The Secret Prayers of Gamblers

Locating the spiritual longing hiding in America’s obsession with betting.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

When I walk into an Appalachian casino on a Friday evening, every sense in my body dilates with the onslaught of stimulation. Outside the casino, it was cool, with dusk descending over a quiet parking lot of pickups and sedans and one limousine. Venus was just visible in the sky.

Inside, up an escalator into a vast hall, everything is consumed by a sound like a screaming eagle or a missile streaking to earth, and Olivia Rodrigo’s voice sings from above me, “Well, good for you, you look happy and healthy, / Not me, if you ever cared to ask.”

The room is so big it feels like it could be measured in acres: aisles and aisles of games with hundreds of people playing patterns of whirs and numbers, clicks and colors—seemingly infinite colors, all of them neon—and each person at each machine has a personal rhythm, at that moment joined with the game in a completely contained world.

The machines advertise their worlds with words that run together like the witches’ incantations in Macbeth: double-double, phoenix, dragon, buffalo trouble, phoenix (again), platinum, champagne, train robbery, cash-cash-cash. Slightly drunk people cheer for each other at a blackjack table, $25 minimum bet. One table over, a man in a dotted shirt plays alone with a dealer. Two over, a waitress in black brings drinks.

The casino never closes. One month this spring, it raked in $21 million after paying out winnings. Another month, it earned $19 million. People in this town make a median income of $44,700 a year. The gambling goes on and on.

Long gone are the days when gambling was something that happened in Vegas and stayed there. “America is one big casino now,” Business Insider reported in 2024. Most Americans live within an hour of slot machines, blackjack tables, and craps. There are more than 1,000 casinos across the country, and more are planned this year and next year for several major metro areas, including Dallas–Fort Worth, New York City, and Chicago.

Gambling in America isn’t restricted to casinos, either. Forty-five states have government-run lotteries, which makes every gas station and grocery store a place to gamble. On the internet, you can bet on real-life events, like whether the US will have a recession, the outcome of the papal conclave, and the fate of Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s marriage.

Then there’s sports betting. It was prohibited by federal law until 2018, when the Supreme Court ruled that states could allow it if they wanted. Now it exists in 38 states. It’s America’s new favorite pastime. Forget baseball. Forget football, basketball, hockey, soccer, golf, tennis, mixed martial arts, NASCAR. People are now watching sports not for the spectacle but to bet on the outcomes. The amount wagered has grown more than tenfold in five years, from $13 billion in 2019 to $148 billion in 2024.

To be sure, there are moral and public-policy questions to ask about all this gambling. But, walking into the casino less than an hour from where I live, I’m seized by the more basic question of human desire. What do Americans want, exactly, when they gamble?

I suspect the answer is spiritual. To me, at least, all this gambling sounds like wild, misdirected prayer.

Philip is a recovering gambling addict who works at a hotline for gamblers who are in trouble. He reached out to CT after we reported how little evangelicals are doing to grapple with the growth of sports betting, hoping to share his story. Philip used to bet on sports on his phone. He won for a while, but then he lost and lost, kept losing, and couldn’t stop.

He might lose still more. He’s facing years of possible prison time because he embezzled money from his employer—more than $1.2 million over four months—to keep gambling. As he reflects on what went wrong, he thinks there was a spiritual reason. His gambling was misdirected longing.

“I went to it to give me something—something that would fill a void for me,” Philip told me. “I think that all addiction is a spiritual crisis. It’s trying to get something from the world that only God can give you.”

Augustine would agree. The great African bishop said this is our basic human problem: We seek the eternal in the transient. We want God but don’t know where to look for him. We look around and see stuff, but stuff is always changing, mutable, restless—and we’re that way too. We look inside and see our longing, lust, and desire. But even our wants aren’t stable. We think we know what we want, but then in the shift of a shadow, a flip of a card, it slips away.

“Stretch wide the net of your insatiable desires, greedy,” Augustine once preached. “Let everything you can see be yours; let everything under the water which you can’t see be yours. When you’ve got all this, what will you have in fact if you haven’t got God?”

It’s easy for us to get lost in longing. Americans have been doing that a lot recently, stretching wide their spiritual nets and catching all kinds of things that aren’t Jesus. Identification with organized religion is declining in the US, as it has been as long as I’ve been alive. But America has not become a nation of secularists and empiricists, believing only what they can see, touch, and test. Instead, there is an effusion of esoterica and re-enchantment.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

The country is awash in experiments with cosmic connection: grounding, crystals, yoga, chakras, channeling, astrology, and more. People are playing with and trying on different ideas of ultimate meaning and attempting to tap into the order of the universe to experience personal fullness. They’re chasing rumors of angels, scrolling through TikTok exorcists, having revelations of divinity with artificial intelligence, and thinking maybe vampires are real.

Sociologist Christian Smith calls this surging spiritual experimentation “occulture.” Today, he says, “a raft of paranormal, magical, occultic, and New Age ideas” has entered mainstream life. In the research for his most recent book, he found that nearly half of Americans think reincarnation could be real. About 20 percent say the same for magic spells and curses. A quarter of the people in his study confidently believe in nature spirits or spiritual energies, and nearly 40 percent are convinced that there is a universal force like karma, repaying good and bad and maintaining balance. Nearly half say they are open to the reality of good-luck charms, lucky numbers, and lucky symbols.

I want to put gambling in this same cultural category. For many gamblers, playing slots or buying a lottery number or betting on athletic competitions is an attempt to find the immutable in the mutable, to latch on to something somehow permanent in the endlessly changing patterns.

Brian Koppelman has talked about gambling in spiritual terms. He wrote the poker movie Rounders, the casino-robbery movie Ocean’s Thirteen, and the poker tournament TV show Tilt. He’s culturally Jewish and an atheist but also practices transcendental meditation. And he thinks gambling is, in some deep sense, spiritual. “For nonreligious people,” he said, “it’s like a way to grapple with God.”

It’s not just about winning money. Statistician Nate Silver says that serious, successful gamblers like to win, of course. But what they love is risk. Put money on a game, raise the stakes, and suddenly everything else is blocked out; the game is the only thing in the world that matters.

This is the experience of unsuccessful gamblers too. Anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll said that when she started studying problem gamblers who are addicted to slot machines, she assumed they were deluded and had somehow been tricked into thinking they could beat the odds. They told her that wasn’t it at all.

What the gamblers wanted, more than anything, was to be in sync with the game. Gambling allowed them to zero in, blocking out the world, its problems, and their own problems (including the problems created by gambling). They merged with the rhythm of the slot machine and did whatever it took to stay locked in.

“I don’t care if it takes coins, or pays coins,” one told Schüll. “The contract is that when I put a new coin in … I am allowed to continue.”
Another said, “I feel connected to the machine when I play, like it’s an extension of me, as if physically you couldn’t separate me from the machine.”

At the casino, I get my phone out to take notes and realize I’m the only one. No one else has a phone out. Everyone’s focused.

