New Resource Helps Kids ‘Grow Into’ Hymns

Children’s minister and artist collect 150 songs to span generations.

Courtesy of the Gospel Story Hymnal

In 2018, Britta Wallbaum and Lindsey Goetz traveled to a worship conference in Nashville. They hoped to come away with new resources to engage children in musical worship at their Presbyterian church in Aurora, Illinois. As they browsed merchandise for leaders displayed in the rows of vendor booths, neither could find the item they had hoped for: a hymnal for children.

“There were zero resources to share with kids,” said Wallbaum. “There were songbooks [for children] with sheet music but no ways to actually engage kids with them.”

The two friends wandered the exhibit hall separately, not knowing that the other was looking for the same thing. When they realized their common goal, it seemed like a divine appointment. They decided to make the resource they wanted for their church and for their own children.

The Gospel Story Hymnal is the product of years of writing, illustration, and curation by Wallbaum and Goetz, who formed Word & Wonder to provide resources for worshipers of all ages, including children.

Crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign, the hymnal is a collection of 150 hymns, including centuries-old mainstays like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “All Glory, Laud and Honor” and more recent works like Michael Card’s “Barocha.” It also contains a schedule that families can use to work through each hymn and the accompanying commentary over a three-year period.

There are five sections in the hymnal: “Creation,” “Rebellion,” “Redemption,” “Already, but Not Yet,” and “Restoration.” Wallbaum and Goetz wanted the hymns to help tell a broad, unified story.

“The Bible isn't a bunch of disconnected stories with good morals. It’s an interconnected story that all points to Jesus. Somehow I had missed that for the first 30 years of my life,” Wallbaum said. “So, this hymnal resource … We needed to build that idea of this overarching story into it—the gospel story, supported by all these different hymns and themes.”

The hymn settings appear alongside Wallbaum’s vibrant watercolor illustrations and original commentary by Goetz.

Wallbaum, an architect, felt inspired to provide the artwork for the book herself. She spent months experimenting with different techniques and styles before developing a watercolor collage process inspired by Eric Carle.

“Each hymn has additional commentary regarding its theological importance, word definitions, applicable context information, scripture references, and/or worship notes, all written at an elementary level,” according the Word & Wonder website.

The authors did not alter or simplify the hymn texts for children. Wallbaum and Goetz believe that there is a benefit to having children sing the original words, even if they are challenging.

“You don’t grow out of hymns; you grow into them,” Goetz said. “As we journey in our life with God, the hymns can unfold greater meaning to us. They are pieces of faith formation that can grow with you.”

Rather than offer simplified hymns, Wallbaum hopes that her original illustrations and the accompanying commentary and scripture will draw children in and impart a sense of belonging in what can sometimes feel like “grown-up church.”

Goetz, the children’s minister at First Presbyterian Church in Aurora and spiritual director of Word & Wonder, believes strongly in the importance of multigenerational worship.

According to Goetz, “a better indicator of whether a high school student will remain a Christian after they graduate is whether they worshiped with their church community, not whether they attend youth group.”

Goetz, who is working toward a master’s degree in educational ministries through Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, spends a lot of time thinking about how childhood experiences in the church shape lifelong faith.

“If our church worship services are not welcoming to children, they need to change. What we see in Scripture is this call for the people of God to worship together.”

For both Wallbaum and Goetz, hymns have been powerful agents of spiritual formation. Wallbaum’s love of hymnody developed while she was a college student at Wheaton. Some of her professors would begin class by having students sing a hymn together. She was introduced to her favorite hymn “Be Still, My Soul” by her computer science professor, who had the class sing it at the beginning of a course meeting. When she got married, Wallbaum walked down the aisle to the hymn.

“It speaks to my soul, and it has walked me through so many phases of my life,” Wallbaum said.

In The Gospel Story Hymnal, “Be Still, My Soul” appears with an illustration of Jesus calming a storm.

Goetz has seen the enduring power of hymns in her life and in the lives of family members who walked with God for a lifetime.

“When someone has dementia, you watch them decline for years,” Goetz said, sharing the story of her grandfather’s death and the role singing hymns had in his final days.

Goetz remembers singing around her grandfather’s bed as he was receiving hospice care. She remembers the late afternoon light and the sound of her family singing hymns together, including “And Can It Be.” She remembers the sound of her father’s strong, deep voice and her aunt’s clear, confident harmonies.

“My grandma’s voice was cracking with tears. We couldn’t hear my grandpa, but his mouth was moving with the words we were singing.”

For Goetz, the memory of her grandfather recalling the words of hymns of the faith in his last hours powerfully illustrates the unique resonance and endurance of hymnody.

Now that The Gospel Story Hymnal is fully funded for a run of 3,000 copies, Wallbaum and Goetz expect books to be printed and shipped by September 2023. Wallbaum is finishing the final illustrations and is working on finalizing copyright licensing for all 150 hymns—no small feat. While many are in the public domain, 64 of them are still under copyright, and many of those have more than one copyright holder.

“It’s close to 100 copyright agreements I’ve ended up getting,” said Wallbaum. “For some I've actually had to get in touch with all the different songwriters, make a copyright license, and meet with them to sign. It's been … It's been a process.”

The creation of The Gospel Story Hymnal has been a rewarding and demanding undertaking for the authors. Goetz said that the prospect of giving this resource to churches looking to be more welcoming to children makes all the labor worthwhile.

“What I have seen at my church, in a congregation where children are welcomed and included—and of course we are still growing in this—I see children who can conceive of themselves as meaningful and important parts of the church,” said Goetz.

Goetz and Wallbaum, both mothers of young children, hope that The Gospel Story Hymnal will become a physical indicator in pews and seatbacks that children are welcome in the sanctuary.

“Experiencing belonging is one of the most important parts of how early faith develops. What's kept me going is the idea of seeing these [hymnals] in the pews and knowing that a child will open a book that's in the pew and say, ‘Oh, this is for me.’”

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Ideas

Ron DeSantis’s Campaign Christianity

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Can the creator of “God Made a Fighter” political ads woo evangelicals from Trump?

Chris duMond / Stringer / Getty Images News

Will they, or won’t they ? The question of white evangelical voters’ support for former president Donald Trump isn’t over yet.

As Florida governor Ron DeSantis seems to be preparing to formally enter the Republican presidential primary for 2024, it could launch a notorious new season, set in sunny Florida and shaped by a buzzy subplot about Christian nationalism, which DeSantis and Trump alike have been accused of propagating.

Trump’s use of Christianity as a political prop is by now well known. Though demonstrably unfamiliar with basic aspects of the faith, the former president gamely toted his Christianity around on the campaign trail and in office. (Sometimes he literally toted it, as when he held up the Bible in front of a church sign for a photoshoot.) In 2016 and 2020, Trump hit his marks, visiting Christian colleges, conferences, and churches, and this year, he’s been eager to remind Christian voters—particularly evangelicals—how well that played with many of them before.

But compared to 2020, when Trump ran functionally unopposed for the GOP nod, in 2024 he’ll have competition. DeSantis, widely expected to be Trump’s most formidable primary opponent, is an especially interesting example here, as his campaign use of Christianity is more knowledgeable and sophisticated than Trump’s has tended to be. Will evangelicals see him as one of our own?

A practicing Catholic, DeSantis has a facility with biblical references Trump could never quite master, and he fits comfortably in evangelical culture in a way Trump does not. He’s a throwback to pre-Trump Republican appeals to white evangelicals as a voting bloc, in which candidates often identified with evangelicalism to a degree Trump has never attempted. (Trump speaks of “the evangelicals” just as he does of “the Jews,” linguistically placing himself outside each category.)

