FDA Approves Generic Abortion Pill

Students for Life leader calls the move “a stain on the Trump presidency.”

iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus

Today’s primary abortion battleground is the prescription pad.

Now that most abortions are chemical rather than surgical, pro-life advocates have amped up pressure on lawmakers and officials to restrict access to abortion pills—but the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week approved another generic version of the drug mifepristone.

The move is a reversal from just over a week before, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA commissioner Marty Makary confirmed plans to reexamine the safety of mifepristone.

Conservatives had been asking for the review for months, prompted in part by a study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC).

“The FDA just said it would do a new serious safety study—so why approve another generic now?” asked Lila Rose, president of Live Action.

Kennedy claimed the FDA gave the drug a green light only because federal law requires the agency approve generics that are identical to brand-name drugs already on the market.

The FDA first authorized a generic version of mifepristone from GenBioPro in 2019. The company says it accounts for two-thirds of mifepristone in the US. Drugmaker Evita Solutions expects its newly approved generic to be available starting January 2026.

“This reckless decision by the FDA to expand the availability of abortion drugs is unconscionable,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “These dangerous drugs take the lives of unborn children, place women and underage girls at serious risk, empower abusers, and trample the pro-life laws enacted by states across the nation.”

Dannenfelser fundamentally opposes abortion for ending life in the womb but also noted that the drugs can result in hemorrhaging, infection, and sepsis in patients.

Doctors prescribe mifepristone, along with a dose of misoprostol, to induce abortions up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. The drugs can be dangerous to women in pregnancies further along as well as in ectopic pregnancies, when the embryo grows outside the uterus.

The EPPC study reported higher levels of complications resulting from medication abortions—1 in 10 by its count—as more women take the pills without adequate medical oversight. Last year, a quarter of abortions occurred without patients seeing a doctor in person, instead getting medication prescribed through telehealth visits.

Kennedy said women taking mifepristone have fewer safeguards since the Biden administration dropped requirements for providers to dispense the drugs in person, often after a sonogram. In a September 19 letter, Kennedy and Makary told a group of Republican state attorneys general that their concerns over mifepristone “merit close examination” and that HHS is “committed to studying the adverse consequences.”

The Biden administration removed mifepristone’s in-person dispensing rule without studying the safety risks. We are filling that gap. Last month, I joined @DrMakaryFDA in writing to state attorneys general, pledging to review all the evidence — including real-world outcomes — on… pic.twitter.com/G0eE4H4y42
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) October 2, 2025

Pro-life leaders see the recent drug approval as undercutting that commitment. Dannenfelser criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the issue and told The Washington Post that it should be an “easy lift” for officials to restore the previous safety regulations. “‘Powerless’ is an adjective no one uses to describe this administration when facing trouble,” Dannenfelser said.

Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins said the approval was “a stain on the Trump Presidency and another sign that the deep state at the FDA must go.” She blamed officials for “putting industry interests over patient safety.”

Missouri senator Josh Hawley said he’s “lost confidence in the leadership at FDA.”

Former vice president Mike Pence called the decision “a complete betrayal of the pro-life movement that elected President Trump” and said Kennedy, once an independent who favored legal abortion, was unfit to lead HHS.

During his confirmation hearing in March, Makary faced questions over whether he would continue to permit access to mifepristone by telehealth.

The Biden administration made permanent what was at first a pandemic provision. Senators accused Makary of hedging on the issue when the former Johns Hopkins surgeon said, “I have no preconceived plans on mifepristone policy except to take a solid, hard look at the data and to meet with the professional career scientists who have reviewed the data at the FDA.”

When the FDA first approved mifepristone and misoprostol for abortion in 2000, they made up just 5 percent of abortions in clinical settings. That figure is now 63 percent. Abortion by mail has taken off among women in states where there are few abortion businesses or where post–Dobbs abortion bans are in effect.

Pro-life advocates have raised safety concerns around the potential for partners to obtain abortion pills and give them to pregnant women without consent. In the UK, a “Pills by Post” program that also took off during the pandemic faces similar scrutiny. There, a man who spiked a woman’s drink with drugs from the program received a sentence of 17 years in prison.

In December, a new Texas law will make it possible for anyone to sue a doctor who prescribes abortion pills, a company that mails them, or an individual who orders them for others. Successful plaintiffs who are related to the unborn child can receive at least $100,000 from the defendant. Others can receive $10,000 and must donate the rest of the penalty amount to a charity or nonprofit.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Church Life

Fighting Korea’s Loneliness Epidemic with Cafés and Convenience Stores

Jennifer Park

Seoul recently introduced free public services to tackle social isolation. Christians have been doing that for years.

The interior of the Gwanak mind convenience store.

Image Courtesy of Jennifer Park

During the day, 30-year-old Hae-ri Jeong seemed busy and cheerful as she taught English and served as a youth group leader at her church in Seoul. Yet at night, she would return to her empty apartment and feel disappointed and anxious over a recent breakup with her boyfriend. At times, the emptiness overwhelmed her.

“It was hard to open up even to my close friends,” she recalled. “I was afraid it would seem too trivial or make me look even more pitiful.”

One night this summer, she stared at her phone in her hand for a long time before calling the local mental health crisis hotline. When the counselor told her, “You can say anything to me,” Jeong burst into tears. After a lengthy conversation, the counselor guided her to a government-run center called a “mind convenience store” near her house, where she could meet with a counselor in person.

Jeong is one of many Seoul residents struggling with loneliness. In the past two decades, the proportion of single-person households has grown from 16 percent to 40 percent. An estimated 130,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 are socially isolated. Nationwide, the government recorded more than 3,600 cases of godoksa, or “lonely deaths”—where a person dies alone and remains undiscovered for an extended period—in 2023. South Korea has had the highest suicide rate among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries for the past two decades.

In response, the Seoul government pledged to spend 451 billion won ($321 million USD) over the next five years on its “Seoul Without Loneliness” project, which would include expanding the 24/7 hotline and community spaces. One of its initiatives is opening mind convenience stores, which provide citizens a place to rest, enjoy tea or simple meals, and receive psychological assessments or counseling, all free of charge. Meanwhile, Christian groups in Korea have long sought to create third spaces, such as cafés, for people to gather and build community.

Convenience stores like 7-Eleven or FamilyMart are ingrained into everyday life in East Asia, where they often appear on every block. The clean, brightly lit stores are filled with food, drinks, stationery, and toiletries and allow customers to purchase train tickets and receive packages. Recent books, like Kim Ho-yeon’s The Second Chance Convenience Store, have depicted convenience stores as places for lonely misfits to find community.

That idea led to the city’s creation of mind convenient stores. CT visited the Gwanak branch in Sillim-dong, Seoul, on a rainy September weekday. Inside, AstroTurf covers the floor as several grannies chat in lawn chairs surrounded by trees and potted plants. A counter offers tea to brew in a glass teapot, while shelves of instant noodles cover a wall. An adjoining room serves as a movie theater and lecture hall with a ceiling-mounted projector and flexible seating.

The space also includes several private counseling rooms and onsite counselors. After registering as members of the mind convenience store, participants can earn points by taking part in counseling sessions or volunteer activities. They can then use the points to join other programs or receive food within the store.

According to social worker Joo-a Son, more than 660 people submitted membership applications to the branch between April and August this year, and more than 100 people use the space daily. Some visitors come just to sit quietly for a while before leaving.

“For those people who have been isolated for a long time, even making an appointment for counseling can be burdensome,” she explained. The center, which is open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and until 1 p.m. on Saturdays, helps participants build ongoing relationships within the community.

One visitor, 45-year-old Cheol Kim, had long struggled with financial hardship and depression, which led to suicidal thoughts. One day he noticed a banner on the street advertising the center. He stepped inside, where he was able to eat and receive free counseling. “I felt the kindness and warmth of the welcome here, and it gave me the courage to overcome depression,” Kim said.