I look over at a blackjack table where all the players seem to be losing. They put down their bets: $25, $25, $25, $50, $25. The dealer has a jack and an ace, 21, and takes all their money. They go again: $25, $25, $25, $50, $25. The dealer takes the chips from four of the five of them this time, and they all go again, laying down their chips: $25, $25, $50, $50, $25.

None of them has a phone face-down on the table to glance at between turns. No one reaches for a pocket, that I can see. They are in it. There are no distractions.

It looks like they’re meditating. Everything around them is changing, shifting, spinning, restless. Just the noise of the place is overwhelming. But they’re sitting there as if they’ve latched on to something timeless and as if they never, ever want to look away.

I ran out of money my junior year at Hillsdale College and had to drop out of school. I moved to Pennsylvania, where a friend of mine was going to seminary, and got a job working at a gas station.

Mostly what I did was sell lottery tickets: scratch-offs, Powerball, and twice-daily drawings where people would bet they could guess a three- or four-digit number. People would read me their lists of numbers, and I would type them into a machine and print them out. People liked to play 222. A lot of them played 215 and 610, which were the local area codes. They played important dates—birthdays, anniversaries—and numbers they just liked.

Sometimes, at the end of their standard list, customers would add a number just for that day. I remember one Sunday afternoon when a middle-aged Black woman came in and gave me her list, adding, “And let me have 828 and 829.”

“All right.” I paused, then asked, “Why those numbers?”

“That’s what the pastor preached on today,” she said. “From Romans: ‘All things work together.’ ”

Then she said, “One more—let me have 3399.”

“What’s that one?”

“Woman at church had a new dress she told everybody she got on sale for $33.99.”

There was another customer, a white man with an Italian name who ran an air conditioning business. He’d buy gas and play the number of the amount of gallons he got. One time he asked me where I lived, and when I told him my address, he played that number. It came up in a drawing the next day, but the digits were in a different order, and he said he kicked himself for not playing all the possible combinations.

The people who played the lotto at the gas station moved through the world looking for numbers. Perhaps they thought the universe was speaking in numbers, and if they focused and listened, really listened, they could learn to align themselves with its thrum.

Sometimes the information came to them in sermon texts—though not any meaning of the texts I would have heard—and sometimes through conversations with neighbors or random license plates in front of them when they were stuck in traffic. When they won, it was like they felt the cosmos said yes. Like the secret pattern affirmed them and blessed them. I don’t know how to make sense of this except as a kind of mysticism, spiritual experimentation, and “occulture.”

There are times in history when Christianity stops seeming plausible to groups of people. Broad swaths of the population start to doubt whether theology is true and, even more acutely, whether the religious practices and disciplines of Christian life are effective. Going to church seems like a waste. Prayer feels empty and rote. Listening to ministers seems pointless.

Many give it all up. Others keep going, propelled by tradition and obligation if not personal experience of transformation. The deep desire to connect to the eternal in the transient remains for all, however, so people start grabbing onto alternative spiritual technologies.

Historically, gambling seems to surge in times of growing distrust of traditional Christianity, organized religion, and religious authorities. When lots of Americans are spiritual but not religious, increasing numbers of people take their chances with chance.

Historian Jackson Lears says white Protestants in 1800s America first flocked to gambling when ideas of God’s providence started to lose their grip on the popular imagination. When Puritan ministers lost political power in Connecticut, for example, the sales of lottery tickets exploded. A young P. T. Barnum, in his pre-circus days, remembered selling tickets as fast as he could print them. When the ministers reclaimed some political power a few years later, one of the first things they did was shut down the lotteries, ruining Barnum’s booming business.

To those Puritans, the lottery seemed a kind of heresy. It was not just frivolous fun or a waste of money but a covert theological claim to divine a pattern behind the numbers, somehow gaining secret access to the mind of God. Perhaps, the ministers said, there had been a time when discerning the will of God meant casting lots, the way the apostles did in Acts 1:26, but that was past. Now, if you wanted to know Providence, you should search Scripture and ask a minister.

But when people didn’t trust those ministers or their ability to explicate the order of divine design, they became very interested in games of chance. After the Civil War, the Unitarian minister Octavius Brooks Frothingham was appalled to find that churches were empty but casinos full.

He stumbled into one gambling establishment and watched a man play roulette while clutching a small box, the bottom painted half red, half black. The man had a spider in the box and watched to see whether the spider went to the red side or the black side. That’s how he bet his money.

The man wouldn’t have listened to Frothingham or any other minister tell him how to spend his money or what to do with his life. But he’d trust a spider. Or a shuffle of cards. Or a pair of dice. He was playing games, but they weren’t just games, according to Frothingham. The dice box was, to that man, “the dice box of destiny.” It seemed to Frothingham like a new spirituality.

Historian Jonathan Ebel found that a similar spirituality emerged among American soldiers who saw combat in World War I. Respected religious authorities—the nation’s prominent Protestant ministers—explained the horrors of war in terms of redemptive violence and heroic sacrifice. This was a crusade for democracy and a war to end all wars. So they said each death was holy, efficacious, and meaningful.

But many who saw death up close could not resolve what happened in battle with such a theology. None of it seemed to make any sense. One person died, another lived, and it was random. So they turned to an alternative spirituality of luck.

Some soldiers reported supernatural experiences. A boy from Massachusetts named Elmer Harden, for example, saw an otherworldly being he described to his mother as a man-angel. “I knew it for Chance,” he wrote, swearing this was not his imagination or a fanciful thought but the truth as he experienced it. He said he survived the fighting only because of this being. “My faith in him … was complete,” Harden said. “He was my God.”

According to Ebel, that kind of supernatural experience was unusual, but many people had the sense they could detect a divine force in the randomness of the battlefield. As they stopped believing that the order of the universe could be discovered through listening to sermons, they turned to experiences of chance, convinced they could somehow discover their own election amid the chaos and confusion.

That’s the same spirituality I saw in the gamblers at the gas station. They wanted to touch God, even if they wouldn’t have put it that way. They wanted to be in sync with the truth that is unchanging behind all the transient things they could see. And they thought they could do it if they just picked the right numbers.

At the casino, I watch a group of three friends in their 20s play blackjack. One of them, a short, muscular guy in a black T-shirt, wins a hand. His buddies slap his back and shoulders and exclaim “Kyle!” in congratulations. Then they play another hand. Kyle bets a stack of five or six chips. He wins, doubling his $200 or $225 with a hand of 20 to the dealer’s 17.

Kyle’s friends explode in hollers, and one almost shoves him off his stool. He just smiles. It’s the smile, I think, of someone who feels he’s been chosen. He’s found his resonance with the universe and grins like someone confident that his election is secure.

Dan hates this idea. He is a professional gambler who quit a doctoral program studying theology to play blackjack. Before that, he was in another graduate program studying moral philosophy, which is where he learned to play poker. I know someone who went to school with him. I asked him my question. Does it make sense to think of gambling as a kind of spirituality?

Dan groaned. “I don’t enjoy casinos. There’s a lot of depressing, terrible vibes. If that’s spiritual, I’d say no thanks,” he said.

Dan spends a lot of time in casinos. He travels around the country playing blackjack and winning. But the feeling he gets most from gambling is sadness. He pushes it down to keep playing. To be a professional gambler, he said, you have to control what you feel.

