Where Angels Fear to Tread: Writing A TV Show About Jesus

Interview by Emily Belz in Midlothian, Texas

The screenwriters for “The Chosen” wanted a main character who is not like Superman.

Chosen screenwriters Ryan Swanson, left, and Tyler Thompson on the Texas set for the feeding of the 5,000 scene.

Courtesy of The Chosen

Ryan Swanson and Tyler Thompson, along with director Dallas Jenkins , write the hit show The Chosen, a drama about Jesus’ life through the eyes of his disciples that has millions of views and has been translated into more than 50 languages. The show’s third season premieres November 18, with four more seasons planned.

Jenkins is usually the public face of the show, but CT spoke with Swanson and Thompson at the show’s production location in Midlothian, Texas, this summer when they were shooting their version of the biblical story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 for season 3. The thousands of extras were all fans of the show who contributed to the crowdfunded show or who won a raffle (see our coverage of the shoot here).

You have some experience in Hollywood. How does it make you feel that the Hollywood gatekeepers like Variety haven’t acknowledged the show much?

Tyler Thompson: I don’t take it personally that they haven’t. They have good reason to be suspicious of it, because it doesn’t really make sense—the whole business model, the app of it all. It hasn’t been a large acknowledgment in the Hollywood press, but we do know it’s being discussed in the boardrooms.

Ryan Swanson: If it was blowing up, it doesn’t feel like it would hit us for a while.

Tyler Thompson: Yeah, there’s the show, and then there’s all the noise around the show. The Bible study booklets, calendars, and documentaries—we stay isolated from the social media hype.

Ryan Swanson: It has been nice in a lot of ways to grow at our own pace.

Tyler Thompson: We have our very tight writers’ room of three. And there are many outside forces speaking into it, but it’s really just us.

So you have shielded yourselves a little bit from the Christian industrial complex?

Tyler Thompson: We don’t cater to that complex. We just make what we think is a good show with professional actors who are Middle Eastern and people of color, and we hire professional [directors of photography] and professional crew.

Evangelicals are arguing all the time, but it seems like you have been able to mostly avoid being the center of controversy—if you don’t read the comments section.

Tyler Thompson: The world is a great place if you never read the comments.

Ryan Swanson: I don’t know how these [evangelical] arguments go. I grew up in a Swedish Lutheran house: We go to church and we do church bazaars and sell cube steaks. And then I went to work in Hollywood. But the show revolves around events from the Bible, and we don’t take a didactic approach.

Tyler Thompson: Right, it’s not preaching. You can extract meaning. People can sense when they’re being manipulated or told to believe a certain thing. The Chosen, it’s just entertainment. It’s about character and plot and story.

Ryan Swanson: It’s never our organizing principle: How can we do this differently, how can we turn Christianity on its head? The source material, it’s immovable.

Tyler Thompson: And it’s not pushing a particular theology. If there’s any theology that we’re trying to amplify, I would say it’s a less-heightened Christology.

Some people have this very high Christology, like, there’s no way Jesus would have prepared for a sermon. But I’m here to emphasize Jesus’ humanity. We’ve portrayed Jesus as a very relatable character who cracks jokes, makes fart noises to entertain kids. And most people love that, but some people think that that’s irreverent. We just want to portray something that was very human.

I did notice Jesus laughs a lot in the show.

Tyler Thompson: We’re not telling people this is what happened. But if we’re talking about someone who’s fully God and fully man, then all these emotions are there. He displayed all these other emotions: fear in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying, Let this cup pass from me. He’s effectively saying, I don’t want to do this, is there another way? That’s a very human emotion. He expresses disappointment in his friends: You couldn’t wait up and watch with me one hour.

Ryan Swanson: He cursed a tree because he was angry.

What made you want to bring a more human Christology to the show?

Tyler Thompson: I think our hatred of Superman. We all agree that Superman is the worst superhero—

Ryan Swanson: —to write, as writers! He always needs a proxy to suffer. So Lois has to be in trouble, or Metropolis.

At the end of the day, we’re setting up the scripts to service Dallas’s vision. And although we write as a team, Dallas does run the show.

How do you approach character development?

Ryan Swanson: What do we know that might suggest or insinuate some motive: fear, vulnerability, or strength? In the case of Philip, who had previously followed John the Baptist, we started to imagine, “Okay, he’s done this before. He’s probably seen some of the hairier stuff than what these disciples have seen. He’ll be an old hand.” What we know from Scripture, we’re limited.

Ryan Swanson: [To Thompson] Do you remember that document that Dallas had sent us early on?

Tyler Thompson: A document with what we know about each disciple. Peter was so directly called by Jesus, and then you have somebody like Simon the Zealot about whom three words are written and those words are “Simon the Zealot.”