Churches and Christian ministries have also long sought to help lonely people in Korea’s big citiesby creating spaces for community to grow. For instance, Pastor Hyo-seong Kim opened up Youth Space Eum on the fourth floor of a commercial building in the Gwanak district ten years ago in response to the rise of single-person households. Local churches and Baekseok University, a Christian college 50 miles south of Seoul, helped found and sponsor Eum, which includes rooms for people to study or hold seminars.

“I wanted to help people struggling with loneliness and to meet them outside the church so I could learn their language and culture,” Kim said. “We opened this space to everyone, whether Christian or not.”

At first glance, Eum looks like a typical café, with a long wooden table and bookshelves lining the walls. A coffee machine is available for visitors to use at no cost. Yet Eum does more than provide a space for friends to catch up or remote workers to set up camp. It holds monthly community gatherings, annual trips, and ongoing counseling by Kim. Through partnerships with the government and businesses, it also offers job-counseling and mentorship programs.

“Faith-based values are at the core,” Kim said, “but what we aim is to reach out to young people to provide practical help.” Kim believes that churches need to care for people who fall through the cracks of social services. “Isolation cannot be solved with short-term projects,” he noted. “Sustainability is what matters most.”

Every summer, Eum hosts a Worship & Lifestyle & Balance camp on Jeju Island. It invites about a dozen young people to eat, rest, and fellowship together for four days. At the close of each day, they share their reflections and encourage one another. “It is a time of worship, but what is most essential in this time is a spirit of hospitality and the courage to be loved,” Kim said. “In the midst of weary lives, participants experience the love God has given and from that love find renewal of body and spirit that points them toward their ultimate direction.”

Meanwhile, in Busan, the second-largest city of South Korea, Christians also work to tackle loneliness by running a place called Promised Land, a basement venue designed as a gathering place for young people.

As visitors descend the narrow staircase to the entrance, the noise of the street fades into silence. At the bottom, a wooden door opens into a room that feels more like a hidden retreat center than a performance hall. Inside, rows of wooden chairs rest on stacked pallets, facing a stage carpeted in green turf. The walls are covered with signs of community life—photographs of visitors, colorful flyers, and a poster for a Christian play called Mother.

Founded in 1998 by Seung-hak Kim and Jung-hee Choi of Donggwang Church in Busan, the café began as a place for small gatherings. When Whoojin Park began volunteering two years later, it was on the verge of closure due to unpaid rent. Park took over ownership, covering the rent first through fundraising and then by taking on other part-time jobs.

“[Promised Land] should not become the possession of a particular church or organization but remain a faith-based commons where anyone can enter, stay, converse, and find renewal,” Park said.

Two decades later, as the COVID-19 lockdowns cut into the café’s business yet again, Promised Land began to rent out the space to Christian and local community groups. It has hosted plays, concerts, art exhibits, poetry readings, and seminars.

On Sundays, the space is closed to the public and used as a worship site for church plants on a one-year rotating basis. More than 14 congregations have gathered there so far. The hall remains open to small groups who wish to use it for worship or community meetings. Rather than charging fixed rental fees, the venue invites contributions through freewill offerings, a practice intended to keep the space accessible, with lower barriers.

Promised Land hopes to create an “urban mission infrastructure” that responds to the isolation and loneliness of people. Park highlighted the importance of place. He has preserved the same basement venue for nearly three decades because “only a space that holds memory can reconnect people with their past selves.”

Back in Seoul, Jeong noted that her late-night phone call to the mental health hotline was the first step of her journey toward healing. “I felt my anxiety calm down during the conversation,” she said. “It didn’t solve the problem itself, but just being able to open up to someone gave me comfort.”

Looking back, Jeong said she hopes others will not carry their burdens alone. “I want to tell people not to be afraid of reaching out for help,” she said. “Even when life feels empty, God’s love never abandons us. That truth has carried me—and I believe it can remind others that they are not alone.”

- More from Jennifer Park

News

John Cornyn’s MAGA-land Challenge

Harvest Prude in Austin, Texas

The incumbent senator is up against his strongest challenge yet in populist-right leader Ken Paxton.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Look, the legislative staffer said, all Ken Paxton has to do is go down to South Texas and say women are “crazy,” and he’ll have the divorced men’s vote in the bag.

That’s the clean version of his remarks. The unedited version seemed to win some grudging respect at his table. The four other 20-something men in coat and tie laughed. One shook his head, a mild reproof.

Their tongues (and collars) had been loosened by sipping cans of Lone Star in the shadowy recesses of the Cloak Room, a famous basement bar just south of the Texas Capitol.

They were relaxing at the end of a steamy August day. One of the off-duty staffers queued up another Freddy Fender song on the classic jukebox near the entrance. The twang of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” began to play, and the five talked about the question launching a thousand debates among politically involved Texans: Who will win what could be one of the most expensive Republican primary races in US history?

Attorney General Paxton, a family values advocate embroiled in a contentious divorce suit, was indicted in 2015, impeached in 2023, and acquitted by a 16–14 vote of the Texas Senate. Nevertheless, Paxton has had an edge in polls regarding a likely GOP primary race next March against incumbent senator John Cornyn, a conservative thought to have a much better chance than Paxton does of winning against a Democratic opponent next November.

Both Cornyn and Paxton have worked closely with President Donald Trump and are vying for the coveted White House endorsement, leading the exasperated president to tell reporters, “I wish they weren’t running against each other,” and to say he would make a decision down the road. A primary fight would be incredibly expensive, if it’s anything like past races: During Ted Cruz’s and Colin Allred’s Lone Star face-off in 2024, the candidates raised nearly $200 million.

I spent a week in Texas to get a sense of the race, interviewing government staffers, pro-life activists, Texas political insiders, Christian voters, and Cornyn. Paxton’s team did not respond to requests for an interview.

One place to start was Austin’s Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail, a ten-mile loop past gleaming downtown skyscrapers and a haze of no-see-ums breeding on the Colorado River. Hardcore sun worshipers ditched their shirts for calisthenics at an outdoor gym to do pull-ups and crunches. Others jogged solo. One white-haired man sped by on a bike, blasting Maroon 5 on a speaker loud enough to make passersby wince.

Just a few blocks away at the Texas Capitol, bristling with lawmakers and protesters during a special session, the talk was of flood disaster response and, more controversially, a partisan gerrymander that had drawn the ire and riposte of the governors of California and New York.

But no one at the Hike-and-Bike Trail was eager to talk politics. The calisthenics enthusiasts declined pausing their workout to talk about the Senate race. Another couple, both Democrats, seemed ashamed to admit they weren’t yet paying attention and “needed to get educated.” Luke, a 26-year-old landscaper working on the trail, said he doesn’t know much about either candidate and isn’t sure yet how he’ll vote.

The trail was a stark contrast with the sleek, modern lines of The Austonian, a luxury condo close to the Capitol. Cornyn, on a brief stop there while crisscrossing the state, spoke with me in a sterile-looking conference room.

Cornyn has been campaigning since 1984, and it’s a grind for him and his wife, Sandy, who travels with him. Cornyn credits her for saving him from having to camp out in bachelor-pad digs popular among his colleagues or sleeping in his office.

The two have been married for 46 years. Whether to campaign again was a joint decision. When he posed the question to her, she was matter-of-fact: “When I told her what the alternative was, she said, ‘You have to run.’”

Incumbent Cornyn has served in the Senate since 2002. He’s a courtly, 73-year-old politician who on the Hill is known among his colleagues as more workhorse than showhorse. He’s more likely found hammering out the finer details of a bill than making appearances on the Sunday-show circuit. In the 1980s, Cornyn was a district court judge in San Antonio’s Bexar County. From there, he served on the state’s Supreme Court for seven years.

