Brazil’s Top 10 Bible Verses

Leaders reflect on what YouVersion list of the most-shared Scriptures in their nation includes—and misses.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels

The most popular verses for Brazilians in 2023 focused on the provision of God.

Those digitally cracking open their Bibles were most likely to search Joshua 1:9, followed by Jeremiah 29:11 and Isaiah 41:10, according to YouVersion.

Valdemar Kroker, who pastors Igreja Irmãos Menonitas in Curitiba, a city of nearly two million in southern Brazil, found the results unsurprising.

“It’s not surprise to me that Joshua 1:9 is the top verse,” he said. “I’ve heard my father sing this passage countless times.”

Nearly all the verses that made Brazil’s Top 10 are Old Testament texts that ring with a sense of “promise,” according to Paulo Won, a Presbyterian pastor, theology professor, and content creator.

“The focus is on what God can do in us, in the sense of granting us victories in life, more than on how we can be molded to God’s will, and thus live the discipleship that presupposes eventual difficulties and tribulations,” he said. “It’s a clear diagnosis that our way of living the gospel is largely triumphalist.”

The appearance of these verses suggest that Christians aren’t learning the Bible as a “grand narrative” or always being given the larger context of where these words come from, says Cynthia Muniz, a biologist and theologian.

“The Brazilian evangelical scene itself has been strongly influenced by triumphalist theologies, so that some of these texts can be understood as personal promises of prosperity and victory, including material ones,” she said.

YouVersion’s apps include tools designed to help people read the Bible more frequently and pray more regularly. These were downloaded 11.2 million times in 2023, an increase of 112 percent compared to 2022. (YouVersion also noted that they worked with 150 partners to launch 330 new Bible plans in Portuguese last year.)

“This year, our team really focused on expanding partnerships in Brazil because we want everyone to have easy access to quality biblical content in their native language,” said Bobby Gruenewald, founder and CEO of YouVersion. “More than anything else, we want to help people experience God’s love, and our ministry would not be possible without these incredible partners we work with in Brazil who are passionate about investing in the spiritual growth of their communities.”

Daily YouVersion Bible use increased 27 percent in Brazil in 2023. But this fervor to read God’s Word wasn’t limited to digital texts. According to the Brazilian Bible Society, on average, the country prints seven Bibles per minute.

Despite this energy around Bible engagement, a close reading of YouVersion’s verse list offers some feedback for the Brazilian church. Beyond identifying a triumphalist tone among the popular passages, theologians also noted the dearth of Bible verses quoting Jesus. Out of the ten verses on the list, only two were found in the Gospels and only one contained Jesus’ words (Matt. 6:33).

“We are, in fact, not only reading too little but also preaching too little from the Gospels,” said Won. “We associate the gospels with stories about Jesus, which often don’t carry the prosperity emphasis that many of our churches favor.”

For example, Matthew 6:33 is part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ main teachings to his disciples and full of instructions on how to embody his values to the world. But today’s churches pay too little attention to Matthew 5–7, says Muniz.

“This is worrying, because the gospels are at the heart of the New Testament message,” she said. “Furthermore, as followers of Jesus and called to be ‘his imitators,’ it is essential that we meditate on his words and be inspired by his actions. There is no doubt that we have a lot to learn from Jesus.”

Muniz and Won also expressed concern about Brazilian Bible readers’ tendency to separate a verse from the larger passage.

For example, Romans 8:28 reads, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” It’s part of a larger section of text where Paul is discussing “the adversities of the present time, the effects of sin, and our participation in Christ’s sufferings so that we can also share in his glory,” said Muniz.

“This text is a good example of how not taking the context into account and reading the verse by itself can lead to misinterpretations," she added.

The idea of victory that Paul notes in Rom. 8:28 does not refer to “prosperity in this life or the conquest of anything worldly,” said Won.

“The victory is over death and sin, over principalities and powers,” he said. “It is Christ’s ultimate victory in which, in him, we have a share. In this sense, reading the text as a simple hope for believers is not only an inappropriate reading but a diabolical misrepresentation of the true triumph we have in the Lord.”

According to Won, the Brazilian church needs to read Matthew 11:29 more, where it says, “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”

“We are experiencing the intensification of polarization in various areas of society. For me, Jesus’ call to meekness and serenity must not be forgotten,” he said.

Kroker emphasizes that Jesus needs to be our greatest example. Brazilian church leaders need to devote more sermons to the Gospels, specifically focusing on Jesus’ nature, actions, and mission, he said.

“We need narrative sermons that more vividly highlight the example of all the qualities and attitudes that are expected of us and that is in the life of Jesus.”

- More from Mariana Albuquerque

Books

Review

The Bible Dictates What the Church Teaches. Should Church Teaching Dictate How We Read the Bible?

Stephen O. Presley

A Protestant considers a Catholic theologian’s call for an “ecclesial” reading of Scripture.

artas / Getty

On November 10, 1942, following a British victory in Egypt during World War II, Winston Churchill famously quipped, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The End of Interpretation: Reclaiming the Priority of Ecclesial Exegesis

R. R. Reno (Author)

192 pages

$3.50

I thought about those words as I opened The End of Interpretation: Reclaiming the Priority of Ecclesial Exegesis, a recent book from Catholic theologian and First Things editor R. R. Reno. Just as Churchill saw that victory as a decisive turning point in the war in North Africa, Reno sees a renewed synthesis between Scripture and doctrine as a path forward through the crisis of our cultural moment.

The book hovers around an essential question: “How,” Reno asks, “do we square doctrine with Scripture?” On the surface, this might sound like an odd question to pose. Aren’t Scripture and doctrine the clearest of allies? Aren’t they two parts of the harmonious whole of Christian witness? For most believers, surely, there is no obvious tension between them. But in seminary classrooms, the topic tends to launch impassioned debates.

In advocating a new synthesis between Scripture and doctrine, Reno is responding to a gradual division during the 20th century among those who engage in serious study of the Bible and theology—a rupture he considers harmful and unnatural. In broad outline, the task of biblical exegesis (understanding the objective meaning of Scripture in its literary, historical, and canonical contexts) has come unglued from the task of theology (constructing authoritative doctrine that distills the Bible’s teachings on God and man).

As Reno makes clear, this state of affairs has an important institutional component. For too long, the traditional disciplines of biblical and theological studies have been separated by a sea of competing methods and assumptions invented in the halls of modern German universities. At this point, Reno hopes that we will cease any attempt at building bridges between them and will instead sail back to the safe harbor of the church, where these boundaries evaporate. Then, if we can get back to reading the Bible in ways that accord with the church’s teaching, perhaps we can pursue the kind of spiritual formation that is socially redemptive.

The ‘presumption of accordance’

Anyone familiar with Reno’s recent publications (Sanctified Vision, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible: Genesis, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, Return of the Strong Gods) can see the way this book captures the transition in his own thinking toward, as his subtitle reads, “the priority of ecclesial reading.”

In the introduction, Reno traces his own intellectual journey through the writings of Karl Barth and 20th-century “post-liberal” theologians, which led him to see the truth of God not as a set of rational propositions or subjective feelings but as a symphony displaying the “synthetic genius” of the divine composer.

Reno’s basic approach in The End of Interpretation can be summarized in a simple sentence: “Proper interpretation proves itself to be such when our reading of Scripture accords with what the church teaches.” Curriculum managers at academic institutions may reject Reno’s call for synthesis, but in my assessment, he is not trying to convince academics. Rather, he is trying to awaken Christians who are active in church ministry and wearied by stagnant debates over biblical interpretation.

As Reno writes, “This book presumes that we ought to take great care to honor the truth of our faith, and it is the job of reason, including its modern methods, to purify and deepen that truth. But we must seek this purifying and deepening as Christians.” Through the union of exegesis and theology, we are drawn “closer to God” and challenged to deeper engagement with Christian theologians who have gone before us. For Reno, the words of Pope Benedict XVI capture this imperative: “For the life and mission of the Church, for the future of faith, it is absolutely necessary to overcome the dualism between exegesis and theology.”