One big difference between winning and losing, according to Dan, is how good a gambler is at preventing “leaks.” A leak is what he calls any habit that makes you lose money: drinking too much, betting more impulsively after losing a hand, giving money to a friend to gamble with you so you’re not so lonely.

“You need to be robotic. You have to emotionally train yourself to be like, ‘Another day at the salt mines,’ ” Dan said. Anything that’s too human is a vulnerability.

As Dan talks about blackjack, in fact, it sounds like it’s half a game of counting cards, half a game of containing the human parts of yourself. Each game is another encounter with inchoate longing. The challenge of the game is that with the next card, or the next, or the potential of the next, the human heart might attach itself deceptively to another impermanent thing. To win, Dan has to resist that spiritual (and human) pull, hand after hand.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

Philip, the recovering gambling addict, could not resist the way the game on his phone responded to his spiritual desire. He told me he started out just betting on his college football team, Florida State, and thought at the time that gambling enhanced the experience of watching sports, increasing his focus on it.

Then gambling gave him a sense of affirmation, the reward of the feeling when he won. It felt like a nod from the universe. Each bet made him want to bet again. But then a $1,000 wager would turn into $2,500, and $2,500 would turn into $45,000, and he’d keep betting and betting—going “on tilt”—until three or four days had gone by and he was down more than $220,000.

He was attending an evangelical church the whole time he had a gambling problem, he said, but he was mostly just going through the motions. He liked podcasts about stoicism. The idea of self-control was really appealing. He couldn’t seem to have it, though. He’d gamble on 100 games in one day, and 80 percent of his waking thoughts seemed to be about sports betting. The shame of his lack of stoic restraint made him feel like he was drowning.

When he got caught and was arrested, police put him on suicide watch for a week. He’s deeply grateful they did. When he couldn’t gamble, Philip said, he was afraid to be alone with his thoughts. In his cell, he started to pray.

“It was raw. It was just me asking God for help over and over again,” he said. “Eventually I got strong enough to say the Lord’s Prayer.”

Philip’s church came around him and got him into an addiction treatment program while he waited for the court to decide his fate. He spent six months in a gambling recovery group and then joined a general recovery group at his church. People there struggle with drugs, alcohol, or porn.

He shares about his gambling addiction and how, when he’s tempted, the thing that works for him is prayer.

“Where I would have that compulsion to gamble, I turn all that to prayer,” he said. “I probably prayed for 75 to 90 days before it started working. Then I noticed, Wow, this is working.”

He starts with the Lord’s Prayer now, then goes into something longer, using his own words. These days, he knows what he wants. It’s not a mystical something, an elusive stability in the tumult of transience. He’s not trying to sync up with a cosmic order that comes into focus for a moment before it slips away. He wants Jesus.

“The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity,” Augustine wrote in Confessions. “Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God.”

The casino is a whorl of sounds and lights and luck and longing. “The longing for grace remains at the heart of the culture of chance,” Lears, the historian, writes. Hope persists that maybe we’ll get lucky.

I know that God can answer even wild prayers. The Israelites in the wilderness looked to a bronze sculpture of a snake and were healed (Num. 21:4–9). Gideon asked God to wet a fleece with dew one night and to leave it dry another (Judges 6:36–40). An Ethiopian eunuch wished someone would explain the prophet Isaiah to him (Acts 8:31). Augustine wanted to be chaste (but not yet), and a friend of mine converted after a clogged toilet coughed up a child’s toothbrush.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness,” the apostle Paul wrote. “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:26–27).

At the casino, I see a dealer standing at an empty table, shuffling cards, setting up for a shift. He wears sadness like a cologne. For a moment, an image of his face as a boy flashes across my mind. Lord, have mercy upon us, I think, which is something I pray when I don’t have words. Christ, have mercy upon us.

A man with a backward cap at an automatic craps game flexes the fingers of his right hand ever so slightly to trigger the next roll of dice, and the next, and the next. He blinks every third roll on the beat. I take out my phone to type more notes. Lord, hear our prayer.

A woman plays the phoenix game, the bird rising again on the machine in pixelated flames with a digital screaming sound. She is wearing a flowered dress that looks like it’s made for Easter. Down the same aisle at two other machines, I see two more women wearing Easter dresses. Lord, hear our prayer.

Outside, the stars are out. It’s dark now. A second limo is parked by the first, and a man in a Chevy pickup is scratching off a lotto ticket on his steering wheel.

There is so much gambling. So much restless desire. Lord, hear our prayer.

Daniel Silliman is CT’s senior news editor.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Praying the Odds".

- More from Daniel Silliman

Culture

Sacred Reverb

Molly Worthen

From Gregorian chants to CCM megahits, we need music that confronts us with the gospel’s strangeness.

Illustration by Kate Dehler

When I was an agnostic, I prided myself on my open mind. I listened to the full range of spiritual theories, from the sutras of Buddhists to the anathemas of Calvinists. Research trips took me to Russian Orthodox feasts and Mormon historical pageants. I found something to appreciate in all the approaches to the God I didn’t believe in. But I was dogmatic about one thing: If God existed, he did not endorse contemporary Christian music (CCM).

I can’t entirely explain the origin of this prejudice. I did not make a habit of having strong opinions about music. Until recently, I could not have told you the title of a single contemporary worship song. On principle, I usually defended evangelicals against others’ caricatures of them. But over my years as a historian and journalist, I had heard so many evangelicals themselves make snide comments about CCM that disdain for this music seemed like an acceptable prejudice—even a way to bond with insiders.

One weekend in 2008, during my doctoral research, I attended a conference at Willow Creek Community Church, the seeker-sensitive juggernaut northwest of Chicago. After the morning’s discussion on the future of megachurch discipleship, the lights dropped, lyrics flashed on the screen above the stage, and the bassist strummed his first chords. I remember sitting in the back of the sanctuary, squinting at my notebook in the ear-thumping darkness, thinking, A rock concert inside a church has to be wrong. Deep in the recesses of my mind, some part of me did find the melody kind of catchy, but that only sharpened my contempt.

Like most secular people, I had no personal investment in the boundary between sacred and profane. Yet I was certain that it was sacrilegious to sing about Jesus with multiple guitars, an electronic keyboard, and a drum set—not to mention the congregation’s vulgar clapping at the end. At that point in my plodding spiritual journey, I had never read the Psalms, so I had no idea that they command worshipers to “clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph” (47:1, KJV).

God did eventually make a Christian out of me about 14 years after my first encounter with sacred reverb in the Chicago suburbs. To my surprise, he did it in a megachurch—not in spite of contemporary worship music but with a strong assist from those simple lyrics and earworm melodies. I repent of my condescending attitude, and now I see this music and my own reactions in a broader perspective.

Today’s debates over contemporary worship music are the latest chapter of ancient arguments over how to reach the culture while preserving the gospel’s integrity and how to design a worship service that nurtures Christians while also captivating nonbelievers. I learned something too: A knee-jerk aversion to something may be a clue that God wants to use that very thing to humble you.

