Who Restricts Religion More, Politicians or the People? Pew Crunched the Global Data.

Jayson Casper

Annual report grades 198 nations and territories, with 9 in 10 harassing believing communities. China and Nigeria score the worst.

Iraqi Christian youths enter a Sunday service

Spencer Platt / Getty / Edits by CT

Government restrictions on religion are at a global high.

Social hostility toward religion, however, has ticked downward.

So concludes the Pew Research Center in its 14th annual analysis of the extent to which 198 nations and territories—and their citizens—impinge on religious belief and practice.

Some sort of harassment of religious groups was recorded in all but eight.

The 2024 report, released earlier this month, draws primarily from more than a dozen UN, US, European, and civil society sources, and reflects conditions from 2021, the latest year with fully available data.

The global median on Pew’s 10-point scale of government restrictions reached 3.0 for the first time ever, continuing a steady rise since the baseline score of 1.8 in 2007. Overall, 55 nations (28%) recorded levels marked “very high” or “high,” only two lower than last year’s total of 57.

Nicaragua was highlighted for harassment of Catholic clergy.

Regional differences are apparent: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scored 5.9, up from its baseline score of 4.7. Asia-Pacific scored 4.2, up from 3.2. Europe scored 3.1, up from 1.7. Sub-Saharan Africa scored 2.6, up from 1.7. And the Americas scored 2.1, up from 1.0.

Pew’s 20 measures of government restrictions included efforts to “ban particular faiths, prohibit conversion, limit preaching, or give preferential treatment to one or more religious groups.”

Some pertained to COVID-19, such as Canada’s fines against open churches.

A further 13 measures for acts of religious hostility by individuals or groups included “religion-related armed conflict or terrorism, mob or sectarian violence, harassment over attire for religious reasons, and other forms of religion-related intimidation or abuse.”

Social hostilities toward religion continued to trend downward since a high of 2.0 in 2018, decreasing to 1.6, the lowest score since 1.2 in 2009. But 43 nations (22%) still recorded levels marked “very high” or “high,” though significantly fewer than the 65 offending nations in 2012.

Nigeria was cited for clashes between Muslim herders and Christian farmers.

The order of regional differences in social hostility matches that of government restrictions. MENA scored 3.6, returning to near its baseline score of 3.7 after peak years from 2012–2014. Asia-Pacific scored 1.9, up from 1.7. Europe scored 1.9, up from 1.2. Sub-Saharan Africa scored 1.3, up from 0.4. And the Americas scored 0.8, up from 0.3.

Only four nations recorded “very high” status in both categories: Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Syria.

Joining them as repeat offenders for government restrictions were Algeria, Azerbaijan, China (highest with a score of 9.1), Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Pakistan joined the list this year with Turkmenistan, while Brunei and Eritrea dropped out.

Fewer nations were designated “very high” on social hostilities, but repeat offenders also included India, Israel, and Nigeria—highest with a score of 8.9. No new nations joined the list this year, while Iraq, Libya, Mali, and Somalia dropped out.

Grading took place on a scale. The top 5 percent of nations in each index were categorized as “very high,” while the next 15 percent were “high.” The following 20 percent were categorized as “moderate,” while the remaining 60 percent were “low.” (Though Pew recognizes North Korea as a clear offending nation, it was not included in the report due to the inability of independent observers to have regular access.)

Most nations in both indexes showed little to no change in their rating. Only 16 recorded a moderate increase of 1.0–1.9 or higher in their combined score, while only nine nations experienced a similar decrease. And only one country, Sudan, witnessed a decline of 2.0 or more for government restrictions, as a new constitution, now in limbo amid civil war, decriminalized apostasy.

For social hostilities, only Turkey and Bolivia declined similarly, the latter due to no reports—as in previous years—of Protestant missionaries expelled from indigenous areas. Conversely, Uganda and Montenegro witnessed 2.0 increases in their scores, the latter due to vandalization of mosques and harassment of Christian proselytization.

Most common, according to Pew, is government harassment. More than 9 in 10 nations (183 total) tallied at least one incident. Social harassment occurred in more than 8 in 10 nations (160 total), and 157 nations experienced both.

Pew also tallied the type of force or violence inflicted around the world. Property damage was most common with 105 offending nations, with Europe registering the highest with 71 percent occurrence. The MENA region led percentage occurrence in all other types, with physical assaults recorded in a global total of 91 nations, detentions in 77, displacement in 38, and killings in 45.

Ethiopia was noted for the deaths of 78 priests during its civil war.

Christians and Muslims remain the religious groups receiving harassment most widely. The number of nations harassing Christians increased from 155 to 160, up from a baseline total of 107. Nations harassing Muslims decreased from 145 to 141, but still up from the baseline number of 96. Harassment of Jews also declined from 94 to 91, but was only recorded in 51 nations in 2007.

An “other” category of Baha'is, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians followed, harassed in 64 nations, followed by folk religions in 40. Violations against Buddhists (in 28 nations), Hindus (in 24), and an “unaffiliated” category of atheists, agnostics, and humanists (in 27) were less widespread.

A new feature in Pew’s report tracked nations that provided benefits to religious groups. With a total of 161 countries qualifying, 127 supported religious education, 107 offered funds to construct or maintain religious buildings, and 67 compensated clergy to some degree. Of the latter, more than half (36 nations) gave preferential treatment to certain religions. And of the total, 149 governments nonetheless harassed believers or interfered in their worship.

Saudi Arabia, Pew noted, gives stipends to imams yet restricts their sermons.

In addition to a tally of nations, Pew also organized data to measure the impact of restrictions and hostilities on a wide scope of humanity. Among the 25 largest nations—representing 5.8 billion of the 7.8 billion world population in 2021—Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria recorded the highest overall levels. Japan, the United States, South Africa, Italy, and Brazil ranked lowest.

- More from Jayson Casper

Books

Review

Metaphors Have a Power That’s More Than Metaphorical

Raed Truett Gilliam

Joy Clarkson peels back the veil of overfamiliarity from commonplace expressions and images.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

I’m afraid these men would only slow me down,” says a cocksure Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of the godfather of computer science, Alan Turing. A 2014 biopic, The Imitation Game, portrays Turing as a lonely, world-changing genius who reluctantly takes on help from less intelligent colleagues who’d only threaten his efficiency and from whom he has to hide secrets that threaten his clearance, career, and life. As it turns out, he will need his friends’ help to keep his job, and together, they crack the Nazis’ Enigma code and create the prototypical model for a computer, the Turing machine (this is history, not a spoiler!).

You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer―A Contemplative Meditation on Language in Scripture and Poetry to Find Meaning and Understanding in Our Words

Joy Marie Clarkson (Author)

BETHANY HOUSE

208 pages

One of Turing’s many contributions to the development of computing intelligence was the Turing test—a method designed to probe a machine’s ability to display intelligent behavior a human observer might confuse for human behavior. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way in that department. In (successfully) designing computers to match and exceed many aspects of our own cognitive faculties, we find ourselves in a chaotic battlefield where grim doomsday jeremiads about AI and utopian techno-optimist manifestos vie for the soul of humankind.

Guiding these rapid-fire developments is a powerful metaphor: the human mind as computer. And the more we use this metaphor, the more readily we come to believe it. And yet, as this mindset has infused itself into our collective unconscious, it’s been met with more and more resistance.