The book’s chapters follow a straightforward outline: The first two defend and explain how doctrine and exegesis “accord” with each other. Chapters 3–4 find historical examples in the work of the church father Origen and the Reformers. And chapters 5–7 provide case studies applied to readings of Genesis, John, and 1 Corinthians. Finally, the book concludes with some reflections on the lessons Reno gleaned while serving as the editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary series.

Throughout the first two chapters, Reno’s watchword is accordance. He argues that exegesis should begin with “the presumption of accordance,” a phrase he describes as follows:

If the Bible teaches something we judge integral to the gospel, then we hold that the church’s teaching must be substantially the same. The reverse holds as well. If the church teaches something as a saving truth, then we assume that the Bible does so. It’s that simple: what the Bible says accords with what the church proclaims.

The word church, of course, could have many different meanings, especially as it relates to Protestant-Catholic divisions, but Reno reminds us that “nearly all Christians adopt the presumption of accordance,” even those Reformation traditions that give primacy to Scripture rather than church tradition.

In chapters 3–4 Origen and Luther are brought forward as examples of the kind of “interpretive synthesis” that Reno hopes the church will model. Origen is certainly controversial, and Reno does not defend him in every way but does show how Origen reads Scripture in a “Christ signifying way.” Of course, Origen labored to draw out the spiritual implications of various biblical texts, but only through an intense focus on their literal meaning. Luther, for his part, argued that doctrine provides what Reno calls a “horizon of truth” that focuses exegesis and stabilizes interpretation.

In chapters 5–7 Reno works through specific passages in Genesis, John, and 1 Corinthians and demonstrates how to read Scripture in a way that accords with doctrine. His discussion of Genesis, for example, shows that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (from nothing) is not something theologians have “imposed” on Scripture, a point he reiterates several times. In reality, the doctrine emerged over time through careful negotiation, or “pressure,” between Scripture and doctrine. In fact, the doctrine is essential for helping us better understand the early chapters of Genesis.

The same is true with Jesus’ call for unity of faith in John’s Gospel and Paul’s insistence on moral formation in 1 Corinthians—the kinds of readings that form believers for what Reno calls “selfless service.” Doctrine, rather than standing apart from these passages, lends them greater clarity and equips believers to live them out. In his examples, which span the whole canon, Reno synthesizes Scripture and doctrine in ways that aim to shape the people of God and prepare them for cultural engagement.

The book ends with some discussion of the controversial Brazos Theological Commentary series, for which Reno served as the general editor. The narrative around this commentary series offers a fascinating case study in the discussion of theological interpretation. Reno admits that authors for the series weren’t told which interpretive approaches to employ, apart from assuming that Nicene Christianity would play a crucial role. While some volumes are more successful than others, this series was a living attempt to accord Scripture and doctrine.

And that is the point: These books were not a platonic ideal that materialized in publication but an example of the journey to marry two things that have been put asunder. While the volumes may have received mixed reviews, at least these were serious attempts, and we can hope, as Reno writes, that in the “foundry of exegesis, better theologians were formed.”

Reviving the church’s voice

Different chapters in The End of Interpretation were written at different points in Reno’s career, and some chapter transitions are difficult to follow, but a careful reading can discern the internal logic of the whole. I find myself largely supporting Reno’s hope for recovering ecclesial exegesis, but I can see the challenges that linger on the other side. I am still not sure how a generation of seminarians and academics trained in critical methods and assumptions can learn to appreciate the synthesis of Scripture and theology.

On some level it seems that the work of reconciliation must begin in the church. The word ecclesial, of course, can mean different things within different denominations and church traditions. But perhaps we can table those differences for another day and, in the meantime, worry about recovering a church-centered way of reading Scripture that offers something hopeful as the people of God face significant cultural transition.

In the end, Reno’s book offers the seasoned reflections of a Christian intellectual who has thought deeply about the history of biblical interpretation and the need for “good” exegesis in and for the church. Reno has been working diligently in recent years to revive the church’s voice in cultural engagement, and it is easy to see how his clarion call for “ecclesial exegesis” fits that agenda.

I sympathize with his thesis, and while his work may not betoken the end of scholarly methods for interpreting Scripture, I pray that it signifies a Churchillian moment when the church can recover habits of ecclesial reading and be bold enough to embrace them. Figures like Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, and the Reformers were. I hope that we are too.

Stephen O. Presley is senior fellow for religion and public life at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy (an initiative of First Liberty Institute) and associate professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His forthcoming book is Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church.

- More from Stephen O. Presley

Theology

Evangelicals Shouldn’t Criticize Evangelicalism (Unless the Evangel Really Matters)

Russell Moore

The gospel doesn’t come with a gag order. It calls us to name and repent of idolatries and hypocrisies—especially our own.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

A year or so ago, my friend David French and I were speaking to a group of young congressional staffers on Capitol Hill when one young man, a Republican and an evangelical Christian, asked us why we would criticize what’s happening right now on the Right.

“With all the hostility coming toward Christians from secularism and progressive ideology,” he asked, “why not punch Left instead of Right?”

Quite often, one will hear this sort of complaint from professing evangelical Christians—often in response to some conversation-generating book, such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne or Tim Alberta’s new work The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. These objections are often couched in terms of maintaining the “unity of the church,” usually picturing those evangelicals who dissent from Christian nationalism or white identity politics as betrayers, with an unspoken subtext: “The first rule of Born-Again Club is that we don’t talk about Born-Again Club.”

Sometimes this critique will extend all the way to the series of scandals issuing from American evangelical Christianity, at times with the argument that evangelicals “attacking our own side” on such matters will only cause unbelievers to hate us more and Christians to trust their leaders less.

This argument is akin to the “No Enemies to the Left” policy of some sectors of American progressivism in the middle of the last century toward the Soviet Union and Communist totalitarianism. One might whisper that Joseph Stalin is awful, but saying so publicly would only make the case for authoritarian anti-Communists. One might recognize that figures such as Alger Hiss sure seem to be KGB assets, but one could never say so. After all, with McCarthyism at a fever pitch and riddled with false accusations about Communist infiltrators, why would one acknowledge that there actually might be some?

The strategy kind of makes sense in Darwinian terms if a group—whether a labor union, a political party, or a church—is a tribal unit evolved to huddle together around the fire, no matter what, for fear of the saber-toothed tigers in the dark. And yet, even if one were to accept that premise, the strategy doesn’t hold together. That’s especially true in a context of avowed commitment to Christian orthodoxy.

First of all, the talking points are self-refuting. If Christians who criticize other Christians—especially in the hearing of unbelievers—are wrongfully attacking the unity of the church and should instead be speaking mostly of “all the good things we do,” then why is it not wrong for Christians to criticize Christians who criticize Christians? At the root of that argument is the very sort of deconstructionist moral relativism we were taught to reject.

More importantly, though, the “just punch Left” argument is, at best, a revelation of unfamiliarity with the actual text of the Bible and, at worst, a disavowal of the authority of the Bible. Moreover, such an argument reveals an agreement with the enemies of the Christian church—that the church is just another partisan tribe.

Which is worse in Scripture: the pagan idols of the nations around Israel or the golden calves that Jeroboam placed at Bethel and Dan? Throughout the Scriptures, God denounces and ridicules the false gods of the nations—but almost always as a warning to his own people not to do likewise.

The golden calves of Jeroboam, like the golden calf of Aaron before him, are not just wrong; they are also blasphemous. Jeroboam, the king of Israel, used the name of God to carry out a political agenda—to keep people from traveling to Judah for worship—as though he were speaking with the authority of God (1 Kings 12:25–33). The Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures denounces this in the harshest possible terms: “And this thing became a sin to the house of Jeroboam, so as to cut it off and to destroy it from the face of the earth” (1 Kings 13:34, ESV).

Jeroboam’s action is perfectly rational in starkly political terms. Every nation in the world, after all, was united around its gods, around its worship. That’s why treaties and alliances and intermarriages almost always included an importation of someone else’s gods.

All that is bad enough, but it was far worse because God actually exists, because he had actually spoken. Jeroboam was not just personally sinning, nor was he just leading a community to sin. He was leading the covenant people of God to idolatry while telling them it was the worship of God.