When you’re thinking about character development, we know that all our Jewish characters grew up with their necks under the boot of Rome. They have generations of trauma in Judaism that needs no explanation: Egypt and the slavery and the exile in Babylon. So we don’t have to make up a trauma backstory, because it’s generational. And it’s very much passed down in their liturgy.

Does it cut off any career opportunities for you to work on a Christian show?

Ryan Swanson: Maybe. At the beginning it was unknown; there was risk for everybody involved. Every working [Hollywood] professional is branded as something.

It sounds cheesy, but this has felt like home. Dallas has never strung me along. He introduced me to Tyler, who’s been a better writing partner than I could have ever imagined.

I’ve put my faith in the people who are behind the project. Even when I had no idea how the marketing was gonna work, how this app was going to work—every time, it’s been proven to me that everybody does their job better than me. Except my job, that is the only job I’m qualified to do.

Tyler Thompson: Someone asked me the other day how it’s funded. And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t understand the funding model.

Speaking of which, you’re surrounded by people who donated to the show right now. What’s it like to be on set with thousands of fans?

Ryan Swanson: I can walk through here; no one knows who I am.

Tyler Thompson: That’s the best part about being a writer, is that you get to do your creative work in solitude. And people don’t conflate you with your work. Those actors, they’re recognizable all over the world now. And people can conflate Matthew and Paras [Patel] or Jonathan [Roumie] and Jesus. People don’t scrutinize our lives the way that the actors are scrutinized.

Do you have a favorite episode you worked on?

Ryan Swanson: It’s actually the same episode for both of us: season 1, episode 2. We realized we were both seeing the same movie in our heads—that final coda, where we check in with all the characters, all the Shabbat dinners.

It’s one thing to crank out a spec script, where you might have a bunch of ideas and the promise of a series. This episode, we had to buck up and write a series based on the pilot we introduced. And so that one felt like, “Hey, we can do this.” We found that every season since, that episode 2 is a kind of place where the storylines get galvanized.

Tyler Thompson: In our life, it’s been infamously always the hardest one to write. Six is really hard. So two and six.

Ryan Swanson: If it’s eight episodes, the second one is the end of act 1, and then episode 6 is the end of act 2. So you have to start to wrap something up, a choice is made, the road behind them closes off, point of no return is reached.

How do the three of you write together?

Ryan Swanson: We’re an assembly line. We plot out the whole season at a retreat, and then parse that out to eight increments. And then I peel off and do an outline.

Tyler Thompson: Then I write a first draft off the outline. I hand off to Ryan, and he works on it, and then it gets handed off to Dallas. Meanwhile, as soon as I hand off episode 2 to Ryan, then I’m working on episode 3. And Dallas is working on episode 1.

Ryan Swanson: And by Dallas’s pass, there’s words from all three of us.

Tyler Thompson: After Dallas, the drafts go to our three biblical consultants. And then we get back pages and pages and pages of notes!

What feedback do you get from your biblical consultants?

Ryan Swanson: Divine pronoun!

Tyler Thompson: A lot of capitalizing His. The scripts eventually are used in the subtitling process. And there’s a huge swath of Americans still hanging onto the divine pronoun. And when they watch it with the subtitles on, people have screenshots: “So proud of The Chosen for using the divine pronoun.” It’s a whole thing.

Ryan Swanson: The bigger notes—sometimes they’re great. These are all learned scholars, and well-intended notes. But we don’t always use them.

Tyler Thompson: Sometimes we’re like, “Great, thank you. We’ll fix it.” And then other times, you’re like, “Thanks for pointing that out; this is a plausible fiction. So we’re going to put this town 10 miles north of where you’re saying it should be.” They point out geographical problems with roads and north, south, east, west stuff. We do our best with that.

We’re not a church, we’re not a ministry, we’re not a Bible study. We’re just entertainment. If they send a note that’s like, “This is blatantly so unbiblical,” we would really pay attention to that. But we’ve never really gotten into much trouble, because we’re so careful.

Ryan Swanson: We’re certainly never ill-intentioned but ignorance can do as much harm as bad intentions if we don’t at least try to understand. So that’s why we bring the scholars in.

Sometimes you have to say, “We made a choice for a show.” We can’t have the intention that, this line is going to save somebody or it’s going to lift somebody up at their lowest moment, which is feedback we have heard.

Tyler Thompson: Ryan always says the answer can never be “Because God.” There has to be some very human and plot-related things that lead characters to their decisions.

The first two episodes of the third season of The Chosen are in theaters Friday, for five days. All episodes, as usual, will be free and available on The Chosen ’s app.

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

Everything You Need to Know About the Respect for Marriage Act

Carl Esbeck

The law recently advanced by the US Senate doesn’t deny religious liberty to those who support traditional unions.