Consider philosopher and cognitive scientist Tim van Gelder, author of the 1995 essay “What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?” In it, he suggests that the Turing machine (a computational model) is less helpful for modeling human cognition than what he calls a “dynamical system.” Such a system is constantly adapting to an always changing environment, responding and adjusting in an automatic give-and-take relationship, whereas a Turing machine is geared only at solving a specific equation.

In other words, our brains are always growing and adapting to our world; they’re not machines programmed with a set algorithm for a specific outcome.

Giving shape to the intangible

In her newest book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer, writer Joy Marie Clarkson explores the metaphors we inhabit in our everyday lives. In our rush to adopt and live into powerful metaphors, we can easily forget that metaphors are, by definition, incomplete approximations. As Clarkson explains in her introduction, “This is why French philosopher Paul Ricoeur proposes what might be described as a tension theory of metaphor … between a literal and metaphorical interpretation. In noticing where the metaphor stops, we are forced to pay closer attention to why the thing isn’t actually what we describe it to be.”

Clarkson exemplifies a new generation of Substack writers and thinkers who’ve gained an audience by sharing thoughts as they go, blending diary-esque observations with erudite notes related to research and writing projects. Reading her book feels more like catching up with an old friend over coffee than sitting at the feet of a remote, inaccessible sage.

While van Gelder and Clarkson find common ground in their resistance to the “human as computer” metaphor, the similarities stop there. Van Gelder writes in a dense, mathematical style (more power to you if that’s your thing), and still employs a machine-based metaphor to describe human thought. Clarkson, on the other hand, is a theology and literature scholar at King’s College London, and her words flow from a passion for poetry, literature, story, and the Bible, revealing a whimsically fun wit and an openness to everyday wonder. She sticks to more agricultural and naturalistic metaphors, arguing that computers, “as a systematic metaphor for human flourishing,” are “incomplete and unforgiving.”

As her book title suggests, Clarkson believes you are less like a computer (designed to work with perfect efficiency) and more like a tree in a forest. Trees, not unlike Turing with his peers, need the sustaining roots of surrounding trees to help them flourish amid seasons of poverty and plenty alike.

You Are a Tree begins with a compelling reintroduction to the concept of metaphors, unpacking just how subtly they can shape us. Metaphors are more than just another poetic tool in one’s flowery-language kit—they can generate cathartic aha moments of self-understanding by giving tangible form to intangible, inexpressible feelings or ideas.

Clarkson shares how, for most of her life, she has been compelled to move from place to place, leaving her to feel like a potted plant whose roots can only go so deep. As she recalls, landing on that potted-plant metaphor “pained but also satisfied me.” A good metaphor is freeing, because it allows us “to speak about our experiences” and to “give these things shape so that we can look at them, talk about them, show them to other people so they can be witnessed, maybe even understood.” Through metaphors, we can know and be known.

Poor metaphors, however, can be dangerous. Unhelpful comparisons are more than just conceptually unclear—they can tempt us into ascribing misleading and even dehumanizing traits to ourselves and others. Clarkson points out how the humans-as-computers metaphor places the highest value on productivity, which can imply that less productive people are broken or expired, and therefore more disposable. This metaphor says, If you can’t function as well, you are less valuable.

Metaphors are not neutral, then. Whether we choose them consciously or absorb them unconsciously, they have a subtle but powerful influence on our lives, and wrestling with them can play a vital role in our individual journeys of spiritual formation.

After establishing the flawed nature of mechanistic metaphors for humanity, Clarkson reserves most of her chapters for unpacking a set of better, richer metaphors (not to mention metaphors within metaphors). In a patient and pleasantly meandering fashion, she traces their appearances in Scripture, literature, and everyday life. Clarkson further equips readers for reflection with examples and recommendations drawn from poems, paintings, films, songs, and even architecture.

The wisdom of clichés

You Are a Tree is an illuminating guide to the metaphors we use for God and our own lives, and it will show you how to meditate on a metaphor and let its deeper meanings speak. One testament to Clarkson’s depth and insight comes from the fact that many metaphors she covers—“wisdom is light,” for instance, or “life is a journey”—explore phrases you’ve probably heard countless times before, to the point of sounding clichéd. What more could one add? Yet Clarkson consistently breathes new life into language that can seem trite at first glance.

Because of the book’s meditative approach and sometimes winding path, some parts will likely prove more interesting than others, depending on how resonant particular metaphors are to particular readers. When specific sections aren’t resonating, the metaphors may start to feel a bit monotonous, and the chapters’ flowing structure might begin to feel unfocused. This is one reason I’d recommend reading the book in shorter increments (one to two sittings per chapter) rather than churning right through. For a relatively short book, You Are a Tree covers a lot of ground, almost like a survey course for college undergraduates. It is packed with insight, though, and if you pay attention (as she reminds us often), you should come away with a wealth of profound and potentially paradigm-shifting insight.

In the final chapter, Clarkson expounds on the “life is a journey” metaphor, admitting to the tricky balancing act she faces in even writing about such commonplace phrases. As she puts it, “I realize I am dangerously close to becoming a ridiculous inspirational plaque in a home-and-garden shop. Life is not about the destination, but the journey,” after which she half-jokingly philosophizes, “But what is life and what is a journey?” In actually diving into these questions, Clarkson tears back the overfamiliarity veil that so often cloaks the simplest but deepest truths.

In reflecting on why life really is a journey, Clarkson brings up Augustine’s sense of restless longing, or, in her words, “what the German existentialists might call Unheimlichkeit, a radical homelessness,” an idea she expands on with references to Camus, Heidegger, James K. A. Smith, and The Lord of the Rings , among others. As a third-culture kid myself—someone with a complicated relationship to the concepts of home and belonging—this resonated immensely. It’s something I will explore a lot more in my own writing. And I’m confident there’ll be at least one image or idea, and likely many more, that will similarly resonate with you.

Raed Gilliam is a writer and filmmaker, and an associate producer for CT Media.

- More from Raed Truett Gilliam

News

Died: Michael Knott, Christian Alternative Musician Who Helped Launch Tooth & Nail

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Knott wrote rock operas, sang with honesty and conviction, called out hypocrites, and bucked the norms of the Christian music industry.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Spotify

Michael Knott, whose music and influence helped cultivate the Christian alternative music scene of the 1990s and 2000s, died Tuesday at the age of 61. He is survived by his daughter, Stormie Fraser.

Knott was the founder of the label Blonde Vinyl and later collaborated with Brandon Ebel to launch the highly influential Tooth & Nail Records, known for bands like Underoath and MxPx.

His raw, innovative, and controversial music pushed against the norms of the industry and laid the groundwork for contemporary communities around Christian alt music.

“Knott helped prove that Christian music could be something legitimate, rather than running two to three years behind mainstream trends,” said Matt Crosslin, who runs the site Knottheads and has become an unofficial archivist of Knott’s work.

Even with his reputation for bucking standards, Knott’s sense of mission was earnest and singular.

“He wanted people to come to Jesus and be saved,” said Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer University. “He seemed to offer a way of holding faith and raw authenticity in tension.”

Knott was born in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up with six sisters in what he described as a modern “von Trapp family.” They were constantly singing and immersed in music through their father, a folk singer, and their mother, a church organist.

When Knott was in second grade, his family moved to Southern California, where he began to take piano and guitar lessons at the YMCA. He started writing songs in his preteen years and would bury them in a folder in his backyard, convinced that nothing would ever come of his private creative life.