Alamy

Larry Norman, 1981.

The Christian message is strange, even offensive. Its moral claims have chafed against every society in different ways, but fundamentally, Christians insist that we need grace and can never earn it for ourselves. That’s a timeless insult to human pride. What’s more, Christians claim that God’s love is somehow compatible with an abundance of evil and suffering in this world—suffering that came to a cosmic resolution 2,000 years ago in the death of a man nailed to a Roman torture device.

Paul called all this a scandal. He spent his missionary career trying to make it comprehensible and palatable. That meant constant experiments in cultural translation—what he called becoming “all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22)—without whitewashing Christianity’s weirdest claims. Today’s contemporary worship music descends, in a broad sense, from two millennia of evangelists and artists trying to use music to do as Paul did: to entice seekers, disciple those already in the church, and worship God.

The songwriters of the Second Great Awakening borrowed fiddle tunes, jigs, reels, and other profane melodies. Christians who have adapted secular music for the church have not always gotten it right, and they have always irritated and offended other believers. Fifty years ago, Larry Norman and other Jesus People combined rock, gospel, folk, and traditional hymnody with lyrics on such indelicate subjects as “gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day.” Christian bookstore owners balked at stocking his albums—or they hid them in a backroom and under the counter for “fear that someone would come in and accuse them of selling that stuff,” Billy Ray Hearn, the founder of Capitol Christian Music Group, told historian Larry Eskridge.

Some Christians still worry that sex and drugs contaminate all rock music. But by the 1990s, the most popular praise bands and Christian pop singers were catering less to rebellious teenagers and more to suburban moms looking to keep their kids away from MTV.

As a result, critics now lament blandness more than bawdiness. “All the songs sound the same, same repetitive chords and voices,” wrote one commenter on a Reddit thread titled “Why is CCM so boring?” A pastor named Joshua Sharp complained in the Baptist Standard that most “modern worship lyrics are just prosperity gospel and cut-rate therapy.”

Songwriters in the “Big Four” megachurch worship ministries—Bethel Music, Elevation Worship, Hillsong Worship, and Passion Music—have come to dominate the contemporary worship music industry with an ambient pop-rock sound that one agnostic friend of mine summarizes as “a bad imitation of U2.” Unlike reggae or gospel, this genre displays no distinctive musical characteristics. It is “aesthetically and biblically vacuous,” wrote pastor and Westminster Theological Seminary professor R. Scott Clark. “The principal function of most contemporary worship music is to produce a mild euphoria.”

Well, that mild euphoria helped save me.

The lyrics are simple, it’s true. But they are vacuous only if you sing those short lines of sans serif type on the overhead screen without thinking seriously about the ideas the words express. If that’s the case, then by all means, flee to the nearest plainchant compline service.

What defines the contemporary worship genre is dissonance—the incongruity between smooth harmonies, uncomplicated lyrics, and the shock that comes if you pause to grapple with the words’ meaning.

Consider the opening of Bethel Music’s 2019 hit “Goodness of God”:

I love you, Lord
Oh your mercy never fails me
All my days, I’ve been held in your hands.

Everything in these 19 words is outrageous: an all-powerful God who knows and cares for each person as an individual, who attends to every detail of our lives, and who not only loves us but also opens the way for puny mortals to love him back. Sure, this is preschool-level Christian theology. But Jesus told us to come to him like little children. If we hang on to worldly, grown-up notions of fairness and power, or “common-sense” ideas of what God ought to be like, we will always misunderstand him.

Mild euphoria during the worship set—a feeling that the sociologist Émile Durkheim labeled “collective effervescence”—can sometimes be a pagan, rock-concert buzz. But for many people, the sensory experience and easy tune are like a parent’s hand on a toddler’s back, guiding us toward what the Bible calls fear of the Lord. This is not (most of the time) a theological breakthrough or a mystical experience. It’s more like a shy and sideways glance at a Savior whose face is “like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:16, ESV). A peek is all most of us can manage most of the time.

A melody that sticks in the ear with a bass line that fills the chest have a way of breaking down our defenses. They can open the eyes of the heart to the wildly counterintuitive picture of the universe contained in Christianity’s basic creeds. They get stuck in our heads and keep working on us all day long. Bryan O’Keefe, a recent convert who attends McLean Bible Church in Virginia, told me, “When I’m hearing these songs, I start to mentally connect them to my own experience, and it starts to feel like something so much larger.”

Worship music ought to be both comfort food and bitter medicine at the same time. But what consoles the heart or shocks the palate depends on personal taste and cultural context. This may be the reason that God has ordained—or at least permitted—such staggering diversity (scholars estimate that, worldwide, Christians worship in nearly 50,000 different denominations, confessions, and associations of churches). Different people need different goads.

I know Christians who grew up in Baptist-inclined, nondenominational contexts and made their way to Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy—because the words and rhythms of ancient liturgy wrenched them out of their 21st-century American bubble and helped them recapture the mystery of the global gospel. But in my case, it was necessary to walk the Canterbury Trail in reverse.

Medieval choral arrangements and clouds of incense drew me into my earliest investigations of the faith. I grew up with no religion. During college, I followed my interest in Russian culture, language, and mysticism into an exploration of Eastern Orthodoxy. In graduate school, classes in church history led me to the Anglo-Catholic parish near campus.

I fell in love with these traditions—and still love them—because of their unapologetic strangeness. I wanted a space that felt alien to technologically enhanced, hyperindividualistic American modernity. Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic churches, so committed to preserving ancient forms, so oblivious to any song written in the past century, offered that.

The trouble was that for an agnostic church-history nerd like me, elaborate liturgy in a space stuffed with carvings, crucifixes, and stained glass offered endless excuses to think about many things that were not Jesus. Once, I gushed to the priest—who was too polite to chide me—that going to church made me feel more deeply connected to Western civilization. I don’t mean to sound like a 16th-century icon-smasher here (although I see where Zwingli was coming from). I’m making a less profound point about my own snobbery, temperament, and the human tendency to run away from hard things.

I listened to CDs of Russian monastic chants for hours, so busy trying to decipher the Old Church Slavic (I studied it for a semester) that I didn’t get around to facing the God those monks were praising and begging for mercy. I sat in the back pew during Sunday worship and thought about how much I loved to acknowledge and bewail my manifold sins and wickedness in the General Confession; the doctrine of original sin made sense to me long before I was even a theist. But my mind would wander more often to the literary genius of Thomas Cranmer than to the God-Man whose death gave depraved humans the nerve to ask for forgiveness—and the temerity to believe they can receive it.

Eventually I stopped attending the Anglo-Catholic church. Belief in God was still a shaky proposition for me, let alone the Incarnation. I felt grateful to these Christians who welcomed me without asking nosy questions or dragging me to coffee hour. But maybe it was time to accept that I was “religiously unmusical” —the self-description preferred by the sociologist Max Weber, who spent his career studying world religions but never professed belief in any of them.