This is why the apostle Paul wrote that the hypocrisies of his own people were even worse than the basest rebellion of the pagans. Of those who are to instruct the nations as a “light for those who are in the dark,” who then are committing the very sins they denounce, Paul wrote, “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Rom. 2:19, 24).

Theologically, Jesus had far more in common with the scribes and the Pharisees than with the tax collectors or even the Sadducees. His harshest denunciations, though, are directed toward the Pharisees. Why? It is precisely because these religious leaders “sit in Moses’ seat” (Matt. 23:2). As Jesus’ brother would later write, those who claim the teaching authority of the church “will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1).

In the big scheme of world politics, which matters more: an entire empire given over to sexual and cultural immorality as well as the worship of a whole pantheon of false gods—or one tiny gathering of Christians in a seaport town ignoring their own member’s misbehavior? The apostle Paul wrote that it was the latter.

In fact, he wrote that he was not telling people to disassociate from unbelievers—even the most fornicating, defrauding, idolatrous kind. “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside” (1 Cor. 5:12–13, ESV).

With all the persecutions facing the church, why didn’t Paul “just punch pagan”? It’s not because he takes the church less seriously than he did the world but because he took it more seriously. The church is, he was told by Jesus, the body of Christ himself.

When a generation is more enamored with Values Voter Summits than with Vacation Bible School, the arguments for the prophets who denounced the “enemy” and spoke reassurance to God’s people seem plausible.

To say to Israel, “Behold, the vessels of the Lord’s house will now shortly be brought back from Babylon” (Jer. 27:16, ESV) can sound like building up the unity of the people. After all, isn’t that how confidence is maintained—by focusing on the “good things” and telling us everything is about to get better? Jeremiah, though, said that was a lie. And when he did, they said he was betraying his own people—that he was siding with the Babylonians (vv. 16–22).

Hananiah would have seemed a more loyal “evangelical” than Jeremiah. He punched at Nebuchadnezzar and cheered up those on “our side.” And God said through Jeremiah, “Listen, Hananiah! The Lord has not sent you, yet you have persuaded this nation to trust in lies” (Jer. 28:15). In fact, Jeremiah said, Hananiah’s “unity” was “rebellion against the Lord” (v. 16).

Even at an infinitely less serious level than that of politics, for those of us who actually care about conservatism, the equation of “conservatism” with authoritarian demagoguery or sexual predation is actually the greatest possible victory for the Left. It leaves the country without principled conservatism and lets an entire generation equate conservatism with white nationalism, anti-constitutional illiberalism, or base misogyny. It makes progressivism, in many people’s minds, the only perceived alternative to insanity or cruelty.

Maybe that doesn’t matter much—unless conservative principles are really true. Even more so, the theological and moral credibility from the inside of evangelical Christianity—of the church that claims to be (imperfectly) the “light of the world,” offering a word of “thus saith the Lord” in an age of deconstructed authority and a call to repentance and faith in an era of relativized morality—is of crucial importance. Evangelical Christianity can only offer to the world what it has not given up on itself.

Baal, Artemis, and Odin will always be better tribal mascots than Christ and him crucified. “Punch at the other side” is always better advice for hacks and pundits than “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” will ever be. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” will always sound more like bad news than good to a faction wanting to win. That’s all self-evidently the case—unless there’s really a heaven, really a hell, really a gospel, really a God.

The gospel does not come with a gag order. The moment we believe it has is the moment we’ve given up on the words, You must be born again.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

The Harvard Obsession

Pete Williamson

Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. Perhaps it’s not time to think less of Harvard, but to think of Harvard less.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

On Tuesday, I received an email from the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, announcing her decision to resign. It was addressed to “members of the Harvard community,” to which I belong as an alumnus (MDiv ’14) and a Harvard chaplain for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Harvard is a community I care about deeply. And the last few months have demonstrated that many other people care deeply about Harvard too—people well beyond the list Gay emailed. Her announcement came after a series of Harvard-centered media frenzies, some about Gay’s December congressional testimony and subsequent plagiarism allegations, and some about student groups’ response to the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war.

I’ve been asked many times for my opinion of what’s happening, and, initially, my instinct was to provide the nuance those headlines always seem to miss. But as the stories kept coming, increasingly, I’ve found myself giving a different answer: Perhaps you should care about Harvard less.

In one sense, the interest was understandable. This round of media attention started with a truly reprehensible statement by a Harvard student organization after October 7, a statement that laid all blame for the violence on Israel and that was signed by a number of other student groups.

I raised an eyebrow when I saw it, but I also know firsthand what student groups can be like: passionate, informal, chaotic. I would later learn that some groups were surprised to see their name attached to the statement, and others had not seen the statement before it was published.

This is going to cause a stir on campus, I thought.

Boy, was I wrong. It did not just cause a stir on campus. It caused a stir nationwide. And why was it a national news story? Probably for the same reason you’re reading this very article: We’re obsessed with Harvard. Harvard gets clicks.

Along with a few other top academic institutions, Harvard has a special way of occupying the minds of the American public. The name alone evokes a strange mixture of awe and envy. The brand conveys a significance that fascinates us. For a second, we forget Christ’s words—“the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt. 20:16)—and are taken with Harvard’s prestige.

I’ve experienced this myself. When I got the opportunity to study at Harvard in 2011, I was drawn in by its reputation. I didn’t really reflect on whether it was the right choice for me or part of God’s plan for me. I saw the H at the top of my acceptance letter, broke up with my girlfriend of six days (sorry!), and bought a one-way ticket to Boston.

Everyone at Harvard knows the power of the name. It’s why Harvard students say, I study in Boston, not, I’m at Harvard. No one wants to drop the H-bomb on an otherwise polite conversation!

As I started my ministry with Harvard grad students, I learned a key lesson from my mentor, Jeff Barneson, who has been a campus minister at the university longer than Israel wandered the desert: “We all must reach the point where we repent of the reasons we came to Harvard.” Why? Because, to some degree, we all came here because we were enamored of the worldly success that is synonymous with the Harvard name.

Harvard has rightly earned much of its reputation through centuries of world-class scholarship. That ought to be applauded. But sound scholarship is not the reason Harvard stories go national while we ignore what’s happening at local community colleges or state schools to which we’re far more likely to have a personal or communal connection. Our increasingly interconnected world is causing our attention, along with our anger, to be pulled toward remote narratives.

Too often we fail to scrutinize where our attention goes and why we’re focusing less on our own communities and more on faraway people and places. We don’t notice the fruit of giving too much attention to glittering names like Harvard—and it is not good fruit.

First, caring too much about Harvard makes us more likely to oversimplify and misunderstand distant stories and people, which risks distorting our attitudes. It’s a symptom of “Gell-Mann amnesia,” a term author Michael Crichton coined to describe how we notice misleading statements and errors when we read news stories on topics within our expertise, then read uncritically on topics outside of our experience.

Because few of us know Harvard and similar institutions well, we are likely to be misled by flawed reporting and to caricature the people involved. Instead of seeing the image of God in them, we see simplistic representations of ideas we hate. We miss the reality of the situation and fail to regard people from Christ’s perspective (2 Cor. 5:16).

Relatedly, caring too much about Harvard often has us spending time and care on problems too big and far for us to help—while neglecting smaller, nearer circumstances where we could actually make a difference. If every person who wrote an angry comment at the bottom of a Harvard article spent that same energy on their city, school district, or church, they’d likely find something more constructive to say and something more useful to do.

Jesus gave his attention to the people in front of him (Matt. 14:14). He gave little credence to the colossal institutions that trusted in their own significance (Mark 12:13–17). We would do well to imitate him.

Finally, our over-attention to Harvard exacerbates the very imbalance of which its critics often complain. Even an anti-Harvard obsession helps to concentrate power in Harvard and institutions like it.

The world is full of brilliant people and outstanding universities. As a society, we would do better to recognize that brilliance wherever it is found, rather than assessing people based on their association with a brand like Harvard. Harvard has no monopoly on brilliance and does not deserve a monopoly on our attention.