Despite his early shyness about his songwriting, Knott began playing with bands in high school and performing at local clubs and bars. After coming to faith, he started to feel like the music he was performing didn’t offer anything meaningful. Through contacts at Calvary Church in Costa Mesa, California, Knott connected with the Christian punk band the Lifesavors and joined. (They later rebranded the group as Lifesavers, then Lifesavers Underground or L.S. Underground)

Throughout his career, Knott performed with a number of bands and released music as a solo artist; his discography is sprawling and varied. He was heavily influenced by fellow California rock bands the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction but dedicated himself to driving the scene forward rather than creating copycat music for the Christian market.

Despite remaining a fixture and catalyst in the Christian alternative scene in the ’80s and ’90s, Knott struggled to make his way in the music industry and to sustain an upward trajectory. He launched the groundbreaking indie label Blonde Vinyl in 1990, but when its distributor went bankrupt in 1993, the label folded.

Knott’s band, Aunt Bettys, signed to Elektra Records (a label owned by Warner Music Group) in the mid-’90s, joining the ranks of Metallica, Tracy Chapman, and The Cure. After a short run with the label, Knott went his own way. There was speculation that Knott’s theatricality and eccentricities were worrisome for label executives.

In a 2003 article, HM Magazine described the many personas of Mike Knott: “a non-Christian,” “a liberal,” “a zealot like Peter,” “a Proverbial fool who speaks too often and too soon with too little thought first.”

For a time, he performed with his face painted white; in his early years with the Lifesavors he was kicked out of Calvary Church for dancing too wildly on stage (and reportedly for encouraging the audience to dance too). He also had a drinking problem, which he spoke and wrote honestly about.

Knott had a reputation for being uncompromising and persistent. Artists like Keith Green and Larry Norman developed similar reputations in the industry for bucking corporate norms and ignoring business advice.

Knott’s convictions about unfettered musical creativity and blunt truth-telling made him an industry black sheep; he was self-aware about the fact that his candidness sometimes chafed those around him. He joked that his nickname in the 1980s was “Captain Rebuko”: “If someone did anything wrong, I would rebuke ’em,” he told HM.

But Knott wasn’t interested in rebuking people for their struggles with worldly vices like drugs or promiscuity; he was concerned about hypocrisy, deception, and spiritual manipulation.

His conviction and condemnation were on full, unapologetic display in the L.S. Underground album The Grape Prophet. The album, which Knott described as a rock opera, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a faith community’s encounter with Bob Jones, Mike Bickle, and their group of Kansas City–based prophets that traveled the US during the ’80s and early ’90s.

Jones (the “Grape Prophet”) is depicted prophesying in songs like “The Grape Prophet Speaks.” According to Crosslin of the Knottheads site, the song “The English Interpreter of English” depicts Mike Bickle, the founder of IHOP, who has recently been accused of sexual abuse and other misconduct.

“Knott was calling out Mike Bickle in the early ’90s,” said Crosslin. “His music said, It’s okay to call this stuff out.”

Knott’s strident, painfully honest songwriting and musical experimentation was magnetic, even for Christian fans who sometimes wondered if they should be listening at all.

Writer Chad Thomas Johnston grew up listening to mainstream Christian pop and rock like Carman and Petra. The son of a Baptist minister in Missouri, he encountered Knott’s music through the Wheaton, Illinois–based Christian magazine True Tunes News.

“I was scared of his music when I first encountered it,” Johnston said in an interview with CT. “It was unflinchingly dark.”

Knott’s music addressed divorce, alcoholism, and drug use. He used profanity. “At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Christian artists were supposed to be singing Christian songs,” said Johnston.

When Knott helped found Tooth & Nail records in 1993, he attracted up-and-coming artists who were eager to join a label helmed by someone with a strong creative vision. In lending his credibility to Tooth & Nail, Knott laid the groundwork for the burgeoning Christian alternative scene of the 2000s, which saw Christian bands pull ahead and become the industry standard-bearers in metal and indie rock.

Those who have followed Knott’s work see a clear lineage from Knott to the spiritual and musical communities that formed around Christian alternative music through festivals like Cornerstone, and now Audiofeed and Furnace Fest.

“For many, the Christian alternative space is an extension of their church,” said Myrick, who is currently conducting ethnographic research on the Christian alternative music community. “People feel accepted, down to the core parts of who they are.”

Knott wasn’t only committed to the health of the alternative music scene—he was committed to the health of the singing church. He worried that the worship of the church didn’t reflect deep, complicated faith.

His 1994 album Alternative Worship: Prayers, Petitions and Praise aimed to offer something needed and unusual. The song “Never Forsaken” is a simple meditation on the Christian life that repeats the reassurance, Never left alone, never left alone.

“If you write a praise song and you’re honest, that will last,” Knott told Christian Music Magazine in 2001. “If you write a praise song just to write a praise song, it’s not going to work. If you write a song about a tree, and you’re honest, it’s going to work.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Books

Excerpt

O Ye of Overconfident Faith

Jennifer Michelle Greenberg

Like the disciples, we need to learn the difference between trust in Jesus and spiritual cockiness.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash

One day, the disciples were stumped by a demon. They tried to cast it out of a little boy, but it refused to budge. In desperation, the boy’s father went to Jesus and begged for help (Matt. 17:14–20).

Defiant Joy: Find the Hope to Light Your Way, Even in the Darkness

Jennifer Michelle Greenberg (Author)

Multnomah

224 pages

Jesus was exasperated. “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” he exclaimed. “How long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” Then Jesus rebuked the demon, and immediately it departed.

The disciples asked Jesus, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Note that Jesus didn’t say that the disciples had no faith. He said they had “little faith.” If this was true of Peter and the disciples, then you and I have micro faith. Are you brave enough to look a demon in the eye and tell it to take a hike?

In the past, I’ve trusted God to help me give birth, find a job, get to church on time, hold my marriage together, and raise my kids. But telling off demons? For the disciples to even attempt this was remarkable.

Surely, they believed they could cast out the demon or they’d never have tried, least of all in front of all those people. So, why did Jesus become exasperated? Because he’d expected a few fishermen to give the devil his walking papers?

I think Jesus was exasperated because his disciples got cocky. They mistook courage for faith. The more they relied upon their own bravery, the less they relied on Jesus. Instead of asking Jesus why he didn’t drive the demon out, they asked why they couldn’t drive it out. They had forgotten that they’re but little children.

A few years ago, I walked into the kitchen to see my spindly little daughter preparing to lift an angry, bubbling casserole out of the hot oven. I didn’t decry an “unbelieving and perverse generation.” But I certainly yelled, “Whoa! Stop!”

You see, the disciples had no business evicting powerful demons all by themselves any more than my eight-year-old had any business extracting molten dinner from the oven. It was way out of their league. Working up the courage was all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t enough.

Faith isn’t fearlessness, and it isn’t courage. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. It’s his faithful endeavor to soften our hearts, fix our eyes on Jesus, and keep our hope alive, no matter what this life throws at us.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Faith Isn't Fearlessness".

- More from Jennifer Michelle Greenberg

Books

Review

Confronting the 21st-Century Church with the First-Century Church

Ed Creedy

Nijay Gupta helps us rediscover the compelling strangeness of the earliest Christians.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Wikimedia Commons

If Christians are called to live differently, love generously, and speak boldly, should they ever get comfortable with their surrounding culture? Nijay K. Gupta opens his new book Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling by asking this kind of question.

Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling

Nijay K. Gupta (Author)

Brazos Press

240 pages

Gupta, a New Testament scholar and popular author, bemoans how “pop Christianity in the Western world often reflects a ‘chemically altered’ version of the Jesus movement that has been manufactured for cheap refreshment.” In response, his book turns to the earliest Christian believers to ask how they lived out a more radical faith and how their example might speak today.

Strange Religion is split into four parts. Part One takes up the theme “Becoming Christian,” exploring the dynamics of conversion and cultural participation for Christians in the ancient world. Gupta’s first chapter captures the all-encompassing religious landscape that prevailed during this era. As he ably demonstrates, “time and place were not divided into secular and sacred.” Pagan gods permeated every area of ancient life, from the household to the battlefield.

In this world of sacrifices, idols, and religious festivals, Christians stuck out with their commitment to a God who superseded the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods. As Gupta explains, “Christians were going against the grain of the common religious thought, practices and dynamics of the time.” In a culture full of religious activity, they were out of place from the start.

Parts Two and Three tackle the beliefs and worship activities of these first Christians. Again, the main theme is distinctiveness. Gupta highlights, for example, just how peculiar it was to worship Jesus as sovereign. Ancient gods were seen as stronger and more powerful than humanity but not as holding ultimate power over all things. Jupiter (Zeus to the Greeks) was the boss, but only because of his victory in a kind of cosmic survival of the fittest.

Because of their distinct beliefs, Christians stood out in rejecting sacrifices to idols or cult statues. At a time when temples and townscapes were littered with religious images, the first Christians taught that God dwelt in humanity itself, not in statues. As Gupta explains in one chapter, they also redefined the nature of time, exchanging a pattern of festivals and cult celebrations for a weekly ritual day of rest and worship.

Part Three considers what early Christian communities looked like. Gupta draws nicely on ancient understandings of family and households to illuminate Paul’s language of the family of faith in his epistles, suggesting that this metaphor meant more to his first readers than we might assume.

This leads into Part Four, “How the First Christians Lived.” These closing chapters explore just how subversive Christian behavior was within the first-century Roman world. Even the simple act of treating others with kindness ran against the grain of Roman ethics, especially when it transgressed rigid boundaries between social classes. One highlight comes toward the end of chapter 11, as Gupta considers the case of Onesimus and Philemon against this historical background.

Even as he invites readers to emulate the first Christians, Gupta makes clear that they were far from perfect. Like believers of any age, they fought, argued, and wandered into error and distraction. The point of rediscovering their historical strangeness isn’t putting them on an exalted pedestal but rather esteeming them as brothers and sisters who have gone before us in the race.

Strange Religion provides a great survey of a complex historical world, but sometimes that complexity ends up tripping up the author. The relationship between first-century Jews and Christians presents perhaps the greatest confusion. On occasion, Gupta speaks of “Jews and Christians” as a unified whole, but elsewhere he speaks of them as wholly alien to one another.

The root of this muddled presentation is found in chapter 3, where Gupta, echoing New Testament scholar John Barclay, argues that “Roman writers did not link Jews and Christians together” in the late first and second centuries. “They were seen as separate cults and more or less separate groups.”

Despite this clear demarcation, Gupta time and again lumps the two faiths together. Throughout the book, “Jews and Christians” are contrasted with unbelieving Romans. The relationship between Jews and the first Christian communities is an enormous subject, and perhaps giving it too much attention would have obscured the book’s central argument. Nonetheless, Gupta leaves readers unclear about important historical distinctions.

More significantly, Gupta’s concluding chapter fails to drive home the central ideas of the book. He succeeds in showing how the first Christians were weird and dangerous in the Roman world of their time. And he demonstrates how compelling they were, winning converts as they pushed back against dynamics of power, cruelty, and pride that dominated ancient culture.

At times, however, Gupta’s conclusion reads more like a product of the “pop Christianity” he challenged in his introduction than a clear rebuttal. Early Christians, as he writes, were “a people obsessed by Jesus,” embracing “a religion of the heart” and “a God-with-us religion.” None of this is untrue, of course, but such language is already comfortably at home in the 21st-century church that Gupta seeks to confront with the first-century church.

The book holds the potential for a bolder challenge. Why do our churches so often elevate the interests of the culture above the interests of gospel-centered faithfulness? Why is our modern approach to time so often me-centered, rather than radically oriented around Christ? Why do our idols so often match those of our unbelieving neighbors, when we ourselves are living temples, dwelling places of the Spirit? Gupta could have gone further in asking where our own churches miss the mark in serving Christ today.

Even so, Strange Religion is a well-researched, entertaining journey into the world of the first Christians. Time and again, Gupta skillfully connects Scripture passages to the culture in which they were received and put into practice, shedding fresh light on their revolutionary impact. Clearly, we’re far from exhausting all we can learn from our earliest forerunners in the faith.

Ed Creedy is a PhD student in classics at King’s College London. He writes at The Early Church Blog.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Difference 2,000 Years Makes".

- More from Ed Creedy

Books

Review

Churches Shouldn’t Outsource Apologetics to Slick Conferences

Timothy Paul Jones

When it comes to defending the faith, local congregations have long been the first line of defense.

Illustration by Alex Nabaum

I sat in a corner of the library with a stack of books, desperately wanting to find some shred of evidence to support my faith.

The Pastor as Apologist: Restoring Apologetics to the Local Church

Dayton Hartman (Author), Michael McEwen (Author)

B&H Academic

160 pages

It was my first semester of college, and I was drowning in doubt. A few weeks earlier, I had been shocked to discover in a New Testament class that there were thousands of copyist errors in the biblical manuscripts. A psychology class had introduced me to Sigmund Freud’s claim that faith was a neurotic illusion. One of my textbooks listed a dozen parallels between pagan religions and Christianity. While searching for answers to these challenges, I ran across books by Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell that multiplied my doubts.

Everything I read seemed to chip away at assumptions and beliefs I’d held since childhood.

When I mentioned my questions at my church, people seemed to be worried about the weakness of my faith. Yet no one was able to point me in the direction of any substantive answers. Despite my best efforts, my search for evidence quickly became a solo quest.

Somewhere along the way, I ran across the word apologetics for the first time. Discovering an entire genre of books that provided evidence for the Christian faith reset the direction of my life.

Apologetics texts by Josh McDowell, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and others showed me that my questions were far from new. To my surprise, the doubts that seemed so insurmountable when I first encountered them had been addressed many times before. This realization renewed my faith and made me determined to share this newfound evidence with as many people as possible.

Three decades later, I’m still grateful for the ways God worked in my life during my first lonely foray into apologetics. Yet even then, I wished my local church could have helped me more. After all, the apostle Peter’s command to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks” (1 Pet. 3:15) wasn’t given primarily to authors or conference speakers. This commission was addressed to local assemblies of believers, with elders, ordinances, complicated relationships, and everything else that makes the church so messy and complex and yet so beautiful (1 Pet. 3:21; 4:8–9; 5:1–5).

Today, attacks on the Christian faith are far easier to access than they were during my first year of college, but so are defenses. With such an abundance of apologetics resources now accessible in print and online, churches seem to be increasingly open to integrating defenses of the faith into ordinary practices of discipleship. At the same time, church members have become less and less inclined to flock to the sorts of conferences, headlined by superstar speakers, that dominated apologetics in the opening decades of the 21st century.