Samuel Corum / Stringer / Getty

This week, the Senate advanced the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA). The law tries to balance the unquestionable goodness of traditional marriage with America’s changing views on same-sex relationships. Some conservatives will undoubtedly treat the act as a loss. But others will take the view that, in a morally pluralistic society, a few concessions yield a win for the common good. I’m one of them.

The history of RMA goes back to late June, when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruled its predecessor Roe v. Wade. Buried in a concurring opinion by justice Clarence Thomas was his suggestion that the court make a clean sweep of things by reconsidering the 2015 Obergefell decision finding a constitutional right to gay marriage. That comment unsettled the tens of thousands of Americans who had entered same-sex unions, which in conservative states are dependent on Obergefell remaining good law.

In response, the US House passed the Respect for Marriage Act, or H.R. 8404. But it failed to safeguard religious liberty for churches, universities, and other institutions that believe in traditional marriage.

Rather than just say no to RMA, a small collective of faith groups moved quickly in the Senate to see if the act could be brought into balance. A few senators from both parties who were keen on doing just that helped. After adding in a measure of religious liberty protections, the Senate substitute of the House bill passed the higher chamber earlier this week, 62–37.

In order of significance, here’s what you need to know about the Respect for Marriage Act:

Section 6(b) of RMA recognizes that religious nonprofits and their personnel have a statutory right to decline any involvement with a marriage solemnization or celebration—including a same-sex one. This federal right would preempt any state or local law to the contrary. It means clergy can refuse to officiate a gay wedding. A church can decline to be the venue for these unions. A Christian college can deny use of its chapel for the same reason, and a Christian summer camp can refuse use of its lake and nearby pavilion, as well.

This section of the act only deals with nonprofits and therefore doesn’t address ongoing litigation over for-profit Christian wedding vendors—photographers, bakers, florists, dressmakers, and others. However, RMA doesn’t harm wedding vendors. It’s simply silent and leaves the matter for resolution in the courts. (One of these wedding vendor cases—303 Creative, LLC v. Elenis—is about to be argued before the US Supreme Court.)

Section 6(a) of RMA states that nothing in the act diminishes any existing federal right to freedom of religion or protection of conscience. For example, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 goes untouched by RMA, and so do many religious exemptions in civil rights legislation.

Section 3 repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriage. But the Supreme Court already struck down DOMA in 2013, so this part of RMA does nothing except remove an already-dead law from the US Code.

Sections 4 and 5 state that if a marriage is valid when entered into in one state, that same union (including a same-sex one) must be recognized as valid in all other states. But this too is already the law. The US Constitution requires that “full faith and credit” be given to the public acts and records of one state to its sister states.

What’s new here: Section 4 goes on to make that right enforceable by the attorney general against state officials in federal court. However, by way of Obergefell, that right is already enforceable in court by the injured couple.

Section 5 provides that wherever federal law takes into account marital status, the government will regard as valid any marriage that’s regarded as valid by one of the states. But here again, this right is already the law, as declared by president Barack Obama shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell. Now it’s the law according to RMA.

What’s new here: Now that RMA has the legislative backing of Congress, no Supreme Court reversal of Obergefell would dislodge the validity of a same-sex marriage or the government benefits, tax breaks, and other gains that go with it. But in my view, it's very unlikely, anyway, that Obergefell will ever get overturned.

Finally, Section 7 makes it clear that marriages addressed in the act cannot be polygamous. This same part of RMA also issues a useful reminder to all parties of the Act’s limited scope. It reassures married couples (including same-sex ones) of income tax breaks and social security benefits that flow from their marital status. But RMA has no impact on federal law “not arising from a marriage.”

Does a religious organization’s tax-exempt status with the IRS arise from a marriage? No. Does a religious school’s accreditation arise from a marriage? No. Does a religious employer’s exemption from civil rights employment antidiscrimination statutes arise from a marriage? Again, the answer is no. Churches, Christian colleges, K-12 religious schools, and faith-based social service providers can take comfort in these boundary lines.

All in all, RMA is a modest but good day’s work. It shows that religious liberty champions and LGBT advocates can work together for the common good. It says to the original House bill, “If a bill is about us, it has to be with us.” And it shows that Congress can still legislate, not just be a gaggle of egos who go to Washington to perform but never fix.

Carl H. Esbeck is the R. B. Price Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Missouri.

Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

- More from Carl Esbeck

Christianity Today Models How to Live Out One’s Faith in the World’

Entrepreneur and investor Tim Jenkins reads widely. Here’s what impresses him about CT.

Morgan Lee

Photo courtesy of Timothy Jenkins

Early in his career, Tim Jenkins became friends with a colleague who traveled often for work, racking up thousands of airline miles. But rather than redeem the miles for his own enjoyment, the friend had other plans. He used his miles to take a young fatherless boy he mentored to Disneyland.

“My friend’s willingness to sacrifice for others opened my eyes to how selfish I was,” said Tim, who met his wife Christina at the same company. The generosity of her lifestyle also impressed Tim, but she told him they couldn’t date unless he came to church with her.