Whether DeSantis can put his cultural expertise to effective use remains to be seen. Once he announces, however, the show will really get going. Background players—including anticipated and declared candidates like former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley—will have their scenes, vying for second billing after the midseason break. And episode recaps will abound: Evangelical leader X declines to endorse at this time. Candidate Y says God led him to run for president. The Z campaign’s secret weapon with Iowa evangelicals.

Christianity itself will appear as a campaign prop, with large block letters for easy identification onscreen and a strategically smoothed silhouette, ambiguous enough that any audience member, if so inclined, could tell herself that’s just like the Christianity she has at home.

There have been only glimpses of DeSantis’s version of campaign Christianity so far, but what little we have seen has been revealing. As much as he sometimes feels like a pre-2016 throwback where evangelical outreach is concerned, DeSantis is decidedly a post-Trump candidate too, with a brash culture-war pugilism almost every GOP contender will try to emulate this cycle.

His “God made a fighter” ad, launched during his gubernatorial campaign last year but clearly intended for a national audience, is a slick amalgamation of the two sides and probably a good forecast of Christianity’s place in this race. That’s why we should notice how little of Christ this campaign-prop Christianity contains. In fact, the ad never mentions Jesus at all.

It has no specifically Christian imagery, not even a cross. Church, visualized as disembodied raised hands, comes up only as a destination a DeSantis voter might wish to visit. Though clearly intended to appeal to evangelicals, there’s nothing specifically Christian here, let alone anything evangelical. A Jewish or Mormon candidate could produce the same ad—cut off the first five words (“And on the eighth day”) and a Muslim or generically deist candidate could too.

And beyond that deliberate religious ambiguity, this ad isn’t really about God or faith at all. DeSantis is the one who will save the people’s “jobs, their livelihoods, their liberty, their happiness.” He’s the hero of this tale. The narrator quotes imagined words from God at length, but God isn’t the object of praise here. God’s the one doing the praising. He’s praising Ron DeSantis.

Shrunk down to prop size and glazed in cheeky mid-century nostalgia, Christianity serves the campaign, not the other way around. The result is a clever ad, delivered in Christianese fluent enough to appeal to a large and useful voting bloc but vague enough to avoid highlighting the candidate’s nonevangelical theology, alienating people who call themselves evangelicals only because of their politics, or turning off the growing post-religious right. I suspect it will be imitated widely in the months to come, maybe even revamped by DeSantis himself for his official national debut.

None of this is to suggest DeSantis and his fellow candidates are insincere in their own faith. I can only make educated guesses as to what’s in their hearts (Matt. 12:34–37), and I know for certain I too have acted out of “selfish ambition or vain conceit” (Phil. 2:3), failed to draw near to God (James 4:8), and “conform[ed] to the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2).

But we don’t need to judge others’ faith to get into “no true Christian” territory or to say campaign-prop Christianity isn’t really Christianity at all. The “fullness of the Deity” (Col. 2:9) can fit inside a baby, but not inside a campaign ad.

The Lesser Kingdom: A prophetic, eclectic, and humble take on current issues, public policy, and political events with thoughts on faithful engagement.

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Ideas

Can the United States Be ‘Forgiven Our Debts’?

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Even if the debt ceiling resolves, we should consider future generations.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Envato / Jtyler / Getty

When my husband and I wanted to buy our first house in 2012, we ran into a problem: Neither of us had a credit history. We both came from families with a typical evangelical wariness of debt, and so we’d gotten all the way through college and marriage without a single loan payment between us. We’d earned scholarships and gone to cheaper schools, hosted a cookout for our wedding reception, and squirreled away cash to buy used cars.

“The borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. 22:7), my mother had often warned. But declining to take on debt also made sense to me at a personal level. I have all the skepticism of complex financial systems you’d expect in someone who finished college during the Great Recession. I dislike the feeling of obligation and limitation debt can entail (Prov. 22:26–27). With a few exceptions like mortgages and some business loans, I associated accumulation of debt with poor stewardship and lack of self-discipline. Having no debt felt right and responsible.

Like many evangelicals, that attitude easily mapped onto my politics. The US national debt was around $15 trillion in 2012, one year after the debt ceiling drama of 2011. If you’d asked me then, I’d have described that debt just as ethicist David P. Gushee did for CT in 2014. It’s “immoral and unwise,” he argued, even citing my mom’s favorite debt proverb:

Certainly, the Bible regularly calls for generous lending and debt forgiveness. But when it speaks of borrowing, the Bible is negative, and not just when addressing individuals. Borrowing is emblematic of national weakness that invites subservience to creditors (Deut. 15:6; 28:12). Borrowing for short-term needs risks long-term decline and even enslavement (Neh. 5:3–5). Creditors gain power over debtors (Prov. 22:7), though the powerlessness may not be visible until later. We Americans are feasting with borrowed money. We risk becoming a beggar nation.

I found that final point—that our borrowing would eventually be ruinous, if not for us then for our descendants—especially compelling. How could so much debt not take its toll? This kind of warning, of which there were many back then, struck me as self-evidently correct.

But $15 trillion in borrowing came and went, and then $20 trillion, and $25 trillion, and now the national debt is sitting at $31 trillion. That works out to about $94,000 per US citizen, $247,000 per taxpayer (a little less than half of the average American’s lifetime income tax payments), and a record-high 134 percent of GDP.

As the debt spiked ever higher, warnings of debt-induced crisis never stopped. Yet the crisis never materialized. The piper never seems to get paid. Is that because—as voices from the typically left-leaning modern monetary theorists to the late Rush Limbaugh have argued—there is no piper? Were the warnings always wrong?

That’s once again a pressing question, because we’re in another debt ceiling drama this spring. In late January, the federal government reached the legal cap on how much money Washington can borrow through the sale of Treasury bonds to make up the annual deficit, which is the difference between tax revenues and expenditures in a given year.

Though the Treasury Department can delay a federal debt default using “extraordinary measures”—accounting maneuvers to keep paying the government’s bills in the short term—those tactics can only buy so much time. But as the default deadline of June 1 fast approaches, the Biden administration and Congress are feeling the pinch to reach a dea—and fast.

Though some congressional Republicans are pushing to keep the debt ceiling at status quo, they don’t have the numbers to get what they want. Nor do Democratic lawmakers who want to get rid of the debt ceiling altogether—and anyway, president Joe Biden nixed that idea months ago, calling it “irresponsible.” (His administration is now reportedly reconsidering that conclusion, but it remains unclear whether Biden would take this option even if his legal advisers offer it.)

Realistically, the final deal will likely keep and raise the debt limit. The outstanding question is whether it will also cut federal spending to decrease or even reverse federal accumulation of debt going forward (as GOP leaders prefer) or if it will be a “clean” deal with no spending cuts (as Biden would like). Either way, a post-deal Washington will still have an unfathomably large debt. Should we be looking for the piper?

It’s not wrong to anticipate serious consequences for this level of borrowing, Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me via email. But she warns that “a future U.S. fiscal crisis have been misunderstood.”

The danger is not so much an inflation so bad you might use bills as wallpaper. It’s rather a drift “toward more of a Japanese-style stagnation,” Boccia told me, and perhaps “a sudden, unexpected fiscal crisis during which interest rates would rise steeply.”

In that latter scenario, high interest rates would hit ordinary Americans trying to get mortgages and other loans, and they’d force the federal government to devote a far higher portion of tax revenues to debt payments to avoid loss of confidence in Treasury bonds or the dollar itself.

Louise Sheiner, an economist who’s worked at the Federal Reserve and US Treasury and is now with the Brookings Institution, didn’t anticipate quite such a drastic consequence in our phone interview. Some have warned that a loss of confidence would mean “no one’s going to lend to us,” she acknowledged. But the US had no difficulty borrowing throughout the pandemic at incredibly high rates. People still see Treasury bonds as good investments, even at the $31-trillion mark, Sheiner said. “We’re always able to pay them back.”

