How to Organize a Healthy Protest

Pastor and political strategist Chris Butler draws on Martin Luther King Jr.’s wisdom when planning action.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Cosmos

Since federal agents arrived in Minneapolis under direction from the Trump administration to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, protestors have responded with vigor to what they perceive as an invasion of their city and unlawful actions by ICE agents.

From individuals like Renee Good and Alex Pretti who engaged on city streets with federal agents to the group of protestors who interrupted a worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul, locals are expressing their distaste for the administration’s methods using a variety of tactics. Some track and report ICE movements and actions in neighborhoods. Others meet federal agents with signs, whistles, and chants. Still others gather food to distribute to immigrant families afraid to leave their homes.

To better understand the protests of recent weeks, The Bulletin sat down with pastor and political strategist Chris Butler, who directs Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation in episode 245.

How would you describe what you saw at the protest at Cities Church?

Chris Butler: As an organizer and somebody who’s participated in lots of protests, I saw a bad protest action. Creative protest is an important part of our political culture, but this seemed like a tactically and morally bad action.

Russell Moore: I’m not sure how the leaders of this protest wouldn’t have said this action was at least counterproductive; and I would probably agree with them about the shooting of Renee Good, the actions of ICE in Minneapolis. But this was not a well-chosen way to express that. It actually hurts the cause of drawing attention to Renee Good.

Interrupting worship would always be a bad strategy for protests, but that’s especially true when you’re dealing with a time when we’ve had church shootings. At the end of it, we knew what was going on, but nobody would’ve known that at the moment. That’s not a way to decelerate and cause people to actually think reasonably about how we get justice in Minneapolis.

The pray-in movement during the Civil Rights Movement was a very different kind of protest. The pray-in movements said, “We’re going to participate in worship and pray.” The disruption actually happened from the churches that were attempting to throw them out.

What are the appropriate boundaries for protesting?

Butler: A lot has been lost in our protest and justice culture. I started organizing and doing justice work as a 12-year-old, and I’m grateful for the chance I had to learn from senior citizens and folks who were much older than me.

A protest action has to be part of a larger process for justice. First, you have to be really clear about what you’re trying to achieve. The goal should be to achieve some kind of concrete improvement in people’s lives. If, for example, we’re trying to de-escalate ICE action in Minneapolis, that needs to be the goal, not just to bring attention to my group because we want the attention.

Then, there are steps in the process. Martin Luther King in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” lays out the process well. He talks about gathering the facts and making sure that there is injustice. Then there’s a step of negotiation and the process of self-purification. If you’re a Christian doing this, that language works well. Even in secular environments in the old days, there was a lot of training and thinking that went into an action. Whatever action we do needs to encourage empathy, not fear; so there’s a lot that needs to come before direct action.

Moore: Dr. King was right about the process of this. He’s also right in saying to the ministers in Birmingham, I’ve spent time talking about the fact that we cannot carry out moral objectives with immoral means. The reverse is true also. You’re going to have people always looking for where the inadequacy is in the way that people are protesting. Because of this, make sure that you are carrying out that protest in a way that is both personally moral and that is actually addressing the consciences of those you’re trying to address. This didn’t do it.

Butler: If you call a news reporter and say, “Hey, we’re going to pick up the phone and call this church down the road and talk to them about this pastor on their staff with whom we have a conflict,” news reporters aren’t going to show up. That’s not going to get clicks or be on social media. Sometimes, you can get things done in ways that don’t attract social media but win improvements for people in their lives. You want to start in those places. If you can accomplish that without disrupting other people’s lives, then you should.

How do you gauge the effectiveness of a protest?

Butler: You have to wait to see the effectiveness of a justice campaign; but the actions that we take, especially when you’re doing direct action, should begin with a goal in mind. For example, your goal might be that a congregation signs a letter rebuking the ICE office. Without a specific goal, it becomes really hard to tell whether a protest was effective or not.

When you think through the direct action that you’re going to take, you have to ask yourself, How are we going to apply pressure to this person who can give us what we want, in a way that’s actually going to get them to give it to us? Oftentimes, antagonizing that person in outlandish ways won’t get that done. This process creates accountability for us. Way more things are involved in the process of direct action than just showing up in a place and doing a thing. Too many times, in lots of different protest situations that I’ve been privy to in recent times, folks are not taking that robust approach. It’s much more reactionary.

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Died: Claudette Colvin, Unsung Civil Rights Pioneer

Haleluya Hadero

As a teenager, Colvin challenged Montgomery’s segregation law and prevailed.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

On a March day in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin boarded a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Under Jim Crow laws, Black riders were forced to sit in the back or give up their seats if the white section became full. Colvin sat with other Black passengers. But when a white woman boarded the crowded bus, the driver ordered the teen and three other passengers to move out of their row. Some moved, but Colvin remained seated.

The Birmingham native has often said she couldn’t move because history had her glued to the seat. The bus driver called the police, who dragged Colvin off the bus and arrested her. She was subsequently taken to a local jail. “Because I’m Baptist, I started praying. I recited the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer,” Colvin once recounted to a group of students at Boston College. She was released from jail three hours later after she made bail.

Colvin’s arrest generated buzz. In the aftermath, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black leaders met with city and bus-company officials. But Black leaders also chose not to make Colvin the symbol of their cause. Instead, they waited nine months until a similar act by Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

In the decades that followed, Colvin’s contributions to civil rights were mostly overshadowed by Parks’s, and Parks became one of the most widely renowned figures of the movement.

During an interview with NPR in 2009, Colvin said Black organizations felt Parks would be a better representative for the movement since, unlike her, Parks was an adult at the time.

Black leaders were also considering other factors. After Colvin was arrested, she became pregnant by a married man. That soured her case even more among civil rights leaders who believed making a young, single mother the face of the movement would attract negative attention. (Later on, Colvin said was the pregnancy was the result of statutory rape.)

By contrast, Parks was a secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and was already well-known among organizers. She also had a lighter skin tone and was middle-class, unlike Colvin, who grew up poor and had darker skin. Colvin believed those things, namely colorism and classism, also contributed to her being sidelined. “Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class,” Colvin told NPR. “She fit that profile.”

But over time, the unsung civil rights pioneer also came to terms with her “raw feelings” about the situation, she told The New York Times in another interview in 2009. “I know in my heart that she was the right person,” she said of Parks, whom she remembered as a kind woman who let her spend some nights in her apartment after the March arrest.

Even though Colvin didn’t become the face of the movement, she did testify as a plaintiff in a landmark case that made its way to the US Supreme Court and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

Shortly after her arrest, Colvin moved from Alabama to the Bronx, in New York City. According to her family foundation, she worked 30 years as a nursing assistant at a Catholic nursing home. She died last month, at age 86, in Texas.

Until her death, she remained “grounded in faith,” a representative of the foundation told CT. She was last a member of St. Matthew Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas.

People gathered to celebrate and commemorate Colvin’s life in late January at Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. During a eulogy at the service, Arthur Lane, the pastor of the church Colvin attended in Texas, read from Psalm 37 and drew parallels between Colvin’s life and the life of David. Lane said despite the struggles both went though, the Lord did not forsake them.

“Although [Colvin] was overlooked for decades, she is a testament that history could forsake you, but God in heaven could never forsake you,” he said.

Lane added that Colvin testified God was with her in her different seasons, whether that was in jail in Alabama, during her move to the Bronx, or in her successful attempt to expunge her juvenile record in 2021.

“God does not forsake the righteous who stand up for others,” he said, “because God remains faithful to the righteous [even] when society and its system fail to celebrate them.”

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Ideas

Saying ‘Welcome the Stranger’ Is Easy. Hosting a Toddler Is Not.

Carrie McKean

Contributor

A conservative pastor I know opened his home to children whose parents were deported. His witness has me examining my comfortable life.

Pastor Elias Rodriguez with three children he flew to Venezuela to reunite with their mother after she was deported without them.

Image courtesy of Elias Rodriguez.

Elias Rodriguez has legally crossed the Texas-Mexico border hundreds of times. He knows every efficiency, like which crossings to use when or whether a snaking line of brake lights means you should stop for dinner in El Paso or hold out for tacos on the other side. He’s on a first-name basis with many Border Patrol officers, and he’s never had trouble crossing until last month. But now he’s being detained and questioned by American authorities each time, held for hours and subjected to intense questioning.