The point is not to bash Harvard—though, certainly, it does deserve scrutiny and even criticism for a great many things. Rather, it is to redirect our attention toward better objects. There’s a quote, often misattributed to C. S. Lewis but more accurately credited to Rick Warren, which explains that humility “is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

Something like that applies here. For most of us, the right response to all this clamor isn’t to think less of Harvard, but to think of Harvard less.

Pete Williamson is the team leader for InterVarsity’s Graduate and Faculty Ministries at Harvard University and a Harvard chaplain.

- More from Pete Williamson

News

Wire Story

Word Perfect: Christian Proofreaders Celebrate a Billion Bibles Checked

Diana Chandler - Baptist Press

Peachtree Publishing Services reviews 80 percent of Protestant Bibles in the US, looking at 300,000 details in each project.

Peachtree Proofreading Services / Baptist Press

When Jan Gibbs began proofreading Bibles 14 years ago for Peachtree Publishing Services, which celebrated in December the distribution of a billion copies of its works, she first had to learn to draw lines.

In the Bible’s poetry books in particular, primary, secondary and tertiary vertical lines designate the indentation for each horizontal line of text. Line placement must match the translators’ desires to a tee.

Mastering poetry alignment, she moved to proofreading running heads to conform to each publisher’s order. Then footnotes. Then word breaks.

Cumbersome to many, to Gibbs it’s mother’s milk.

“I find it fascinating,” said Gibbs, who today is Peachtree’s vice president of Bible proofreading. “My husband said that this would absolutely drive him insane.”

When proofreading God’s inerrant Word, there’s no room for error.

Peachtree proofreads 80 percent of the English Protestant Bibles in the US, proofreads many Catholic Bibles and serves publishers worldwide, Peachtree president Chris Hudson told Baptist Press.

“We are making sure everything is as perfect as can be,” he said. “We want people to find God when they read the Bible, not find a mistake.”

But surely, with so many details in play, someone must have made an error somewhere in Peachtree’s history, one could presume.

“We don’t get a lot of feedback of mistakes. Mostly we’re catching lots of mistakes before it’s printed,” Hudson said. “Every step along the way gets looked at at least twice by different people. Through our electronic and our people checks we’re catching most things. But we are human, so occasionally we’ll get (feedback) that we missed a spelling of a word here or there, but it’s not very often.”

Preserving God’s inerrant Word in perfect text is Peachtree’s key theological motivation.

“We have the Bible he wants us to have, and therefore we want to preserve it exactly as God intended. It’s why our people work for us,” Hudson said. “We could all be making more money doing something else, but we’re driven to protect and advance God’s Word and help people engage the Bible. It’s that genuine theological drive that motivates us.”

An evangelistic heart to spread God’s Word at home and globally inspires Peachtree’s team of “introverted people” to sit at their desks and check text for hours. In 2023, Peachtree proofread Bibles in 12 languages with a capacity to reach 94 countries.

Among Peachtree’s more than 45 clients are B&H Publishing, Harvest Ministries, Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, the Museum of the Bible, the American Bible Society, and Moody Publishing, as well as Catholic Bible publishers.

Gibbs recalls an error being made on a project she oversaw. One of the scanners on her team missed a detail in a portion of the red-letter text. The publisher spotted the error during printing. A couple of pages would have to be pulled and the correct pages inserted. It was expensive.

“I was just devastated,” Gibbs said. “It was like at the end of a red-letter section. I want to say it was like the ending punctuation was missed. It was something like that. On some red letters, you’ll have a red single quote that ends a section, then the double quote next to it would need to be black. But it was just horrible.”

Peachtree had to recheck the entire red-letter section with no additional compensation before the publisher finalized the print.

“Needless to say, ever since then,” she said, “I almost always go through and check red letter sections for jobs I’m in charge of. We are humans and we do miss things sometimes. It’s crushing when we do, because it’s such an important book.”

Peachtree checks more than 300,000 details on any given Bible before publication, including the biblical text, supplemental material, study and devotional content, cross-reference systems, concordances, and indexes. About 20 fulltime workers and additional contract employees do the work, all remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of hours are poured into each project, usually spanning as much as three months, Hudson said.

Peachtree has its roots in the 1960s work of Mildred and Frederick Tripp. Mildred, a solo proofreader, gained clients after she developed a unique method of proofreading at Oxford University Press, according to Peachtree’s website. Doug and June Gunden purchased the concept from the Tripps and formed Peachtree Editorial Services in 1981, refining the method to include a systematic team approach to proofreading.

Hudson has incorporated software tools to work in concert with the human hand, which he describes as merging the best of both worlds. It’s not artificial intelligence, he said, but he speculates that AI might be used in the future to improve the software programs in use.

The proofreading process has changed since Gibbs began at Peachtree, but she’s as motivated as ever.

“I’ve spent the last 13 years learning it, and I still love it,” she told Baptist Press. “I still love the work I do.”

- More from Diana Chandler - Baptist Press

Books

Review

Close Encounters of the Elite Institutional Kind

Daniel G. Hummel

How a contested alien abduction claim from the 1960s helps explain modern cynicism toward credentialed experts and organizations.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

A friend recently recounted a horrible flying experience full of delays, obfuscating explanations, and eventual cancellations. We concluded that one of the most infuriating parts of modern travel is that there is no single person to blame when it falls apart. Most likely, it’s not a failure of this specific pilot or that particular mechanic or this or that airline. It is truly systemic, with a hundred moving processes, none of which have overriding authority over the others.

The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America

Matthew Bowman (Author)

Yale University Press

288 pages

$19.54

You can lose your cool in the terminal, but what power does any single employee really hold? You can curse the universe, but alas, it is not moved. If you are a Christian, you can utter a prayer for mercy—I’ve petitioned for such travel miracles but never experienced one myself. It all makes your jaw clench and your stomach turn.

Americans today seem to be in a similar situation as the stranded passenger, directing our rage both in focused and indiscriminate ways across our society, which many see as falling apart.

Since the 1960s, public trust in all types of institutions has plummeted. Since Gallup started tracking survey results, faith in the US Congress has dropped to 8 percent, with newspapers rating at 18 percent, banks at 26 percent, and organized religious institutions at 32 percent. According to these metrics, most institutions have bottomed out in the last two years. Overall, American confidence in institutions has fallen from 48 percent in 1979 to 26 percent in 2023.

Explanations are many and varied. To make sense of the collapsing trust in government, we often cite events like the Watergate scandal and trends of party polarization. Loss of trust in business is often attributed to scandals like Enron and the 2008 banking crisis. Cratering trust in religious institutions is blamed on moral failures, including revelations of systemic sexual abuse. Recent commentators have offered many theories for what historian Matthew Bowman calls “the cynicism and conspiratorialism of American life today.”

Bowman’s new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America, offers a new way to frame the problem in human as well as institutional terms. The results are surprising and welcome.

Bowman uses what has been characterized as the original blueprint for the modern UFO-encounter trope—the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in rural New Hampshire on September 19, 1961—to explore the cynicism in American society that began in the 1960s and continues today. The book manages to recast big trends in American life through a story that is smaller in scope and more intimate in detail.

A historian at Claremont Graduate University who has written on Mormonism, evangelicalism, and religion and US politics, Bowman is well equipped to tell the Hills’ story. In his account, both the couple’s abduction narrative and its broader reception were deeply influenced by the surrounding social context, which combined the height of American civil religion, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the authoritative scientific pronouncements of credentialed experts and government officials.

The Hills’ UFO encounter not only reflected this world but, over time, chipped away at it. They were rejected by military and scientific authorities, and they were simultaneously embraced by competing authorities in the realms of religion, spirituality, and pseudoscience. Their story pried open cultural fissures resembling those in our world today: widespread distrust in both public and private institutions, skepticism toward institutional leaders, dismissiveness toward expertise we don’t already agree with, and the conspiracy thinking at work in many parts of public life.

The encounter

On the night of their claimed abduction, when Betty and Barney Hill witnessed a mysterious “flying saucer” overhead while driving home from Montreal, they were living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Betty, 42 years old at the time, was a white social worker and a New Hampshire native. Barney, 39 years old, was an African American postal worker and civil rights activist from Philadelphia. Married in May 1960, they were a rare interracial couple in New England.