I finished my PhD and spent the next dozen years reading books and archival documents, interviewing believers, teaching classes, and doing all the stuff that qualified me as an expert on American Christianity. I wasn’t happy being an agnostic. But I accepted my condition, since I’d been to all the doctors—at least the reputable ones—and none had the cure.

My story is my own, but the point is universal. There are many ways to fool yourself into thinking you have Christianity figured out, when really you have remade the Christian God into a deity that suits you.

God ambushed me about three years ago. I was writing a magazine profile of a local Southern Baptist megachurch, The Summit Church, based in Raleigh. The pastor there, J. D. Greear, turned our first interview into an ongoing conversation. He pushed me to realize that I needed to investigate the claims Christians make about history—that there were piles of books that do so meticulously. I should have read these books years ago, and I needed every one of their footnotes. Without them, I never could have gotten to the point of accepting that the New Testament documents are reliable sources and that the Resurrection is the best explanation for a very puzzling set of historical circumstances.

But while I was slogging through books like N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, I continued to attend Sunday worship at Summit. Each weekend, from my comfy upholstered seat in the nosebleed section in the back of the auditorium, I stared at the lyrics on the giant screen. I even sang them, because it was dark and loud and no one could see or hear me. Yes, it felt like a rock concert—one that, for me, removed the parts of church that I had turned into idols and excuses.

Slowly I realized that there was nothing cheesy about singing “We are ransomed by our Father through the blood.” And maybe the melody wasn’t the only reason Charity Gayle’s “Thank You Jesus for the Blood” was stuck in my head the whole drive home.

Some caricatures of contemporary worship music do hit the mark. Many songs take God’s victory and care for his people as their main subjects, paying less attention to topics like sin and suffering. “Make way through the waters / Walk me through the fire / Do what you are famous for,” Tauren Wells wrote in his 2020 song. Or, from Passion Music: “There’s nothing that our God can’t do / There’s not a mountain that He can’t move.”

Three of the four big worship ministries lean charismatic, while Passion City Church is broadly Reformed—but both traditions share an emphasis on the transformative power of the Resurrection, a major theme in the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters.

If the point of communal worship is to tug us into a posture of praise when the rest of life pulls in the other direction, then it makes sense to sing songs that remind us of the cosmic victory that will, eventually, erase this world’s suffering, even when we are in the middle of it. “Yes I will, lift you high in the lowest valley,” runs the chorus of Vertical Worship’s “Yes I Will.”

Contemporary worship music aims to cultivate a certain kind of experience, a sense of intimacy with God that critics mock as “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Without grounding in comprehensive biblical teaching, these lyrics could encourage a shallow emotional state that resembles junior high hormones more than submission to Christ. But there’s something deeper happening. Musician Melanie Penn told me that she sees herself “as a kind of heart doctor. I open the artery between head and heart.”

When Maverick City sings in “Communion” that “You are closer, closer than my skin / And you are in the air I’m breathing in … This is where I’m meant to be (right here) / Me in you and you in me,” they are in good company with the biblical authors, who frequently returned to metaphors of erotic love and marriage as they tried to help mortals grasp the magnitude of God’s covenant. During the Middle Ages, the Song of Songs was one of monks’ favorite biblical texts to write about—not because they were repressed celibates but because they grasped the divine intimacy made possible by Christ’s sacrifice.

No worship music, whether electronic or Gregorian, is meant to serve as a person’s sole source of spiritual formation. A Christian’s theological diet ought to be like the caloric kind—balanced, drawn from a variety of sources, and approved by experts who know something about nutrition. Preaching, prayer, Bible study, and other reading should bring forward the themes that get less attention during the worship set. And we laypeople trust that church staff are scrutinizing the theology of the lyrics.

In the anti-CCM corners of the internet, critics complain about the controversial theology and conduct of some of the ministries associated with popular songs—Bethel Church’s radical charismatic teachings; Elevation Church’s whiff of prosperity gospel; allegations of sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement at Hillsong.

But the songs their worship teams compose for broad consumption usually leave aside any theological irregularities in favor of mere Christianity, and the personal failings of artists or clergy do not detract from the orthodoxy of their lyrics. Cynics may say they stick to the fundamentals of free grace and God’s sovereignty to sell more albums among the widest possible range of churches around the world. The non-cynic in me (and converting to Christianity requires a leap away from the cynicism that’s so fashionable in modern culture) thanks God for weekly reminders of the gospel’s most basic claims. Cultural and political currents continually pull Christians away from one another, prodding us into fights over secondary issues. Contemporary worship songs bring us back to Jesus.

I sing them gratefully every Sunday. I drive my family nuts blasting them on the car stereo. And if they stop prompting wonder, I will not hesitate to dig out my Russian Orthodox chant CDs and my Book of Common Prayer. It takes the whole church to disciple a sinner like me.

Molly Worthen is a historian, journalist, and professor. Her most recent book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

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Books

Review

Wendell Berry’s Grief and Gratitude

Russell Moore

They go together in his latest novel, as they will for readers who realize it might be his last.

Illustration by Katherine Lam

An elderly woman once told me she was making a long trip back to her hometown for the little community’s autumn apple festival. She had returned many times for the festival—an annual ritual of her girlhood and young adulthood—but this time was different. Now in her 80s, she said, “I’m going back home for what I’m sure will be the last time.” It felt awkward to press the point, but I wondered what it must be like to see a familiar event lose the expected promise of next year.

I felt something of that ache when I realized I might well be visiting for the last time a beloved, familiar community that I’ve traveled to over and over again since adolescence. The difference is that this community does not exist. Or rather, this place, Port William, exists in the imagination of Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry.

Those of us who have savored his novels and short stories—with the familiar generations of Catletts and Coulters—can see that when Berry is gone, Port William will be gone too. No one else can or should write it.

Berry knows this too. The mind that can cite King Lear and Paradise Lost from memory line upon line knows the poetry of the King James Bible even better, certainly well enough to quote the psalmist’s assertion that our lives are 70 years or, “by reason of strength,” maybe 80. He also knows that this same psalm tells us those allotted years are soon gone, “and we fly away” (90:10, ESV).

Now over 90 years old, Berry seems to have embedded in his latest novel, Marce Catlett, a kind of last word for his readers—a goodbye from Port William to us.

Port William is, as I noted, fictional, but not in the manner of Xanadu, Oz, or Middle-earth. It is grounded self-consciously in the folklore of Berry’s real-life homeplace, Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky. That puts an even more melancholy frame around this novel, because it seems like a goodbye to Port Royal in our world just as much as to Port William in his.

The novel is a combination of origin story and apocalypse. Andy Catlett, the character most similar to and often read as a stand-in for Berry, narrates the story from the perspective of a man grown old. Andy reflects on what he now sees as the pivotal moment of his family’s life: his grandfather Marcellus Catlett riding by train to Louisville for an auction sale, his entire year’s tobacco crop packed into hogsheads—only to learn that he will be coming home with little more than it cost to get there due to the price-rigging of the monopolistic Duke Trust.