That’s not to say there’s zero risk of unwanted outcomes here, Sheiner continued, but she believes those consequences are mostly related to a rise in interest rates that would affect the whole economy, including both consumer and federal borrowing. This serious yet relatively mundane effect would require lawmakers to make the difficult choices they’re avoiding while low interest rates keep debt payments relatively affordable.

A spike in interest rates isn’t the only crisis economists envision coming from too much national debt. The modern-monetary-theory crowd contends inflation is the real concern and deficits don’t matter unless they’re causing inflation to rise too much. Across the board, though—whether we fear interest hikes or inflation or not, believe loss of confidence in US bonds and dollars is a real risk or not, want spending cuts now or later—there’s one consistent theme here: uncertainty about the future.

“We keep adding to the debt, and at some point, that is going to cause issues in the economy,” Sheiner told me, “but we don’t know what that point is. No one knows what that point is.” But, she said, “we care about the debt because we care about the future,” which requires us to think past the next decade, past the next election, past this deadline in June.

On this point, Boccia agreed, noting that the policy changes we would need for Washington to stop spending at a deficit “can take decades to produce significant savings,” and the kind of “prudent policy foresight” we’d need to adopt those changes now is in short supply.

We should be considering our children’s children and the impact on future society, not just the present moment (Prov. 13:22). Unfortunately, it appears more likely that we will stay in our ways and “pay the penalty” (Prov. 22:3). But it shouldn’t take a default deadline for us to think long-term.

The Lesser Kingdom: A prophetic, eclectic, and humble take on current issues, public policy, and political events with thoughts on faithful engagement.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

News

Died: Rachel Kerr James, Missionary Nurse to War-Torn Vietnam

Daniel Silliman

One of the first Southern Baptists into Indochina, she started medical clinics while raising four children and helping her husband plant churches.

International Mission Board

Rachel Kerr James was the first medical professional to arrive on the scene of the US embassy bombing in Saigon in March 1965. She saw the smoke, mangled metal, and scores of people wounded by the blast that ripped a hole in the side of the five-story concrete building. She knew immediately what she had to do.

“I am going to stay here as long as necessary,” she said to her husband, Sam. “It could be a long time.”

James spent three days tending to the wounded at the embassy—and 13 years caring for the people of Vietnam during the war. A Southern Baptist missionary nurse, she volunteered with the Red Cross, set up medical clinics in the villages around Saigon, and launched a mobile clinic, all while raising four children and helping her husband plant churches and start a seminary.

James died in Virginia in April. She was 88.

“I felt God called me to be a foreign missionary,” James said. “My whole life has been centered around this call.”

James was born October 17, 1934, in Durham, North Carolina. Her father, Theodore Kerr, worked at a local hospital. Her mother, Ethel Peed Kerr, was a homemaker who had once dreamed of being a missionary and passed her passion for mission work on to her daughter.

James accepted Jesus as her personal savior at 14. Shortly afterward, she started to feel a call to nursing and missions that was, as she later described it, “increasingly definite.” As she started to date, however, that call was challenged. Few if any of the young men she knew were committed to missions. Fewer still liked the idea of getting married to a woman who wanted to be a missionary.

One day, praying in church before dawn, she was convicted that following Christ had to come before anything else—even getting married and having a family. She stretched herself out on the altar as the sun rose through and gave her life to God.

“Lord, I want you to know I am completely willing and ready to go alone,” she said. “But, Lord, if you send me somebody, and we can go together, that will be okay too.”

Two years later, as a nursing student at Duke University, she was invited to dinner at the home of a woman from her church. The woman also invited her nephew, a Navy veteran who had a born-again experience while serving in Korea. Sam James was immediately smitten with this woman who was so committed to the Great Commission. He drove her back to her dormitory, and the two sat in the parking lot until midnight, when all the nursing students had to be in for curfew.

Before they parted, they prayed that God would guide them on their respective paths to serve him—each hoping, but not saying aloud, that those paths might merge.

Sam and Rachel James were married on August 8, 1957.

As they prepared for mission work, Sam took a job as a pastor of a Baptist congregation in rural North Carolina. James had her first child there, and then her second.

The growing family struggled in those first few years of ministry. Political tensions divided the church, and some people started leaving when they heard Sam was planning to allow Black people to attend. He had not thought about trying to integrate the congregation, Sam later wrote in a memoir, but he was deeply unsettled by the racial views in the church. He demanded the church vote on whether to keep him.

“God loves all mankind no matter where in the world they live, what skin color they have, what economic strata they belong to, or what social standing they have,” he preached. “Above all, God loves every single one of us.”

The congregation agreed to keep their young pastor and allow Black people to sit in one section of the sanctuary if they came. (None did.)

In 1961, the Jameses were accepted as candidates by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Rachel James attended orientation while three months pregnant with her third child.

They left by boat from San Francisco in March 1961, with a three-year-old, an 18-month-old, and a newborn in tow.

When they landed in Hong Kong, however, the Jameses were informed that their visa applications had been rejected. The South Vietnamese government, run by Catholics, was concerned about American Protestants undercutting support for the regime. They appealed and waited. They waited all spring, all summer, and into the fall.

Yet when it seemed like they would never get approval, Rachel James became convinced the authorities were going to change their minds. Baptist churches in the United States had a calendar telling them when to pray for missionaries, and they were scheduled to pray for her on her birthday, October 17. She was certain it would make a difference.

On October 17, the Jameses were notified their visas had been approved. They became the sixth Baptist missionary family to go to Vietnam.

The Jameses spent two years in intensive classes learning Vietnamese, taking turns studying and watching the children. As they learned the language and the culture, they began to love the people.

It wasn’t always easy, though. There were small but embarrassing faux pas, like the time Sam offended a guest by eating first or the time he couldn’t think of the vocabulary for “plucked” and asked a woman in the market for a chicken without clothes. She called everyone over to laugh at him.

There were more serious challenges too. The American government started sending combat troops into the country, and fighting increased. The South Vietnamese government, worried about dissidents, outlawed all meetings of more than three people, making all of the Jameses’ Bible studies illegal. Rachel wasn’t legally allowed to start a clinic, because all the Vietnamese doctors had been drafted into the military and she needed a doctor to supervise.

In 1967, as they began their second term in Vietnam, however, an American army doctor showed up at the church they had planted in a suburb of Saigon. S. Leo Record Jr., a Wesleyan from North Carolina, had received orders to provide medical care to the South Vietnamese. But he didn’t have anyone to translate. He heard the Baptist missionaries spoke Vietnamese and was shocked to find that one of them was a trained nurse who wanted to start a clinic.

James and Record teamed up to provide medical care. They opened weekly clinics in the villages around Saigon, each serving 100 to 200 people. Around the same time, James had her fourth child.

In 1973, when President Richard Nixon started withdrawing troops, most of the medical personnel in Saigon were sent home. The army sold James all the medical equipment she wanted, though, and she teamed up with a Catholic doctor and established a mobile clinic, driving to a different place each day to continue the work.

James insisted on continuing, even when the work was threatened by Northern Vietnamese soldiers.

“Sam,” she told her husband, “I just can’t give up the ministry God has placed in my care. The need is just too great. … I simply will not, cannot quit.”

James continued for another two years, until the South Vietnamese government fell and the family had to be evacuated.

Back in the US, James supported her husband as he oversaw the construction and development of a missionary training center in Richmond, Virginia, known today as the International Learning Center. Sam went on to serve as East Asia area director for the International Missions Board and then vice president for creative leadership development.

“A missionary wife goes through cycles of life and ministering,” she said. “There are times when she is free to do what she wants to do. Then she may enter a cycle where she is busy almost full-time carrying out the responsibilities that come naturally to a wife and mother. … All of this is the Lord’s work and in his will and timing.”