Rodriguez thinks he can explain this sudden scrutiny. At Thanksgiving, he escorted three Venezuelan children to be reunited with their mother in Venezuela after she was deported from America without them. His best guess is that the trip put him on some kind of Department of Homeland Security list.

A dual American and Mexican citizen, Rodriguez is also the pastor of a network of evangelical churches on both sides of the border. Each winter, he travels south with trailer loads of donated supplies for outreach events he helps host in and around Juárez, Mexico, that pair evangelism with a hot meal and gifts.

Since that Venezuela trip, the pastor has been detained for about two hours each time he’s come back to the US. He’s been asked about drug and arms trafficking—even threatened with arrest.

These encounters are “inconvenient and unnerving,” Rodriguez told me. “Sure, it makes me uncomfortable. But I told my wife if this is the cost that I have to pay for making sure those kids get to be with their mother [in Venezuela] again, it is worth it. I’d do it all over again.”

Over the last few months, as I researched the story of these left-behind children and the Rodriguez family’s efforts to help them, that willingness to live with discomfort became a constant theme—and a source of personal conviction.

Would I do what Elias Rodriguez and his wife, Sandy, have done? I’ve asked myself more than once. They dropped everything to drive across Texas and pick up three kids they had never met, taking (unofficial) custody of them indefinitely while working out an improbable plan to get them back to a country with dangers well beyond most Americans’ comfort zones—and with no direct flights to or from our shores.

And now that those three children are reunited with their mother, the Rodriguezes have taken in two more children in a similar situation. Another American family nearby is also voluntarily (and unofficially) fostering strangers’ children: 1½- and 5-year-old girls whose parents were deported without them.

Both American families are my friends, and when I see them putting Matthew 25 into practice, I’m confronted with my own uncomfortable hesitations. To go and do likewise would make my family uncomfortable. A common retort from immigration restrictionists asks whether immigration supporters would be willing to take new arrivals into their homes. If I’m honest, if they’re toddlers, I’m not sure.

After all, I already have a lot of responsibilities on my plate: family, church work, and an endless calendar of appointments to which I must drive my kids. The thought of suddenly and indefinitely adding more children to the mix—children who miss their parents, who may be markedly younger than my own, who may not speak English—well, suffice to say it’s a daunting prospect. Undeniably uncomfortable.

Image courtesy of Elias Rodriguez.

One of the children reuniting with her mother.

Rodriguez doesn’t fit into neat political boxes, and that’s not comfortable for most of us either. He supports strong border policy and yet shelters migrants. He believes people who break the law should be deported—including the mother whose children he returned to Venezuela—and yet he took her children into his own home. Amid a storm of extremism, this conservative pastor is a lighthouse of both mercy and justice. He has eschewed our culture’s dangerous alchemy of high-minded public judgment and street-level disengagement in favor of true service in the model of Christ.

This commitment to integrity over personal comfort is what must distinguish the church, Rodriguez told me. “Obedience to the Lord will always carry a cost,” he said. “It is will always have a price tag, and sometimes the price tag is that you don’t get to have an easy life. It is not going to be comfortable.”

I don’t think it’s just my Texas twang talking when I say that I don’t think there’s much difference between the way all and our sound, though I guess you can test my theory. Try saying these phrases out loud and decide for yourself: God of all comfort. God of our comfort.

And whether they sound similar or not, the American church has blurred their meanings. Too often, what the Bible says and what we hear are two different things—and the difference matters enormously.

In 2 Corinthians 1:3–5 (ESV), Paul writes to the church in Corinth, a city then known for worldly power and prosperity, decadent living and luxurious comforts. This was a church, that is, with which we middle class Americans have a lot in common. Here’s how he opened the letter:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

I’m sure all and our don’t sound so similar in the original Greek. But I wonder if those early Christians struggled as much as I do with conflating the two. Because here’s the uncomfortable thing about that verse: It’s really not about our comfort at all.

For all the talk of Christian nationalism and the conservative-versus-liberal battles that dominate this age, Rodriguez believes the fundamental problem with today’s American church is that most of us have grown enchanted by a false god of our own comfort. We have accepted sloppy seconds—a nice life, nice stuff, nice neighborhoods, and nice friends—in exchange for any uncomfortable situations that put us squarely in need of God’s comfort, with which he promises to bless us when our lives are dangerous or unpredictable. As safe and predictable as these lives we’ve built for ourselves seem, when we functionally worship the tawdry pursuit-of-our-own-happiness idols we’ve constructed, can we see how dangerously close we are to gaining the whole world yet losing our very souls (Matt. 16:26)?

This is not the way of Jesus, who promises us abundant life—life abundantly full of more than our own comfort.

As a winter storm descended over much of the United States last week, millions of us stayed at home—iced in and increasingly focused on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As tensions escalate, I worry that simplistic partisan opinions about federal immigration enforcement have a way of dangerously freezing us in place.

Here’s what I mean: Armed with nothing more than the knowledge of how someone voted in 2024, most of us could place a winning bet on where that person lands on any number of complicated political and social issues. And though most of us fancy ourselves free thinkers, the truth is, few of us are. We tend to take up the party line, even to the point of refusing to listen to people on the other side. This makes us feel like we belong. And it can feel so principled, but in practice, we’re picking at the threads of our fraying social fabric.

For us as Christians, this is a moment that demands more than attention or anger or sympathy. It demands that we turn toward peacemaking. It demands we imitate Jesus in tangible care for the people right in front of us, including those—like the tax collector who hosted him for dinner (Luke 5:29–32) and the unclean woman who washed his feet (7:36–50)—who make us uncomfortable. Jesus did not speak in platitudes or diatribes. He did not deal in vague generalities or broad stereotypes. He drew near to broken people, even at the cost of his own reputation (Mark 3:21).

One reason we need to follow Jesus even to uncomfortable places is what happens to us when we finally draw near in the same way. The things we once assumed were simple become far more complex. And that’s a good thing! In this fractious age, growing in understanding is how we become repairers of the breach and restorers of the paths between us (Isa. 58:12). I’ve seen it play out in my own community these last few weeks as a whole band of Christian women in my town has joined a group text to coordinate practical aid for these children in our friends’ care.

The women in the text chain are mostly politically conservative and supportive of strong immigration policies. Most probably voted for Donald Trump. Many of us in the group, at some time or another, have probably nodded along to talking heads on cable TV offering proposals of simplistic solutions for complex problems. But the group text demands deeds, not words. We are coordinating meals and securing car seats and dropping off clothes and toys. Some women have helped buy airplane tickets. Some have offered to babysit, while others have held little hands while crossing busy streets.

All this is simple too, but it has brought us each to see the faceless, nameless “immigration issue” with a lot more complexity. It has taught us to see both good and bad, broken systems and broken laws, mothers and children, justice and mercy.

These tensions are uncomfortable by human standards—they can make us feel like outsiders in our preferred tribes and transform us into people who are more difficult to politically manage and control, which feels risky. And yet as we step into these uncomfortable places, God “draws near to us in our fear and uncertainty and pain and suffering,” as Rodriguez said to me. In the messiness of it all, we’re met by the God of all comfort—not merely our own.

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

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Seeing Black History Through Scripture

Rann Miller

Similarities between the African American and Jewish experience can help us think biblically about human dignity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Memorials and remembrances are important. We remember the past not just to remind us of where we’ve been but also to help us move forward in the right direction. And every February, Black History Month gives us a chance to do just that.

Commemorations of Black history dates to “Negro History Week,” which was created by historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926—100 years ago this year. Woodson chose February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Black communities were already celebrating both men, and Woodson thought the weeklong event could be a way for teachers to review all the Black history they had taught students within the previous year.

Woodson wanted Black students to learn about the accomplishments of African Americans and, in turn, be inspired to emulate “the examples of those who achieved in spite of tremendous handicaps.” Many of those handicaps, of course, were due to anti-Black racism. It was never Woodson’s intention for Black History Month to obscure that reality. But it’s fair to say much of our contemporary commemoration leans more toward acknowledging Black achievement than spotlighting historical injustices and how they impact us today.

Throughout history, African Americans have been a despised people. The US Constitution declared our ancestors to be enslaved noncitizens. That language remains in place to this day, albeit without legal force. During the Civil War, we were looked upon with resentment and hatred for resisting enslavement and formally fighting for our freedom. That hatred manifested into institutionalized racism through Jim Crow, which existed in the North as it did in the South, and inspired Nazis and Afrikaners alike.