“If Marce was going home with nothing from that day’s sale, he was not going home to nothing,” Andy remembers. And indeed, he was not. From the humiliation of that defeat, the novel shows us how Marce and his family returned to the work of farming: “He had been defeated, but he was not destroyed.” The scene of the elder Catlett telling his worried wife about what he had lost transforms their son, Wheeler, who becomes a lawyer and policymaker advocating for agrarian communities like his own.

For a time, of course, these complementary responses work. As in all of Berry’s stories, the little things—raising a family, tending a field, burying a neighbor—are what really matter in the end. And Wheeler’s work matters too. He is instrumental in getting a New Deal–era tobacco cooperative formed that is run not by distant Washington bureaucrats but by the farmers themselves.

Then, of course, tobacco is discovered to cause cancer. And more ominously, the mechanization and regimentation of agriculture—and of virtually everything else—destroys what held Port William together.

Several persistent Berry themes are here. One is the importance of community as drawn from Paul’s epistles (1 Cor. 12:12–31), not as an abstract concept but as membership and belonging to one another. This book defines the “only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help.”

“By extension of their one rule, there was no ‘settling up,’” Berry writes, in implicit contrast with the tobacco monopoly. “All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.”

This membership is a covenant between not just those who live among each other but also between the living and the dead. The story unveils in quiet power what Berry has told us in his previous works: That covenant has been broken.

The novel also clearly identifies the villains: First, the tobacco monopoly; then, the government that pulled away the tobacco program; and then, behind all of that, the mechanization of farming paired with the “upward mobility” of generations into cities and exurbs.

If you ever wanted to see Elon Musk show up in a Port William story, here he is (unnamed but unmistakable):

The good, frugal farmers who drove their first tractors into the fields around Port William were entering, without knowing it, the technological romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and the billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer “space,” invade Mars, a place better known to them than the country that grows their food.

Berry has always argued that big problems require one to, in the words of his 1970 essay, “think little.” He once told a group of environmental activists that they mistakenly believed the solution to a problem should match the scope of the problem itself. In reality, as he argued in one book of essays, The Way of Ignorance, “the great problems call for many small solutions.”

But Marce Catlett feels, more than most of Berry’s other novels, resigned to defeat. Reflecting on his father, his grandfather, and himself, Andy Catlett says, “What we wanted was to make a life and a way of life, here in this place, that our children and their children could take from us and carry on. And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.”

This felt fatalism is a necessary—but not final—through line. One of the most startling scenes is one in which old man Andy, reflecting on that defeated trip of his grandfather’s, starts to pray for him. “Oh, stand by him,” he prays. “Let him come home.” As Berry writes,

Andy never before has prayed or heard of so displacing a prayer, which sets him outside such sense as he has so far been able to make, outside even of time and into the great outside, the eternity maybe it is, that contains time. He seems to have spoken not from his own heart only, but from the hearts also of his grandma and grandpa, his mother, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and others, many others, or he is praying their prayers as they stand with him in that boundless outside.

Without articulating it this way, Andy seems to experience the epiphany that T. S. Eliot conveyed from the rose garden at Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” Andy comes to see that, in this opening between time and eternity, he, his father, and his grandfather are contemporaries possessed of a common vision; they are in fact brothers.

It is not just that the story continues from one generation to the next—although that’s certainly part of it. Rather, the story is held together, somehow, in eternity itself.

Berry has always understood and communicated the sense that Israel was part of a story that began far before, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Marce Catlett, Berry also seems to emphasize what Jesus said to the Sadducees who denied the resurrection from the dead—that God remains the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).

Because of this, the redemption in this story is not found in some dramatic plot twist at the end but in the telling of the story itself. Of Andy Catlett’s adolescence away at school, Berry wrote, “In those days nobody knew that he was a boy who belonged to a story. In those days he did not know it himself.” But he comes to realize the force of the story of his grandfather’s loss and thus comes to understand his father: “Because of the story, there were some kinds of a man that Wheeler could not be, a certain kind that he had to become, and certain things that he had to do.”

Andy moves from remembering the Catlett family story to inhabiting it. But not all at once. The story does the slow, small work of planting sequoias, as Berry’s “mad farmer” advises in a poem. The fact that Andy could awaken to its meaning enough to enter it himself leaves the possibility that others will do the same.

That memory doesn’t resolve into a tidy moral or a plan of action—all of Berry’s preaching aside. But it forms a certain kind of being that comes from a certain kind of knowing that “all turns on affection,” as Berry noted elsewhere. Andy comes to realize that Marce could only have shouldered this defeat with the bearings of a man who

had lived long and ably in a place and in ways intimately loved and known—or, as Andy has come to realize, intimately loved and therefore known, intimately known and therefore loved.

Andy comes to see, only with the clarity of old age, that “his remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it.”

At the end of Marce Catlett, I realized this is not the end of Port William. All its stories still exist. There’s a reason Mr. Berry took us backward and forward in the timeline. He was teaching us how to love a people and a place, if only in our imagination, and those stories are still there.

Near the end of the book, Berry writes, “As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.” I thought about this as I realized what I was feeling was indeed grief; the odds are low that I will ever get to read a new Port William story for the first time. The grief and the gratitude go together.

And so, maybe the right response is to pray for Wendell Berry—not the old Wendell Berry in Henry County right now, but somehow the young Wendell Berry making the decision Andy Catlett once made: to root himself in a place where he could tell us these stories that require of us to be certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of things we must love and certain kinds of things we must do.

That young Berry probably knows that he will end up heartbroken. “Oh, stand by him,” we might pray. “Let him come home.”

Russell Moore is editor in chief at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Good Night, Port William".

Ideas

An Exhortation to the Exhausted Black Christian

Lecrae Moore

Many Black Christians left evangelicalism after 2020. I almost joined them—until God showed me justice in his Word.

Illustration by Richard A. Chance

PART I

Between 2015 and 2020, something broke inside of me.

I was a devoted Christian, a student of Scripture, and a public voice for the gospel.

But I found myself angry, grieved, and deeply disillusioned as I repeatedly watched—and read—about unarmed Black men and women being killed.

Their names, and lives, are now etched into history books: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others who were gone too soon.

I was grieved, and assuming most Christians cared about their deaths, I raised my voice. I thought this was a chance for the church to be salt and light.

But what I saw from some of my white brothers and sisters was something else:

Silence. Dismissal. Deflection.

And in some of the places I trusted most, outright resistance to acknowledging the injustice in front of us. I was haunted by a question—not “What’s happening in America?” but “Where are God’s people in all this?”

Soon, that turned into a crisis of faith, not in Jesus but in his body.

PART II

My mother was shaped by the Civil Rights Movement. She raised me on Black pride and culture and gave me the writings of prominent activists, like Malcolm X and W. E. B. Du Bois.

When I found Jesus in college, my world changed.

I became a student of theology and followed my Savior with a thirst for spiritual growth.

I wanted truth. I took in—and read—whatever I could and did not care about the color of the author who wrote it.

I became a student of African and Black theologians, like Augustine and Tony Evans, but also white ones, such as John Piper and Tim Keller.

I was discipled in predominantly white spaces, not because I rejected my culture but because that’s where I was spiritually fed.

I believed the gospel was the solution to everything. To racism, poverty, brokenness, and addiction.