In 2002, the Jameses were allowed to return to Vietnam to see the church they helped start in Saigon with $50,000 taken up in Lottie Moon offerings in Southern Baptist churches. The church survived the Communist rule under Vietnamese leadership and continues to this day. The couple made regular trips back to Vietnam to teach until James’s health no longer allowed her to travel.

James is predeceased by her third child, Philip. She is survived by her husband and children, Deborah Winans, Stephen James, and Michael James. A memorial service will be held at First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia, on May 13.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

They Denounced an Art Exhibit. But Will Anyone Understand Why?

Yiting Tsai

Taiwanese Christians thought a zombie-themed show dishonored God. I’m not sure their response was Christlike.

People look at mannequins at a Zombie exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan.

ChiangYing-ying / AP Images

Last year, the Tainan Fine Arts Museum announced a forthcoming exhibition featuring images of ghosts and zombies. To contextualize the show, which originated in France, curators incorporated artwork inspired by local folk beliefs and cultural stories of various Asian countries.

But before the exhibit had even opened, many Christians began flocking to the museum’s Facebook page to criticize the show as “immoral and harmful to public decency” and a “freakish power of the demon”—and even to request that the museum pull the plug on it. One church issued a public prayer request, claiming that the exhibit would “pollute the country and the people” and that the “the evils of our country are growing [and] we are ignorant, deeply offending God!”

As Christians lamented the zombie exhibit, its supporters argued with them in the comment section—and bought tickets. Ultimately, presales for the zombie exhibition sold out as soon as they were available, and many people waited in queues for several hours to enter the venue.

The Christians I grew up around in Taiwan would likely defend the critics who say pop culture or art is displeasing to God. Like many evangelicals in America, many of them believe the church has the responsibility to speak out against the culture when it appears to violate biblical teaching and values. But is this asking too much of the world?

To paraphrase Marvin Olasky, Christians often categorize their society as Israel, when in actuality it’s Babylon. While Olasky makes this claim about American Christians, it is even more true in Taiwan, where Christians make up only 5.5 percent of the population and nearly half (49.3%) of people profess folk religion (a mixture of Daoism and Buddhism).

For years, while Taiwan was under authoritarian rule, Taiwanese society kept and practiced the Confucianist ethics. Since many moral codes advocated in Confucianism overlap with biblical principles, Christians in the past did not seem as concerned with countering Confucian teachings with biblical truth.

But when Taiwan started to democratize in the 1990s, the country began opening to different voices and values. The church was used to being in a relatively “comfortable” conservative society and wasn’t ready for the rapid progress of “secularization.” Taiwanese Christians began to imitate American Christian narratives about combating secularization and reacting against perceived “godlessness.” In the process, they forgot the fact that Christians have always been the minority in Taiwan and that people have been worshiping worldly idols for centuries—including our own culture.

Consequently, most people who live on the island do not care what the “Christian God” thinks of them or what the “prophets” of the Christian religion may think of their chosen ways of life. When these “prophets” ascend to the mountain to cry out and lament, Taiwanese people cannot understand what they are angry about. Often, all they can see is strangers judging their actions.

To Christians, this ignorance should make sense. Paul notes that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Cor. 1:18). The word world (κόσμος) occurs 186 times in the New Testament alone. And before we met Christ, weren’t we ourselves once practitioners in the world’s ways?

In his time on earth, the Gospels do not portray Jesus as showing any discomfort around people who did not know him. In fact, Jesus made the deliberate decision to eat with “tax collectors and sinners” in an age and culture where eating at the same table was an intimate act. And the Bible includes more instances of Jesus rebuking those who considered themselves to be religious than those who counted themselves as sinners.

The Pharisees, who claimed to keep God’s law, were obsessed more with manipulating people’s behavior than with caring for their difficulties (Mark 3:1–6). They rejected people’s words on account of their social status (6:1–3), looked on the outward appearance and not at the heart (7:1–23; 10:23–27), sought glory in their own way (8:32), competed for status and prestige (9:33–37) and were jealous of those who were gifted in ministry (9:38). I think the reason Jesus rebuked the Pharisees and the disciples so often was that they not only misunderstood the world (lacked compassion) but also could seldom see how much they resembled it (1 Cor. 3:1–3).

The Bible teaches us to love sinners, but it also expects sinners to repent. And yet we often overlook how Jesus called sinners to repentance—how he made them willing to repent.

Jesus could have spent all his time directly rebuking tax collectors and prostitutes for being immoral sinners, but instead he focused his ministry on building relationships with them and addressing their needs. In the process, they often came to understand why they needed their sins forgiven. After a conversation in the middle of the day, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman about water that ensure she will never thirst again (John 4). He also confronts her about being married five times and that she currently isn’t married to the man she is with. After this long exchange, she is not only willing to change her own life but she eagerly tries to convince her community to meet Jesus.

And while many in this world will see the kindness of God in the loving way of Jesus, realize their sinfulness, and ultimately repent (Rom. 2:4), there are just as many who have a “hard and impenitent heart” (v. 5, ESV)—including those who claim to follow him yet “have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear” (Mark 8:18).

Paul said, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). After Jesus left the world, the church became the body and messengers of Christ—representing his image on earth. As such, we are called to live out the essential commands of Christ: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31).

How strong is our public testimony if all we are doing is reminding everyone of our high moral standards, expressing our disappointment with people’s life choices, and displaying our anger every time we see what we consider to be an “offensive” act against God? Instead, how powerful would our witness be to those outside the church if they saw us fighting for justice day and night, repenting for our wrongdoings, making peace and reconciling with others, and sacrificing ourselves to serve our neighbors and the least of our brothers and sisters?

As Kirsten Sanders argues in a recent piece for CT, “When the church becomes preoccupied with defending itself to the world, it eventually becomes incoherent.” This does not mean the church should be “withdrawn or ignorant or politically uninvolved,” but it does mean that there is a better way to go about it—and that is “to speak the peculiar language of peace, of forgiveness, of repentance and resurrection.”

Jesus’ Great Commission to the church is not to “go therefore and make all nations know that they are sinners.” Instead, he commanded us to make disciples—and part of that involves letting our light “shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). Sometimes, the world cannot understand us because they cannot see how we are any different than they are. And unless Christians understand the ways of the world, how will we know whether we resemble them?

Some Christians fear that our light is too small for the world to see. This fear can convince them that speaking authoritatively and stridently is the best way to remind people that Christians are not ashamed of their faith. But I do not believe this approach best reflects the way Christ conducted himself on earth.

Personally, I don’t think Jesus would try to stop people from going to see the zombie exhibition. Instead, he might engage them about the spiritual themes in the art. He might praise the artistic talent on display in the work or look for ways for the church to honor and recognize the artists. Or maybe he would recognize that people’s very desire to be in a setting that connects spirituality and beauty is the same impulse that can lead them to seek out God—and then he might invite them into that very thing.

Yiting Tsai is from Taiwan, and currently serves at a local church in Chicago. She also leads Christianity Today's Chinese translation efforts.

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Theology

‘Memorizing’ the Scars of South Korea’s Gwangju Massacre

Duke Kwon

Chun Woo-won’s apology for his military dictator grandfather’s sins is Nehemiah in action.

Mangwol-dong cemetery in Gwangju where victims' bodies were buried.

Wikimedia Commons

Midway through global K-pop sensation BTS’s 2015 track “Ma City,” J-Hope raps a lyric that’s both a personal homage and a history lesson: “Everyone dial it, 062–518.” Those digits are a cleverly encoded reference to his beloved hometown Gwangju. The South Korean city’s area code is 062, and 518 harkens back to May 18, 1980, and the prodemocracy mass uprising that took place in Gwangju on that date.