Today, our communities struggle with police brutality, challenges to landmark voting rights protections, and as recently seen through the removal of a slavery exhibit in Philadelphia, efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize our history. Our experience is an enduring struggle to affirm our humanity within a society whose power structure continues to deny it. And in many ways, this struggle mirrors the experience of Judeans under Roman occupation and of Jesus, who was despised yet without sin.

Christians generally know that Roman occupation was oppressive and overarching, touching every aspect of life. But the day-to-day aspect of the brutality is less known. Though King Herod was a visible representative of Roman authority, the Roman military was even more so. Roman soldiers demanded goods and services in the form of labor for whatever they saw fit. They also used rape to terrorize and demoralize occupied peoples, just as white slave owners did so in the US against many slaves.

When Judeans resisted and rebelled against Roman authority, crucifixions were used—much like lynching in the 20th century—to quell dissent and solicit compliance with Roman rule. Quintilian, the Roman historian, is thought to have said: “Whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen, where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect.”

In the same manner, Black men left hanging from trees sought to remind Black people of their place within white society. As Billie Holiday famously sang, the men were strange fruit left to rot—an analogy that can be extended to our God, who too was left to rot on a cross after he was beaten, flogged, mocked, and humiliated (John 19).

I’m not the first person to point out this parallel, but it’s something I think about often. How we see Jesus, after all, should impact how we see other people—as image bearers of God who have worth and value.

But concerns about dehumanization still ring true in our country, particularly currently against immigrants who find themselves scared and vulnerable to the federal government’s overreach. It’s an experience African Americans are all too familiar with. And thus, the lesson is one we—both as Americans and as Christians—must learn repeatedly.

We can recognize Black History Month appropriately this year if we strive to ensure everyone, regardless of their race or immigration status, can be treated as the image bearers they are.

Our commemoration of Black History Month should not be redundant and lacking power. It should not be dominated by businesses who seek to profit off people and movements. Nor should it merely seek reconciliation without also moving toward restitution.

Instead, let us honor the accomplishments of the past by working to eliminate any “tremendous handicaps” that can and do hinder Black people—and anyone from a historically oppressed group, for that matter—from accomplishing great things. Let us also celebrate the goodness that has come from Black people in the places racism has put them and end the racism that put them there.

Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in southern New Jersey. His writings on race, education, and politics have been featured in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Salon. Miller currently serves as a youth ministry teacher at The Perfecting Church in Sewell, New Jersey.

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Trump’s Visa Suspension Leaves Adoptive Families in Limbo

Hannah Herrera

The government doesn’t provide a blanket exemption for international adoptions but will examine them case by case.

The Dowey family and their adopted daughter, Grace, who is currently in Haiti.

Images courtesy of Lifeline Children's Services

Grace and Dave Macchioni sat down excitedly for a call with their adoption agency in mid-January. After more than a year of submitting background checks, financial records, and other paperwork, they finally had a travel date to pick up their soon-to-be adopted daughter: January 24.

In Colombia, they would reunite with 14-year-old Zuli then head to the US embassy in Bogotá to obtain a visa to bring her home. Yet over the call, the case worker informed them that earlier that day, the Trump administration had issued a visa freeze for 75 countries, including Colombia.

The Macchionis recalled the case worker didn’t seem concerned and assured them it was probably an oversight. But the couple felt something was wrong.

“We looked at each other, and once we hung up the phone, I just bawled,” Grace Macchioni said.

The Macchionis first met Zuli through a hosting program called Project 143. She spent a month in their Rhode Island home in 2024, where she experienced snow for the first time, attended a ceramic painting class, helped Macchioni’s aging mother walk to her appointments, and bonded with the Macchionis’ two sons.

“She became a part of the family,” Macchioni said. As soon as she left, the couple started working on the adoption process.

At the beginning of January, the Macchionis had a video call with Zuli, who had been transferred from her foster home to a waiting facility ahead of their arrival. Grace Macchioni showed her the bedroom she had prepared with all of Zuli’s favorite things–a purple butterfly bedspread, butterfly paintings, a Colombia nightlight to remind her of home, a wall hanging of a Spanish Bible verse, and figurines of Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch.

“Are you happy?” Macchioni recalled asking Zuli.

“I prayed to God for this,” she responded.

Now the Macchionis, like hundreds of families in the international adoption process, have no idea when they’ll be able to bring their adopted daughter home. They canceled their flights as well as the caretaker they had hired for Macchioni’s mother. They called family members who were planning to stay with their boys and informed Dave’s work he would not be taking leave.

The State Department’s January visa freeze temporarily halted the issuance of all immigrant visas for 75 “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.” It came on the heels of President Donald Trump’s December presidential proclamation, which banned immigration from 39 countries and could last until the end of his term.

Past visa suspensions have always included a blanket exemption for adoption visas. Yet the December travel ban and January freeze do not.

The announcement sent shock waves through the adoption community. While grappling with the news of an indefinite delay on top of years of waiting and extensive vetting, adoptive parents mobilized. They shared their stories on social media, made calls, sent letters, signed petitions, met with their representatives, and urged others to do the same.

Last Friday, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption wrote a joint bipartisan letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging him to reinstate the categorical exemption for adoption visas, provide pre-travel exemptions to adoptive families, or issue clear guidance on how to apply for case-by-case exceptions.

On January 28, the White House released a guidance instructing families to proceed in the adoption process, saying, “Consular posts have been instructed that intercountry adoptions are eligible for National Interest Exceptions under the current presidential proclamation and should be processed on a priority, case-by-case basis.”

Karla Thrasher, vice president of international ministries at Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest evangelical adoption agency in the country, said the adoption community is celebrating the news while still advocating for the categorical exemption to be reinstated.

“The visas are going to be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, and we’re just not quite sure what that means at this point,” Thrasher said. “Is there still a chance that a visa could be denied? And if so, what is that criteria? There’s still a lot of clarification that we’d like to see.”

Christine Deason of Louisville, Kentucky, is in the process of adopting a 7-year-old from Thailand. She and her husband never thought that getting a visa would be an issue in her two-and-a-half-year-long adoption process.

She said she doesn’t understand why the visa freeze would not have an exemption for adoption visas, since its stated purpose is to prevent the entry of immigrants who will become a “public charge,” or use government benefits.

Most adopted children become citizens upon entry to the US, and the public charge rule only applies to noncitizens. Also, the adoption vetting process requires submitting extensive financial documentation, including the records of a designated guardian should something happen to the adoptive parents.

“Time and time again, we’ve had to prove ourselves financially stable,” Deason said, adding that they’ve even postponed big purchases, like buying a house or car, to prevent any change in their records that could cause delays.

The Deasons are hoping to bring their daughter home in April. Her room has been ready for two years, and in the corner sits a pile of wrapped presents—one for every birthday they’ve missed since she was born.

“We were very excited about traveling in April, because she turns 8 in May,” Deason said. “Fingers crossed, we’re not gonna miss another birthday.”

Parents adopting from the 39 countries included in Trump’s December proclamation have now spent a month and a half in limbo.

Ashley and Ted Dowey of Camden, South Carolina, have been in the process of adopting their 10-year-old daughter, Grace, from Haiti for more than five years. After countless setbacks, the couple finally received their adoption decree from Haiti, meaning Grace is legally their child and Dowey is legally her last name. But since the announcement of the travel ban, they have no idea when, or if, she can come to the US.

“We expected delays from Haiti from the beginning,” Ashley Dowey said. “But the last thing we expected was to get almost to the end and then for it to be the [US] that’s causing a delay. That was really shocking and disappointing.”

Grace has been in an orphanage her whole life. She loves music, spaghetti, and the color yellow. The girl lives in a particularly unstable part of Haiti, so the Doweys have completed many hours of trauma training to prepare for her arrival. They speak with her once or twice a month on Zoom, and Dowey noted that she always asks, “When do I get to come home? When do I get to come live with you guys?”

Dowey is holding onto a line from Psalm 68:6: “God sets the lonely in families.” She prays this can be true for Grace soon.

Meanwhile, back in Rhode Island, Grace Macchioni said she is feeling “very hopeful” to hear the White House announcement that adoptions are eligible for exemptions. “There’s power in numbers,” she said, noting the adoption community’s petitions. “I’m hoping this is really a move forward.”