So Tim, then 25, followed her to church. On Easter Sunday a few months later, he accepted Christ.

“It ’s not like I become a saint overnight,” he said. “I certainly had some bad personality traits like arrogance and selfishness.

“Yet I knew something was different after that Easter Sunday,” he said. “My friends noticed that I was beginning to care more about them than me. My eyes opened to how I had treated people before. I had more remorse. I felt bad about how self-centered I was.”

Today, Tim has been a Christian for more than 30 years, striving to live his faith out in the corporate and nonprofit world in the Pacific Northwest. Christianity Today entered his orbit about a decade ago after he joined the board of a large Christian ministry and thought reading it might better equip him for his role.

“It was great from the first issue I read,” Tim said. “I appreciated that CT was apolitical, unlike a lot of the Christian movement that had been hijacked by those seeking political power. Instead, CT was interested in modeling how to live out one’s faith in the world. I appreciated both the biblical perspective and intellectual rigor.”

Tim reads CT consistently and sometimes uses articles as the basis of the devotionals he leads, citing recent essays “What Should We Do If Our Compassion Runs Out?” and “My Boss Is a Jewish Construction Worker.”

“I actually took the [latter] article to the men ’s group I lead,” Tim said. “It helped us understand what a ‘carpentry’ profession meant in an ancient context. Understanding how Jesus likely interacted with others in his professional life—and how others likely saw him at the time—provided some amazing nuance and stoked some rich conversation in our group. The article helped us to understand Jesus more fully.”

Beyond Tim’s passion for CT, his love of journalism has led him to begin giving regularly to CT’s ministry.

“Reading widely is one way I gain an edge as a businessperson, so when there ’s a periodical that consistently adds value to my work, I try to support them financially,” he said. “I regularly read about 15 different print magazines and newspapers and a similar number of electronic newsletters. I’ve been told that I have a uniquely broad strategic mindset, and when people ask me why, I tell them I read a lot. I appreciate the role of journalism in a free society, both to hold those in power accountable and for expanding our worldviews.”

Tim grew up in the Bay Area and went to college at the University of Washington before attending business school at the University of Chicago. He started with the company that is now known as Accenture before he founded the consulting firm Point B after returning to Washington state. After selling the company to its employees in 2014, he shifted to a career as a private investor and now spends much of his time identifying purposeful investment opportunities and providing advice to other founders.

“CT is a voice that needs to be heard, because it helps the church ground itself in the essentials. CT is a moderating voice that turns people toward Jesus versus toward a particular cultural or political point of view,” he said.

“The world wants the church to take sides in the political world. But we need to understand that our identity does not come from our nationality, our politics, or our sexuality. Technically, I am a citizen of the United States, but I’m an alien in the world. My true citizenship is in God’s kingdom,” he said. “It ’s important for folks to interpret the world through a kingdom-focused lens, and CT helps me do that.”

Morgan Lee is global media manager at CT.

News

Died: Michael Gerson, Speechwriter Who Crafted Faith-Inspired Language for George W. Bush

Daniel Silliman

The one-time theology student believed politics should have “heroic ambition,” and speeches should be written, on occasion, for the angels.

Courtesy Michael Gerson / edits by Rick Szuecs

Michael Gerson, an evangelical columnist and speechwriter who believed politics could have noble and moral purpose, died on Thursday at the age of 58. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2013.

Gerson crafted the language of faith-inspired politics for president George W. Bush from 1999 to 2006. He fused a theological vision of moral purpose with a practical policy agenda—and in the process produced some of the era’s most memorable phrases, including “armies of compassion” and “axis of evil.”

He gave Bush’s speeches about compassionate conservatism and moral internationalism their rhetorical framework: starting with the “inexorable” call of the historical moment, adding the demands of duty and conscience, naming the various temptations that could lead the American people astray, and ending with a clarion call to do the right but difficult thing, forging forward with “confident hope.”

Even when key lines or the bulk of a speech was written by someone else in the White House, a colleague recalled, “Mike’s conceptual architecture was always indispensable.”

In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Gerson was described as “the man whose words helped steady the nation.” A few years later, Time magazine named him one of the country’s most influential evangelicals.

He believed the work of writing speeches was a high calling.

“On most days,” he once said, “you are writing for the next day’s headlines. In a few moments, you are writing for American history. … And then there may come a time, once or twice, when you are writing for the angels.”

Gerson was born into an evangelical family in New Jersey on May 15, 1964. His father was a dairy engineer who developed ice cream flavors, and his mother was an artist. They moved to St. Louis when Gerson was 10.

The young Gerson got interested in politics a few years later, during Jimmy Carter’s insurgent presidential campaign. He liked how forthright Carter was about his Christian faith and saw him as a contrast to the corruption in Richard Nixon’s White House.