A little more than a week later, a military crackdown that included tanks and helicopters stormed the hundreds of thousands of civilians who had gathered to protest Chun Doo-hwan’s military coup and dictatorship. The brutal attack left 144 civilians dead, according to official government figures, although surviving eyewitnesses claim that the true death toll surpassed 2,000. Thousands more were injured, with many falling victim to indiscriminate beatings, rapes, disembowelments, and torture carried out by riot police and paratroopers. The state massacre is widely considered to be one of the darkest moments in Korea’s struggle for democracy.

In 2010, BTS’s Suga released the hip-hop track “518-062,” which pays tribute to courageous victims and calls a new generation to join him in “memorizing” the scars and wounds from “that dark past day”:

their bodies are filled with scars from the flag

darling, I’ll ignite your will again

brothers, I’ll memorize your scarred Korean flesh without pause

“[I want] to ask people not to allow the uprising to fade little by little from their memories and to remember it once again,” Suga said when the track debuted.

Chun Woo-won, the 27-year-old grandson of the late former president Chun Doo-hwan, has not allowed the uprising to fade from his memory. His recent actions vividly illustrate the biblical practice of intergenerational responsibility and confession and its capacity to engender the healing of old, festering wounds.

A public confession

The younger Chun, who lives and works as an accountant in New York, made international headlines on March 31 when he visited Gwangju to offer a formal apology to surviving victims and bereaved families of the 1980 massacre.

“I sincerely apologize for coming so late, and I am grateful to the people of Gwangju for graciously welcoming me for doing something that should have happened a long time ago,” Chun said that day, appearing visibly emotional.

Although he gestured towards his own flaws and failings, Chun expressed remorse primarily as a stand-in for his grandfather, who died in 2021: “As a family member, I acknowledge that my grandfather Chun Doo-hwan was a sinner and a slaughterer who committed such a great crime.”

Chun concluded his visit by paying respects to the deceased at Gwangju’s May 18 National Cemetery, which holds the graves of 764 victims. He vowed to “repent and express regret for my family’s wrongdoings for the rest of my life.”

While the immediate reaction was mixed, no one could deny that this public gesture of contrition was remarkable for having happened at all: Chun Woo-won is the first member of his family ever to apologize for the 1980 massacre. His grandfather, nicknamed “The Butcher of Gwangju,” denied issuing a shoot-to-kill order in a 2016 magazine interview, claiming, “I had nothing to do with the Gwangju incident.” He died, still defiant, at the age of 90.

Even after Chun Doo-hwan’s passing, victims ached for acknowledgment from the family. “A truthful apology would require Chun’s family coming to and kneeling at the victims’ graveyard,” insisted Choi Hyung-ho, the head of the Seoul branch of The May 18 Memorial Foundation.

And this is precisely what Chun Woo-won did. Besides offering a verbal apology, he also knelt before massacre survivors and family members of victims and offered the deepest and most formal way of expressing humility and respect in Korean culture: keunjeol, or a full-prostration bow, in which all five points of the body, including elbows, knees, and forehead, touch the ground.

https://twitter.com/0veptodittID/status/1641622459299561474

Videos of the powerful moment immediately went viral across social media platforms around the world. Some expressed skepticism about Chun’s sincerity and motives, which were undermined by his personal vices and indiscretions. But many were hopeful. One individual commented on Twitter, “This has me shedding tears.” Another said, “This is so powerful. It’s such a simple gesture. But an apology goes a long way.”

Reflecting on this incident, King’s College professor Anthony Bradley wondered what America might be like today “if US white conservative descendants of slavery’s Master Class and Jim Crow supporters (who were in every state) had practiced this Nehemiah 9:2 act in local communities across America in the 1970s.”

Such is the potential for public apologies to heal and to mend. Such is the power of intergenerational confession.

Bearing responsibility

Nehemiah 9, the text Bradley cited, offers a salient example of intergenerational confession from the Bible. With their bodies draped in sackcloth and dirt smudged on their faces—a cultural analog to keunjeol, perhaps—the restored exiles of Jerusalem gather to confess not only “their sins” aloud but also “the iniquities of their fathers” (v. 2). They do so, first, by rehearsing the history of God’s dealings with their ancestors in judgment and redemption (vv. 6–32), and then by identifying with that story and those ancestors in a penitential prayer: “You have been just in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly” (v. 33).

Us. We. With these pronouns of remorseful solidarity, the people join a chorus of voices in Scripture that own and acknowledge their predecessors’ sins. “Both we and our fathers have sinned,” Psalm 106:6 sings. “We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord, and the iniquity of our fathers, for we have sinned against you,” laments the prophet Jeremiah (14:20).

“Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities,” the author of Lamentations bemoans (5:7). This ancient chorus echoed once more in the voice of a grandson in Gwangju, a voice that grieved “the hideous crime we had committed.”

In spite of this broad biblical precedent, there will be some in the Christian tradition who appreciate Chun’s apology for its symbolic and sentimental value but resist any suggestion that apologizing for the sins of one’s deceased forebears should be a normative practice.

Two possible reasons for this skepticism are worth examining briefly.

The first involves the skeptic’s cultural vantage point. Sociologists have long noted that the social function and meaning of an apology can vary widely in collectivist cultures like South Korea, as opposed to individualist cultures like the US. In the former, people tend to see themselves as connected to others, define themselves in terms of their relationships, and apologize as an expression of eagerness to repair a damaged relationship. In the latter, people tend to see themselves as separate from others, define themselves by their individual traits and choices, and associate apologies primarily with personal guilt.

These two groups will tend to read the Bible differently when encountering collectivist and intergenerational concerns in places like Nehemiah 9. Individualistic observers are more likely to resist the idea of apologizing to strangers they have never met for wrongs they didn’t personally commit.

This brings us to a second reason for skepticism toward intergenerational confession. Some say that the practice is theologically invalid because it unjustly punishes people as if they had personally committed the sins of others. But this reflects a misunderstanding of the concept.

Intergenerational confession doesn’t rely on a reckless imputation of an individual’s personal guilt to another. The prophet Ezekiel clearly asserts that a person “shall not die for his father’s iniquity” (Ezek. 18:17; also Jer. 31:29–30), even as he affirms the fairness of Israel’s communal judgment by exile (Ezek. 16–17). Individual culpability remains distinct from collective responsibility.

The Gwangju apology does not imply that Chun bears personal guilt for his grandfather’s atrocities, as though he himself had committed them. Neither does it serve as an equivalent substitute for the repentance his grandfather owed but never offered—“his blood shall be upon himself” (Ezek. 18:13). Rather, Chun’s apology represents an embrace of corporate responsibility for the sins of one member (Chun Doo-hwan) of a collective (the Chun family) in which the person apologizing (Chun Woo-won) is also a member.

Whether by instinct or learning, Chun, who is Christian, appears to understand that he is implicated in his grandfather’s evils, even if he is not personally to blame for them. He bears responsibility “as a family member.”

The road to healing

What does this collective, intergenerational responsibility entail? The obligation to ameliorate, and not merely acknowledge, the harms of the past.

Old Testament scholar Michael Rhodes points to the Year of Jubilee as a key example (Lev. 25–26). Israelite families that had acquired land from other families, sometimes by sinful and oppressive means, were required to return the land to the original owners every 50 years. “If the damage one generation does is not fixed in their own day, that damage does not simply disappear at their death. The wrong must be righted, and the job may well fall on their descendants,” Rhodes explains.

This biblical principle applies to Chun Doo-hwan’s descendants: They may not have broken it, but they must repair it. They should not only “confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers” (Lev. 26:40), as Chun Woo-won did, but also “make amends for their iniquity” (Lev. 26:43).

What kind of amends can be made to the residents of Gwangju? What emblems of repentance, healing, and neighborly love can be offered? This is a matter for Chun to determine for himself, guided by the input of victims and their families. But he already appears inclined toward this frame of mind. In a press conference after the event, Chun expressed his intent to “continue to contact” the bereaved families “as much as needed” and to “continue the dialogue.” Perhaps that dialogue could include the possibilities of repair.