A book by Thomas T. Fox about Cornyn’s political rise dubs him a “quiet strategist.” For much of his career, that approach has paid off. He sits on some of the most important committees: Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Finance, Intelligence. During the last Congress, GovTrack ranked Cornyn as the second-most-prolific lawmaker, with 19 of the bills he introduced becoming law. During the two years before that he headed the Senate leaderboard for the number of laws enacted.

But that’s part of why some Texans are less than pleased with Cornyn. In 2022, Cornyn was a high-profile negotiator on a bipartisan gun law following the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting.

The bill did not restrict access to guns for law-abiding citizens. It did offer, among other changes, funding for increasing school security and incentives for states that do implement red flag laws. During that time, at a state party convention in Houston, hundreds of Republicans booed when Cornyn took the stage.

The response showed how political winds have shifted. The center of gravity on the right has moved from the hawkish, pro-business, fiscally conservative Bush-dynasty-era Republicans to the gloves-off, Make America Great Again populist right. This newer right is quick to criticize any overtures to the other side. Bipartisanship reads as betrayal.

“Nobody is going to confuse me with Donald Trump,” Cornyn acknowledged—but that hasn’t stopped him from working closely with the president. A super PAC supporting Cornyn blasted the airwaves with an ad campaign highlighting that Cornyn “votes with President Trump over 99 percent of the time.”

Cornyn is betting that voters will consider his long record when making their decision. But for the GOP base, “quiet strategy” has fallen out of favor. Has Cornyn?

His opponent, Ken Paxton, certainly is making that case. Paxton, who has been attorney general in Texas since 2015, has built a reputation as one of MAGA’s most aggressive attack dogs, from leading a charge challenging the 2020 presidential election results to suing the Biden administration over immigration policies. He wants Texans to send a politician more self-consciously molded in the MAGA-warrior archetype.

In an advertisement, Paxton said the senator betrayed the America First movement when in May 2023, asked about Trump’s chances in 2024, Cornyn said, “Time has passed him by.” Cornyn later endorsed Trump.

Paxton’s biggest challenge in the race is his history of legal and personal controversies. Allegations of adultery were something of an open secret that did figure in the 2023 impeachment debates.

Paxton admitted to staffers in 2018 that he’d had an affair, but said it was over. The trial examined whether Paxton had acted corruptly. He faced allegations of bribery and abusing the power of his office. The prosecutors alleged that Paxton misused the powers of his office to help Nate Paul, a donor and real estate mogul, in part because Paul had hired the woman Paxton was seeing. At the time, his wife Angela Paxton’s support was one reason the Senate acquitted him of those charges. Angela Paxton, also a state senator at the time, attended the trial but abstained from voting.

Paxton’s lawyer during the trial, Tony Buzbee, said the allegations weren’t relevant to the case. “Imagine if we impeached everybody here in Austin that had had an affair,” he said during cross-examination. “We’d be impeaching for the next 100 years, wouldn’t we?”

Paxton has faced allegations of corrupt acts over his years of public service, but he’s never been convicted of a crime. Last year, he struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid a trial in a felony securities fraud case nearly a decade in the making. An agreement on community service and payment of nearly $300,000 in restitution led to the close of the case last year. Federal investigators also closed a whistleblower case this year concerning corruption allegations from his former aides.

Scandal hasn’t prevented him from winning reelection, and Paxton has lambasted the allegations as political witch hunts. But his marriage has been a casualty: This summer, Angela Paxton filed for a divorce. On social media, she said “biblical grounds” and “recent discoveries” led to the move. In the divorce filing, she cited adultery as a reason for ending the marriage and noted the two had ceased living together as spouses since 2024. They had been married 38 years. They helped found a nondenominational evangelical church in Frisco, Stonebriar Community Church, and would later attend Dallas megachurch Prestonwood Baptist Church, according to Texas Monthly. Paxton has attributed his success to getting “the Christian community out to vote.”

Cornyn, who was raised in the Church of Christ, is not the type of politician to wear faith on his sleeve. But in our conversation he did connect faith with the thorny questions this campaign has raised: “I don’t hold myself out as the gold standard on anything. But I do think that’s one of the important issues that’s going to be decided here: Does character still matter in politics?”

Cornyn added, “Everybody makes mistakes. The most important thing is, what do you learn from those mistakes? Or do you just keep repeating them over and over and over again, which seems to be the case for Mr. Paxton?”

Greg Jeffers, a Christian voter who attends an Anglican church, said that years ago he would have assumed evangelical voters would be turned off by a candidate undergoing a divorce due to cheating. He’s no longer sure that’s true, with national politics casting a long shadow over state and local matters. “The question is, is Trump the only one immune from the sort of criticism that would normally take out a politician? Or is Paxton also?”

He said that in his circles Christians are turned off by Paxton’s cloud of scandal. So is one conservative Christian group, Texas Values Action, which rescinded an endorsement of Paxton after news of the divorce broke. Texas Values Action president Jonathan Saenz said the revelation concerns a lot of Christians, with many asking, “If he’s not faithful to his wife, will he be faithful to us voters?”

Texas Values Action has worked with both Paxton and Cornyn and has not so far made a choice for the primary. Saenz said, “Many Republican, Christian, conservative voters still want to feel like they’re not being asked to overlook … or sort of lay down their Christian beliefs when they go to the ballot box.”

The state is more religious compared with the US population at large. According to Pew Research Center, 67 percent of Texans identify as Christian, with nearly 30 percent of those identifying as evangelical Protestant. Another 5 percent identified as historically Black protestants.

While Paxton is weighted down with scandal, Cornyn struggles with, well, vibes. “He seems a bit detached from your average grassroots voter in the state of Texas,” Saenz said.

Perhaps the perception of detachment strikes more acutely because of the contrast with Cornyn’s Senate counterpart: “Every other night Ted Cruz is probably on Fox News or some other national news broadcast.”

Still, Cornyn’s record of bipartisanship and “pleasant gentleman personality” would come in handy in a general election, Saenz said.

Paxton’s bomb-thrower approach has plenty of fans, particularly among those most likely to show up for the primary. “Activist Christian groups that are more engaged in the political and electoral process, those folks tend to favor fighters,” said Cal Jillson, political science department chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “They’re willing to argue that God has always used flawed vessels for his purposes.”

Texas political insider Michael Quinn Sullivan is not endorsing either candidate, but he praised Paxton’s work as the state’s top law enforcement official: “Ken Paxton did a great job suing the Biden administration”—more than 100 times.

Sullivan publishes Texas Scorecard, which maintains a directory of lawmaker ratings and provides right-of-center content. Texas Scorecard censures non-MAGA politicians, and everything at its headquarters in the Austin suburb of Leander seems oversize, from four large-screen TVs to the flags—a “Come and Take It” and “Don’t Tread On Me” among them—draping the walls.

The big, airy space is a fitting setting for Sullivan, who at six foot four towers over everyone in the office and keeps his large hound dog, Freddy, nearby. Both are very hospitable, though Freddy’s friendly overtures are somewhat smothered once Sullivan puts him on a leash.

The Texas Monthly and The Dallas Morning News have deemed Sullivan “the enforcer” and the state’s most influential unelected Republican. He dismissed concerns that Paxton’s ethical questions will cost Republicans a Senate seat: “When the plumber came to my house this morning, I didn’t give him a theology test. I didn’t quiz him on the state of his family. I wanted to make sure he had his plumber’s license and that he had the tools to do the job right.”

Sullivan, who identifies with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), said many of the criticisms of Paxton—like that he’s the “more flawed” candidate Democrats want to go up against—are attempts to play “17D chess which doesn’t actually apply to anything in the real world.” A coffee table in the Texas Scorecard office features a chess set in shades of brown. Not a piece is out of place.

Sullivan’s line in defense of Paxton may account for his lead against Cornyn in the polls: nearly 15 percentage points in May. But that was before the divorce news and before Cornyn’s allies began an aggressive advertising campaign. Recently, according to RealClear Polling’s average, Paxton’s lead was only two percentage points.