Gerson went to a Christian high school and then headed to Georgetown University to study politics and foreign policy, but he decided after a year that he was on the wrong track. He transferred to Wheaton College, where he earned a B.A. in Bible and theology.

He planned to go to Fuller Theological Seminary when he graduated and pursue academic theology. But in his senior year, he got a call from Chuck Colson, Nixon’s self-proclaimed “hatchet man” who had gone through a religious experience and come out a born-again evangelical. Colson had read a column Gerson wrote on Mother Teresa and invited him to come to Washington, DC, to help him write Kingdoms in Conflict.

After a few years with Colson, Gerson decided he didn’t have to choose between faith and politics. He could take the theology he cared about so much and apply it to the public square.

“His heart was really in a spiritual kind of politics,” a colleague once told the Los Angeles Times. “He was very committed to the notion of uplifting the country.”

In a book he wrote with friend and fellow evangelical columnist Pete Wehner, Gerson said he came to believe that “politics is the realm of necessity; politics is the realm of hope and possibility; politics can be the realm of nobility.”

Gerson went to work for Republican senator Dan Coats from Indiana, a fellow Wheaton grad he called the most decent and humble man in national politics. He served as his communications director until the 1996 presidential campaign, when he left to work as a junior speechwriter for Republican candidate Bob Dole.

From both men, he said, he learned “a conservatism of the common good that argues that we need to orient our policies towards people that might not even vote for us.”

Gerson was asked to help the governor of Texas run for president in 1999. Friends and colleagues later joked that he recounted the story as if it were the calling of an apostle. “It was a pretty persuasive conversation,” Gerson recalled. He especially liked Bush’s plans for education and faith-based welfare reform.

“I think evangelicals were naturally attracted to Bush as somebody who shared many of their priorities,” he told CT. “He brought a broader agenda than the traditional conservative issues. He was capable not just of doing a traditional Republican economic agenda but also of doing the HIV/AIDS initiative.”

After the attacks of 9/11 Gerson’s main focus, like the president’s, shifted from domestic to foreign policy. He was at home writing a speech about how the government could encourage “communities of character” when he heard the first reports of the attack. On his way into the White House, he saw a plane crash into the Pentagon, killing 125.

Gerson was influential in developing the argument for the invasion of Iraq as part of the task force working on the communications strategy. When top officials wondered how to make the case for invasion, despite the lack of evidence that Iraqi was connected with the terrorists responsible for 9/11 or that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Gerson suggested the line “We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice used it on CNN a few days later. Intelligence reports about nuclear weapons programs, along with evidence of weapons of mass destruction and secret support for al-Qaida, all ultimately proved to be false.

In his memoir, published in 2007, he wrote that he grew angry when he was forced to reckon with the fact that the assessment of Iraqi threat had been so wrong. But he couldn’t say anything in the White House because “the issue was covered in a blanket of silence.”

He remained convinced that conservatives, despite some big mistakes, should pursue bold political visions at home and abroad. They should have “heroic ambitions.”

When asked for examples, Gerson most often pointed to the president's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. In 2003, only about 40,000 people on the entire continent of Africa were receiving antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. In five years, the US government program delivered treatment to two million people.

“Memories I’ll really take away are being in Namibia,” Gerson told CT, “meeting this little 6-year-old, HIV-positive girl whose parents had named her ‘There is no good in the world,’ because they assumed she was going to die. And then seeing a perfectly healthy little girl because of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief …. That’s a vivid experience.”

After leaving the White House, Gerson took a job writing a column for The Washington Post. He continued until the month before he died, writing his last few pieces on racism in the Republican Party, the value of public service, and the need to fight COVID-19 with global health efforts.

Gerson frequently criticized evangelicals and conservatives in his columns, writing about how appalled he was at Christian support for Donald Trump, for example, or about how the nation needed “Republican vertebrates” with a backbone for bravery.

But he also, as time went on, wrote more intimately about his life. Some of his most popular columns were about taking a child to college and his love for his dog.

Gerson also, often, returned to the theme of faith. Writing a few days before Christmas 2021 about the problem of resentment in contemporary politics, he talked about the need for faith, hope, and love in the public square. He argued that if the Christmas story is true, “it is a story that can reorient every human story.” And for those who couldn’t quite believe it, he urged them to look around: “There is an almost infinite number of ways other than angelic choirs that God announces his arrival.”

Gerson spoke openly of his illness and some struggles with mental health. In a much-noted sermon at the National Cathedral in 2019, he talked about being hospitalized for depression and how faith, along with medicine and therapy, had carried him through. He’d learned, he said, to choose hope.

“Fate may do what it wants,” he said. “But this much is settled. In our right minds, we know that love is at the heart of all things.”

Gerson is survived by his wife, Dawn, and their two sons, Michael and Nicholas.