To be clear, the process of healing did not begin with Chun’s apology. It has taken place over the past 40 years at the local and national levels through efforts around truth-seeking, criminal prosecution, memorialization, and government reform. It has also included material reparation. Beginning in 1990, the government—which bears primary responsibility for the massacre—passed a series of measures, including the Kwangju Compensation Act, that provided compensation to families of the deceased and missing and to those who were injured. A total of 5,185 cases were handled, and 233 billion Korean won (approximately $202 million USD) was paid to victims, for an average amount of 45 million Korean won ($39,000) awarded per person, according to one estimate in 2009.

Transitional justice advocates will insist that redress to victims is an essential pillar of social healing. Old Testament law apparently agrees. Yet, $39,000 is a relatively modest sum when considered in light of the full extent of the actual damage that was done—the murders, the brutalization, and the rape and sexual assaults carried out by soldiers during their crackdown on the uprising.

Reparation is necessary for healing, reconciliation, and peace. But its limited payout brings into brighter focus the sheer enormity of the loss, together with what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “predicament of irreversibility,” the plain human inability to undo what has been done.

No amount of recompense can undo what was done in Gwangju, and we would be wise not to sentimentalize the tearful goodwill displayed there. “Transgenerational forgiveness cannot be achieved with a simple apology and its acceptance,” said Ani Kalayjian, a scholar and descendant of Armenian genocide survivors.

Forgiveness, like collective responsibility and confession, is a scriptural imperative (Matt. 6:14–15; Luke 17:3–4; Eph. 4:32). It brings about a mutual release from the oppressive bonds of vengeance. But it is also complex. Sometimes forgiveness proves elusive in a sin-scarred world. Very often, forgiveness involves a long and arduous process, especially when it is generationally delayed and involves remorseless or deceased perpetrators of state brutality.

Survivors and families whose loved ones perished in the Gwangju massacre received Chun Woo-won warmly in Gwangju. Some of the bereaved, including elderly mothers who lost their college-aged children decades ago, burst into tears and accepted his apology. Others commended him for his courage and hugged him. One woman, whose son was killed in the uprising, expressed her hope that Chun would “think of Gwangju as his second home.”

Whether these visible gestures of goodwill can be accurately interpreted as forgiveness is unclear. Whether they reveal that the original perpetrator, Chun Doo-hwan, is hereby forgiven on account of his grandson is even less certain. Still, the victims’ magnanimous response indicates that some kind of release from indebtedness, some kind of freedom from vengeance, may have pierced through the decades-old fog of bitterness and grief that day.

If so, that too is a kind of healing. That too is a legacy worth memorizing.

Duke Kwon is coauthor of Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair and lead pastor of Grace Meridian Hill, a neighborhood congregation in the Grace DC Network. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children.

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News

Mobs Kill 6, Burn Down 25 Churches in Northeastern India

Surinder Kaur

While ethnic tensions have festered for decades, leaders in Manipur say religious extremism is fueling the extreme aggression.

Associated Press

Rioting mobs have taken the lives of at least six people and destroyed or burned down 25 churches in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. Since May 3, thousands of victims, the majority of them Christians, have fled as their homes and businesses have gone up in flames.

While tensions over property rights and economic interests have existed between the state’s ethnic groups for decades, local leaders told CT that church burnings are the result of the growth of Hindu nationalism among the dominant Meite community.

The chief minister of Manipur, N. Biren Singh, described the situation as a “prevailing misunderstanding between two communities” and said that his government was committed to protecting “the lives and property of all our people.”

“We should not allow the culture of communal harmony in the state to be disturbed by vested interests,” Singh said, adding that he also intended to address the community’s “long-term grievances.”

Manipur borders Myanmar and is home to a diverse range of ethnic groups, including Meiteis, who are a numerical majority in the state and are predominantly Hindu, and various tribal communities, who are largely Christian.

Primarily based in Imphal Valley, a region which includes Manipur’s capital, the Meiteis have long dominated the state's political and economic landscape. Meanwhile, tribal communities make up around a third of the population (35.4%) and are mainly concentrated in the hills surrounding the valley, 90 percent of the state’s geographical area.

For decades, the issue of land ownership and control has been a source of conflict between the two groups. But in recent years, these tensions have been exacerbated by the political influence of the Hindu nationalist organizations Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which have sought to promote their faith as the dominant religion in India and have used the Meitei community to advance their political agenda in the state.

https://twitter.com/ashoswai/status/1654141620130914305

This month’s violence came weeks after the Manipur High Court ordered the state government to respond to the Meitei community’s request for Scheduled Tribe status. The designation gives communities special constitutionally backed protections including reserved seats in the parliament and state legislatures, affirmative action in education and employment, and property protections.

But believing that this categorization would dilute their own protections and political representation, Manipur tribal groups have long fought this change.

While area leaders believe that the violence was largely a reaction to this political decision, they see its viciousness and severity, particularly the attack on churches, as the growth of the influence of BJP and the RSS. Radical Hindu ideology historically has struggled to find a foothold in Manipur, because of its mix of tribal, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim communities.

Christian leaders from the area told CT that they believed this violence was religiously motivated.

“In this pogrom, the Hindu Meiteis not only burned down churches belonging to tribals but also churches that exclusively belong to Meitei Christians,” said Ngaineilam Haokip, an academic at university in Kolkata, who grew up in Manipur. “They targeted their own brethren who follow Christ by burning their churches.”

“If this is not a pogrom, what is? They are burning churches when the protest rally was simply against the inclusion of Meiteis as Scheduled Tribe by All Tribal Student Union Manipur (ATSUM). There is definitely a religious angle here,” said a Christian leader in the area, who for security reasons asked to be identified by the name Lien.

After the BJP came to power in 2017, it sought to create a Hindu nationalist identity for the Meitei community. This encouragement to see themselves as part of the Hindu fold has come even as nearly 10 percent of the community practice an indigenous religion known as Sanamahism.

After the court’s April 19 directive, the state government was given a four-week deadline to review the Meitei community’s request and make a recommendation to the federal government for its consideration.

https://twitter.com/ashoswai/status/1653988653717176322

On Wednesday, thousands of people across the state, the majority Christians, gathered locally to protest the Meitei’s demand. Although the event ended peacefully in several districts, there were reports of arson, vandalism, and confrontations in other areas.

In the district of Churachandpur, one unidentified group set fire to a famous war memorial. Infuriated by this arson, there was a clash among locals, resulting in the destruction of homes and forcing hundreds of residents to seek refuge in nearby forests. Retaliatory attacks by local youths targeted Meitei neighborhoods in Churachandpur, and the violence caused two deaths and injured 11. Some reports alleged attackers carried sophisticated weaponry.

In response, groups of people targeted several tribal neighborhoods in the capital city of Imphal. Residents told The Wire that mobs burned down 23 houses and injured 19 residents.

One victim of the attacks was a tribal legislative assembly representative who sustained severe head injuries and is currently in critical condition.

“Tribals were not prepared for a war. They were holding peace rallies against the demand for Scheduled Tribe status by Meiteis. The Meiteis on the other hand, were planning for this kind of confrontation for a long time, it seems. They collected gun licenses and guns and then lit the fire,” Haokip said.

In the wake of the violence, the government has imposed a curfew and suspended internet access. The severity of the situation has led the Indian government to deploy military to the affected areas and authorize it to use lethal force in “extreme cases” in addressing the increasing violence. The federal government has additionally invoked Article 355, giving it authority over the state of Manipur. More than 7,500 people have been evacuated to safer places.

As of the evening of May 4, interpersonal violence has abated, although some residents have reported burning buildings and church vandalism.