She spoke to Zuli on Wednesday, who she said seemed “restless” in the temporary waiting facility. “I reassured her,” Macchioni said. “I said, ‘Once they give us the green light, we’ll be there.’”

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After Their Kids Survived the Annunciation Shooting, Parents Search for Healing

Emily Belz in Minneapolis

Families in the same Anglican church watched their young children deal with trauma, anxiety, and grief. They found one solution: each other.

A note reading " I Love You Fletcher" is left outside Annunciation Church and School on August 30, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fletcher Merkel was killed in the shooting.

Photo by Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Minneapolis lay under a blanket of snow and single-digit temperatures as parishioners poured into church on a Sunday morning in early December last year. They piled jackets into a coatroom and grabbed cups of strong coffee from the dispenser in the lobby. In the sanctuary of Restoration Anglican Church, vertical stained-glass windows sent shafts of light across the pews.

A regular sight in the small balcony next to the organ now is three families, all close friends: the Revells, Holines, and Sharpes. Their children attend Annunciation Catholic School and were there the morning of August 27, 2025, when the student body gathered for the first Mass of the school year and a shooter fired through the sanctuary windows from outside, riddling the Catholic church with 116 bullets. Two students were killed—Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10—and 28 were injured.

In all, six families at Restoration Anglican have children at the school. All survived the shooting unharmed, but they’re dealing with the aftereffects of what one parent likened to a military ambush. Some of the children have nightmares and don’t sleep well. Loud noises or flashing lights or simply being alone can send them into an anxiety tailspin. The parents are fragile too.

The stained-glass windows lining Restoration’s sanctuary are similar enough to those at Annunciation that the children had a hard time returning to church services. So the Sunday after the shooting, Restoration church staff set aside space for the families to worship in the balcony so the kids feel less exposed. For the first few weeks, ministers brought Communion to the families.

Trip Sharpe, 8, who survived the shooting, likes sitting in the balcony.

“Being down there, no,” he told his dad Will Sharpe recently. Why? his dad asked. Trip said he liked just having their family around. Will Sharpe and Mary Marshall Revell are siblings, so some of Trip’s balcony buddies are his cousins.

Trip’s best friend, Fletcher, was killed in the shooting. Trip helped lead a procession at Fletcher’s funeral, holding hands with Fletcher’s brother. Trip’s dad, Will Sharpe, gave a eulogy. Trip can list off his friend’s birthday and tell stories about fishing trips they took together.

Ash Revell, whose big sister Ansley also survived the shooting, zoomed a car over the balcony pews during the service. Nearby was June Holine, a fourth grader who ran with her teacher out of the school during the attack.

June’s little sister Olive, a first grader, also survived. Annunciation has a buddy system for Mass, pairing older students with younger ones—Olive’s buddy laid on top of her during the shooting, then covered her head as they ran out.

The parents still worry in the balcony. Will Sharpe has to pray each service to keep violent images of a potential attack in church from entering his head. His sister, Mary Marshall Revell, struggles with the same thing, her imagination playing over and over what the shooting was like for their kids.

At the front of the sanctuary, two Advent candles were lit, and a child read Isaiah 11:1–10:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. (v. 6, ESV)

“Does God interrupt the chaos of the world?” asked rector Rick Stawarz in his sermon on the passage.

Stawarz and his wife, Molly Stawarz, the pastor of mission at Restoration, had enrolled their 3-year-old, John, at Annunciation’s preschool. When they got word of the shooting, they drove as fast as they could toward the school. They couldn’t get close with all the activity around the school, so they ditched their car and ran, Rick losing his Birkenstock sandals and forgetting to turn off the engine. They found their son and “kissed him like crazy,” Rick said.

John had not been in the sanctuary—he was blessedly oblivious, thanks to a calm teacher who had them play “the quiet game” in their classroom during the attack. As John walked out, he was entranced by all the police and fire trucks; he asked to dress up as a firefighter for Halloween.

America’s ongoing scourge of school shootings not only takes lives but also leaves a pool of surviving children who carry the horror with them. More than 398,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine shooting in 1999, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

Research has shown long-lasting effects on surviving children—like struggling with depression or dropping out of school—but it has also revealed children can be incredibly resilient.

“The field of post-trauma is really big and developing all the time. There is so much we don’t know,” said Anna Mondal, a Christian counselor who specializes in trauma.

The families at Annunciation discovered quickly that there is a national infrastructure to respond to school shootings: trauma centers for children, parental support groups. Organizations showed up in Minneapolis with therapy dogs and bunnies, a big hit with the children.

Annunciation brought in the Washburn Center for Children, a local counseling group, to provide onsite mental health professionals for two school years. As Washburn’s chief clinical officer, Jenny Britton, described to me the close-knit community at Annunciation and how essential that is for trauma recovery, she took a call about an Annunciation student who needed help.

Yet even with all the resources, mass shootings tear an unimaginable hole in a community.

“You keep seeing the fracture continue to spread,” said Will Sharpe, Trip’s dad. Parents of kids in other school shootings have warned Annunciation parents that every step after the event—like deciding whether to reopen the site of the shooting or how to memorialize it—could bring dissension.

“It was pretty shocking … how much it takes to clean up the pieces,” said Emily Collings, who leads the children’s ministry at Restoration and coordinated care for the families of child survivors. She sat in meeting after meeting discussing what to do next: how to support the families, how to navigate kids’ questions in Sunday school, whether to change the classroom locks. One parent asked her about hiring an armed guard.

All of it makes Collings angry at the shooter—such devastation wrought in so few minutes.

But the families at Restoration, taken together, might have something special that could speed their recovery—and help their kids bounce back and understand what happened. These families are seeing the value of close relationships in a trusted faith community in a country where people often suffer individually, out of sight.

Americans are becoming less and less socially connected. As their isolation grows, so do problems with their mental health. But even recovery from crises is often an individual activity with a therapist.

Scientists widely consider social connection one of the strongest predictors of survival at any stage of life. And research on mass shootings has shown that a religious community helps in recovery. The survivors and families at Restoration are learning this—but remaining in community is itself a struggle sometimes.

“Showing up to men’s prayer, showing up to church—showing up has been something that we’re telling ourselves to do. It’s not coming naturally,” said Anders Holine, the dad of June and Olive, who survived. “There are days where I just want to move to the woods and cut ties and be safe.”

But after church events, he said he almost always feels encouraged, renewed. It helps that Restoration’s rector personally understands his family’s terror.

The families say they feel comforted even as they struggle to find meaning in the tragedy.

“You’re not just making sense of it yourself. You’re making sense of it for your kids, who are asking, ‘Why?’” said Anders.

“It’s unnatural, what we experienced,” said Mary Marshall Revell.

Anders Holine and Will Sharpe went to high school together in a Twin Cities suburb but didn’t really know each other. When they were students, Will said, he was getting in trouble while Anders was “pursuing church and making good decisions.” They became friends after Will turned his life around.

Now their families live across the street from each other—a few blocks from Annunciation—and hang out all the time. They walk their kids to school.

Mary Marshall Revell is Will’s sister and also lives less than a five-minute drive away, with her husband, Micah Revell, and their two kids, Ansley, 9, a third grader at Annunciation, and preschooler Ash, 5.

The Holines, Sharpes, and Revells all go to church together. Will and his wife, Kacie, recommended Annunciation to their rector’s family, the Stawarzes.

The day of the shooting, Will and Anders walked their kids to school and then split off. Will went to a grocery store nearby, Anders went home. As Will walked back, he passed the campus. Trip and Fletcher and one of their friends called out to him from a window, laughing. Will laughed too but told them to get back to class. He returned home, took the family dog on a walk, then heard gunshots.

He hopped in the car to get to campus, parked in an alleyway next to school, and ran into the school parking lot. He found an older woman lying on the ground, shot in the leg. Then police came around the corner and told him to get away because they were concerned about a second shooter. Like other parents, he was desperate to find his son. (He knew kindergarteners, including his daughter, didn’t go to Mass.) Trip was in the church, a few rows up from his friend Fletcher.

Anders also heard the gunshots and drove to the school. First responders were just arriving. He saw a police officer come through the church doors with injured children. As the police opened the door, he went into the crime scene to find his girls Olive and June.

But his girls weren’t there. For the parents, the half hour of not knowing their children’s fate was hell. Some kids were hiding under pews. Others had run out at the start of the shooting and were in buildings around the area. They eventually reunited at a gym.