Cornyn’s allies are betting that once voters learn more about Paxton’s flaws and Cornyn’s long record, the incumbent will take the lead.

Joe Pojman, founder of Texas Alliance for Life, said Cornyn’s quiet strategy is still needed in politics: “He is not flashy. He is substantive. He is not superficial. I think that that will prevail, as it did the last two times.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Culture

You Haven’t Heard Worship Music like This

Joel Heng Hartse

John Van Deusen’s praise is hard-won and occasionally wordless.

Image Courtesy of Anotherland / Edits by CT

There’s a song on John Van Deusen’s epic new album, As Long as I Am in the Tent of This Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise (Pt. 1), called “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship.” You’d be forgiven if you assumed this is a cover of the Matt Redman classic. After all, Van Deusen himself is a worship leader at a church in his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, and he’s clear that this recording—unlike many others from the two decades he’s been making them—is indeed a worship album.

But careful readers will notice that Van Deusen’s tune, while it borrows the lyric from Redman’s song, has a different title. (The original is called “Heart of Worship.”) And any listener will soon understand that Van Deusen’s “version” is a joyful subversion. It’s loud; distorted; played in an odd, shifting time signature; and, most noticeably, absent of any lyrics or vocals.

This isn’t typical of the whole album, much of which has more in common with mainstream contemporary worship music—big, anthemic crescendos; simple, repeated choruses; and lyrics focused on personal devotion to Jesus. Tent of This Body interprets the genre through Van Deusen’s immersion in Pacific Northwest indie rock and his personal struggle with what it means to love and praise God in the midst of disorientation and depression.

Still, the raucous, instrumental “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship” does feel like an important statement.

“It’s not a flippant ‘Your song sucks; mine is kind of cool and weird,’” Van Deusen told me in a Zoom call from his home in Anacortes. “It’s actually a nod. It’s my way of saying,‘I see you, Matt Redman.’ [And] it’s meant to say to the 14-year-old in Tennessee who might, for whatever reason, stumble upon this, ‘Hey, this is worship.’”

Van Deusen said he wants Tent of This Body both to be widely accessible and to push the boundaries of Christian music. This isn’t surprising given his artistic history. The son of a pastor, Van Deusen was a prolific songwriter from his teen years, cutting his teeth in Western Washington’s vibrant (and secular) indie rock scene alongside peers like Death Cab for Cutie in Bellingham, Washington; Modest Mouse in Issaquah; and Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie in Anacortes. Van Deusen won a Seattle-wide contest for under-21 musicians with his band The Lonely Forest, which made some half-dozen albums. The band toured extensively, was signed to a major-label imprint by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, and then broke up, all before Van Deusen turned 25.

While The Lonely Forest made rousing, even inspirational music—“Turn Off This Song and Go Outside” and “We Sing in Time” are as bombastic and uplifting as anything Switchfoot did in the early 2000s—Van Deusen describes his time in the band as rich and exciting, but also difficult, fraught with addiction and friction in his young marriage. That led him to leave the group and recommit himself to his faith.

The four-part solo album series Van Deusen released after The Lonely Forest’s breakup, (I Am) Origami, reflects this shift in priorities. It lays bare the sometimes-challenging balance between finding a steadfast faith in Christ and feeling alienated from the trappings of evangelical Christian culture—a chafing which many former (and current) evangelical musicians have experienced. Some, like Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, end up leaving the faith. Others, like the band Luxury, find a home in another Christian tradition. Some contend with deconstruction and end up reaffirming their beliefs, like Joshua Porter of the band Showbread, who is now a pastor at an evangelical church.

Probably the best-known album from Origami, 2018’s Every Power Wide Awake, is unabashedly worshipful, the product of Van Deusen’s own prayer life and Scripture reading as well as Oswald Chambers’s devotional classic My Utmost for His Highest. But it sounds almost nothing like stereotypical worship music, having much more in common with Seattle indie rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie or Sunny Day Real Estate. (For what it’s worth, The Gospel Coalition ranked Every Power Wide Awake at No. 4 on its list of “The Best Christian Albums of the 2010s.”)

Van Deusen describes the experience of seeking out art beyond the evangelical media culture of his youth in a way that will be familiar to many of his generation: “I left Switchfoot, Newsboys, and Audio Adrenaline for Radiohead and Nirvana. I found in other musical artists lyrical truth that felt authentic. And so I fled to this new land.”

But once he arrived and “tried to live a life without Christ,” he realized he was “really hungry for something more. … That’s where my second and, truthfully, the real spiritual journey for me within a religious context began.”

Van Deusen still often speaks of living in the “dissonance” between the Northwest’s musical culture, in which “you should probably be ashamed of yourself if you are going to make music that is religious,” and the world of church music.

“When I walk into a writers’ retreat with a bunch of Christian songwriters,” he said, “I’m thinking, Have you guys listened to The Microphones or Mount Eerie, or have you ever heard Sonic Youth? Did you watch Twin Peaks? Do you read far-future science fiction? Every once in a while, someone is like, ‘Yes.’ But in general I just don’t fit in.”

“And yet at the same time,” he continued, “I love my Lord and Savior so much. I love singing about him. I love talking to him. I love hearing other people talk about him. … When I get around other believers in Christ, even those who have different political views, when we start to talk about God’s love, God’s forgiveness, his grace, his mercy, his artistic brilliance that literally goes beyond comprehension—I love it!”

It’s a beautiful and productive tension that comes out on Tent of This Body, where noisy jams, Weezer-style power pop, sound collages, and bombastic ’90s rock drums rub shoulders with polished-sounding praise choruses that wouldn’t be out of place at a Hillsong-style church service—the repeated refrain of “Hallelujah, what a love” on “You Never Let Go” or “Jesus, you are our home” on “You Are Our Home.”

Van Deusen hopes Tent of This Body will encourage listeners to imagine worship music as something broader than they might otherwise have, and perhaps to write praise tunes on their own terms—including out of a place of pain. While the sound-collage track “Self-Aware, Ready to Die” is only 30 seconds long, it hints at the depression Van Deusen described experiencing while making the album.

“I often felt this heavy sense of simultaneously feeling bliss in worshiping God and taking creative risks and being who I think God has made me to be, while also feeling a really heavy sense of ‘I don’t know how much longer I can exist in this dissonance’ that we’ve described—not just the dissonance of culture but just my personal dissonance of existence,” he said.

Though these songs are overwhelmingly praise-oriented as compared to the occasionally darker (I Am) Origami series, the praise is still hard-won (or, to venture Leonard Cohen’s brilliant but now-cliché lyric, it’s a “broken hallelujah”). Songs like the raucous “Let Me Rest My Head,” which begs, “Silence all the feedback / Screaming and warning” or the plaintive “Answer Me God,” which demands, “What must I do to reach Your ear down here?” exist alongside the hopeful assuredness of “Knowing” and “You Never Let Go,” which sing of God’s faithfulness and providence.

“It’s a strange thing to make a worship record where I’m singing honestly and earnestly and I’m worshiping and I’m praising and I’m thanking God while also recognizing that this dissonance I feel, it doesn’t dissipate just because I’m doing the worshiping,” Van Deusen said. “I don’t know how to talk about that.”

Sometimes, though, you don’t have to talk about it. As in “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship,” some things can be expressed with less—or more—than words.

Joel Heng Hartse is the author of several books, including Dancing About Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do: Writing About Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable. He is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

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Ideas

Excerpt

‘Don’t Take It If You Don’t Need It’

From The Bulletin

The Trump administration releases new recommendations for Tylenol use during pregnancy.

Valerie Macon / Contributor / Getty

Last month, the White House announced new research aimed at treating and reducing autism. One headline claim linked acetaminophen (Tylenol) use during pregnancy with increased autism diagnoses. Administration plans include a push for label changes, notices to physicians, and a public awareness campaign.