The Hills were also Unitarians who attended South Church in Portsmouth. The ethos and assumptions of Unitarianism—and by extension Protestant civil religion—pervaded the Hills’ New England culture. In the 1950s and early 1960s, this meant a progressive theological and political optimism, rooted in a trust of human reason and the American dream, that defined Unitarian beliefs and teachings.

More specifically, in 1961 this meant a seamless religious and social embrace of the civil rights movement. Though the Unitarian denomination was predominantly white, its leaders were notably active in promoting civil rights. The South Church minister installed just six months before the Hills’ fateful September night was a liberal civil rights minister named John Papandrew. His sermons and efforts at community organizing came from a place of deep hope in the capacity of American institutions to reform, and from a confidence that those institutions could effectively better the lives of common people. This faith set up the Hills for repeated disappointments and disillusionment.

Enter the event that made Betty and Barney believe that they had encountered an extraterrestrial UFO. Bowman does not evaluate, as many investigations have before, the veracity of the Hills’ account. He believes their testimony was sincere, but he is guarded in giving it credence. Part of the problem is that the Hills’ narrative evolved over time, with Betty and Barney remembering more details and discovering more memories through hypnosis.

The Hills, channeling their Unitarian optimism in human reason, believed (contra the consensus among professional psychologists) that hypnosis helped to recover accurate but repressed memories. In their case, these included vivid descriptions of an invasive abduction involving small grey aliens with large eyes, a needle that penetrated Betty’s womb, and dozens of medical tests performed on Barney.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

Betty and Barney Hill

As respectable, progressive members of their community, the Hills looked for validation in the best ways they knew how. They contacted the Air Force and a knowledgeable civilian organization, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), met repeatedly with an esteemed psychologist, and eventually invited journalists to document their story.

At each turn, however, they faced increasing scrutiny. The Air Force dutifully received the Hills’ story but did not take it seriously. Psychologist Benjamin Simon, who led both Betty and Barney in multiple sessions of hypnosis, interpreted the findings as evidence of suppressed racial anxieties rather than any external reality. And journalists grew both skeptical and bombastic in recounting the story.

The Hills were active participants in spinning their experiences out of their own control. They actively sought attention and recognition in Portsmouth and beyond, growing increasingly convinced that a conspiracy of suppression was underfoot. With enough national notice, they believed, their narrative would be vindicated.

Resistance and disillusionment

Of course, as Bowman’s subtitle makes clear, this all took place not in a vacuum but in a roiling social and political climate defined by increasing polarization around civil rights. Papandrew, a very public supporter of Betty and Barney, left his South Church pastorate in late 1963 because his sermons and activism had failed to sway the congregation. The people “did not want him to preach things that made them uncomfortable,” Bowman concludes.

Betty and especially Barney began to see their own story falling victim to similar forces. By 1966 the first full journalistic accounts of their abduction were hitting bookshelves. But the increased attention did not provide the breakthrough the Hills were seeking. It mostly made things worse. The couple ditched their psychologist and began to consult with a local psychic, an antiestablishment scientist of parapsychology at Duke University, and a UFO enthusiast who also dabbled in the occult, among others.

These alternative authorities supplied the Hills with a vast array of intellectual and spiritual tools for making sense of their experiences. In describing the spiritual “New Age” that the Hills were entering, Bowman uses the term bricolage to capture the mixing and matching of ideas from the occult, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, and the like.

Establishment resistance led to disillusionment across the board. Even as the Civil Rights Act became law, Barney “was beginning to worry that his trust in the power of the state to change minds was unjustified.” This happened locally in Portsmouth as white residents dragged their feet—from the barber shop that refused to integrate to the lawyer that took the barber’s case.

Bowman mentions that Barney never joined the more radical Nation of Islam or embraced the ideology of Black power, which harbored a deep skepticism that American institutions could integrate at all. Yet Barney and the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, shared a fascination with UFOs and a faith that “science would reveal the bankruptcy of white America.”

Moreover, Barney interpreted backlash from the scientific establishment and civil rights activism “to be expressions of the same bigotry.” In less than a decade, a cynicism foreign to Unitarian progressivism had captured Betty and Barney—and many Americans besides.

Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969, while Betty lived until 2004. The divergent lifespans meant that while Barney remained largely stuck in a place of disillusionment, Betty continued to grapple with her own story in new and increasingly creative ways. Her version of what happened in 1961 continued to develop, and she reported further encounters with UFOs. By the 1970s, she claimed to have witnessed hundreds of visitations.

Her fame increased with a 1975 film starring James Earl Jones as Barney, and her infamy grew when a large portion of one of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos episodes in 1980 was dedicated to debunking the Hills’ story, employing the memorable phrase, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The establishment, in Betty’s mind, was at it again.

Betty remained a household name among UFO enthusiasts but ultimately lived a life of struggle with the very authorities from whom she sought validation. As Bowman writes, establishment skepticism “frustrated the Hills because it implied to them that their own reasons and perceptions could not be trusted.” Moreover, he concludes, “It seemed catastrophic to them, not only because of their experience but because it implied the nation was run not by its citizens but by a dominant and trained elite.”

In 21st-century parlance, you could call it the “deep state,” the “swamp,” or simply “the elite.” Bowman’s insightful and compelling analysis of the Hills shows their resemblance to many Americans today who trust their own ability to determine the truth while doubting the motives of those who wield expertise and institutional power.

Believing rightly

The Hills’ story helps illustrate that this state of affairs has a deeply personal and experiential component that can’t be captured by invoking either discrete events (like Watergate) or broader patterns (like polarization). The collapse of trust in institutions can’t be pinned exclusively on either a conservative or liberal cast of characters. Nor is it definitively populist or establishmentarian in origin.

The “establishment” began to alienate the Hills through encounters with individual scientists, psychologists, military representatives, and journalists. And Barney’s loss of civil rights optimism occurred not primarily because of white resistance to integration nationally but because of events in Portsmouth.

In other words, individual organizations and entities, including churches and other ministries, have the heavy burden of representing a much larger institutional type in their day-to-day interactions, whether they like it or not. None of us have been mistreated by “the church” or “the state” in some absolute definition of those terms. Yet thousands of us have been mistreated by specific churches, authority structures, and government agencies—by certain manifestations of systemic forces and particular structures of injustice.

This way of reframing the cynicism and conspiratorialism of American life today affects Christians in at least two ways. First, it bears repeating that the Hills were active agents in their own alienation. They misunderstood the purpose and effects of hypnosis, they routinely obfuscated or changed their story, and they resorted to authority sources that were specious at best.

They acted in ways they understood to be consistent with their Unitarian faith—which was not “anti-science” or antiestablishment—and many others in their community spurred them on. Regardless of the details of the Hills’ experience, there were telltale signs that their story was not true or, at best, incomplete and subject to scrutiny. When the truth is obscured in this way, it reflects failures of discipleship, community support, and individual character.

At the same time, the Hills were subject to larger forces that treated them, time and again, as less than fully human. Many people looked to instrumentalize the Hills, and many others looked to suppress, exaggerate, or twist the couple’s experience for their own ends. In Bowman’s telling, very few people who entered the Hills’ life after 1961 regarded them as humans first. Rather, they quickly became pawns in various games of authority, control, or careerism. Bowman’s book is a heartbreaking portrait of the all-too-common American experience of institutional life. No wonder it breeds cynicism.

Some years ago, Dallas Willard observed that “we live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes.” That insight drove those (like the Hills) who doubted the establishment as much as it drives those today who doubt the ability of others to reason toward truths on their own.

Willard’s charge is not to believe indiscriminately but to believe rightly. He concludes the above quote by observing that “the fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.” If cynicism has become the problem in the way Bowman documents, then genuine thinking and living seem the most effective recourses we can summon.

Daniel G. Hummel directs The Lumen Center, a scholarly collective of Christian writers, researchers, and educators on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

- More from Daniel G. Hummel

Theology

Neural Implants: Should We Become One with AI?

A. Trevor Sutton

As Christians, we must prioritize thinking theologically about emerging technologies.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Getty

Will artificial intelligence destroy humanity or elevate it to new heights? Silicon Valley technologists are in a tumultuous debate about this very question.