In the chaos of the shooting Ansley Revell, the third grader, tripped and fell over a shoe someone had lost, and then someone stepped on her finger. She got out, and she remembered her friends crying, but parts of her memory are blank.

“I want to remember all of it, but my body won’t let me,” she said, sitting on her couch next to her parents. “I can’t picture it in my mind.”

Ansley remembers that after her parents collected her, an officer checked off her name, noting that she was okay, and her mom and dad said she could have whatever she wanted for lunch. But she felt sick to her stomach and couldn’t eat. She had a popsicle, which helped. The kids may have blocked out the shooting, but they remember the food they ate that day—mostly pizza. Ansley had a smoothie bowl.

After the shooting, the three families piled in at the Sharpes’ house. The kids watched TV downstairs for hours, which they’re not normally allowed to do. The parents sat together upstairs, numb. They stayed at the Sharpes’ house until late. When the parents learned Fletcher had died, they pulled the children aside to tell them.

Ansley immediately went to Trip, knowing he would be upset, and they started talking, said her mom, Mary Marshall. The parents said the children sometimes found it easier to talk to each other about the shooting than to them. But now the kids ask deep questions about it at random times, like on the way to school.

One of Will’s friends came over the night of the shooting. They sat on the front steps, and Will cried, the first time he let himself lose it. Micah Revell lost it in his kitchen after he put his kids to bed. Micah’s dad, John Revell, got into full-time police chaplaincy in 2012, ministering to first responders in Newtown, Connecticut, who struggled after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The evening of the shooting, Restoration held a prayer vigil. After that, the three families said they ate more meals together than not, sometimes with the Stawarzes as well. They didn’t wallow in feelings about the shooting—sometimes they were just hanging out—but these times were a relief when other people either avoided talking about the event or wanted to move on quickly.

“Having the ability to process and talk through with each other was such a gift from God,” said Will.

Britton, from the children’s trauma counseling group, said well-meaning people often ask questions like “How are you doing?,” which can sometimes feel hard to answer, especially for kids. Instead she suggests having a normal conversation that is not about their recovery, like “I am so happy to see you today. I heard you joined the basketball team.”

The day after the shooting was Ansley’s birthday. Collings, the children’s pastor, pulled together a birthday gift and care package.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, that must have been a horrible birthday.’It was a pretty good one,” said Ansley.

Restoration started a meal train for the families. Anders discovered there were skilled sourdough bread bakers in the church after several delicious homemade loaves showed up at his home.

“They had already, within a very short amount of time, thought through all of these ways to care for us so that we didn’t have to think of those things,” said Mary Marshall.

Will was asked to do a eulogy for Fletcher’s funeral. He processed it with his counselor and then with Rick Stawarz and prayed every morning for the right thing to say. He felt intimidated by the glare of attention. What came to him was Psalm 23: “I lack nothing” (v. 1). He clung to it. At the Restoration service before the funeral, Stawarz anointed him with oil. People laid hands on him and prayed.

Will had coached Fletcher in soccer, football, and basketball. In the eulogy he talked about the gift of being welcomed into the Merkels’ circle, then told the family, “We are here for you, and we are not going anywhere.”

He quoted 1 Corinthians 15 and said, “Because of Jesus, death has had no victory over Fletcher. … He is safe. He made it to his heavenly home, and boy do we miss him.”

After the funeral, the Sharpes, Revells, and Holines ate dinner together. By the end of the evening, they were even laughing.

“I remember looking around and thinking, Okay, this is how we’re going to survive this. Because we have this,” said Mary Marshall.

Courtesy of Anders Holine

Three families—the Holines, Sharpes, and Revells—whose children survived the Annunciation shooting go to the same church.

Before the shooting, Micah Revell said the three sets of parents were struggling with some level of numbness with their faith. Now church is what brings out his emotions, even if he has felt disconnected during the week. Communion especially feels like “tangible comfort,” said Micah. “This really is the physical presence of Jesus.” The parents all brought up falling back on the sacraments and liturgy of the Anglican tradition.

Discussion of sorrow and suffering is “built into the way that the Anglican church, or our church, approaches daily life and the world,” said Sharpe, who is new to Anglicanism. The Holines and Sharpes weren’t at Restoration a year before the shooting, but Mary Marshall feels they were all drawn together into the same church as a gift.

“Church has always been really hard for me … for most of my life,” said Mary Marshall, mentioning some hurtful experiences at recent churches. But the time her family has been at Restoration has been “life-giving and healing,” she said. “Their response and their care for us—it couldn’t have been more different.”

Molly Stawarz said the Anglican tradition places a high value on kids’ involvement in church because of the belief that they can have a relationship with God—and, Rick Stawarz added, they can practice spiritual disciplines.

“This is a place where their kids are being given the space to process this—not just individually but to process it liturgically,” said Rick. “Whether they realize it or not, they’re being connected to the weekly rhythms of our church and the prayers of our church.”

In September, about two weeks after the shooting, June and Trip were scheduled to be baptized at Restoration. They both wanted to go forward with it. Usually the Anglican tradition does sprinkling baptism, but many in the congregation come from Baptist backgrounds, so the church does full immersion, too, which is what the kids did. June wore an Annunciation T-shirt. Anders told himself to keep it together as he watched, going into a sanctuary for the first time since the shooting.

“It’s the very basics of Christianity that I really should have practiced—fundamentally trusting God with your future, trusting the unknowns, entrusting your kids’ lives,” said Anders. “Am I really doing that? I’d rather have safe circumstances and just be safe physically. The Bible is really challenging. … I can’t pave my own road.”

Anders said June dried off from the baptism, they ate a quick lunch, and they went to Harper Moyski’s funeral.

Rick reflected on the baptisms later: “Yes, be reminded that by Christ’s death and resurrection, you are united to him, and nothing can separate you from him. You are claimed by him, united with him, and received into the household of God, which is both a local church reality, but it’s also this heavenly, cosmic reality as well. You belong to Jesus.”

But the parents still discover unexpected “pockets of pain,” as Will described it. The power flickered in the Revells’ house recently, and Ansley sprinted to Mary Marshall, screaming. Mary Marshall just held her. Ansley’s whole body was shaking.

“She has a really good game face, and I do believe she’s sharing with us, but there’s a lot more going on inside,” said Mary Marshall. The therapist the Revells see told them they didn’t need to rush her into therapy but should wait until she is ready—advice echoed by other therapists CT interviewed.

June Holine sleeps with her Bernedoodle sometimes because nights are hard now. She said if she could, she would have 50 dogs, and then she could crowd-surf on them.

“To have those friendships in place with these friends that are also at their church, and then the broader church community that we have, is going to be really good for Ans,” said Micah.

The Anglican families have felt cared for by the Catholic community at Annunciation, too. The parents go to a weekly meeting with other Annunciation parents at a local pizza place, where they’re forming a parents advocacy group that, among other things, is looking at pushing gun reforms. “The grief and helplessness is getting channeled into ‘Okay, what can we do?,’” said Mary Marshall.

One snowy night in December, Beth Holine, Anders’s wife, proposed to the parents a name and mission for their nonpartisan advocacy organization. Anders was watching their girls at home and followed the meeting on Zoom, and the Revells squished behind a table with other parents. The room was packed, and the floors were wet from snowmelt.

“I would love for there to be some kind of broader Christian response that can really make a change in our country,” said Molly later about the gun debate. “We are uniquely equipped to enter these incredibly difficult dialogues.”

Life goes on, with sports, parent meetings, and birthday parties, but the shooting comes up. When June’s basketball team lost recently, the winning team gave them bracelets as consolation because they were from Annunciation.

Recently, the Sharpe, Revell, and Holine children went back into the Annunciation sanctuary for the first time since the shooting. The parents noticed that June, Trip, Olive, and Ansley wandered to the choir loft on their own and prayed for the families of Fletcher and Harper.

Meanwhile, Restoration’s worship director, Derek Boemler, and another church musician, Chris Gisler, released a new worship song for their church that they wrote in response to the events:

“There is a refuge in your wings
A help in troubled times
You cause the broken heart to sing
And you’re singing now in mine.

“May I know the Comforter
May I know the God of peace
May I know the one who holds the stars
Is holding on to me.”