We want CT readers to be informed about the risks and benefits, so The Bulletin sat down with Dr. Lydia Dugdale, practicing clinician and director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University, to learn more. Here is a tightened excerpt from the interview. Listen to the full conversation in episode 211.

What research did the White House press conference present?

In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers from Harvard, the University of Massachusetts, UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), and the Mount Sinai Hospital explored the relationship between Tylenol and various neurodegenerative disorders, including autism and ADHD. This study prompted the conversation about Tylenol and pregnant women.

This team found 46 studies in the scientific and medical literature: 27 of 46 showed a positive association between Tylenol taken during pregnancy and neurodegenerative disease in the child. Nine studies showed nothing. Four showed a protective effect: You were less likely to have a child with these diseases.

Some of these studies were done very well, and some were less accurate. The higher the quality of the study, the stronger the association between prenatal Tylenol use and a diagnosis of ADHD, autism, or other neurodegenerative disorders. In all, 8 of the 46 studies looked specifically at prenatal Tylenol use and autism. Five of those eight showed a positive association.

These studies show correlation, not causation?

To do a causation study, you’d need to take a group of women who are pregnant, have them take 2,000 milligrams of Tylenol a day, and see if it eventually hurts their children. That would be completely unethical. You cannot do that sort of study, especially when we have this data that’s concerning.

The data suggest correlation, not causation. The trimester of Tylenol ingestion mattered, and the amount of Tylenol ingested mattered. In this study, women who took more Tylenol were more likely to have a child with autism. We cannot say one causes the other, but this gives us pause.

The rhetoric we’ve heard forever is Tylenol is completely safe. But I can tell you from 25 years in medicine that our understanding of science changes. This is where physicians need a lot of humility in giving out this advice.

What is the current recommendation on Tylenol in pregnancy?

The researchers on this study said the safest thing still in pregnancy is Tylenol. Tylenol brings down fever and treats pain. If a woman is pregnant and has a high fever, the fever itself can damage the child. We do need to treat fever. If pain is insurmountable, we do need to treat pain. But everything in medicine is a balance between risks and benefits.

The first and most important action is to talk with your doctor. I’m not giving out medical advice. Having said that, the study showed that the more you take, the higher the risk. So the recommendation is to take Tylenol when needed under the guidance of a physician so your doctor keeps track of how much you’re taking. Don’t take it if you don’t need it.

Having had kids myself, I know lots of aches, pains, and strange feelings come with pregnancy. You might be inclined to reach for a Tylenol just to take the edge off. If you are someone who is used to popping a pill when you’re feeling any kind of discomfort, pause. If you don’t need to take it, please don’t take it. But certainly if you’re having a fever or severe pain, talk to your doctor and then take it judiciously.

How do Christians keep scientific developments like this in perspective in a broken world?

All of us have to make decisions and live in the world with what we know. And what we know is changing constantly. A certain amount of “let go and let God” attitude is helpful here.

You think about the children who had thalidomide exposure in the 1950s and ’60s. These children were born with no arms because their mothers were given an anti-nausea medicine that everybody swore was safe. That’s nobody’s fault. No one was out to cause these birth defects. We all live in a world where we are scarred and where we try to make the best decisions with the information we have.

Part of every human story is that sometimes we just make the wrong decision. Sometimes, we know what’s good and true and beautiful, and we refuse to do it because of our own fallen natures.

We need to have a certain amount of grace on ourselves and on one another, recognizing that ultimately all of this will be redeemed. That’s the hope that we hold on to.

The information provided in this article is for general knowledge and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.

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News

Gateway Church Founder Robert Morris Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Abuse

Emily Belz

The criminal conviction comes decades after the abuse and a year after the survivor shared her account online.

Former Gateway Church founding pastor Robert Morris

Alex Brandon / AP

The former pastor of one of the biggest churches in Texas has pleaded guilty to child sex abuse that took place over 30 years ago.

Robert Morris, the founder of Gateway Church on the outskirts of Dallas, will serve six months in an Oklahoma jail under a ten-year suspended sentence and register as a sex offender. Under the plea deal, Morris will also pay the survivor, Cindy Clemishire, $270,000, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Morris is among the highest-profile pastors to face a legal sentence for child sexual abuse, since decades-old cases rarely result in criminal convictions or guilty pleas.

Morris, 64, pleaded guilty to all five counts in the case, charges of lewd or indecent acts with a child. Law enforcement officers cuffed him and led him out of the Oklahoma courthouse where he was sentenced.

The crimes took place in the 1980s and came to light in June last year when Clemishire publicly disclosed that Morris had abused her as a 12-year-old.

The molestation took place over four years, Clemishire told the abuse watchdog blog Wartburg Watch, and took place at her family home in Hominy, Oklahoma, where Morris would stay as a traveling pastor. She said Morris would come into her room and touch her under her clothes, with the molestation eventually escalating to attempted intercourse. Morris was married and in his 20s at the time.

Morris resigned from Gateway following Clemishire’s disclosure last year, and after an independent investigation, the church removed four elders for knowing his abuse involved a minor.

Gateway elders initially said they believed the “extramarital relationship” was with a “young lady” and not a 12-year-old, and they said Morris had already undergone restoration. The church later apologized for that characterization. A law firm hired by the church for an independent investigation did not find additional victims.

At the court hearing, Clemishire told Morris directly that she was “not a young lady, but a child. You committed a crime against me.” NBC News reported from the courtroom that Clemishire’s 82-year-old father was crying.

One of Morris’s attorneys told the Associated Press that Morris pleaded guilty to bring the legal matter to an end for the sake of him and his family and Clemishire and her family.

“While he believes that he long since accepted responsibility in the eyes of God and that Gateway Church was a manifestation of that acceptance, he readily accepted responsibility in the eyes of the law,” said Bill Mateja.

Clemishire continued in her victim impact statement in court, “Today is a new beginning for me, my family, and friends who have been by my side through this horrendous journey. I leave this courtroom today not as a victim, but a survivor.”

She added that she hoped that her story would help other victims, to “lift their shame and allow them to speak up. I hope that laws continue to change and new ones are written so children and victims’ rights are better protected.”

Criminal convictions for child sexual abuse are unusual to begin with. The mean age for victims abused as minors to disclose abuse is in their 40s or 50s. When victims typically come forward with their stories decades later, civil penalties might be the only remedy available to them due to statutes of limitation.

Oklahoma attorney general Gentner Drummond said when an Oklahoma grand jury indicted Morris in March last year that the statute of limitations did not apply to Morris because he was never a resident of Oklahoma. The state’s legal system established during the frontier era was meant to deter people from committing a crime and fleeing the state, he said.

“This case is all the more despicable because the perpetrator was a pastor who exploited his position of trust and authority,” Drummond said in a statement on Thursday. “The victim in this case has waited far too many years for this day.”

Morris founded Gateway Church in 2000. It grew to tens of thousands of congregants at multiple campuses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Gateway produced famous worship leaders like Kari Jobe, and Morris was a spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump in his first term.

Since Clemishire’s disclosure, Gateway congregants have also filed a lawsuit against Morris and Gateway, alleging the fraudulent use of their tithes. A federal judge recently ruled that that suit can proceed. Clemishire is also pursuing a civil case against the church.

In the months after Morris’s resignation, attendance at Gateway dropped precipitously. That summer in Dallas-area churches a number of megachurch leaders resigned over sexual misconduct.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

A Quiet Life Sets Up a Loud Testimony

J. D. Greear

Excellence and steady faithfulness may win the culture war.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Twenty-one years ago, before social media, an American Airlines pilot went viral for his evangelism strategy. He had just returned from a mission trip with his church to Costa Rica. The trip had made a huge impact on him, and as he taxied the 767 down the runway at LAX, he felt God was trying to tell him something. He picked up the intercom to make his usual announcement to the passengers and then decided to add another message.