And it is. But what I did not realize back then was how shallow our application of the gospel often is.

PART III

In the past five years, we’ve seen a quiet exodus.

Black Christians who believed in multicultural ministry, racial reconciliation, and the dream of “kingdom diversity” began slipping out of the back doors of the churches they helped build.

Some went back to historically Black churches, where the gospel was preached holistically and lament was welcome.

Some started new churches with leaders who looked like them and understood their experience.

Some are still wandering, without a church home.

And some of my friends, sadly, walked away altogether.

They weren’t looking for attention or trying to be edgy. Nor were they trying to escape church accountability or sound doctrine.

They were simply trying to make sense of a faith (and a people) that told them to love their neighbor but could not love them back.

And if I’m honest, I almost joined them.

PART IV

I know people who left the church because they were deeply hurt by the silence of white leaders.

And sometimes, even more painfully, by the silence of Black ones who should have known better.

I have heard white pastors say they “did not know what to say,” so they said nothing. But silence isn’t neutral; it speaks.

And for many Black believers, it told them, “Your pain is too complicated for us.”

Worse than silence, though, was the misuse of language. The word unity was used like duct tape over a broken pipe.

Some accused those of us who spoke out of being “divisive,” which often meant “Don’t make us uncomfortable.”

But I’ve come to know that unity built on avoidance isn’t biblical unity. Real unity is forged through truth, repentance, and love.

And true love doesn’t shun conflict; it stays at the table during it.

PART V

Somewhere along the way, we started acting like justice and Jesus were enemies, signaling that many of us had become disciples of our culture instead of the Bible.

Christians acted as if caring about police reform, equity, or the dignity of Black life somehow meant we had strayed from the truth of the gospel.

As if caring about the poor and the needy while acting justly and showing mercy were optional electives.

As if the God who delivered Israel from slavery has no interest in systemic oppression today.

But God is not allergic to justice. The gospel is justice.

God secured our salvation in a just manner. But Jesus did not just come to save our souls.

He also rose to redeem a broken world personally, relationally, and yes, even structurally.

Our God didn’t ignore the marginalized. He centered them.

Nor did he avoid hard conversations for the sake of comfort.

PART VI

Some people who have left the church never looked back. And I get it. I have been there.

I have felt the sting of betrayal. I have wrestled with the hypocrisy. I have stood on stages, smiled in interviews, and quietly wondered if I still belonged.

But I’m still here.

Not because the church has always been good to me. But because Jesus never stopped being good.

Not because I found the perfect community. But because I believe in what the church could be if we lived out the gospel we preach.

This is reconstruction.

It is not about rebranding a broken system, but searching the Scriptures to see what God says about himself.

It comes in abandoning the shifting views of American Christians and replanting our faith in the deeper knowledge of the triune God.

When the walls fall, reconstruction allows you to discard fragile materials and rebuild with truth, integrity, justice, grace, love, and hope.

We can grieve the loss of what was but refuse to settle for shallow answers, and plant seeds for what could be.

When everything else feels unstable, we can grab hold of the God who never changes.

PART VII

If you’re still here, still believing, still showing up even when it’s hard—I see you. You are not alone.

And if you’re on the edge and your faith is held together by threads, I get that too.

But don’t stop at doubt or despair. And don’t let pain be the period at the end of your sentence.

Here’s my prayer for the church:

I pray the body of Christ doesn’t flinch at hard conversations. That it doesn’t choose comfort over conviction.

I pray that we learn how to lament and repent.

I pray that we make room for the voices of people of color.

I pray for a church that doesn’t dilute justice but disciples people in how to act justly.

I pray for a church that sees past political binaries and picks up a cross instead.

I pray for a church that looks like Jesus.

And I believe, deep down, we can get there.

But only if we’re willing to reconstruct.

Lecrae Moore has won multiple Grammy Awards and is a bestselling author, activist, and founder of Reach Records. He has led conversations on justice and faith through public engagements, chart-topping albums, and his hit podcast, The Deep End.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Black Faith After the Fire".

- More from Lecrae Moore

Readers Agree: ‘The Creed Is Cool!’

Kate Lucky

Responses to our May/June article about the Nicene Creed and other stories.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, an early statement of Christian beliefs—including articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity—that many followers of Jesus continue to incorporate into worship today. Despite Protestants’ historically complicated relationship with the text, some evangelicals, as Daniel Silliman noted in our May/June article “How the Nicene Creed Became Cool Again,” have been reciting it more frequently as part of their worship.

“I frequently use both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed to explain the heart and core definition of Christianity,” wrote Christine Taylor on Facebook. “Goes right to the heart of what I mean when I say I’m orthodox,” @grantbarber6 wrote on Instagram. “The belief in the Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and present day Christians bearing Jesus individually, but more important, corporately. Orthodox does not mean a coded way of judging others’ views on moral topics. It is not bigoted virtue signaling.”

Another Instagram commenter shared a story of the creed’s power in her own life. “A few years ago, my husband and I were led into a spiritual situation with a young man we both cared deeply for who had delved deeply into the occult,” she wrote. “The Holy Spirit actually led us to proclaim the creed out loud night after night. It strengthened our faith, reminding us of who we rely on and who has the authority. I saw the demon leave and God receive the glory. Argue if you will. The creed is cool! The creed is biblical. For everything it says, we can say, ‘It is written.’”

Kate Lucky, senior editor, culture and engagement

The Nicene Creed is the result of intense debates among competing theologies throughout the fourth century. Consensus was achieved on two principles: The most credible theological inferences from the Bible are ones that (1) have the broadest and clearest Scriptural support and (2) are logically consistent with other clear doctrines of the Bible. But to understand the creed, one really needs to know what the framers meant by consubstantial, true God, begotten, and world to come. And these are best understood when contrasted with the heretical claims they were intended to refute—claims that have resurfaced in our time.

Richard Brown, Durham, NC

Should I Talk to My Kids’ School About the Pledge of Allegiance?

Your advice column recently answered a question to a parent about their child choosing not to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance. I disagree with the advice that the parent should talk to the school proactively. Why would they do that? It sounds as if the child is able to respectfully opt out and no one is taking issue with it. That’s the best result. Why force an issue when there isn’t one? We don’t have to pick fights all the time. To tell someone they should bring it up when there isn’t a problem suggests it is about something other than the kid.

Rick Miltimore, Brentwood, TN

A Splintered Generation

While I agree with the three tentative explanations [for the dechurching gender gap], one was not mentioned: Most evangelical churches offer different things to men and women. Growing up in the church, most boys and girls experience similar opportunities to learn from God’s Word, serve him at home and in missions, and grow in their faith. As they enter adulthood and consider where God is calling them in terms of their professional and family life, young women find that many of the vocational paths open to men in evangelical spaces are closed to them. Young women are asked to believe that Jesus has redeemed them completely, fully accepted them into his family, called them to kingdom work, and does not consider them appropriate candidates for many professional ministry positions. Is it any surprise some of them find this
difficult to believe?