The Evangelical Fellowship of India expressed sadness and concern over the violence, though it did not link the event to religious extremism or suggest that Christians had been targeted because of their faith.

“We call upon all parties involved to exercise restraint and work towards a peaceful resolution of the issues. We urge the people of Manipur to avoid forces that instigate division and cause polarization,” said Vijayesh Lal, the general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India in a statement. “We also appeal to the state and the union government to engage in constructive dialogue with all stakeholders to address the underlying causes of the conflict.”

The North East Students Society of Delhi University, a group that represents the Christian tribal community, condemned what they described a “division along the lines of religious faith and communal identity fueled by political propaganda.” Representing a similar constituency, the Naga Students Union Delhi urged the government to “address the underlying issues that have led to these events by wider consultation with the various stakeholders.”

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News

Wire Story

Josh Butler Resigns as Pastor Following TGC Article Backlash

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

The “Beautiful Union” author said the conversation around his book took an intense toll on his Tempe, Arizona, church.

Josh Butler at Redemption Church

Screengrab / Redemption Church

An evangelical Christian pastor and author whose book on the theology of sex caused a furor online earlier this spring resigned Wednesday from the leadership of his Arizona megachurch.

“We have found ourselves in an impossible situation,” Joshua Butler wrote to members of Redemption Church in Tempe in announcing his resignation. A copy of the letter was posted on social media. His photo and bio no longer appear on the church’s website.

Butler’s new book, Beautiful Union, which argues that “God’s vision for sex” explains the meaning of life, was controversial even before it was released in April.

In March, an excerpt of the book appeared on the website of the influential church resource organization The Gospel Coalition. In the excerpt, titled “Sex Won’t Save You (But It Points to the One Who Will),” Butler offered repeated descriptions of sexual intercourse in spiritual terms, most of them characterizing sex as a man bestowing a holy gift to a woman and comparing that to the relationship of Jesus and the church.

“She gladly receives the warmth of his presence and accepts the sacrificial offering he bestows upon the altar within her Most Holy Place,” wrote Butler. “Similarly, the church embraces Christ in salvation, celebrating his arrival with joy and delight.”

The excerpt led to public outcry, claiming Butler’s writing contained not only bad theology but an oversexed view of religion centered on male pleasure. While the excerpt did quote from the New Testament’s Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, theology professor Beth Felker Jones, among others, argued Butler had missed the point of the passages he addressed.

“But the piece does not dig into Ephesians, paying close attention to the text,” wrote Jones. “Instead, it turns into a rhapsody over a very male-centered experience of sexual intercourse.”

The Gospel Coalition removed the article days after it was posted, replacing it with an apology and a note that Butler had resigned as a fellow with the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, a project of The Gospel Coalition, named for popular author and retired pastor Tim Keller. Butler’s ties to the center amplified the controversy over the book.

In his church resignation letter, Butler said “the toll of this controversy on many of our staff and leaders this month has been intense.” Butler and other elders at the church decided it would be best for him to step down, according to the letter.

Resigning, he said, would allow him to take part in “public conversations” about his book without harming the church.

Those public conversations have taken place even as Butler contemplated his resignation. He continued to promote the book on his personal website, publishing another article related to the book, titled “The Ethics of Contraception,” that also created controversy.

“A condom dams up the ‘river of life,’ preventing its life-giving waters from reaching the opposite shore,” Butler wrote. “With a diaphragm, a barrier is placed at the most intimate point of contact, preventing a full reception of the gift within the generative holy space of the womb.”

Butler also said he would be revising a future printing of the book in light of feedback he has received and he would be available to speak with church members who felt angered or hurt because of the controversy.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

How to Improve Your Odds for a Successful Marriage

Scott Stanley

If you’re dating seriously, don’t slide into a life-long commitment. Decide on it.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Envato

A substantial number of practicing Christians believe that living together before marriage is a good idea—at least 41 percent, by one estimate. Although far more nonreligious people believe the same thing (88%), 41 percent is not a small group, and it’s likely growing over time.

A recent report from the Institute for Family Studies surveyed people who married for the first time in the years 2010 to 2019. My colleague Galena Rhoades and I found conclusions similar to those of past studies: Patterns of cohabitation before marriage remain associated with higher odds of divorce.

What people often miss is the inertia that comes with moving in together. In essence, cohabiting couples are making it harder to break up before nailing down their commitments. Many of them get stuck in a relationship they might otherwise have moved on from.

Consistent with our theory of inertia, we find that couples who moved in together before engagement were 48 percent more likely to end their marriages than those who cohabited only after getting wed or at least engaged. We also show that moving in together for “relationship testing” or financial convenience is associated with higher risks for divorce.

In light of this research, Christians contemplating marriage may wonder what they can do to improve their odds of staying married. Relationship advice is cheap and easy to come by. But this latest research suggests that certain steps and precautions will improve the likelihood of staying together “’til death do us part.”

First, don’t believe the hype that living together is good for your relationship.

Although conservative Christians are less likely than most to cohabit before marriage, many do. Given that most men and women believe it can increase their chance for marital success, the practice is highly tempting. But there’s very little evidence that living together in advance improves the odds of an enduring marriage. By contrast, there’s a lot of evidence that it complicates that goal.

In defiance of cultural trends, couples should consider the traditional path: engagement first, then marriage, then moving in together. Those steps help ensure clarity about the commitment you’re making as you move forward into a shared life. They also give you a clearer decision line that separates your life before marriage and after it.

Slow down. Timing and sequence can get you on the right relationship path.

There are benefits to going slowly as a relationship develops. Super slow? No. Some couples wait years and years to get married, long after they know what they want the future to look like. That approach can bring its own problems—for example, entering marriage without the joy and energy of a shared commitment.

Why is it important not to rush things? Two people need time to learn more about each other, clarify expectations and beliefs, and develop their relationship in a community of family and faith. In too many relationships, both partners believe they’re on the same page about marriage when they’re not. It takes time to get clarity. Some Christians move too fast toward marriage because they’re abstaining from sex and want to get to, well, everything. But they miss a lot of what they need to see.

How slow should you go? It depends. I often tell people they should see a person through at least four seasons. For most, though, one year is on the shorter side of things. Similarly, a long engagement can be valuable. It gives the couple a chance to practice a high level of commitment and “try on” being publicly devoted to each other with marriage as the goal. And it often draws out challenges that can make or break the relationship.

Decide; don’t slide.

A commitment involves making a choice to give up other choices. It’s a decision—and one that should be based on good information. But surprisingly few relationships follow this basic model. An important study on cohabitation showed that people tend to slide into living together, with no discussion about it and no decision reflecting commitment.

We see a similar lack of intention in how men and women communicate. We live in the age of ambiguity. Partners often avoid being candid with each other, perhaps in the naïve belief that if they don’t express their desires, they’ll hurt less if the relationship fails. But, of course, that rarely works. While it’s not a good idea to have “the talk” on a first or second date, don’t avoid deeper discussions when things change and become serious.

Candor is especially important because dating partners often have very different levels of commitment. You don’t want to find that out after you’ve said “I do.” By talking things through with a potential spouse, you leave less room for misunderstanding, and you’re more likely to bring mutual intention to a lifelong promise.

This “deciding” approach doesn’t guarantee success in a relationship, nor does sliding into it mean you’re doomed. But, on balance, more marriages would last if partners got their signals clear long before making life-altering transitions.

Don’t move in together to test the relationship.

If you want to find out if the person you’re dating is a good fit, you can do that without moving in. Take a relationship education course. Talk about what a future together would look like. See if you’re compatible by dating for a longer period of time. Take time to experience your partner in different social settings. Pay attention to how you feel with this person and how he or she treats others. And ask trusted friends, family members, and pastors what they think.