“Would all of the Christians on board raise your hands?” In the cabin, the passengers looked around to see if it was a joke. A few people gingerly raised their hands in the air. He continued by encouraging passengers to use this time to talk to the Christians on board about their faith.

But his bold move for God didn’t quite “land” how he had hoped. How would you feel if the pilot of your plane suddenly told you to get ready to meet Jesus? Some on the plane pulled out their phones to call their family members in a panic.

They arrived safely at the airport, and the passengers disembarked with a bizarre story to tell. The zealous pilot, meanwhile, was summoned to see his supervisors.

If you’re anything like me, you admire his courage. But you also might be thinking, There’s no way I could pull a stunt like that and keep my job. You’re probably right. Many Christians wonder what bold, faithful gospel witness looks like in a 21st-century world where religious pluralism is axiomatic. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a popular spiritual guru, famously said that calling someone else’s moral or spiritual approach wrong is the equivalent of “spiritual racism.”

Furthermore, Christians increasingly find many of their most cherished beliefs outside the Overton Window of what is considered acceptable public discourse. Sociologist Aaron Renn says that we Christians have now entered a “negative world,” meaning that not only has Christian faith lost its status as a societal foundation but also it is now considered in many places to be an enemy to progress.

What does Christian witness look like in this kind of environment? Is our only recourse culture war, heading to the polls to elect a champion who can regain control of the societal intercoms?

The apostles Peter and Paul give a different, and rather unexpected, answer. They command Christians in exilic environments to “live quietly” (1 Thess. 4:11, ESV). Peter uses the word “honorably” instead of “quietly” in 1 Peter 2:12, but he’s pointing to the same idea. “Live quietly” may seem odd coming from Paul, whose preaching provoked a riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:23–41), or from Peter, who boldly accused his community of killing Christ by wicked hands (Acts 2:23). But as Peter and Paul both explain, the quiet life sets us up for a loud testimony.

The quiet life is not about living invisibly, however. It’s about working for the prosperity of your city and pointing people to Jesus as you do so. Peter and Paul outline five components for “living quietly.” These constitute the daily objective for every Christian, whether we go to work every day teaching third graders or directing the operations of a multinational conglomerate—or piloting a 767. Our life in today’s Babylon, they explain, should be creation-fulfilling, excellence-pursuing, holiness-reflecting, redemption-displaying, and mission-advancing.

First, believers should seek to fulfill the creation mandate through their careers and calling. The initial commission given to us, after all, was not the Great Commission, but the Creation Commission. By developing the world around us and making it a better place to live in, we glorify our Creator. It’s no accident that the first time the concept of being filled with the Spirit is used in the Bible, it’s in relation to a man’s woodworking skills, not his sermons (Ex. 31:1–5). Testimony to Christ begins not with our words but with our jobs (Gen. 1:28; Prov. 22:29).

Second, we pursue excellence in our work. We do so not for status or applause but because our work reflects the excellence of the one we serve. Daniel had an excellent spirit, which manifested itself, he tells us, in both his diligence and his integrity (Dan. 6:4). Even the smallest task, Paul tells us, can become a testimony when done “as working for the Lord” (Col. 3:23).

Third, the quiet life reflects God’s holiness, setting us apart through our purity and integrity. We have an ultimate Master in heaven, Paul tells us, and when we live with fairness and justice even when no one is watching, it points others to his existence (Col. 4:1). Peter tells us to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy, which will make us stand out like bright lights in a dark and depraved world, pointing others to the living God (1 Peter 1:15–16; Phil. 2:14–15).

Fourth, our lives should display redemption. In a broken world, believers put the gospel on display through forgiveness, grace, and radical acts of mercy. Living this way doesn’t mean eschewing a free-market, merit-based economy, but recognizing that behind this economy—superseding it—is an even more fundamental one based on grace. Christians look for ways to inject radical displays of grace as a reflection of the gospel. We see this patterned in Leviticus, where God commanded the Israelites to leave the corners of their fields unharvested so that the poor could glean from them (Lev. 19:9–10). Our kindness and patience point people to the Cross, the ultimate basis of the Christian’s economy (Eph. 4:32).

Finally, our lives should be mission-advancing. As Peter tells us and the life of Daniel illustrates for us, living quietly opens doors to share the gospel boldly and loudly. Our ordinary lives become platforms for extraordinary witness (Dan. 12:3; 1 Pet. 3:15).

These principles are all applications of Jeremiah’s command to the Jewish exiles in his day to settle into Babylon, seek its peace, and help make it a better place to live in (Jer. 29:4–7). Living by these principles provoked at least two Babylonian kings to profess faith in the God of Israel and prompted a gaggle of wise men many years later to leave the regions of Babylon in pursuit of the Christ child.

Daniel and his generation offer a model for Christians seeking to live out bold testimony in an increasingly hostile, “negative” world. Consider: Daniel was so bold and courageous in his Babylon that he ended up in a lion’s den because of it. Yet he was so beloved that the king who threw him in there couldn’t eat or sleep, hoping against hope that he’d make it through the night (Dan. 6:18).

I suspect that the reason King Darius wept outside the lion’s den was not because he missed Daniel’s prophetic rebukes but because Daniel was his friend and he couldn’t imagine Babylon without Daniel. Our communities should be able to say about us, “We may not believe what those crazy people over at that church believe, but thank God they’re here—if not, we’d have to raise our taxes!”

There is a time for clear, prophetic rebuke—even accompanying political advocacy. As Os Guinness said, in a Western democracy, to not contend for God’s laws in the political sphere would be a “failure of citizenship,” because in our system of government, “every American citizen is responsible for every American and the American Republic.” But the tip of our missional spear is the quiet, remarkable, Jeremiah 29:7-fulfilling life.

This kind of life sets us up to offer a loud testimony, a testimony that cannot be marginalized or ignored. As Lesslie Newbigin explained, how we go about our lives and pursue our vocations provides the first dramatic contrast with Babylon.

I saw this kind of life exemplified by my friend Mike, who is the head of neurology at one of the United States’ most prestigious universities. Every year, that university sends him to medical conferences around the world as its representative. Mike finds himself in some of the least evangelized places on the planet, the special guest of communists, Buddhists, and Muslims. He opens every talk by explaining how his experience with the gospel affects his view of medicine. I asked him, “How is your university okay with that? They are, after all, not at all interested in world evangelization. In fact, they’d be downright opposed to it.”

He replied, with a twinkle in his eyes, “Well, I’m the top-ranked neurosurgeon in America. I can say whatever I want.” Mike does his work well and stands before kings because of it (Prov. 22:29). And when he’s there, he points them to King Jesus.

You may not have the same reach as my friend Mike. Or the platform of Paul, Peter, or Daniel. But you have the same tools at your disposal. The good news is, in the kingdom of God, you don’t have to be remarkable to live a remarkable life. You simply have to live the quiet yet counter-cultural life of faith, a faith grounded in the knowledge that we’re citizens of another kingdom with an all-conquering King. A quiet life that proclaims a loud testimony.

J. D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of many books, including his latest, Everyday Revolutionary: How to Transcend the Culture War and Transform the World.

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News

Survey: Evangelicals Contradict Their Own Convictions

Kate Shellnutt

A new State of Theology report shows consensus around core beliefs but also lots of confusion.

Evan Jeung / Unsplash

When American evangelicals affirm the Trinity but don’t see the Spirit as a personal being, when they consider Jesus as the sole source of righteousness but insist that people are still inherently good, either not enough churches are teaching sound doctrine or not enough churchgoers are listening.

That’s what Ligonier Ministries had to say about the results of its latest State of Theology survey, conducted in partnership with Lifeway Research.

“Many of the survey answers from evangelicals in 2025 reveal an alarming lack of biblical literacy, as well as a tendency to hold contradictory beliefs without seeming to recognize the incongruity,” the report said.