- More from Daniel Silliman

CT Is On My Prayer Radar

Featuring Beth Moore, Author and Founder of Living Proof Ministries

Beth recently realized that CT is an “extremely important publication for these times” and began committing to partnership in prayer and support.

I Feel At Home With CT

Featuring Beth Moore, Author and Founder of Living Proof Ministries

Beth sees CT and its readers as willing to grapple with the harder things in the church and the world, and she is both challenged and encouraged by the Christian thinkers she finds through CT.

Theology

Trump Won’t Divide the Church This Time (and That’s Not Necessarily Good News)

Russell Moore

Cynicism and cruelty are even worse than division.

Drew Angerer / Getty

After Donald Trump announced this week that he’s running for president in 2024, many of my fellow evangelical Christians started bracing for more upheaval in their congregations and denominations. The situation is especially troubling because many of us haven’t yet recovered from the first Trump era.

But what if this time around, we don’t see the same levels of contention and division? And what if the potential quiet isn’t actually good news?

Upon hearing about Trump’s announcement, a contact of mine told me about the trouble in his own family. “We’ve already fought about this for seven years,” he said. “How much more can we take?” (I’m not even sure whether this person is a Trump supporter or opponent.)

Y’all know where I stand on this issue. But even many of those who disagree with me lament the fact that families are estranged, churches have split, denominations have been ripped apart, and friendships are gone—all because of politics. And now here we go again.

I wonder, though, whether the most dangerous thing might not be the arguments themselves but rather the absence of arguments.

After all, one of the most traumatic aspects of 2016 to 2021 was the sense of betrayal felt by people on almost every side of the divide. One Black Christian told me that the Sunday after Election Day in 2016, she left a church service in tears because she knew most people in her predominantly white evangelical church had voted for Trump.

“How can they say they are for me and my family and yet be for that?” she asked.

Much of the heated personal conflicts over Trump and Trumpism were caused by the vertigo that happens when people ostensibly in the same “tribe” turn to one another and say, “I don’t even know who you are anymore!”

Trump supporters often turn to Trump dissenters and ask: “Don’t you want conservative judges? Don’t you want a fighter?” Those of us who don’t support Trump say to those who do, “Didn’t you tell us that character matters? Do you really believe he’s fit for office?”

These conversations may still happen this time around, but in smaller circles where former Trump advocates feel they can’t support him anymore or former opponents decide to start backing him.

But most people know what to expect—not just from one another but also from Trump. This will be true in 2024 much more than it was in 2016 or in 2020.

The first time around, I could often assume that people really didn’t see what I was seeing. Maybe they thought that Trump’s worst features were just performative and that he’d govern differently. Or maybe they presumed the “guardrails would hold,” protected by constitutional institutions or by the “grownups in the room” around him.

But we know now how things turned out. We all saw January 6 and everything leading up to and from it. Either we think those events were a threat to the constitutional order, or we don’t.

This time, there will probably be less internal fighting in local churches over Trump because no one really expects the other side to be convinced. Many churches have “sorted” themselves out over political issues (and related questions about COVID-19 precautions, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo).

Some of the multiethnic churches I saw most divided over these matters aren’t multiethnic anymore. Some of the multigenerational churches I saw wrenched over these issues aren’t multigenerational anymore.

In those situations, the 2024 presidential election might seem much less divisive than the last two elections because those who disagree are now gone from the church. The divisions are already formed, and for many people, they seem intractably permanent.

What’s more significant, though, is how the Trump era has already changed all of us.

Several months ago, I was talking to a college-age evangelical Christian. I mentioned that many pastors are exhausted and discouraged right now and that many of them wrongly assumed the time of upheaval would eventually return to “normal.” The young man responded by telling me he doesn’t really remember national life before it was like this.

“I don’t even know what ‘normal’ is,” he said.

Think about how accustomed we are to personal insults and “trolling”—not just from bad actors on the internet but from people in leadership. The new owner of Twitter trolls his own advertisers, stockholders, and employees. Denominational meetings and church gatherings often operate in much the same way—with leaders making statements meant to cause outrage.

We’re used to it.

Moreover, the Overton window has shifted to the point where some evangelicals can embrace white nationalist viewpoints like the great replacement theory. Their overtly segregationist ideas now result in discipline not for themselves but for those calling out the bad ideas.

Several years ago, during all the world-shaking, an older Christian leader pulled me aside with this advice: “Make sure you deal with your anger.” I responded that I wasn’t angry at all and that I really felt no ill will toward any of the people who had hurt me. He said, “What if you’re just numb?”

What if we’re just numb?

Many are bracing for more political tumult. But what if it doesn’t happen? What if our churches are more tranquil than ever? And what if that’s not so much because we’ve made peace with Donald Trump but because we’ve become like him?