“The One Who Holds the Stars,” courtesy of Derek Boemler:

- More from Emily Belz

Books

How Football Shaped Christian Colleges

John Fea

Three history books to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

**Hunter M. Hampton, The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth- Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2025)**

In Gridiron Gospel, historian Hunter M. Hampton explores how Christian colleges and universities—his case studies are Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Wheaton, Wiley, Baylor, and Liberty—used football to promote Christian masculinity and adapt to the shifting social and religious landscapes of 20th-century America. Muscular Christianity plays such a central role in this book that it is surprising the word masculinity is not included in the title or subtitle.

The book contains a significant amount of straightforward football history, at times reminiscent of reading the sports section of an old newspaper. Hunter chronicles specific games, records of wins and losses, and coaching changes. However, his narrative is most compelling when he moves beyond these details to examine how administrators—many of whom initially questioned whether football was too violent for Christian colleges—concluded that the sport could build good Christian men.

Hunter demonstrates that administrators consistently integrated football programs into broader efforts to reinforce institutional identity. For instance, at Wiley University—a historically Black school in Texas—football strengthened the school’s Black identity. At Baylor, the sport reinforced the university’s commitment to racial segregation. At Wheaton, football facilitated the evangelical liberal arts college’s transition out of fundamentalism, though Hunter is not entirely clear about how this occurred.

In recent years, sport historians have begun to take religion seriously, while American religious historians are also starting to recognize the importance of sports. Hampton’s book fits squarely within these promising trends.

**Pamela Walker Laird, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, Cambridge University Press, 2025)**

What do 17th-century English Puritan statesman Oliver Cromwell have to do with 21st-century socialite and influencer Kylie Jenner? Both have been described as “self-made.” Like Hunter Hampton, Pamela Walker Laird is interested in the myth of the “self-made man.” In a sweeping narrative covering 400 years of American history, she examines how American culture celebrates “self-made” as a “badge of honor that rewards individualist ambitions while it hammers against community obligations.”

In Cromwell’s era, presenting oneself as “self-made” signaled sinful pride, selfishness, and unhealthy ambition. “Well aware of their roots and forces outside themselves,” Laird writes, “self-fashioners then did not—could not—see themselves as self-made.” By the 19th century, however, the term had become a largely positive character trait. Laird masterfully explains how this transformation occurred.

As historian Seth Rockman observes in his endorsement of this book, “To call someone ‘self-made’ has almost never been true.” Laird recognizes that the pursuit of individual ambition and self-fashioning was not accessible to all Americans. The ability to improve oneself or “rise up” was consistently limited by entrenched systems of inequality. Laird also points out that as Americans celebrated a meritocracy based on hard work and determination, they were simultaneously constructing the myth of “self-made failure.”

From Benjamin Franklin to Davy Crockett, from Horatio Alger to Donald Trump, the idea of the self-made American endures. For those interested in how such individualism and ambition may or may not contradict the teachings of the Christian faith, this book is an essential read.

**Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003)**

Progressive Christians are often associated with opposition to American wars. As historian Richard M. Gamble demonstrates, pacifism has a long tradition within this branch of modern American Christianity. Yet, progressive Christians—the advocates of what was called the “social gospel” in the first half of the 20th century—sometimes acted as war hawks.

The War for Righteousness did not receive the attention it deserved when it was first published in 2003. Gamble argues progressive Christians were “crusading interventionists” who championed United States involvement in World War I as a means of spreading a messianic vision of American exceptionalism and the coming kingdom of God throughout Europe. Today, much of this pro-war rhetoric might sooner be found coming from a Christian nationalist.

The key actors in Gamble’s book are the so-called modernists. They are the theologians and church leaders who sought to integrate Christianity with modern science (including Darwinism), taught critical methods of interpreting the Bible, and believed that social justice was a central feature of the gospel. They include Lyman Abbott, Washington Gladden, Shailer Mathews, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the leaders of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ.

Although many of these men were opposed to war in principle, they eventually viewed President Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in Europe during World War I as a means of preventing the spread of German evil and advancing the kingdom of God. As Gamble writes, “The great irony of the war was that, in the very name of perpetual peace, the Protestant liberal clergy rationalized and legitimized the mass destruction of the first total war of the twentieth century, and demanded that it be carried on to a decisive victory.”

John Fea is a visiting fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and distinguished professor of history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

- More from John Fea

History

What CT Asked Advice Columnist Ann Landers

Daniel Silliman

As America teetered on the edge of revolution, the magazine called for more innovation, responsibility, sensitivity, and stewardship.

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

In 1970, CT caught up with Ann Landers, the widely read newspaper columnist who answered personal, ethical questions. CT asked, “Why do you think people come to you for advice rather than seek the counsel of a clergyman?”

My readers actually answer this question in the opening sentence of their letters. For example: “Please don’t tell me to see my clergyman about this problem. I’m ashamed to let anyone know we are having this kind of trouble in our family.” “It is easier for me to write to you because you do not know us.” …

I receive approximately 1,000 letters a day. Every letter that has a name and address receives a personal reply in the mail. …

Both clergymen and psychiatrists have written to me for help. Far more numerous are letters from wives of psychiatrists and clergymen. The wives of clergymen resent the criticism of women from the congregation. If they dress in style the word is, “She has no right to look like a fashion model.” If the clergyman’s wife underdresses, she is harpooned for “looking dowdy.”

Ministers appeared marginal in other popular media as well. CT noted a lack of “evangelical visibility in TV programming.” Part of the problem, according to the magazine, was that church leaders showed little interest in innovation.

The churches are still trying to reach people within the confines of formal worship, and not on the level where they live. … The Church has to realize that just as evangelism must assume many different postures (as shown at the recent U. S. Congress on Evangelism), so spiritual television programming must find expression in a variety of situation contexts.

Here is the meat of what the Church can portray: examples of believers on the firing line of contemporary events and needs; enactments of Christian heritage, perhaps in a spiritually oriented “Saga of Western Man” series; modern-parable presentations of the Christian message in ways able to speak to all age groups; and exposure of the great music, art, and literature of the Church with an emphasis on the Church’s ability to continue to inspire the arts today.

Many evangelicals were pessimistic about the future of America in 1970. The country seemed on the verge of collapse.

More and more the question is asked: Will we soon need a new Gibbon to write The Decline and Fall of the United States of America? Signs of decay are not hard to find. The showy facade of affluence, technological advance, great knowledge, military might, and a high standard of living cannot hide the internal rot. …

The frightening thing is the combination of ailments coupled with the patient’s disregard for his symptoms, and his unwillingness to seek a true cure. Is this not a way of committing suicide?

We are engaged in a war that has terribly divided our people, brought near anarchy to some college campuses, and elicited a flood of obscenities, half-truths, name-calling, and irresponsible rhetoric. Emotion and fear and weakness, rather than reason and courage and strength, now seem to characterize our people. The social fabric is wearing thin and the holes are visible to all.

Founding editor L. Nelson Bell was especially concerned about the anti-war movement and the possibility of a revolution.

We must recognize the forces with which we have to deal. We are not confronted merely by a group of idealists who wish to effect change by an over-activistic approach. True, many young enthusiasts have been captivated by the professed idealism of some leaders. But the fact is that we are faced with a hard core of student activists and others who are determined to tear down the present structures of society at any cost, and within their number are those whose basic philosophy is closely allied with that of either Moscow or Peking.

That spring, national guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed students at an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio. CT invited an evangelical campus minister to write about the experience.

I have never been in war, but that day as I stood with hundreds of students on the campus commons I knew how ugly war could be. … The whirlwind has begun. The unalterable laws of the spiritual dimension are proving their reliability. God is not mocked. What a man plants in his life and in the lives of others will yield back manyfold. And we have sown the wind.

We have sown the wind of permissiveness in the home. … We have sown the wind of egotistic humanism. … My plea to the Church is to begin sowing the wind—the Spirit. Begin at the most crucial location in the nation: the college campus. Sow genuine love and spiritual power in the lives of students who may someday determine the direction of men and nations.

Evangelist Tom Skinner, author of Black and Free and How Black is the Gospel?, said America was in the midst of a racial revolution and the church faced a critical test.

The black brothers on the street are not playing when they say that unless they get justice they will burn the system. Now the question is, Where does the Church stand in the midst of that revolution? What is the message of evangelism? What is the message of the Church? …

The New Testament Church also grew up in a time of revolution. It grew up in a time when the Romans were exploiting the Jews, and when the seeds of revolution were being sown by Jewish nationals who were saying that there was only one way to get that Roman honky off your back and that was to burn him out.