Elon Musk, owner of Tesla and SpaceX, is working with his new startup, Neuralink, to develop neuroprosthetic devices—tiny electrodes implanted into human brains that can connect us to computers and artificial intelligence (AI). The corporation received FDA approval to conduct human clinical trials after its controversial testing on primates. It’s raising substantial funds to compete in this industry and making headlines in the process.

Proponents claim they could treat quadriplegia or Parkinson’s disease—or augment cognition and memory. Musk believes that through this technology, we will “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”

Despite its continuity with existing embodied technologies—such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, pacemakers, and smartwatches—neural implants are the first devices to enable humankind to interface directly with machines. Such new territory often invites either terrifying fears or massive hopes.

Terrifying fear, or techno-pessimism, imagines a dystopian future where human beings become dispassionate and dependent machines—while limitless hope, or techno-optimism, imagines a utopic future where technology solves all our woes. The latter logic flows as follows: AI cannot outpace human intelligence if we are one with it. In other words, if you can’t beat AI, join it.

But whether technology inhibits absolute human freedom or promotes absolute human power, both assume that humanity is an absolute law unto itself.

Egbert Schuurman, a Christian philosopher of technology, thinks that techno-pessimism and techno-optimism are both essentially religious in nature. Arguing that these views have to do with absolutes, Schuurman writes that “the fundamental choice upon which this pretension rests is a radical one and thus is religious in character.”

For example, if you think neural implants will either destroy or deliver us, that is a religious thought. If implanting computer chips in our brains becomes our ultimate hope or fear, then it has become either our god or our eternal enemy. Either way, Schuurman points out, the conversation takes a religious turn. And humanity will never develop a proper relationship with this technology if we seek to let it determine our absolute hopes or fears.

As a pastor and co-author of Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits, I want us to consider how any emerging technology might intersect with our theological framework. How can we think theologically about neural implant devices? Let’s consider three simple and questions: Do I want this? At what cost? For whose benefit?

Do we want this? Theologian Norman Wirzba said we should always ask ourselves whether any new technology is something we even want.

“This stuff is coming so fast,” Wirzba said of AI. “It’s coming with such allure because the promises are enormous and it’s really easy to get sucked into that. Because maybe it does not correspond to fundamental values that we should be having.”

The Bible says much about human ambitions and desires—and about how our wants can often become our wardens. Scripture is full of characters with misguided aspirations. Adam and Eve desired god-like freedom but later came to regret it. Israel wanted a king like the other nations only to be ultimately disappointed. Such stories can serve as a warning sign to limit our impulsive instincts.

Desiring new technologies to ease human suffering and disease can be a good and noble objective. But even a purely altruistic motive can eventually turn into the goal of optimizing basic human brain functioning. Do we want a future where human thought is indistinguishable from machine learning? Are we dissatisfied with the human brain in its present state such that we feel the need to augment our cognition and memory?

At what cost? We need to consider the ethical and societal costs that could come with bringing neural implants to market and whether the ends justify the means.

What humanitarian price are we willing to pay when it comes to how clinical trials are conducted on human subjects? What societal price are we willing to pay if this technology results in a steep divide between the technological haves and have-nots?

The answers to these questions will reveal our ultimate priorities. Martin Luther stated that a god is that which we fear, love, and trust in above all else. If we are willing to sacrifice anything—financially, ethically, societally—to bring neural implants to market, then this emerging technology has become our god.

For whose benefit? As of now, neural implants are positioned to benefit individuals with clinical deficits, such as people suffering from paralysis. But who stands to benefit when this technology reaches the wider consumer market?

Jesus calls us to love God along with loving our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30–31). By keeping the focus on how neural implants might serve our neighbor—and not just ourselves—we can better ascertain the proper value of this emerging technology.

It is very likely that neural implants will go to market before these questions are answered, since neurotechnology companies are likely not thinking theologically about their creations. But as believers, we can reflect on how emerging technologies might impact us all.

Perhaps that starts with considering the impact existing wearable technology has on us. Has my Fitbit or Apple Watch brought more or less peace into my life? How does tracking my daily step count serve my neighbor? What is really driving my desire to have that next new wearable device like Apple’s Vision Pro?

Once we begin to think theologically about the devices we are already wearing on our bodies, maybe we will be better prepared to ask far bigger and harder questions—like what it might mean to implant devices in our brains that help us become one with AI.

A. Trevor Sutton is a Lutheran pastor in Lansing, Michigan, and co-author of Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits.

- More from A. Trevor Sutton

News

Died: Donald Wildmon, Champion of Christian Boycotts

Daniel Silliman

The Methodist minister and founder of American Family Association mobilized believers to exert economic influence on major corporations.

American Family Association / edits by Elizabeth Kaye

Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister who seized on the idea that boycotts would be the best way to make America more moral, freeing television airwaves of suggestions of sex and anti-Christian bias, died on December 28. He was 85 and suffered from Lewy body disease, a type of dementia.

Wildmon organized and mobilized Christians across the country, convincing them that they should exert their combined economic power to influence what was on TV.

Through a succession of organizations he founded in Tupelo, Mississippi—the National Federation for Decency, the Coalition for Better Television, Christian Leaders for Responsible Television, and ultimately the American Family Association—he taught the Religious Right to embrace boycotts as a political tool. Before him, boycotts were primarily associated with the civil rights movement. Many conservatives considered them anti-capitalist, coercive, and un-American. Wildmon changed that.

“What we are up against is not dirty words and dirty pictures,” he said. “It is a philosophy of life which seeks to remove the influence of Christians and Christianity from our society.”

Wildmon also refined and developed boycotting strategies, learning to go after advertisers, rather than TV networks, for maximal effect.

He and his organizations objected to the depictions of sexual situations and suggestions of immorality on All in the Family; Almost Grown; Amen; Benson; Charlie’s Angels; Cheers; The Dukes of Hazzard; Dynasty; The Facts of Life; Family Ties; Full House; and The Golden Girls (going alphabetically); as well as Knight Rider; Knots Landing; L. A. Law; Magnum, P. I.; Matlock; Murder, She Wrote; Saturday Night Live; Three’s Company; Three’s a Crowd; Who’s the Boss?; Wiseguy; The Wonder Years; and many other TV programs.

So they applied pressure to major American corporations from General Motors to General Mills, Pepsi to Clorox, pushing the companies to cancel ads and curtail their financial relationships with ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Wildmon was not always successful. That didn’t bother him.

“I was raised to know that it was not a disgrace to fight and get whipped,” he said.

He was successful enough, on the other hand, that TV executives and civil libertarians called him everything from a religious dingbat and rabble-rouser to a would-be Christofascist censor taking “the first step toward a police state” by organizing “the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced.”

On news of his death Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised Wildmon’s “impressive legacy of Christian ministry,” saying it will “live on for many years to come.”

Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress said, “Don Wildmon was a true pioneer in encouraging pastors like myself and thousands of others to speak out on the great moral issues of the day.”

Wildmon was born on a farm in Dumas, Mississippi, on January 18, 1938. His father Ellis raised cotton on 100 acres. But the family ran into financial trouble, forcing Wildmon’s father to take a job with the state government and his mother, Bernice, to go to work as a school teacher. The family lost the farm and moved to Ripley, Mississippi, when Wildmon was a child.

Raised in a Methodist church, Wildmon felt his first call to ministry at age nine, but as he later recalled to CT, it was kind of vague. He just knew that “the Lord had something special for me to do.”

In high school and college, Wildmon found himself drawn more to journalism. At 16, he started working part-time as a local sports reporter, writing for a newspaper and broadcasting on the radio. He joined the army after college, serving a stint he later described as “miserable,” and then returned to the idea of ministry.

He was ordained in the Methodist Church in 1964 and enrolled in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University the following year. He was initially rejected from Emory because of a weak academic record but, as he later recounted, figured out how to lobby his way in.

“I found out who had influence,” he told CT in 1991.