In the recent midterm elections, millennials and Generation Z defied historic precedent and showed up to vote. In overwhelming numbers, they rejected election deniers in key battleground states. If we don’t see these same voters in our churches or hear their pushback in our faith communities, it likely means they’re already gone or they’ve already given up.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe 2024 will be just as church-dividing and family-splitting as 2016 and 2020. Or maybe I’m wrong because we’ve reached a new level of maturity and wisdom in sorting through our divisions. But what if we’ve just adapted? What if all of us—no matter what we think of Donald Trump—are too exhausted and cynical to even be divided?

Asking these questions might be the first step to finding a different way.

Russell Moore is editor in chief at Christianity Today.

Theology

A Requiem for the Twitter I Once Knew

Hannah Anderson

The social media platform has birthed key movements and conversations. Here’s what I’ll miss if it dies or changes form.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty

When billionaire Elon Musk assumed leadership of Twitter in late October, I was ambivalent. When top executives left almost immediately and Musk made dramatic layoffs, I began to feel nervous. But then came a new verification system that quickly failed and cost companies billions of dollars.

Now, two weeks later, I find myself deeply saddened by the chaos he continues to unleash. Unlike the entrepreneur’s other ventures (Tesla or SpaceX), Twitter is not a tech company. It’s a community.

Twitter Inc. may own and maintain the land on which we live, but users are what make it great. And leading that kind of community means understanding how people—not just systems—work. It means learning how to cultivate space to let people thrive. When I first joined Twitter ten years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom to small children, a pastor’s wife in a rural community, and a hobby blogger. My tweets reflected my life: comments about my kids, the church, gardening, and sometimes the latest evangelical controversy. (In late 2012, it happened to be Rachel Held Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood.) While other moms gathered on Facebook and Instagram, I found a home on “the bird site.” There, I discovered ideas and debates that were shaping culture and the church. Had these conversations transpired in person, my place, age, socioeconomic status, educational status, and domestic life would have limited my ability to engage. But Twitter’s digital public square invited me in to them.

As Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei put it in 2010, “Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.”

Soon enough, I found myself talking with top scholars, experts in their fields, and new friends from all around the world. Somewhere along the line, I learned to thread tweets and discovered the joys of microblogging.

Today, I am the author of five books. I’m regularly invited to speak around the country and the world. And as of last August, I returned to divinity school. None of that would have happened without Twitter. But even as I look over my current feed, the light touch remains. I’m still a mom and still involved in ministry. I live in the same place I did ten years ago. I occasionally get swept up in the latest controversy, but for the most part, Twitter is a delightfully diverse place that challenges and encourages me.

A conversation about the nature of the Trinity can quickly give way to sharing a pie crust recipe. My feed includes updates from medieval scholars, investigative journalists, and Welsh sheep farmers. I have DM conversations that have been going on for a long time. Over the years, Twitter has challenged my understanding of the world by granting me proximity to people and stories I wouldn’t necessarily have encountered in my own circles. In 2013, I learned of the brutalities committed by abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, despite the media’s hesitation to cover them. In 2019, I experienced true grief at the passing of Evans, whom I’d first met through online disagreement but whose deep humanity bridged our divides. And it was on Twitter that someone patiently explained the nature of systemic racism to me. Some users worry about how Twitter flattens the norms of engagement. After all, if you walk into a university or a church, you won’t have access to professors and pastors in the same way you do on social media. In the words of Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel, I too “got at least one job because I was overzealous and presumptuous enough to start interjecting myself into conversations I probably had no business in.” But for me, that’s exactly the genius of Twitter: Folks outside the institutional establishment can worm their way into the conversation. Folks who don’t live around other Christians can find community. And folks who have no way of making their voices heard suddenly can.

Twitter’s accessibility is also why it became a place for reform movements like #MeToo and #ChurchToo. Just as the invention of the printing press led to the Protestant Reformation, platforms like Twitter have allowed people to question the status quo and bring abuses to light.

If I’m honest, my sadness about Twitter’s current disarray probably has less to do with the platform itself and more to do with how it reflects the disarray of our larger society. The past few years have brought immeasurable grief as we’ve watched communities and relationships be torn apart by those responsible to steward them. Instead of cultivating places where people can flourish, leaders have fought to control them. Instead of protecting the most vulnerable, leaders have protected themselves. And instead of building bridges to cross divides, leaders have burnt them down. As parents, pastors, business leaders, and civil servants, none of us “own” the communities we lead. However, we are responsible to cultivate environments that allow others to flourish in whatever God has called them to do. As Genesis 2 puts it, stewardship is the responsibility to “tend and keep” the garden by cultivating, supporting, and protecting the growth that’s already naturally happening (v. 15, NKJV). For over a decade, Twitter has been that place for me. In God’s providence, this unique platform gave me the infrastructure I needed to develop my voice as a writer and my vocation in God’s kingdom.