The survey takes place every two to three years and captures theological stances among US adults and evangelicals in particular. The research defines evangelicals as Christians who report strong beliefs in biblical authority, evangelism, Jesus as their Savior, and the power of the Cross.

It’s no surprise that nearly everyone who agrees on those tenets of faith would also affirm the Trinity (98%), an unchanging God (95%), and the physical resurrection of Christ (98%).

Yet in other survey questions, their responses contradict foundational beliefs in the God of the Bible. Somehow, 28 percent of evangelicals, who all said they “trust in Jesus Christ alone” for salvation, agreed with half the country that Jesus was a great teacher but not God. And despite professing belief in “one true God in three persons,” over half of evangelicals say the Spirit isn’t a personal being.

“The survey seems to indicate that evangelicals, defined in the survey according to a form of the Bebbington Quadrilateral, are confused about the nature of God and his relationship with the world he has created,” said Glenn R. Kreider, professor of theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. “It also demonstrates inconsistency in beliefs, even to the point of contradiction.”

Evangelicals, he said, could do a better job synthesizing their beliefs and practicing systematic theological thinking—but that takes training.

With each State of Theology survey, evangelicals have been prone to agree with beliefs outside of Christian orthodoxy: Around half consistently say people are good by nature and that God accepts the faith of non-Christian religions.

The prevalence of evangelical misunderstandings or inconsistent beliefs has held relatively steady over the past decade and hasn’t climbed significantly. (On most points, the stances of Americans at large haven’t changed much either.)

Theologians see the trends, though troubling, as an opportunity for the church.

“It does not take much wisdom to look at the numbers from the 2025 study and see there is a problem theologically. It does, however, take wisdom to know what the best course of action is after the study,” said Ronni Kurtz, systematic theology professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “In my opinion, the study represents less of a call to hunt heresy and more of a call towards discipleship.”

That’s where theologians, scholars, and professors do see signs of hope. Evangelicals, they say, are taking more interest in studying doctrine, creeds, and systematic theology.

Kreider remembers decades ago, as evangelical students focused in on biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, many didn’t see the value of further theological education.

“I am seeing more and more interest in theology and am encouraged that many recognize that constructive theology needs a foundation of Christian orthodoxy,” he said. “It has been a long time since I have heard students object to the need for systematic and historical theology courses.”

Kurtz, similarly, has seen among pastors a renewed interest in church fathers and centuries-old thinkers, “especially as it relates to those theological topics we call ‘theology proper’—dealing with doctrines like the Trinity and divine attributes.”

For the first time in a decade, a majority of US seminaries saw enrollment growth last year, according to the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), and the trends are particularly strong at the top evangelical seminaries. The number of theology doctorate students is up over 13 percent in the past five years, and non-degree enrollment has spiked by 46 percent.

Still, even pastor-theologians armed with seminary degrees and deeper study will struggle to disciple evangelicals who don’t see church involvement as a priority.

That’s one shift in the State of Theology that’s held over from the pandemic: 63 percent of Americans and 44 percent of evangelicals say worshiping alone or with family is just as good as going to church. Most Americans and nearly a third of evangelicals (31%) don’t think Christians have an obligation to join a church.

Kurtz cautions against a “how dare they” approach to the theological misunderstandings reflected in the survey results and instead sees the situation as a call to bring fellow believers into a richer, truer understanding of God.

“While there is a place for gatekeeping as it relates to orthodoxy, I am convinced many more would come feast at the banquet that is theology if they simply felt invited,” he said. “I would encourage those who are discouraged by the numbers to invite people into the deeper waters of theological thought but in a way where you truly love your neighbor and want them to ‘come and see’ the beauty that has so transformed you.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Theology

What Horror Stories Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About the World

Russell Moore

Columnist

We want meaning and resolution—and the kind of monster we can defeat.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

When you were a child, did you ever go to the place where your mom or dad worked and get a little glimpse into what their day-to-day life was like when they were away from you? I’ve been trying to imagine today what it would be like to see that my father spent all day not selling Ford cars (as mine did) but making up ways a homicidal clown could lure a child into a sewer grate.

That thought crossed my mind as I read an essay in The New York Times by Joe Hill—son of the world’s most-well-known horror novelist, Stephen King—on the anniversary of the release of King’s famous vampire novel, ’Salem’s Lot. Hill, now also a writer in the same genre, describes what it was like as a seven-year-old to be terrified by the television adaptation of what he then mistakenly called “Salem’s Yacht.” Along the way, he offers his thoughts on why people continue to crave stories that terrify them—whether in books or films or video games or podcasts. He writes,

People believe—want to believe—in a moral universe, a universe that confirms the existence of the human soul, a thing of incalculable worth that can be won or lost. If that heightened moral universe doesn’t exist in reality (I think it does, Richard Dawkins thinks it doesn’t, and you can form your own conclusions) then we will search for it in fiction. We don’t want to flee “’Salem’s Lot.” We want to live there.

Hill goes on to say that the reason we want such stories is because we recognize that there is evil out there and we don’t know what to do with it:

To be human is to find oneself confronted with vast, terrible forces that lack form, that can’t be fought in any literal sense, hand-to-hand, stake to heart. That doesn’t satisfy us. It’s fine if there’s evil, wickedness, cruelty. We just want it to have a point. If we’re in this fight, we want to know there’s an enemy out there—not just bad luck and grinding, impersonal historical forces. More than that, though: Once you give evil a face and fangs, once you give it agency, it becomes possible to imagine a force opposed against it, a light that can drive out shadow.

What Hill points to here is not unique to our cultural moment, a fact seen in his father’s latest project, Hansel and Gretel, which retells the old German fairy tale. Using illustrations completed decades ago by the late children’s author Maurice Sendak (author of Where the Wild Things Are), King attempts to restore the horror of the original story, tamed as it has been by our familiarity with it.

The new version reminds us of what’s most important about the original: Childhood is not merely the idyllic days of play and innocence but also something that sits on the precipice of the terrifying. The tropes in “Hansel and Gretel”—parental abandonment; starvation; being lost in the wilderness; cannibalism; the occult; and perhaps scariest of all, predatory adults masking as kind—are all there.

Sendak is the perfect choice to illustrate this story, because he recognized the root of the problem. Responding to those who thought Where the Wild Things Are was too frightening with its fanged monsters in the dark woods, Sendak argued that children know there are scary things afoot. The way for adults to calm such fears is not lying that such things don’t exist but talking about them. Honest discussions enable children to do what Sendak’s character Max did to tame the wild things: look them straight in the face.

Most seven-year-olds don’t want to see ’Salem’s Lot. That’s where the wild Kings are. But they do like “Hansel and Gretel” or some other iteration of the monster story. And most adults do too—for all the reasons Hill outlined. That ought to say something to us.

C. S. Lewis famously noted that hunger indicates there is such a thing as food. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world,” he wrote. “If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Maybe we want meaning and resolution—and the kind of horror we can get back into the coffin with a stake in its heart—because we do indeed live in a universe that’s a haunted house. But it’s been claimed by one whose voice causes the spirits to ask, “Have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1:24). We want the answer to be yes. And it is.

Horror stories tell us half the truth. They tell us the world is both more terrifying and more meaningful than our everyday lives allow us to see. The gospel, though, assumes the horror story and then overcomes it. That’s the difference between the two. One leaves you running from the monster. The other shows you that the monster is around you—and within you—and then gives you everything you need to overcome it. Namely, mercy that is stronger than death.

Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Culture

Welcome to Youth Ministry! Time to Talk about Anime.

Austin Gravley

Japanese animation has become a media mainstay among Gen Z. You may not “get” it, but the zoomers at your church sure do.