In the midst of this there arose this radical group of disciples who had been with Jesus for 3 ½ years, who had walked with him and seen him live his life in total dependency upon his Father, had seen him crucified, resurrected, and ascended to his Father. Filled with his life they went out and impressed people that they had been with Jesus. … They said that real revolution lies in allowing the common clay of your humanity to be saturated with the deity of Christ.

CT reported on “gay rights” groups staging protests:

The Gay Liberation Front caused a furor among 600 Episcopal delegates to the Diocese of Michigan’s annual convention when two Gay Lib members spit out Communion wine near the altar. Others hugged and kissed in the pews and aisles at St. Paul’s Cathedral. …

The diocesan convention was later adjourned early when twenty Gay Libbers marched to the podium carrying signs and shouting slogans. The disruption took place when a Gay Lib leader was not allowed to speak in favor of a resolution encouraging Episcopal churches to lend their facilities to homosexuals.

A Gay Lib member yelled to departing delegates: “What are you going to do when you have a Christian son or daughter that’s a homosexual? Are you going to disown them, too?”

Several days later in Washington, D. C., about thirty-five militant homosexuals held hands, hugged, kissed, and shouted obscenities as they disrupted a conference on theology and homosexuality at Catholic University. …

The spokesman (none of the dissidents revealed his or her name) demanded that conference members stop examining homosexuality and begin practicing it instead.

CT noted the emergence of a new denomination that rejected biblical condemnations of homosexuality—the first example of what would later be called an “affirming” church.

People call the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles the “gay” church. This doesn’t particularly please the 440-member congregation drawn overwhelmingly from the homosexual community. “We are a Christian church first, and homosexual second,” said its 56-year-old assistant minister, who prefers not to be identified lest his regular job in the “straight” world be jeopardized. …

Its homosexual ministers are far from homogeneous in theology or even in their views of the basic cause of homosexuality. [Troy] Perry, whose sermons are fundamentalistic in tone, considers homosexuality essentially genetic. His assistant minister, a former United Church of Christ and Evangelical Reformed minister liberal in theology, believes homosexuality comes from psychological conditioning. Both men were married and fathered two children before turning to the gay life.

Some churches across the country were , CT reported.

Christians who have lamented the drift of so many churches away from the faith centered in Jesus Christ and founded on Scripture should take joyful note of the list of congregations now returning to that faith. This list is increasing at a rate that may indicate a trend, and perhaps the beginning of a general movement. Throughout the country there is a growing network of pastors who have given themselves to leading churches back to the only solid foundation for Christian faith.

The Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland [Massachusetts] a good example. … When the Reverend Donald S. Ewing became pastor of Trinitarian in 1955, the church was struggling to maintain its existence. Many of the 175 members were inactive. The church had a debt of more than $80,000 with an annual budget of only $12,000. Under Dr. Ewing’s ministry it has grown to a membership of more than 1,200 with an annual budget of more than $160,000.

But these statistics are only a reflection of the really significant developments, those that took place in individual lives. Commitment to Jesus Christ, interest in Scripture, and concern for people throughout the community are now common characteristics of the members.

Some congregations were experimenting with different kinds of music in worship.

Evangelical churches have taken the lead in introducing a new kind of sacred music patterned after the popular folk rock. Country or Western music is also being appropriated by evangelical churches more than ever. Theologically liberal churches have been more reticent about such musical inroads, but in those congregations that allow it, these types of music as well as straight jazz are now heard. Most common are the folk and jazz “masses.”

Interestingly, the new movement is being welcomed by many respected church musicians, even those who have until now insisted upon classical forms. Others are critical. Church-music journals have generally been sympathetic, though they are publishing hot dialogues on the pros and cons.

“The Church is groping now for a new musical language,” says Dr. Donald Hustad, professor of church music at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “At the moment we go with the latest fad.” Hustad regards the current trend as secular music’s biggest invasion of the Church since about 1850.

As President Richard Nixon established a new government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, an Asbury Theological Seminary professor wrote about Christian responsibility to steward creation, not exploit it.

The Christian should face with frank realism the fact that the biblical understanding of things must run counter to many prevailing modes of thinking. He must, for example, challenge the current stress upon purely quantitative evaluations of economic success, usually stated in terms of the annual increase in our Gross National Product. It is not only that infinite expansion is impossible within a finite order, but also that “man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” …

Taken seriously, the concept of biblical stewardship will permeate human life with the conviction that man holds his environment in trust, under God. It will remind man that abuse of his trust will bring, not only a searing final judgment from the God under whom man lives, but strong intermediate judgments in the form of impoverished lives and hungry bodies. It is in these terms that our decision-makers need to be reminded of the consequences of an outraged environment.

Toward the end of the year, reflecting on their stewardship of CT, editors published a statement of purpose, reminding themselves and readers of the goal of the magazine:

We have tried to present orthodox Christianity to nonevangelicals reasonably and persuasively and to provide evangelicals with a scholarly apologetic for their faith. We have explored the relation between evangelism and social action on the part of Christians and have tried to stimulate a new sense of responsibility in those who formerly had shied away from involvement in the affairs of the world. At the same time we have given hearty support to personal and mass evangelism.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Kenyan Churches Compete with Bullfights on Sunday Morning

Pius Sawa in Kakamega County, Kenya

As the traditional sport regains popularity, pastors report young people have disconnected from church.

Spectators cheer as two bulls take part in a fight during a traditional bullfighting tournament in Malinya Stadium in Kenya on January 1, 2024.

Fredrik Lerneryd / Contributor / Getty

On a Sunday morning in Kakamega County in western Kenya, two elderly women dust plastic chairs, open windows, and lay white linen on the tables at the front of the sanctuary inside Grace Calvary Christian Baptist Church. Pastor Jackson Sikolia prepares his sermon in his small office as members start arriving one by one.

When the 56-year-old Sikolia enters the sanctuary, half the seats are empty and only a handful of the attendees are young people. No youth sing in the choir. Only one teen girl helps with the children in Sunday school.

Yet outside, young men and women crowd the roads blowing vuvuzelas, whistling, or honking motorbike horns as they wait to accompany one of their village’s champion bulls to a fight a few miles away. Then they hop onto overloaded bikes—often holding four to six people—and carry tree branches (a traditional expression of excitement) as they cheer and follow the bull out of town.

Fights often start around 8 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Less successful “curtain raiser” bulls face off in up to 20 matches before the main event: a fight between the champion bulls. Matches only last a few minutes as the animals lock horns in an open space surrounded by a ring of spectators, while their owners wave sticks and shout to incite a fight. The match ends when one bull pushes the other out of the ring or when one falls down or runs away.

While locals celebrate the revival of the traditional form of bullfighting, pastors worry that the weekly events are leading young people to skip church. Although bullfighting used to take place on Saturdays and on public holidays, organizers now schedule them for Sundays, Sikolia said. For small churches like Grace Calvary’s 30-member congregation, a few more empty seats is a big loss.

Sikolia said his youth serve as the “main pillar” of the congregation, as the church’s current activities and future growth depend on them. Young people help with Bible readings, singing, and ushering on Sunday mornings. Now they’re not showing up.

“Sunday should be a day dedicated to God, not to fighting bulls,” Sikolia said. In Kakamega, about 1.7 million of the county’s 1.8 million residents identify as Christian.

Bullfighting in Kenya has centuries-old ties to the local Luhya culture. Its current form began in Kakamega in the 1960s as a post-harvest celebration and has grown in popularity, moving from fields to larger venues and capturing the attention of an increasing number of Kenyans. Fights can draw thousands, with some commuting hours to watch the events.

Now, even some prominent politicians, the county government, and a university in Kakamega promote bullfighting events on special occasions. Sociologist Kathleen Anangwe pointed to the country’s high unemployment and young people’s need for socialization as reasons for the rising popularity of bullfighting.

Francis Inganji, a 23-year-old from the village of Shibembe, said he prefers watching bullfighting to going to church. His mother required him to attend church services growing up, so he rarely had a chance to see the fights. After he dropped out of high school at age 15, Inganji started attending the fights with his friends. He still attends church on Sundays when no fights are scheduled.

These fights provide more than entertainment. Inganji said the bulls’ owners often treat fans to meals of beef or chicken, bread, rice, and sodas when they return from a fight to thank them for their support. Some owners build a fan base by giving money gifts as well.