I don’t know what the future holds for Twitter, but if and when it falls—or more likely, when it becomes uninhabitable—I’ll grieve it the same way I’ve grieved the loss of other communities: grateful for the time we had together, deeply saddened by our parting, and hopeful that God will provide the structures we need to do his good work.

Hannah Anderson is the author of Made for More, All That’s Good, and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul.

Unfather Christmas

J. D. Peabody

An Advent reading for December 22.

Stephen Crotts

Read Matthew 1:18–25

Joseph’s biggest claim to fame is who he wasn’t. We know him as “not the real dad” of Jesus. Matthew emphasizes how little Joseph had to do with the unfolding redemption story, from Mary’s pregnancy to the location of Christ’s birth to the events that led to the family’s flight into Egypt.

Scripture also renders Joseph conspicuously silent. He utters not one recorded word. As a result, Joseph is often either glossed over or is the subject of our conjecture. We want to know more. Yet perhaps Joseph’s non-contribution is the very thing God would have us remember.

This man’s most significant role is his apparent lack of one. His diminished involvement encapsulates a central tenet of the gospel: Salvation belongs to God alone. Joseph’s story reminds us we are not the orchestrators of our own rescue. The angel didn’t tell Joseph, “Here’s what God wants, so now go make it happen.” He said, essentially, “Here’s what God has made happen, and here’s how to receive that truth.”

It would have been understandable for Joseph to resent life not unfolding as he’d expected. But rather than focus on all he was being asked to give up, Joseph made room for a greater reality: This child was the Promised One, the key to God’s redemption of the whole world. And if Jesus was truly good news for all people, that included him. The bigger plan for humanity also meant salvation for him personally.

So it’s worth noting that Joseph’s silence is broken with a single word. He’s not quoted directly, but we’re told he spoke it, and the word was Jesus. Joseph alone had the honor of giving the child a name that means “God saves.”

Matthew links this name with the text in Isaiah identifying the Messiah as Immanuel—God with us. Jesus and Immanuel are virtually interchangeable names; God’s presence makes our salvation possible, and our salvation allows us to stand in his presence.

For Joseph, assigning this name was more than following the angel’s orders. It was a declaration. The man who says nothing speaks loudly here. In his helplessness, when his world went sideways, Joseph’s response was Jesus. God saves.

As events unfolded over which he had little control, Joseph could personalize the words of the prophet: Immanuel. God is with me. And when he would soon face such peril that he and his family would have to run for their lives, Joseph carried the truth in his arms. Jesus. God saves. Immanuel. God goes with us.

Though the space allotted to Joseph in the narrative is small, maybe that’s a good thing. In Joseph, we can see our own smallness and remember that salvation belongs to the Savior who is with us to the end.

J. D. Peabody pastors New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington, and is the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind.

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A Flock of Shepherds

J. D. Peabody

An Advent reading for December 23.

Stephen Crotts

Read Luke 2:1–21

When my wife, Karin, was in preschool, she played a miniature Mary in a living Nativity scene. While it was an adorable idea, the reality of having live animals stand next to a three-year-old proved terrifying for her. She cried hysterically, wanting no part of the whole thing. To console her, her father stepped into the scene and lay down on the ground between her and the beasts, forming a human barricade so that his daughter felt secure. He covered himself entirely with straw so visitors to the living Nativity were none the wiser.

It’s a striking image of what shepherding is all about. In Luke 2, the shepherds are “keeping watch over their flocks at night”—highlighting the very real dangers of darkness. It was when thieves and predators posed the greatest threat. So the shepherds placed themselves in harm’s way, protecting their sheep with their very lives.

But in Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth, the shepherds also turn out to be sheep. That first Christmas, the Lord revealed himself as the Good Shepherd in the story, caring for the shepherds themselves as part of his own flock.

Consider how much God’s attention to the shepherds resembles David’s description of God as a shepherd in Psalm 23. God supplied the shepherds’ need—a need they may not have even articulated. He quieted their souls through the angel’s words: “Do not be afraid.” He led them on paths of righteousness straight to the manger. He showed he was with them in the most humble and relatable of ways: as a baby in a manger. He restored their souls with a message of hope and belonging—a message that turned out exactly “as they had been told.” He filled their cup to overflowing with praise “for all the things they had heard and seen.” He not only met their need; he anointed their heads with the oil of joy. He showed them goodness and mercy that would no doubt stay with them all the days of their life.

I need that kind of care. As a pastor, I’m grateful for this reminder that shepherds are also part of the flock. I’m thankful for a Savior who knows his skittish sheep well, who laid his life all the way down in the hay, placing himself between us and every danger.

And I’m grateful that when our anxious souls need tending, the Lord still speaks the word of peace on earth in the recognizable voice of our Good Shepherd. That is indeed good news of great joy for all the people.

J. D. Peabody pastors New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington, and is the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind.

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