If Christians do begin to see their local churches as contexts for apologetics, this development will not be something new. It will be a retrieval of practices that are very old.

Ancient apologists such as Justin Martyr, Aristides of Athens, and Athenagoras presented the life of the church as primary evidence for the truth of the faith. Irenaeus, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, and many others pursued apologetics not as scholarly specialists but as pastors who were responsible for the spiritual well-being of ordinary Christians in local churches.

Resources like The Pastor as Apologist: Restoring Apologetics to the Local Church, a new book from pastors Dayton Hartman and Michael McEwen, give me hope that this venerable approach to apologetics might be making a comeback.

Hartman is lead pastor at Redeemer Church in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He’s authored several books, including Church History for Modern Ministry: Why Our Past Matters for Everything We Do. McEwen serves as the pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church in rural Tennessee. Their goal for this little primer is to “reclaim the historic role and biblical mandate for the local church pastor as an apologist.” The authors’ love for the local church is evident on every page.

By presenting the pastor as an apologist, Hartman and McEwen are seeking to recover “an ecclesial approach” that intertwines the whole life of the local church with apologetic engagement. From the perspective of the authors, “parachurch ministries are wonderful tools that can and should exist in order to support initiatives of the local church, but they must never take the place of the local church or its scriptural mandates for engaging the world.”

Hartman and McEwen begin their defense with an appeal to Scripture. In the New Testament, they write, apologetics isn’t merely “a defense with our words, but also a defense with our whole selves.” Sometimes, as in 1 Peter 3:13–16, this defense requires Christians to correct misrepresentations of the faith. In other instances, it calls us to correct false teachings within the church, as in Jude 1:3. In both cases, apologetics is one of the pastor’s primary responsibilities. No wonder, then, that when the apostle Paul listed the qualifications of a pastoral leader, he included a capacity to defend sound teaching (Titus 1:9).

After laying this biblical foundation in the opening chapter, Hartman and McEwen offer a quick historical survey that highlights how Christian apologists throughout history have refused to separate their defenses of the faith from the life of the local church. As they observe, generations of ancient and medieval apologists recognized that “one of the best ways to engage and navigate hostile cultural environments is to ground apologetic engagement under the oversight and auspices of the local church.” Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, for example, is rightly recognized as a work in which Calvin developed a sustained argument that the Reformed faith was the historic faith of the church.

The book includes a useful chapter on apologetic preaching, especially as it emphasizes the resurrection of Jesus and the reliability of Scripture. The recommendations for using transcendental and cosmological arguments in preaching are somewhat less helpful than the sections on Scripture and the Resurrection. The cosmological argument, as the authors present it, defends God’s existence by pointing to the logical impossibility of an infinite regression of events that excludes an initial cause. The transcendental argument contends that the laws of logic must originate in a source that transcends the cosmos.

These arguments are cogent. And perhaps there are a few churches where a sermon that highlights the objective transcendence of logic would reassure members of God’s goodness in response to the problem of evil. I suspect, however, that there are far more churches where such arguments would leave listeners bewildered. I’m certain that when the authors themselves preach, they do bring their arguments down to the level of their congregations, but a few simpler examples of how to do this might have been helpful.

The closing chapter of The Pastor as Apologist provides pastors with a series of practical ideas for their churches. The authors point out that the most effective movements toward apologetics won’t occur because of large-scale conferences. Instead, churches will develop lasting apologetics cultures when leaders consistently “drip” defenses of the faith into a variety of contexts. These contexts include not only preaching but also member training, small-group discussions, and occasional events that provide opportunities for non-Christians to have their questions answered.

For all its virtues, The Pastor as Apologist is curiously brief and somewhat uneven. There are only four chapters. Taken together, they barely surpass 100 pages.

In my view, the authors’ defense of presuppositionalist apologetics is unneeded in such a short work. This method pushes back against philosophical categories that treat truth as a neutral category. As the authors argue, presuppositionalism regards “truth itself as distinctly Christian,” with all forms of thought reflecting “a duel between Christian and non-Christian philosophies of life.” Although discussions of differing apologetics approaches have their place, appealing to one in particular seems out of place in a basic primer. As a whole, however, the book is perfectly compatible with a range of apologetics methods.

Two appendices provide readers with a list of recommended resources as well as an example of how a church’s liturgy might function apologetically. The one titled “Liturgical Apologetics” is perhaps the most creative and useful portion of the entire book. There, the authors provide a step-by-step plan for developing an Easter service that engages non-Christians with a clear and winsome defense of the most central claims of the Christian faith. Reading this appendix, I found myself wishing that it might have been developed into one or two more chapters, with suggestions for other worship services throughout the year.

Despite its minor weaknesses, The Pastor as Apologist is a welcome work at a moment when apologetics training seems to be shifting from public debates and conference stages to local churches. Hartman and McEwen are correct to say that “for far too long churches have relied on professional apologists, slick websites, branded videos, and snarky memes to do the heavy lifting of engaging our world with a reasoned defense of the gospel.”

Decades ago, I wrestled with my faith in a tiny congregation with godly members who loved Jesus but who weren’t equipped to aim a struggling college student in the direction of any reputable evidence. I pray that future pastors and churches take the message of this book to heart. If they do, maybe future students like me will not find themselves on a solo quest for evidence. Perhaps they will discover their answers in the context of the church, this glorious and beloved bride for whom Jesus gave his life.

Timothy Paul Jones is chair of the department of apologetics, ethics, and philosophy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as a preaching pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the coauthor, with Jamaal Williams, of In Church as It Is in Heaven: Cultivating Multiethnic Kingdom Culture.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Defending the Faith Starts in the Pulpit".

- More from Timothy Paul Jones

Books

She Wrote Love Stories. Then Her Marriage Ended.

Interview by Ericka Andersen

How a romance author journeyed with God through an unwanted divorce.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Betsy St. Amant Haddox has built a career writing romance novels. But as a young mother, her own story took an unwanted turn when her husband packed his bags and left. She prayed for reconciliation, believing God would heal her marriage, but to no avail. In Once Upon a Divorce: Walking with God After “The End,” St. Amant Haddox candidly shares her personal journey. Writer Ericka Andersen, author of Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church and the Church Needs Women, spoke with St. Amant Haddox about persevering through an unwanted divorce.

Once Upon a Divorce: Walking with God After "The End"

Betsy St. Amant Haddox (Author)

Kregel Publications

200 pages

At the moment you knew your husband was actually leaving, what was going on within your head and your heart?

In one sense, I knew it was coming. I had been living on eggshells for a year, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I was still caught off guard, because in the back of my mind I still wondered if it would actually happen.

After he told me, he immediately started packing a bag. Then I just hit the floor of my kitchen. I was hunched over, crying, and hardly able to breathe. But in that moment, God’s presence was there in a surprisingly tangible way. It felt as though I wasn’t taking in any oxygen, but God was literally sustaining me.

In the immediate aftermath of the separation, how did you and your husband differ in your thoughts about the future of the marriage?

Once he was out the door, I think he was done. But I was ready to fight—for him, for our marriage. So I gathered prayer meetings with fellow believers and friends who knew and loved him. At the same time, I held back from communicating directly, not wanting to argue or push him away.