Illustration by Kate Petrik / Source Images: Getty

After winning the gold medal for the 100m in the 2024 Summer Olympics, Team USA sprinter Noah Lyles did a Kamehameha. Over the summer, when Elon Musk introduced chatbots as a new feature to of Grok—the AI element of his social media platform, X—a sexually provocative, anime-inspired “companion” named Ani proved explosively popular. And earlier this year, the L.A. Lakers did a collab with One Piece, with jumbotron branding and animation shown during a game.

If you don’t know what a Kamehameha is, chalked up Ani’s popularity entirely to lust, or were baffled by a major league sports crossover with a Japanese TV show, I want to propose that you’ve missed one of biggest cultural shifts of the past 30 years: the mainstreaming of anime in the West.

These three examples—and I could give you many more—are not niche or fringe moments for younger generations of Americans. They’re signs that we’ve hit a cultural tipping point decades in the making. For Gen Z and younger millennials, anime has become a cultural influence as significant as (and distinct from) movies, television, video games, and music. And if, like me, you work in high school or college ministry, anime is probably already shaping your students’ hearts and minds whether you realize it or not.

That’s not cause for alarm. In fact, I have good news: You’re already prepared to minister to the anime fans under your care, because anime is not as different from more familiar cultural products as it may seem. But you do need to grasp the scope of this cultural shift to serve these students well.

At its most basic, anime refers to a style of Japanese animation. Even if you know very little about it, you probably know the look: big eyes, spikey hair, lots of action. Think Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z, two of the earlier anime shows to come to the West.

But anime is far more than a genre of film and television. It’s an entire ecosystem of digital media and physical media and physical merchandise and music and clothing and tourism and more. That ecosystem is a $34 billion global industry today and is expected to become a $60 billion industry by 2030.

Unsurprisingly, given that growth, anime’s popularity is no longer limited to stereotypical audiences (chiefly tech-savvy young men). The NFL and MLB are doing anime collaborations alongside the NBA, and the reception has been positive among sports fans and anime fans alike.

The recent Netflix movie K-Pop Demon Hunters blends anime visual inspiration with American animation and Korean pop music, and it became a global smash hit. Art-house film distributor A24 is bringing China’s anime-influenced animated film Ne-Zha 2 to theaters in the States; it’s the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. And Disney just announced its first official anime, a series based on a lucrative mobile game that puts Disney villains in a Harry Potter-style setting.

For most younger Americans, none of this is news. I was born in 1991, and for many people around my age, the question worth asking is not whether we watched anime as kids but whether we kept watching it into adulthood. And my experience as a youth pastor suggests that for those in Gen Z and younger (anyone born after 1996), the notion of dropping anime as an adult is almost nonsensical.

For these students, anime is simply a normal part of life, a mainstay of pop culture. It’s reached water-is-wet levels of cultural saturation, much like Friends, Seinfeld, and the original Star Wars trilogy are for Gen X, or The Office for older millennials. As that younger cohort gains economic power, the anime industry is shifting to satisfy their nostalgia and take advantage of their disposable income in a trend similar to that of Disney adults. There’s big money in anime merchandising, and the market is only growing.

Even as a lifelong anime viewer, I struggle to wrap my mind around just how pervasive anime has become. That baseline familiarity has served me well in youth ministry, but thankfully, you don’t need to be an anime fan to understand why younger Christians care about anime and how it’s influencing their lives. Here are three ways to begin.

First, add anime to your list of cultural buckets. When we’re trying to get to know someone, we often work through large cultural buckets—books, movies, TV, sports, video games, and so on—to learn what they like. If you’re talking to someone under 30, add anime to that list. The question will likely elicit a strong opinion even from students who aren’t interested, and once you add this category to your standard introductory small talk, you’ll more organically notice how anime’s import has grown.

Next, ask good questions with genuine interest. If a student is wearing a T-shirt with anime characters on it or makes a reference to an anime as you’re talking (and that’s likely the allusion if you can’t think of what else it could be), ask them about it. Kids love talking about things they enjoy, and they want adults to notice them and their interests. Who, what, and why questions are great starting points: What show is that? Who is that on your phone case? Why do you like it?

If you didn’t grow up with anime, I realize the style may look childish or unserious: characters with colorful hair, loud and exaggerated displays of strength or emotion, giant robots and other sci-fi or fantasy designs. But it would be a gross mistake to assume that anime is shallow in story and content. On the contrary, a major part of its appeal is the complexity of its narratives, the freshness of its themes, and the sincerity of its storytelling. While much of Western media has declined into endless sequels and soulless reboots, anime is still offering new (or, at least, new to us) ideas and characters.

Moreover, many of its stories are positive and hopeful, appealing to both boys and girls, with clear morality structures that do not confuse good and evil. Where Western media often treats boys and men as dangers to avoid or problems to be solved—Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men is eye-opening here—many animes have aspirational male heroes and messages about courage, dedication, sacrifice, persistence, and duty. Anime may have a surface-level weirdness for older Western audiences, but look deeper and you’ll frequently find remarkably virtue-driven storytelling.

Of course, like any media, anime varies widely in quality. Some of it is as shallow as it appears. Some of it is worse than shallow, particularly with animes that oversexualize female characters. The portrayal of women in anime is too large a topic to cover in detail here, but suffice to say the conversation around it resembles similar debates around the portrayal of women in Western media.

If I run into sexual content in the course of asking about a student’s anime interests, my approach is as with other media: I reiterate that God has called us to holiness, to crucify our flesh with its sinful desires in the power of the Spirit, including our lustful fantasies (1 Thess. 4:3). “And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matt. 5:30).

At the same time—and again, just as with Western media—each anime should be evaluated on an individual basis, and ministry leaders should recognize that students may express enthusiasm for an anime in spite of its objectionable content rather than because of it. Taking a scorched-earth stance to all anime because some of it is grossly sexualized will make good questions and genuine interest impossible.

Third, connect the deeper appeals and aspirations of anime to Christ through the Word. Anyone with long experience in youth ministry knows that pop culture can be a meeting point for deep discipleship. Being a good conversation partner about the stories our students love and why they love them is a ministry skill. In this sense, anime is no different than any other story, and you can submit the questions, ideas, and themes in these stories to examination by the Word.

For example, consider the anime show Death Note, which supplied the character design inspiration for Musk’s chatbot Ani. The main character is a high school student named Light Yagami who discovers a supernatural notebook capable of killing anyone whose name he writes inside. Driven by a strong sense of justice, Light begins using the book to kill scores of people he believes worthy of judgment: politicians, criminals, corrupt businessmen, and more. The wave of unexplainable deaths triggers a panic and a race to find their source, even as many come to think of the unknown killer as a prophetic figure delivering the world from evil.

Death Note is dark and disturbing story. But it also seriously grapples with questions of law, justice, and morality. Its Dostoevsky-esque storytelling has made Death Note one of the most commercially and critically acclaimed animes—and, potentially, an entry point to fruitful conversations with young fans about what it means to be righteous, what to think when the wicked escape justice, and why we long to live in a world where the guilty are punished and the innocent protected. You may have visceral distaste for this media style, but if you’re willing to dig into why a student loves an anime like Death Note, God can use that perseverance for good.

Anime is part of internet culture, and internet culture increasingly is our culture. The church needs mature Christians to be willing to navigate this huge new bucket of media consumption. But even as culture changes, the words of Ecclesiastes are true: There is nothing new under the sun (1:9–10). The way we tell stories may differ, but the stories that captivate our hearts always speak to our deepest need for God.

You may never “get” anime, and that’s okay. But with the patience and courage to learn more about it, obstacles can become opportunities. For the sake of discipling future generations of Christians, we should take every opportunity we can get.

Austin Gravley is the director of youth of Redeemer Christian Church in Amarillo, Texas. He is formerly the social media manager of The Gospel Coalition and executive producer of Mending Division Academy for American Values Coalition. Find Austin through on the What Would Jesus Tech? podcast and his Substack.

- More from Austin Gravley

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