After graduating with a master’s in divinity, Wildmon was assigned to a church in Tupelo, Mississippi. But the work left him unsatisfied. He started writing on the side, turning out more than a dozen devotional books and starting a syndicated religious column that was published in papers across the South. Most of his columns were on the practical and psychological benefits of religion, often ending with a twist that revealed the person he was writing about was famous.

He still felt bored and constrained, however, like he was “going ’round and ’round and getting nowhere.” He told a friend he had “lost the feeling God had something ‘special’ for me to do.”

Wildmon’s life changed direction in December 1976 when, as he would recount many times, he tried to watch television with his wife and four kids.

“On one channel there was sex,” he recalled. “On another there was profanity, and on the third a guy was preparing to work someone over with a hammer.”

He turned off the TV—and wondered if he could rally others to do the same. Wildmon launched “Turn Off the TV Week” in April 1977, urging his congregation not to watch anything for seven days.

The event received national attention, and Wildmon, who was 39 years old, decided to leave the ministry, take $5,000 he had saved, and start the National Federation for Decency.

“I remember lying in bed thinking, ‘Is this what the Lord wants me to do?’” he said.

It wasn’t clear that short-term boycotts of television shows would have the impact Wildmon wanted to have, though. It was also hard to prove that people were really not watching. So the next year, instead of asking people to not watch TV, Wildmon tried a different approach. He asked people to watch and keep track of every depiction and reference to sex they saw.

He and his supporters viewed 225 combined hours of prime-time television over a 15-week period and, according to their tally, saw something sexual or sexually suggestive more than three times an hour. The vast majority of the references, according to Wildmon, were sex outside of marriage.

Wildmon and his supporters also identified the sponsors of these shows. Instead of complaining to the networks about the programing, Wildmon picked an advertiser to target.

“I regret that it’s come to this,” he told reporters at the time, “but people have a responsibility to support good programming and not support programming they think is prurient. We think that, economically, the sponsors can be held accountable.”

That same year, Tupelo was in turmoil because of a boycott organized by a Black civil rights group called the Union League. Silent marchers, protesting white police violence, had an impact on the local economy. Stores in Tupelo saw sales drop between 10 and 20 percent.

The tactic was criticized for being too aggressive and coercive, but Union League leaders pointed out it was actually working.

“The Black boycott of white-owned stores has not only had an economic effect,” one said, “it’s causing an emotional breakdown in the white community.”

Wildmon adopted the same strategy. As he later explained to CT, he realized he didn’t need to change people’s minds. He needed to change the incentives that were driving their behavior.

“They may be converted to my way of thinking; they may not,” he said. “The bottom line is: Are you going to keep putting things on TV?”

The first target was Sears and Roebuck, which was advertising on All in the Family, Charlie’s Angels, and Three’s Company. Wildmon only had about 1,400 people on his mailing list at the time, but he arranged a few strategic pickets at stores around the country and the company’s headquarters in Chicago. A short while later, the company announced it was going to cut back on its investment in TV ads, and Wildmon was able to declare victory.

Wildmon’s activism had an impact even on companies he didn’t target. In the 1980–1981 TV season, Procter & Gamble withdrew ads from 50 different shows. The company, which was spending about $500 million in television advertising at the time, credited Wildmon.

“We think the coalition is expressing very important and broadly held views about gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity,” the CEO said. “I can assure you that we are listening very carefully to what they say.”

Wildmon saw another big success when he moved beyond television to target convenience stores that were selling Playboy, Penthouse, and other pornographic magazines. In 1986, 7-Eleven announced it was going to stop selling pornography at its 4,500 corporate-owned stores. 7-Eleven recommended franchise owners drop the magazines as well.

“It is a good example of what can happen when the Christian community stands together with selective buying,” Wildmon said. “It took us approximately two years, but our voice was heard.”

Wildmon led subsequent protests against Holiday Inn for showing pornographic movies; the National Endowment of the Arts for supporting art many thought obscene; theaters that showed the film Showgirls; and Kmart, which owned Waldenbooks, which sold novels with “erotic” stories about child sexual abuse.

Despite some notable victories, not all conservative Christians agreed with the strategy of boycotts, however. Jerry Falwell Sr., founder of the Moral Majority, initially signed on to work with Wildmon and to contribute $2 million to promote one boycott but later changed his mind. He had questions about whether the approach was too coercive.

TV executives pushed the argument that boycotts are anti-democratic and that Wildmon and people like him were threatening censorship (even though neither Wildmon nor any of his organizations suggested the government should ever be involved in suppressing speech). One called boycotts “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.” A poll, commissioned by the networks, showed that 55 percent of those who identified with the Moral Majority did not want to force their opinions on others, and Falwell backed away from that approach.

Other Christians questioned the church’s role in this kind of political activity.

Alan Johnson, a New Testament professor at Wheaton College, told CT that his church participated in the boycott of 7-Eleven, but he thought that was wrong.

“It is inappropriate for the church to become involved in the use of coercive force,” said Johnson, who died in 2018. “When [the church] gets into the business of coercion, it detracts and can even undermine its main mission … which is the proclamation of Christ’s gospel.”

Wildmon, for his part, easily dismissed arguments that he was trying to advance a police state. People could decide what they wanted to buy, he said, and that didn’t undermine democracy or free markets.

He did sometimes think, though, that his political activity might have had a negative effect on his own faith.

“I went through a period where I lost my emotional connection to my faith,” he told CT in 1991. “I’m not entirely out of that period. I don’t know if I will ever regain my emotions.”

Wildmon said this wasn’t because of the boycotts themselves, however. He felt estranged from his faith because so many churches and so many Christians didn’t see the urgency and importance of fighting for public morality like he did. He couldn’t understand why Christians were so focused on church suppers and softball teams when the culture was being overrun by evil.

While he agreed that getting advertisers to pull ads from TV programs with sexual content wasn’t the same as bringing people the Good News of Jesus Christ, he still thought it was related.

“I see it helping make conditions in society conducive to the message that a Charles Colson or Billy Graham or somebody else brings,” he said.

And Wildmon didn’t think conversion was supposed to be the end of Christian life, either.

“Once an individual accepts Christ, what then?” he asked. “Is that it? Is that the sum total reason for the existence of the church?”

The answer seemed clear to him. To be a faithful Christian in contemporary America, Wildmon believed, you had to get involved in politics, protests, and boycotts—even when they weren’t effective.

“God didn’t call me to be successful,” Wildmon told The New York Times. “He called me to be faithful.”

Wildmon is survived by his wife, Lynda, and their children Tim, Mark, Donna, and Angela.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Why a Journalist Believes Christianity Today Is Needed in Our World

“I have a broader perspective at the end of reading an article in CT.”

Nabor Godoy

From the time she was little, Amy Burgess loved hearing people’s stories and felt as though she had endless questions for those around her. She loved to uncover the truth and look for new angles on situations. These passions made her decision to pursue journalism feel like a no-brainer. It was a career that would give her permission to dig into new stories and get paid to help tell them.

“I can sit and talk with people forever, asking question after question,” Amy explained. “If you do that as a random person, it can be weird, but if you can say you’re working on a story, then you can ask whatever you want and people are willing to help out.”

Amy started her career path in journalism as an undergraduate student at Biola University. Biola gave her a strong foundation for her vocation. Not only was Amy part of a community of young believers who were committed to their faith, but she also found a safe place to have hard conversations about faith and the role journalism should play in a free and democratic society.

“It was very impactful for me to think about journalism and how its core principles are integrity, honesty, and objectivity,” Amy said. “There is courage required to participate in certain aspects of journalism and to bring truth, whether it’s appreciated or not.”

Amy started her career as a daily newspaper reporter. Her first week on the job, she had to cover the accidental drowning of a man on a nearby lake. She was one of the first people on the scene and the first person to talk to the man’s friend who had been in the boat with him when the accident occurred.

That story sticks with Amy to this day because of the weight of the situation. The man’s friend was in one of the defining moments of his life, and Amy was present with him. “It was a heavy weight, but also it felt like a sacred privilege to be able to be a compassionate presence with him in that moment,” Amy said.

Over the years, Amy has worked as a news reporter, freelance journalist, marketing consultant, and many more roles, but the weight of journalism and what it brings to the world has stuck with her and led to her appreciation of Christianity Today with its work in Christian journalism over nearly 70 years.