Meanwhile, I was just begging God to tell me something. There were days I felt sure the marriage would be restored—and days when I wasn’t sure at all. Looking back, I think God led me through that time of questioning, listening, and surrendering to grow my faith and trust. Sometimes we don’t get those answers. And sometimes we mistake God’s voice for the voices of our own desperate hearts.

How would you assess your spiritual life during this period of waiting?

Because I had grown up in a Christian household, I was very familiar with everything you’re supposed to do, spiritually, when you’re going through a hard season in life. But I’m someone who likes answers and explanations. I almost feel like I can deal with any hard situation if I at least have information. But in this season, I had none of that.

Deep down, I was trying to reconcile God’s sovereignty with man’s sin, which is kind of a timeless theological question. If things really go the way God intends, as Scripture says, then how could he fail to put my marriage back together? Because it’s obvious, from Scripture, that divorce isn’t his plan for his children. I wasn’t angry, just genuinely confused.

At some point, the Lord released me from the burden of fighting for the marriage. I had to learn to surrender, to realize that just because God is sovereign doesn’t mean we’ll always grasp how he uses adverse circumstances in our lives to bring him glory.

In research for my own book, I found that divorcées and single moms are leaving the church at higher rates than other categories of women, in part because they don’t feel like they belong. How does that track with your personal experience?

From my perspective, getting divorced and then staying in your church is quite different from coming into a new congregation as a divorced person. I see the latter situation a lot, and in those cases I’ve seen the church try to provide love, help, and encouragement.

But when someone is established in a church and then goes through a divorce, it’s more common for the church not to know what to do. People get nervous, and they default toward a hands-off approach.

In my situation, the church didn’t really know what to do with me. The people there meant well, and I don’t have any hard feelings. But I do recall one staff member’s wife who asked me why I was fighting for a marriage with someone who didn’t want to be married anymore. At the time, I was in hardcore fight-for-my-marriage mode. And even though I didn’t know exactly what I needed, I knew it wasn’t an invitation to quit fighting. I didn’t have deep roots at this church, which made it easier to move elsewhere with a clean slate. I wasn’t trying to hide the situation, but I wanted to attend a church where at least some people weren’t aware of it.

How can churches better minister to people in your situation?

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on so many factors, like the individual needs of the person going through divorce. If you’re a single mom, for instance, then it really helps to be seen almost as a widow, because this takes away the stigma of having it assumed that you’re living in sin if you’ve chosen divorce.

It’s always hard, after all, to know someone’s full story. If you look at my court papers, for instance, you’ll see that I filed first. But I had to because I had been abandoned. You could look at those papers and conclude that I had initiated the divorce. But I was only trying to keep from going flat broke. So sometimes the first step is not worrying about who did, said, or initiated what.

And then, just show the love of Christ and ask what people need. Sometimes that need might be financial. Sometimes it involves practical things like babysitting or mowing the lawn. Those are the sorts of things I badly needed during my own experience with divorce, but never in a million years would I have thought to ask.

How would you describe your experience of getting remarried?

When you’re divorced, it’s tempting to believe that everything will be okay if you can only get married again. Logically, of course, you know that’s not true, because every marriage is a difficult matter involving two sinners.

One thing I wanted to emphasize in the book is not letting remarriage become your main goal. You can be completely fulfilled without it. It took me a while to get to that point. When my now-husband and I had planned our first coffee date, we both almost canceled. We were so tired of the try-and-fail relationships.

Over six years later, I’m grateful we’re still married. But remarriage is hard. Between you, there can be lots of baggage, trauma, and insecurity. But it’s definitely redemptive. I felt like our wedding ceremony was the most holy, anointed experience of my life. It confirmed God’s goodness and his redemptive work.

Overall, what is your message to women who find themselves in a situation similar to yours?

I want to tell them two things: First, you are not walking through this alone, even if you don’t have that friend or church community you wish you did. God still sees you, and he won’t turn his face because of the divorce label.

And second, going back to my “romance writer who got divorced” perspective: Know that this is just one chapter. It feels long and horrible, but it isn’t the whole story. Divorce doesn’t have to get the final say. Within the circle of loving family and friends—and especially within your walk with the Lord—you can enjoy a happily ever after.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Fighting for a Fraying Marriage".

- More from Ericka Andersen

Novel Reactions to a Focus on Fiction

Alexandra Mellen

And other replies to the January/February issue.

Abigail Erickson

It’s long been clear that CT readers are also book readers, and we see this especially around our January/February Book Awards issue. This year, we saw a particular outpouring of appreciation for fiction and our explorations of it in Ann Byle’s report “Christian Fiction (Finally) Has Issues” and Sara Kyoungah White’s article “Reading for the Love of the World.”

Many people wrote in to share their long love of Christian fiction and their edification from what Byle calls “a noticeable shift in Christian fiction away from safe sentimentality and toward messier characters and story lines.” Michelle McNeil of Nashville said, “I have been reading Christian fiction for 30-plus years and read or listen to about 100 novels a year. I’m so relieved to see the addition of harder topics, less Sunday school–style answers, and flawed characters.”

Some are still looking for improvement, though. “The best works of fiction being written by Christians are not being published by Christian publishers,” wrote @amy_mantravadi on Instagram. One of the subjects of Byle’s story (and a CT Book Awards judge), Sarah Arthur, replied to her: “I’m so glad that both trade publishers and Christian houses nominate titles for the CT Book Awards! Makes my job as a judge absolutely fascinating.”

Responders also resonated with White’s encouragement to be literary “pilgrims and sojourners in a culture where Christian stories are slowly fading or already forgotten.” Adding contemporary secular literature into one’s reading should be “done carefully and with discernment,” one Instagram user said, but “you do come to find that it is all connected,” added another. One subscriber who emailed a response also recommended processing such books in a discussion group.

Instagram users responding to our posts about these two articles also left plenty of book recommendations. So if you’re looking for more reading suggestions, head over to @ct_mag on the app and join the conversation!

Alexandra Mellen
Conversations editor

Christian Fiction (Finally) Has Issues

Many of us follow people on Instagram because they give closed-door guidelines—chapters to avoid if you don’t want explicit language/scenes. I love to read but have stayed away from Christian books. I want real-world stories!

@kalikalimann (Instagram)

Thanks for pointing out the upswing in clean mainstream fiction. Many of us have gone in that direction to reach a broader audience.

@heatherdaygilbert (Instagram)

Reading for the Love of the World

While I read widely, especially old classics, I rarely read contemporary secular literature, especially fiction, because I don’t trust authors with my time and mental energy. Sara’s article helped change my mind.

Jonathan Threlfall Concord, NH

This is also why it’s important to look at movies coming out of “non-Christian” society. The stories told reveal so much about our own perceptions of the world, fears, and desires. Recognizing patterns of hunger in non-Christian culture can help us understand where they’re at (they aren’t so different from us), have empathy, and respond in love with the fullness and truth of Christ.

@joni.elizabeth (Instagram)

Theology Is Not a Waste

We just watched the Super Bowl. Those players spend years preparing their bodies and minds for a four-hour game. We’re in a spiritual battle for the eternal lives of those around us. How can we not prepare?

Improv Missionaries (Facebook)

It would be bizarre if I thought that I could love my wife better by not knowing much about her. (I’d end up being in love with my own imaginary version of her rather than the real woman.) Same with God.

