no sympathy for drug traffickers or terrorists whatsoever. That these summary executions took place by executive authority, with no clear legal authorization, says a lot about our culture that I think is deeply disturbing.

Elizabeth Neumann: Even if a boat were firing on us, it still would be unprecedented to take an entire boat out in our Western Hemisphere when you’re not in the middle of an active war. At least, then, you could argue that we were acting in self-defense. None of that appears to be at play.

When I served in the first Trump term, the administration was actively evaluating whether to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. The steady hands of the counterterrorism community made a compelling case for why you didn’t want to do that. We were concerned that, by opening the aperture of how counterterrorism tools get used, the federal government could do a host of otherwise unacceptable things. If that authority was abused, the courts would stop it. We need those tools to keep America safe and bad actors at bay.

Even with a terrorist designation, the government has to take detailed steps to do lethal attacks like this. It is a very rigorous process of identification and an evidence path that says why we believe particular people are a threat to the United States. You must present to lawyers enough evidence to demonstrate that they have proactively caused harm to the United States.

Moore: This is an important issue for Christians not just because of American constitutional questions, which we ought to be concerned about. In the Christian tradition, Romans 13 is a passage we have used to try to unpack what Scripture teaches about war. Romans 13 seems to give legitimate authority to the government to carry out war and police powers, for those of us who aren’t pacifists at least. Other restraints on power come throughout Scripture. Augustine and those after him developed “right authority” in this understanding of military power. War requires not just the right intention to be carried out ethically and morally: it has to be done by a right authority.

In the American system, that right authority is Congress. There’s a lot of latitude in terms of the outworking of that authority, but Congress ultimately holds this power. That’s why we ought to be really concerned about this. For Christians, these acts are a moral problem and a theological problem, not just a constitutional one.

It could be argued that the previous way of handling the drug cartels wasn’t working, and President Trump is a wrecking ball to provoke dramatic, needed change. How do you respond to that?

Cosper: You hear this a lot: The system’s broken, the drugs are getting in, the gangs are getting in, there’s violence in the streets. There’s truth to that. The question we must ask is, What kind of government do we want to be living with? Do we care about the expectation of accountability? Those who say the system was broken are right, but due process and precedent matter. God made all human beings in his image. Scripture says not to glory in the death of evil men (Prov. 24:17–18).

Moore: I do agree with the way that President Trump and Secretary Rubio are labeling the bad guys: Narco-terrorist gangs are villains. President Maduro is a villain. His authoritarian regime is unsafe for people. But will that labeling have any effect on how we see Venezuelans who have come to the United States seeking refuge illegally and are now being sent back? You have the worst of both worlds in Venezuela—the authoritarian strong man, and anarchy and chaos with these roaming gangs.

Neumann: This opens up scrutiny for the world to make a case that we violated international law here. Certainly, Maduro is not happy about this. I’m not a fan of his. I’m not trying to defend him; but if we’re going to declare war in Venezuela, you really need to consult with Congress on this, if that’s what this was about.

These strikes make me very uncomfortable that we are now putting military men and women in harm’s way. If it was a drone strike, you’re not physically putting them in harm’s way, but we have ships out there now. We have members of the US Navy sitting off the coast of Venezuela, and Venezuela now actually has legal reason to retaliate. We gave them that legal reason. Are they going to do that? Probably not. There’s such an asymmetry there in terms of our power and their power, but it does put our troops in harm’s way. We should have taken that into account through all of the normal processes we use when we decide to use force.

You become an authoritarian regime by watching abuse of power against other people. All of a sudden, you’re the only one left; and, because you didn’t stand up for those guys, there’s nobody to come save you. We could approach this in lots of legal ways, judiciously with due process. This doesn’t have any of that.

We’re seeing a similar flex of force with immigration roundups, with the deployment of the National Guard in cities–a pattern of not wanting to be constrained by the rule of law, not wanting to follow the process that the system requires in order to ensure that our constitutional rights are not violated.

I certainly appreciate that sometimes the government moves really slowly. As an executive branch official, I was often frustrated by that. There’s plenty of room for improving the speed of government to be able to deal with threats, but you cannot skip the process altogether.

If we believe that all men are created equal and endowed with their creator to the right of life, then it doesn’t matter if they’re American citizens or not. That’s our value as a country—that their lives matter. Even if they’re doing something wrong, their lives matter. Due process should be applied before a life is taken. As a Christian, I am also concerned that we are so willing to be performative and to demonstrate our power. We quickly snuffed out lives, and there wasn’t actually a real threat as far as we know.

Venezuela and President Maduro aren’t the only ones concerned. Mexico is concerned as well, and we need the cooperation of that ally as we try to figure out the difficulties surrounding immigration. What do we risk damaging in that relationship with actions like this?

Moore: There are so many complexities involved. On the one hand, we want a good relationship with Mexico; but Mexico has pitifully responded to the very real drug problem that is coming from there, not just with the gangs and the cartels but with the actual trafficking of drugs. We do have the right to expect more from them.

Cosper: A war against the drug cartels is very expensive, very complicated, and would require a certain kind of military sophistication. Does Mexico have what it takes to actually prosecute that and pull it off without us? I’m not confident that they do, and I think that’s part of why the situation looks the way that it looks.

Neumann: It’s important for us to remember that the world we get to live in now, that we are taking for granted, is actually rare in human history. We got here by recognizing all of the ways that power corrupts, all of the ways that it can abuse the minority or the weaker party. We set up systems and structures to constrain that, to restrain that power so that it’s harder for the abuse to occur.

There’s a sadness and a weightiness to this. We need to figure out how we as citizens and as Christians can stand up for those who are experiencing the abuse today and be able to call our government to account. We must say, We expect better out of you. We expect you to respect the dignity of life. People deserve due process before they are killed.

Because of the way that we interact with information online, it is easier to rile us up and keep us angry. A 2024 University of California Davis study reported that 26 percent of Americans believe violence is justified to achieve a political aim. With that number so high, I do think we have a pretty large group of Americans who are willing to say, “Forget the law, forget due process, forget your rights.” I just want this fixed. For example, the previous administration’s handling of the border was a disaster. That has led to people being very willing to say, “I don’t care how he does it; just fix it.”

The problem is that when you start pushing the line and abusing your authority in one space, you end up doing it in many other spaces. Because of that tendency, it is important that Americans speak up now and say that what happened wasn’t okay—pushing back with our voices, calling our representatives, calling the White House. We can say, “I am not comfortable with how my government is acting right now. They need to follow the law. They need to follow the Constitution. They need to respect that all life matters.” We can also pray. There is definitely a spiritual aspect to our culture’s devaluing of life. We have to acknowledge that there are unseen forces that we war with here too.

As Christians, we have answers for this world’s numbness, loneliness, and lack of meaning and purpose. We can be at the forefront of solving this problem, but it’s not through politics. It’s not through culture warring. It’s through doing the very unexciting work of loving our neighbor in practical ways, especially the people who are very tough to love. That’s how we heal culture.

- More from The Bulletin

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