“If you look back at when Billy Graham founded Christianity Today, 1956, people had an almost blind trust of anything that was in print,” Amy said. “There was trust in the voices of journalism. It was great for Christianity Today to be born in that and to be the voice that represented kingdom topics.”

Now Amy sees that our world has a completely different view on journalism, and there is a common distrust of media. People are constantly getting scams on their phones or in their emails. As a consumer it can feel like you have to be on your guard all the time.

“It’s such a hard time to establish credibility, authenticity, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and I think Christianity Today does a great job of that,” Amy explained.

Amy was recently talking with a friend who was having trouble finding the truth about a certain topic. Even though her friend had explored multiple sources about her question, they were all saying different things and she couldn’t decipher which one was true. They all seemed to be drawing from the same facts and interpreting them differently.

It isn’t enough anymore to do research and find a path through the facts. Amy believes that in today’s world, we have to take more responsibility than that. Christians have always been searching for trustworthy sources to help us navigate the emerging issues of our day. We continuously have to go back to Scripture and figure out how to align modern life with the eternal truths of God’s Word.

“Some issues are cultural, and some issues are absolute. It’s not always easy to tell the difference,” Amy said. “Christianity Today offers a place for intelligent, respectful, informed conversations about these issues. That’s a rare space these days.”

Some of the biggest emerging issues for Christians in this present context—women in ministry, gender identity, and politics—are important to be able to discuss. Amy believes that, of all people who should be able to have civil discussions based in love for each other, Christians should be at the front, and it’s heartbreaking to see the opposite of that so often.

“Christianity Today is addressing the modern issues that are confronting Christians in the context they live in,” Amy said, “and trying to put truth-seeking at the center.”

Over the last five or six years, Amy became aware of some of the heat CT takes for having difficult conversations and bringing different voices to important topics. It astounded and frustrated her and was one of the things that prompted her to donate to Christianity Today.

When Amy and her family reached a point where they were able to expand their giving, she started looking around at what was important to her and what she could invest in that had the potential for far-reaching impact. Journalism, and in particular Christianity Today, was one of those things.

“Christianity Today’s ability to cover the kingdom globally, to remind us of the bigger picture and be courageous enough to broach topics and discussions that can make people angry” are reasons she’s giving to CT.

Amy never regrets the time spent reading CT articles. “I know more, I understand more, I have a broader perspective at the end of reading an article in CT. It’s a huge benefit to me in that way,” she claimed.

Amy wants to contribute to the work Christianity Today is doing to hold space for important civil conversations around topics of faith and culture. She feels one thing we can do with our money is encourage groups we care about.

“It’s like casting a vote in a way,” Amy explained. “I vote for this existing. I vote for Christianity Today to be a thriving part of Christian discourse. Sending money is a way I can do that.”

Theology

Friends in High Places

Stefani McDade

We love celebrity conversions, but this obsession may not be as gospel-centered as it seems.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

We love Christian celebrities. And by that I don’t only mean speakers and pastors who gain celebrity status in the Christian world. I mean famous celebrities in secular spaces—think Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Daddy Yankee, Hulk Hogan, or the latest, Nala Ray—who publicly convert or make a profession of faith.

In one sense, this rejoicing is good and right, an extension of the “rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10). But applauding celebrity professions of faith from afar is not quite the same as rejoicing when witnessing true repentance. And if we’re not careful, we can end up grasping at straws, looking for the subtlest of signs that our favorite famous figures are believers—even if they’re bearing little to no fruit (Matt. 7:15–20).

This habit of looking for Christians in high places is popular across cultural and political lines. Our family watched football games together when I was a kid, and whenever a player pointed to the sky after a touchdown, my mom would say (sometimes joking, sometimes not), “I bet he’s a Christian!” She and my sisters do the same thing now with K-pop band members, and I once had a roommate who was lowkey obsessed with Justin Bieber and regularly prayed for his salvation.

Believers on both sides of the political aisle are eager to prove that their favorite politicians are really and truly saved—like those who claim former president Donald Trump was (repeatedly) led in the sinner’s prayer, or those who point to President Joe Biden’s Mass attendance as a sign of genuine faith.

This past fall, as soon as news spread of actor Matthew Perry’s passing, Christians started circulating quotes from his autobiography detailing a powerful encounter he had with God. Just a few weeks prior, Christians were scouring the pages of Britney Spears’s new memoir for kernels of faith—which are there, alongside her account of learning Kabbalah from Madonna and the revelation that she doesn’t have “strict ideas about religion.”

Spears’s religious syncretism is one reason this eagerness to find breadcrumbs of faith is not simple Christian hope: It encourages us to overlook serious departures from basic orthodoxy in our enthusiasm for claiming a famous soul.

More recently, there’s been debate in evangelical circles about the Muslim-turned-New Atheist intellectual figure Ayaan Hirsi Ali—whose public conversion outlines her reasons for subscribing to Christianity but doesn’t mention Jesus at all. While some say she’s just a new believer who doesn’t have the right words yet, others speculate that she’s not so much gained a Christian faith as accepted the Judeo-Christian worldview as a sociopolitical tool.

Moreover, our obsession with celebrity conversions evinces a kind of favoritism Scripture explicitly prohibits (Gal. 2:6; 1 Tim. 5:21). James 2 warns us about this: “My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism,” for “if you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers” (vv. 1, 8, 9).

Heaven’s rejoicing seems to be impartial, but the greatest rejoicing here on earth is too often reserved for celebrity sinners. After all, do we rejoice with equal gusto when people in other industries become believers? Do we jump for joy when we discover our plumber is a Christian? Are we just as eager for signs that our ordinary neighbor or coworker is coming to faith in Jesus?

Of course, our neighbor converting probably won’t make Christianity seem cooler, while celebrity conversions can. It’s hard to imagine that’s not a factor in this phenomenon. Maybe, we think, the public conversion of a famous person will help the cause of Christianity.

Granted, the Bible makes it clear that we are all called to use our talents to glorify God (Matt. 25)—and that could include worldwide fame, popularity among our peers, or a general regard for our good deeds (1 Pet. 2:12). But Jesus’s earthly ministry didn’t rely on converts’ high social status. He didn’t pursue the well-to-do or highly regarded but rather those on the margins who held little to no power and influence.

The Old and New Testaments are congruent from start to finish in demonstrating that God chooses the foolish things to shame the wise, exalts the insignificant to shame the self-important, and bestows greatest value on the people the world finds most worthless (1 Cor. 1:28).

Indeed, in the body of Christ, Paul says, “the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor,” because “God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it.” Why? “So that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it” (1 Cor. 12:23–27).

When we unduly exalt the already-exalted, we may fail to care for this part of the body of Christ in a different way. We risk doing a grave disservice to the very people we admire, particularly when they are new believers and therefore vulnerable in their faith. The Bible repeatedly warns against pride (Prov. 8:13; 1 Pet. 5:5; James 4:6), but lauding celebrity Christians encourages it.

Inappropriate honor may also compel new celebrity Christians to lead in a season of faith when they would do better to follow. Last fall, the television personality and entrepreneur—and former occultist—Kat Von D posted a video of her public baptism on Instagram. Her post was reshared by countless giddy believers, and yet she made it clear in a follow-up video that she likely won’t talk much about her faith online: “If you started following me because you think this will become some kind of Christian meme page, it’s not going to happen.”

“It’s not for any other reason than I just don’t really feel equipped to be the poster child for Christianity,” Von D continued. “I think that I’m still learning and as I do, I will become more equipped.” That’s wise, for as James advised, “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1). Especially for those with large audiences, sound discipleship should come first.

Jesus Christ himself became famous, but he is not a Superstar—and his followers aren’t called to fame either. The conversion stories we amplify shouldn’t be tributes to secular stardom but testimonies of God’s grace. Let’s not orient our evangelism strategy to reach the famous at the expense of the forsaken, and let’s stop looking for celebrities to validate our faith.

Stefani McDade is theology editor at Christianity Today. Update (April 17, 2024): This story has been updated to note new celebrity conversions.

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