If you currently live with your partner, put in the hard work of figuring out where you are headed. Study the relationship and its challenges. Talk openly and clearly about expectations. Don’t avoid asking hard questions. Ambiguity is not your friend. Seek input from others you trust, including pastors, lay leaders, and wise friends. Get information, support, and wisdom wherever you can find it. And finally, use all available resources.

Any couple with a serious commitment can explore the many books, online resources, workshops, and therapy services that were created to support them. Here are some suggestions:

Books:

Consider reading The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman, Reconnected: Moving from Roommates to Soulmates in Your Marriage by Greg and Erin Smalley, or A Lasting Promise: The Christian Guide to Fighting for Your Marriage by me and my colleagues—Daniel Trathen, Savanna McCain, Milt Bryan—as well as other books on relationships and marriage preparation.

Premarital training or counseling:

Evidence suggests that premarital training and counseling services may help prevent marital problems, so look for premarital support in your area. Your local church can be a great resource as well. The pastors or lay leaders in your faith community may offer helpful guidance.

For couples facing problems, find help sooner than later. Too many people wait too long before getting professional support. And if you’re in a relationship you’re not sure about, see a counselor on your own who might help you get perspective.

Workshops for couples:

Although still rare, more and more churches provide marriage and relationship workshops (as do various community agencies). These educational workshops can help couples strengthen their connection and commitment. You can also find rigorously tested online programs for couples. They’re not coming from a Christian perspective, but nonetheless they are solid programs.

OurRelationship is an online relationship education program based on a popular, effective couple therapy approach. Find it at our relationship.com.

ePREPis an online program founded on the decades of work in the Prevention and Relationship Education Program. Find it at lovetakeslearning.com.

Look for other online resources as well.

The team at PREP Inc.—full disclosure: I am co-owner—produces a variety of resources to help people succeed in their most important relationships, including a four-minute video that’s based on our research, available on YouTube: “Relationship DUI—Are You Sure You’re in Love?” This video explains the risks of going too fast and getting locked in too quickly. It’s a fantastic video to share with a friend.

The Institute for Family Studies also offers relevant resources. A few years ago, my colleague Galena Rhoades and I authored a public report titled Before “I Do” on how premarital experiences are associated with relationship quality after marriage.

Church community:

There’s a lot of talk these days about loneliness and isolation. It’s a serious problem. Research suggests that couples, too, are less and less likely to be in community with others and more prone to be “alone together.” That’s not the best path for your marriage.

But there is good news. If you are not involved in a church community, you can be. One of the best ways to protect your marriage—and your own well-being—is getting connected to others who can root for you and your marriage, pray with you, and be there as you travel the road ahead. You can also support and encourage others in a similar position.

If you’re an “alone together” couple, find a place where you and your mate (or mate to be) can develop in a community, and start to pursue a fuller, more meaningful life. It’s one of many ways that the two of you can decide, not slide, into your future.

Scott Stanley is a research professor in the psychology department at the University of Denver and a senior fellow at the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for Family Studies.

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Theology

On Tucker Carlson and the Fear of Being Replaced

Russell Moore

Christians who seek the wrong kingdom will dread the wrong apocalypse.

Illustration by Sarah Gordon / Source Images: Jason Koerner / Stringer / kyoshino / E+ / attaphong / iStock / Getty

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

“I only get an hour a week; Tucker gets five.” I’ve heard a sentiment along these lines countless times from evangelical pastors—although they sometimes replaced “Tucker” with “Laura” or “Sean” or another Fox News cable host.

After his firing by the network, Tucker Carlson no longer has five hours a week. But his legacy ought to tell us just how much the church has secularized. Nowhere is this clearer than in the kind of replacement theory embraced by so many Christians.

Originating on the white nationalist fringes, the “great replacement theory” holds that “globalist” elites are seeking to replace white Americans with Black and brown immigrants from around the world. At the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for instance, the alt-right crowd chanted, “You will not replace us; Jews will not replace us.”

This view was made mainstream by Carlson, perhaps more so than by any other figure, because he promoted extreme voices few others would. When others would hint in the direction of the great replacement theory, Carlson would explicitly articulate it, even arguing that immigrants were making the country “dirtier.”

Many Christians have never heard of the great replacement theory and never watch Carlson or any other cable news commentator. Yet they can find themselves changed by the great replacement theory’s vibe, if not its explicit content. That’s because the most significant carrier of conspiracy theories such as this one is not cognitive but limbic. What’s needed is a general stance of fear about an existential threat—like the threat of being replaced.

Two years ago, commentator David Frum argued that there actually is a great replacement happening, but not the one popularized by Carlson and others. Frum said, “The most politically important ‘great replacement’ underway in the United States is the ‘replacement’ of conservative Christians by their own liberal and secular children and grandchildren.”

Frum’s argument should come with lots of caveats and qualifications. Like for those who say that demographic change with increased minority populations would lead to a permanent progressive majority in the United States, some naively assume that secularization trends will mean the end of religion—especially of conservative Christianity.

For all sorts of reasons, this is not the case. But Frum is correct that one of the most seismic generational changes over the past 20 years is the rise of the “nones,” referring to those with no religious affiliation. And the younger we go on the generational chart, the sharper the decline of religious self-identification, worship attendance, and other metrics.

One reason American Christians are in a state of denial about these realities is that so many are sorting themselves into the wrong “us.” Every blood-and-soil form of fear-based identity politics thrives on defining us in terms of visceral categories like race, tribe, or nationality. This assumes a blatantly social Darwinian view of what human communities are or can be.

The problem for Christians is that the gospel contradicts this ideology at its very root.

If “Christianity” for you is white and American, then it is not only out of step with the Bible; it is also precisely the kind of religion that almost every chapter of the New Testament explicitly repudiates as carnal and pagan.

The gospel situates us in a whole new story—one based on the promise God made to Abraham (Rom. 4; Gal. 3:1–9). If the church is just another way for humans to protect their gene pools, then Jesus was a fraud from his first sermon onward (Luke 4:25–27). If the blood-and-soil nationalists are correct about what defines success, then the crowds were right to call out for a leader like Barabbas instead of Jesus (John 18:40).

But Jesus and his apostles gave us an entirely different vision of how we and us are ultimately defined. The apostle Paul is in sync with the rest of the New Testament canon when he reveals that “here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11).

Once we lose that biblical sense of “we-ness” overall, any threat to the places where we do catch rare glimpses of it is considered an ultimate threat—capable of destroying “us” completely. If we have misplaced hopes, we will have misplaced fears. When we seek the wrong kingdom, we will fear the wrong apocalypse.

That sense of paralyzing fear can also fuel the loss of the next generation. If the only choices we offer are secularization and paganization, we shouldn’t be surprised that they choose one or the other. Moreover, our children will find it very hard to connect a scared and anxious church with a Jesus who perspired not a drop before the leaders of the Roman Empire but sweat blood before the face of God (Luke 22:44).

The implicit but faulty logic is that if we teach a generation to fear many things, they will at least fear the things they ought to. But it doesn’t work that way. When my generation was taught that rock music included hidden “backward masked” satanic messages, this did not lead us to become more discerning about cultural narratives. And when we found out this wasn’t true, it only taught us to wonder what other of our elders’ fears were imagined or fabricated.

But if Jesus is right that our ultimate belonging comes not by our flesh but through the Spirit (John 3:3–8), then none of us can consider our present or potentially future siblings in Christ scary or “unclean.” If we really believe in the unstoppable advance of God’s kingdom, then we will be known by our joy and peace—not by our fear and loathing.

Cable television hosts come and go, but there will always be people who try to make us find our identity in the wrong places and our enemies in the wrong people. They want us to be afraid so we will look for someone or something to fight for us. The great replacement theory is bad for democracy, but it is even more poisonous to the church.

The church will go on into the future, even in America. And it will probably be led then by the very people we are told to fear now.

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

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