One owner in his 70s, Joel Mulela, buys and sells bulls in Kakamega. He said since many families struggle to feed their children, free food from the owners can entice young people: “These children will never want to miss a bullfight.”

Some families invest in keeping bulls and grooming them to fight, hoping they will catch the eye of a wealthy buyer who wants aggressive animals for more elite fights, which come with cash prizes. Buyers may pay as much as 200,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,500 USD)—15 times the value of an ordinary cow at the village market, Mulela said. In contrast, selling a dairy cow’s milk only earns about 6,000–10,000 shillings ($47-77) per month.

Bullfight watchers also engage in gambling. Recently, sports betting companies such as Pepeta have started allowing people to place bets on bullfights, paying out cash to winners and making a profit off those who placed losing bets. Inganji admits he’s gambled on bulls. His occasional winnings keep him following the fights.

Pastor Moses Isachi of Friends Church Lurambi said he opposes bullfight gambling because it tempts young people to steal money from their parents: “We have had cases where these young people steal even chicken or eggs to go and sell in local shops to get money for gambling.”

He said gambling also encourages laziness and discourages learning jobs skills.

Brian Shinyaga, 25, another youth from Shibembe village, struggles to balance attending church on Sunday and watching bullfights. He said he tries to catch the 10 a.m. service at his Catholic church after attending a bullfight. Because of his frequent absences, he lost his position as youth group treasurer.

“A fight can last for between 10 and 30 minutes,” he said. “If it starts at 8, I have enough time to rush home and prepare for the next church service.”

Sometimes the crowds get rowdy. Shinyaga admits many youths end up fighting, falling off overloaded motorbikes, or engaging in sexual activities under the influence of drugs during these events. Bullfights can also lead to injuries as the overwhelmed bull seeks to escape from the ring, goring or trampling spectators in the process.

Bishop Zadock Lubira of the Holy Peace Fire Church, an evangelical congregation in Nyayo Tea Zone, Kakamega, said that in the late 1990s, churches and concerned parents convinced county authorities to shift fights from Sundays to Saturdays. “How it went back to Sunday is what I don’t understand,” he said. “We should unite as a church to change this.”

Sikolia agrees, but he wants to do more than change the schedule. Youth need job skills and leadership opportunities, he said. In 2020, he began teaching young men how to make energy-saving stoves and charcoal briquettes—made from sawdust, maize stalks, or other organic materials—to sell to locals at an affordable price. He’s currently mentoring 20 youths, hoping they will encourage their peers to get more involved in church and abandon bullfighting.

Whenever he preaches at funerals, Sikolia also slots in a message for the youth against bullfighting. “I tell them to stop mixing dangerous events with the church, because God wants the youth,” he said, adding that young people who skip church to attend the events have sometimes been injured or even killed. “At the end of the day … the church [is] called to pray for [these youth].”

- More from Pius Sawa in Kakamega County, Kenya

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Refugee Arrests Shatter Sense of Safety in Minnesota

Emily Belz in Minneapolis

A federal judge ruled that ICE can no longer arrest legally admitted refugees in the state, many of whom are persecuted Christians. But damage has been done.

Law enforcement carry out an arrest in St. Paul, Minnesota on Jan. 16.

Mostafa Bassim / Anadolu via Getty Images

It was the coldest night in years for Minneapolis, but a young refugee’s friends there texted that they wanted him to come hang out.

He texted them back that he couldn’t come because his dad didn’t want him going out. Even as legal refugees, this Afghan family, whose identity is withheld for their safety, was concerned about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The young man’s mom poured more saffron tea for everyone at their home as they sat on cushions and talked with friends who had come for dinner, a spread of rice, chicken, eggplant, and big rounds of naan.

Cheryl Hudson was helping one of the Afghan kids tape a script by their front door to remind family members what to say in case they were visited by ICE agents, who cannot enter without a warrant. Hudson helped the family resettle through her Minneapolis church, Urban Refuge, four years ago. Hudson’s family and two other church friends have since grown close to the Afghans—they’ve accompanied the refugees to the emergency room and have shared many late-night dinners.

Thousands of refugees, many of them persecuted Christians, have found a safe haven in Minnesota. But for weeks now, many of them have not left their homes on advice of their lawyers and local refugee-resettlement agencies.

The Afghan family applied for green cards but are still waiting for approval, which made them worry they were at risk of arrest under the Trump administration’s Operation PARRIS, an effort announced in early January to “reexamin[e]” refugees who have been granted legal status but are awaiting their green cards.

Instead of simply reinterviewing the refugees, which would be unusual on its own, federal immigration enforcement has been arresting and sending many of them to detention centers in Texas.

At least 100 refugees have been arrested in Minnesota, according to The Advocates for Human Rights, a legal aid group. The group did not know of any who had been deported to their home countries last week, but it said it could not know every situation among the more than 5,000 refugees in Minnesota potentially subject to reexamination.

“There’s been a large number of people arrested without access to an attorney or assistance, and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has no process or system in place to track who they are arresting or what is happening to them,” said Madeline Lohman, the group’s advocacy and outreach director, in an email to CT.

Agents did not inform refugees of what was happening to them during their arrests, according to CT interviews and lawsuits filed since.

Some refugees were released in Texas without a way to return home. Part of what immigrant churches in Minnesota have been doing in the last week is arranging travel for their refugee congregants to return home if the government releases them.

Unlike asylum, for which tens of thousands of immigrants in the United States apply even though odds of approval are low, refugee status can only be requested from abroad. Refugees must wait outside the country, often for years of vetting and background checks by multiple agencies, until they receive an invitation from the US government. They must prove that they face persecution in their home countries. They resettle in the US in partnership with an agency, often faith-based nonprofits like World Relief.

When the government first began arresting refugees a few weeks ago, World Relief’s CEO Myal Greene called it a “five-alarm fire.”

But on Wednesday night, a federal district judge issued a temporary restraining order barring further arrests and “unlawful detention” of refugees who have not been charged with any grounds for removal.

Judge John Tunheim also ordered the release within five days of all Minnesotan refugees who have been arrested. He ordered that the government return them to the state for their release and alert the refugees’ lawyers so someone can meet them, due to Minnesota’s stretch of dangerously cold weather.

A higher court could overrule the judge, and the judge could amend his own order after a fuller hearing, but refugee resettlement organizations like World Relief breathed a sigh of relief.

“Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully—and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested and detained without warrants or cause in their homes or on their way to religious services or to buy groceries,” Tunheim noted in his ruling.

Already the arrests have shaken refugees’ sense of safety in their new country. In court filings and interviews with refugees and advocacy groups, a similar picture of ICE emerges: agents entering refugee homes without warrants and sometimes coaxing them outside through deception. A class action lawsuit recounted one plainclothes agent allegedly pretending he had hit a refugee’s car to get the refugee outside for an arrest, a tactic others shared in interviews with CT.

One refugee who was targeted at home said in the class action lawsuit that her “experience has caused her to relive similar experiences of armed men knocking on her door in the country she fled.”

US Citizenship and Immigration Services said its effort centered on “adjudicators conducting thorough background checks, reinterviews, and merit reviews of refugee claims.”

Tunheim, the federal judge, ruled Wednesday that the government could “conduct reinspections” of the refugees’ cases without arresting them.

At the Afghan family’s home, Hudson explained again why they couldn’t trust government agents or open the door for them. “I’m really sorry they’re not doing the right thing,” she told them.

But the warnings about ICE quickly gave way to happier dinner conversation. Hudson’s daughter and the Afghan kids recalled playing laser tag together and going on the flume ride at the Mall of America. Another church friend at dinner helped them refill a prescription by phone. After only four years here, some kids in the family already have American accents and talk with the young slang of 6-7 and brain rot.

“They’ve grown in their independence greatly,” Hudson said. “We’ve grown in depth of friendship.”

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**Pamela Walker Laird, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, Cambridge University Press, 2025)**

**Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003)**

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Kenyan Churches Compete with Bullfights on Sunday Morning

Refugee Arrests Shatter Sense of Safety in Minnesota

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Hunter M. Hampton, The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth- Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2025)

Pamela Walker Laird, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003)

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**Hunter M. Hampton, The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth- Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2025)**

**Pamela Walker Laird, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth, Cambridge University Press, 2025)**

**Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003)**