Michael A. Covington (Facebook)

American Christianity Is a Flourishing Forest

A confusion here between the core elements of historical, orthodox, biblical faith and the expressions of that in different contexts. You can’t have someone say, “Jesus is Son of God” and another say, “Jesus was merely a human” and then claim to have the same faith.

@Bobafrith1 (X)

The 2016 Election Sent Me Searching for Answers

Thank you for sharing Carrie Sheffield’s testimony. It was so uplifting and encouraging to read about our current political divisiveness playing a positive role in someone’s journey. I continue to pray and hope for more of this.

Kathy Erb Gaithersburg, MD

From the Archives

Christianity Today‘s books issue from February 26, 1971.

A yearly review of the Christian publishing market is an old CT practice, far predating the current Book Awards concept. In the magazine’s third calendar year, the February 17, 1958, issue included surveys of books about the Old and New Testaments and an overview of “Significant Theological Works” and the “Upturn in Evangelical Publishing.”

The practice expanded from there. A few years in the ’60s had spring and fall book lists (along with every issue’s regular reviews section). Editors starting in 1973 added deeper comments on “Significant Books” of the year.

In 1978, editor Donald Tinder wrote, “We intend the list to reflect the diversity of views, branches, and concerns within the evangelical movement, broadly defined. … The purpose of this list is to call attention to books that are rarely bestsellers but with which the reading Christian should be familiar.”

The first CT Book Awards appeared in April of 1990. It included both Critics’-choice and Readers’-choice Awards, with subscribers voting from a shortlist of the year’s best. Current senior books editor Matt Reynolds took the reins in 2011, and in 2014 he introduced the first Book of the Year (God’s Forever Family by Larry Eskridge).

These book lists and commentaries on the Christian publishing industry are still available to all our subscribers in our archives. And check out the archive of our Books & Culture magazine, which ran from 1995 to 2016.

Alexandra Mellen
Conversations editor

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Novel Reactions".

- More from Alexandra Mellen

Testimony

I Wanted a Bigger God Than My Hindu Guru Offered

Rahil Patel

As my doubts about his teachings grew, so did a secret fascination with Jesus.

Betty Zapata

I was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Shortly after, my family moved to England and settled in a leafy suburb near London.

My elder brother and I went to a good school. In Indian families like ours, education was a status symbol and an avenue toward long-term success. Although the school wasn’t Christian, we sang hymns every morning, prayed before lunch, and prayed again before leaving for home. Every Christmas I took part in the school’s Nativity play.

In the 1970s, Indian families who settled in the UK from East Africa had left a lot and lost a lot. But they didn’t want to lose their language and religion. To maintain their cultural identity, many families gathered at their local Hindu temple every weekend. I would meet almost everyone in the community over food, prayer, and worship.

At home, we had a whole room dedicated to the Hindu deities we believed in. Every morning, I went downstairs to pray there. Every evening, my family spent 30 minutes in front of the house shrine before dinner.

In my teens, my life changed radically. My parents were struggling to accept their way of life in the UK. There were constant arguments about status and wealth. These fights kept me in anxiety and fear.

I found solace and belonging in the temple, where I made friends and partook in activities like speechmaking, drama, and dance or simply cleaning, serving, and worshiping in front of images of various deities.

Our denomination had a guru, Guruji, who claimed to personify God himself. Whatever he said and did was regarded as divine. In 1988, when I was 16, he came to the London temple and watched me give a speech on ancient Hindu scripture.

Afterward, as I went to bow at Guruji’s feet, he said, “You have a great gift of speaking.” He invited me to become a swami, or Hindu priest, and join his movement. Immediately, my heart leapt, buoyed by a sudden rush of purpose and power.

At age 19, I left home for a monastery in northwest India. It housed 200 people from around the world. The training was intense. Every morning, we awoke at 4:30 for a cold-water bath. After meditating for an hour, we attended corporate worship. Then we carried out simple chores of cleaning or making garlands for the images. Later, we had classes on Hindu scriptures and other world religions, which lasted until late at night.

Those were exciting times. However, after my first month of training, an incident shook my foundations. I was upstairs in the temple, worshiping with the other priests. The bells were ringing, and the drums were beating. Just then, I distinctly heard a question whispered in my left ear: Have you made the right decision? Are you in the right place?

This shocked me, and I struggled for the remainder of the worship time. I told myself it was “maya,” the evil force of delusion in Hinduism, trying to disrupt my destiny. Still, I began having many questions and doubts.

All around me, I saw swamis who had worshiped and studied for decades without experiencing any meaningful change in their lives. Why, I wondered, after all this fasting, reading, and meditating, were they still given to anger, jealousy, or spite? I didn’t feel like I was changing, either.

A few years later, I was ordained into the Hindu priesthood and began wearing the saffron robes of sacrifice. With my shaved head and holy appearance, I embarked on a pilgrimage to sacred Hindu sites across India. I bathed in the Ganges and other rivers invested with spiritual significance, hoping to cleanse my sins and gain a sense of renewal. But again, nothing in my inner nature changed.

In 1997, Guruji directed me to settle at the London temple and develop congregations across Europe. I launched temples in cities like Paris, Lisbon, and Antwerp, and they grew quickly. My speeches gained recognition, and Guruji was impressed with my work. Frequent travel made me feel like a high-powered corporate executive.

One time in Rome, though, I stumbled onto something so authentic that it made me question this life of fame and success. I was sitting in the Sistine Chapel underneath Michaelangelo’s painting of the Last Judgment. I was already blown away by the artistry of the church, but the depictions of Jesus were especially striking. Thus began a secret fascination with the person of Jesus. During my travels, my eyes would find the cross of Christ almost instinctively.

A very different God began to etch in my heart—a God with more beauty and depth than Guruji or the images I was worshiping. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he wasn’t the god I was preaching.

Betty Zapata

Top: Rahil Patel’s personal Bible. Bottom: Patel’s church in Oxford, England.

By 2005, my public speeches had taken a slight theological turn. I still spoke from Hindu scriptures, but I began speaking of a “much broader god” who encompasses all of humanity. I still didn’t know who this god was. It was frustrating.

In 2006, I broadened my search for truth and satisfaction by studying several great Hindu philosophers. I dove into Yoga and breathing techniques. In desperation, I even searched Western self-help books. But my search had hit a brick wall.

Meanwhile, all this spiritual unease was taking a toll on my physical health. By 2010, I was taking up to 40 tablets every day to treat various pains and disorders. That year I entered the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville for a 10-month stay. During weekends, I traveled to temples across America and continued to preach a “bigger” god.

After my recovery, I planned a visit to India to meet Guruji. But my doubts about his divinity intensified after a very senior swami informed me that the whole doctrine had been invented to bring structure to the movement. My heart sank further as I verified this claim with other leading figures.

Upon landing in Mumbai, I learned that Guruji was upset at my change in theology. He wanted to curtail my influence by sending me to remote villages in India. For the first time, I dared to resist, and a tense debate followed. Finally, with a deep sigh, I told Guruji I wanted to leave the priesthood.

Silence froze the room. After what felt like an eternity, Guruji exclaimed, “Fine! Go! Wherever you want to go, just go!”

I didn’t know where I would go, as my parents had moved away from London. A Hindu friend took me into his hotel in the city’s South Kensington neighborhood. Disappointed and hurt, I parked the whole idea of God and began searching for a job.

Weeks later, however, I was strolling down a road, lost in thought, when suddenly I saw a beautiful church. It was Sunday morning. As I entered the main door, God’s presence fell on me like a comforting blanket. At the same moment, I heard another unmistakable whisper saying, You are home.

I went upstairs and sat in a pew. I enjoyed the worship, and the sermon strangely made sense to me. I left the church with an excitement I couldn’t articulate. On that day, my heart said yes to Jesus, and I gave him my life.

I quickly realized, however, that I needed to undergo a lot of detox, both spiritually and emotionally. One of the hardest lessons early on was learning to rest in God’s love. As a Hindu priest, I had been accustomed to thinking I could only please God through spiritual effort. The transition from religion to relationship was very uncomfortable but beautifully rewarding.

By grace alone, I have come a long way in a short while. I am thankful that Jesus healed me from shame, guilt, resentment, and anger. Most of all, I am thankful that he kept knocking on the door of my heart, patiently, until it finally swung open.

Rahil Patel is the author of Found by Love: A Hindu Priest Encounters Jesus Christ. He is a speaker and tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "I Wanted a Bigger God Than My Hindu God Offered".

- More from Rahil Patel

News

Why Your Favorite Theologians Are All Talking about Theological Anthropology

Stefani McDade in Texas

Attention to bodies and cultural conflict has brought attention to the question of what it means to be human.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Christians have wrestled with a lot of big, new issues related to the body in the past decade—questions about sex, gender, racism, public health measures, end-of-life care, and even artificial intelligence. A growing number of evangelical theologians say the answers lie in the field of theological anthropology, the study of what it means to be human in light of God’s revelation.

“If you asked 10 systematic theologians in the US about the three most important doctrines we’re talking about today, I would be very surprised if you didn’t get all 10 of them saying ‘theological anthropology,’” said Marc Cortez, a theology professor at Wheaton College and the author of ReSourcing Theological Anthropology. “Almost all of the liveliest conversations we’re having in society, in theology, and in the church revolve around differences about what it means to be human and how we flourish as human persons.”

While theological anthropology has “dominated theological discourse for a while,” according to Cortez, the topic has taken on new relevance as a result of cultural shifts. This sense of urgency was visible at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) meeting in San Antonio in November, where theological anthropology was the 75th annual gathering’s designated theme. Every seat was taken at a session on Wheaton theology professor Amy Peeler’s new book Women and the Gender of God, with more people standing and sitting knee-to-knee in rows on the floor.

Evangelical theologians are taking topics that “we tend to think of as being more sociological,” Cortez said, and showing they are, in fact, “deeply theological.”

Some say the change is long overdue.

“What I’m really encouraged by is a trend toward paying attention to our bodies and not thinking of ourselves as just brains on a stick,” said Carmen Joy Imes, a Biola University professor and the author of Being God’s Image.

Imes points to the “critical mass” of women in evangelical institutions—including the installment of the first female president of ETS—as one reason for this shift.

“The brain-on-a-stick thing never really worked well for women,” she said. “We have too many bodily reminders of our humanity.”

Some were initially skeptical of “body theology,” since the progressive theologians who first began promoting it decades ago “were taking it in a much more relativistic way—in terms of how the body is fluid and dynamic,” according to Joshua Farris, author of An Introduction to Theological Anthropology and a fellow at the University of Bochum, Germany. “When you reject essentialism [the idea that human nature is fixed or stable with a shared set of core characteristics], I think you open up the door to all sorts of potential ramifications, in terms of how we use our bodies.”

Since evangelical academics began exploring the topic from a biblical and orthodox perspective, it has filtered down to the local-church level. Several books on the topic, including Kelly Kapic’s You’re Only Human and David Zahl’s Low Anthropology, brought theological anthropology to a popular audience. Moral questions are prompting a greater need for resources, and theologians say changes in technology will likely increase the demand for good evangelical work on these issues.

“We need robust theology as a source of knowledge to inform how we understand what it means to be human and how we interact with the rest of the world,” Farris said. “Theologians have something really important to say that philosophers and scientists do not.”

Another reason for the increased interest is that evangelical theology today is more engaged with science. The field has become more interdisciplinary, as theologians interact with contemporary developments in psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Some scholars in theological anthropology are seeking to develop a more robust doctrine of Creation and go around what S. Joshua Swamidass, author of The Genealogical Adam and Eve, calls the “impasse” over issues like the age of the Earth, evolution, and the existence of Adam and Eve.

The theological field is also prompted by the careful consideration of large, secular intellectual trends like the decentering of humanity.

“We’re moving away from an anthropocentric worldview, which is a long overdue corrective,” said Christa McKirland, a theologian at Carey Baptist College. “History shows that humans do not do well when they are in a position to dominate other creatures and creation.”

And yet, she said, “you might call me a ‘speciesist,’ because I think it’s critical not to lose the distinct importance placed on the human race.”

For McKirland, that emphasis is necessary if we accept the biblical idea that humans are created in the image of God and that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ.

She argues that if our understanding of humanness starts with those revelations, then we can “ground human flourishing in something deeper than specific debates about the human person.”

The biblical conception of the human being, evangelical theologians argue, counters secular notions about what we are and what we are for.

Establishing a baseline value and purpose for human life is “one of the goods theological anthropology has to offer the world,” said Daniel Hill, a Baylor University theologian. “The Christian doctrine of Creation pushes back on ‘me as just an acting thing’—that I receive myself in a certain sense before I become it. … And so, my value then isn’t in what I’m doing; it’s actually in this relationship of reception that I have with God.”

While theological anthropology is useful for answering ethical questions, scholars find it also raises other interesting and often complicated questions.

For example, if we Christians affirm that our bodies, with all their particulars, have been given to us by God, then we might reasonably ask which aspects of personhood will persist beyond death and into the new creation. Will our resurrected bodies possess the same traits they do in life—such as our race, gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities?

Some of the most contentious conversations in the field, in fact, revolve around human differences in a fallen world. There are “things we place in the diversity bucket,” said Cortez, and other things that belong in “the brokenness bucket.” It’s not always obvious which is which, though, and scholars debate the standards for discerning what aspects of human difference represent “legitimately different ways of being human in the world” and which are “manifestations of various kinds of brokenness” that Christians should try to alleviate.

These discussions exist “at the juncture of theological anthropology and moral theology,” said Fellipe do Vale, a theology professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They transcend the basic question of “What does it mean to be human?” and move into “What does it mean to be a good human?” he added.

Yet interest in these more “contingent aspects of being human”—such as race, gender, and disability—is a relatively recent development in evangelical theology.

“For a long time, especially in church history, people wouldn’t talk about them,” do Vale said. “I think these ‘dark-side’ issues only really get dedicated attention when they intrude upon our lives.”

Scholars hope their work will equip local churches and Christian leaders to respond theologically to some of the most pressing problems plaguing the public square today.

“I have never heard a sermon on sexual assault—and it’s in the Bible,” do Vale said. “Where’s the theological guidance for stuff like that that’s gonna impact, statistically speaking, a good chunk of your congregation?”

These and other issues will continue to be discussed by evangelical theologians at annual meetings—as well as in books and papers, seminars and lecture halls. And wherever these scholars gather, greater attention will be paid to the bodies that brought them there.

“We’re embodied, our bodies matter—our bodies are coming with us into the new creation,” Imes said. “That has implications for what we do with our bodies now and how we think about our bodies now.”

Stefani McDade is theology editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the April, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Not Just Brains on a Stick".

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