Rhiannon Evangelista, Atlanta, GA

What Do We Want from Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

As a Lutheran theology student, I traveled to Germany in 1979. My intent was to learn the language and study the writings of Martin Luther. I eventually married a German woman and was brought into a German family. Often, people would speak about what happened to them during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. I heard some remarkable stories of survival. I did not always agree with these individuals, but they had lived through this dark period in German history; I had not. I have learned that I should not so quickly and easily condemn or praise as we are prone to do in our culture.

Richard Krause, Pewaukee, WI

The Christian Schools That Cried Wolf

“Fearmongering is not a godly way to keep those tuition checks rolling in. I have seen the results of this style of advertisement, and some of you deserve a refund.”

Tonya Carroll Syers Matheson (Facebook)

Inside the Crowded Hospital Full of Congo’s Rape Victims

Thank you for printing this. It was very disturbing to read about the horrible crimes being committed against women and children. We need to be aware of the degrading atrocities happening in our world and of people like Dr. Mukwege, who are pouring out their energy to make a tremendous difference. May we pray that this situation, which seems to stem from greed, somehow be rectified. It is not too difficult for our loving and mighty God to bring this about.

Esther Aikens, Calgary, Alberta

Measuring the Good Life

The opening paragraph nailed it: Short-term missions folks usually come back in awe of the joyful community they experienced in the developing country they served. Developing countries might have many issues, but loneliness and [lack of] meaning are not among them. Meanwhile, our youth are riddled with anxiety and dependent on little black boxes in their pockets for connection. How can the church be the voice in the wilderness to lead the way?

Christian Anderson, Stuart, FL

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our May/June Issue".

- More from Kate Lucky

Church Life

Families Use Our Church to Get into Private School. What Do I Do?

Karen Swallow Prior, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in on theological disagreements at church and living above reproach.

Illustration by Jay Cover | Portraits by Jack Richardson

Got a question? Email advice@christianitytoday.com to ask CT’s advice columnists. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: I’m a staunch egalitarian, but many members of my church family lean complementarian. I read a lot to better understand the biblical basis of what I believe, and I want to avoid confirmation bias, but reading arguments for complementarianism fills me with dread. Do I need to look at both sides even when I feel firm in what I believe? —Wary in Wisconsin

Karen Swallow Prior: The more strongly we hold a conviction, the more we are obligated to be knowledgeable about it. The issue you’ve raised here is one on which you feel strongly, but it’s also a question about which Christians have disagreed across church history, including within evangelicalism.

Many individual Christians and denominations have changed their views about women’s roles over the years. For example, I know of one prominent Christian who began as an outspoken egalitarian, then called women’s roles a secondary issue, and then called complementarianism an essential matter of biblical commitment.

Moreover, the categories of egalitarian and complementarian as used today only date back to the 1980s, and that period has brought numerous nuances, clarifications, and subcategories. None is infallible.

In general, this debate should be handled with charity and humility—and with an eye focused more on church history than on today’s constantly evolving postures. For you specifically, I’d advise considering how much these questions come up in your local church life.

If you’re debating the issue intensely or often, you should probably be well-read to be able to speak graciously and thoroughly. But if the topic isn’t of high interest to others in your church and you continue to be content to worship alongside complementarians, your present knowledge may suffice.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Karen Swallow Prior lives in rural Virginia with her husband, two dogs, and several chickens. Following a decades-long vocation as an English professor, Karen now speaks and writes full-time.

Q: I coordinate a children’s ministry at my town’s only Anglican church. Nearby, there’s a private school for Anglican girls, and I’ve long seen families attend our church a year or so before their daughter would enroll. The child gets baptized, but then the families often disappear. I’ve told myself I should welcome a chance for evangelism and discipleship, but I find myself suspicious of families who turn up with a daughter of a certain age. I’m sick of feeling used but then feel guilty about feeling that! What should I do? —Not Sure in New Zealand

Kevin Antlitz: I think most of us who work in churches can relate to how you feel.

My initial response to you was to strategize ways to stop this: Maybe you could require families to be part of your church longer before baptism or sync up with the school to ask for institutional changes.

But as I sat with your situation, I found myself softening. As frustrating as it is to feel like a box being checked, I encourage you to focus on the opportunity here.

Maybe most of the families really are using the church solely to get their kids into this school. But that still means they’re with you for a year. This is a chance to love freely, without condition. What might it look like to more intentionally support these families? They may still check out after a while, but that’s not something you can control.

So much of ministry is sowing seeds. As we partner with others in sharing the gospel and discipling, the Lord gives the growth (1 Cor. 3:6). Or he doesn’t. We can only sow and water.

Instead of trying to insulate yourself from being used, spend your time and energy doing what you can to help these girls and their families experience the love of God in your church. Maybe, at the end of the year, they’ll no longer be able to imagine life apart from your community.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three young children who they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: I have a friend who is thinking about dating a guy, but they live in separate states. He’s visiting her and staying at her place overnight. I know they won’t sleep together, but it still feels a little weird to me. Should I say anything to her as her friend? What does “living above reproach” really mean? —Ill at Ease in Indiana

Kiara John-Charles: Scripture discusses “living above reproach” as a responsibility of church leaders (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6), but those leaders are an example for all believers. As Christians, our lives are a witness to those around us, and even the appearance of wrongdoing can hurt our witness or lead others astray (Matt. 18:6–7).

An overnight stay can also lead to future compromise because of the comfort and intimacy this experience may establish outside of marriage. Without clear boundaries, we can overestimate our ability to resist temptation as desire naturally deepens when we become close emotionally and physically (1 Cor. 6:18).

As a friend once told me, “Your body will betray you” in these moments if you are not on your guard, relying on the help of the Spirit (1 Cor. 10:13).

Boundaries are important in dating relationships, and godly friendships are a beautiful gift in the life of a believer and can offer accountability and wisdom (Prov. 27:17). So it’s worth asking your friend why this potential suitor needs to stay with her overnight. Why hasn’t he sought other options, like a guest room at another friend’s home?

There are plenty of reasons this plan is unwise, and you may be able to encourage her to set boundaries against temptation, helping her avoid unintended consequences or moral compromise.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Books

Review

The Uneasy Conscience of a Christian Introvert

Matt Reynolds

Introverts don’t need to become extroverts. But sometimes I’ve let my introversion excuse my failure to love God’s people as I should.

Illustration by E S Kibele Yarman

Somewhere in the lower circles of introvert hell, about halfway between Office Birthday Party Boulevard and (shudder) the Professional Networking District, you’ll find a former church of mine.

Don’t mistake me: I loved this church, though I only spent a few months there. It revitalized my understanding of the Bible’s blueprint for local congregations. Yet a palpable dread enveloped me each Sunday as the benediction crept closer.

In most churches, as the sanctuary thins out after a service, introverts have options. Rather than lingering to socialize, we can merge with outbound traffic as it flows toward restrooms and refreshment tables. Here, though, you sat back down and fell into conversation with your nearest pew-mate, often for ten minutes or more.

No one commanded this from the pulpit. No ushers enforced it. It happened because everyone wanted it to happen. Presumably, they’d been discipled to believe that when brothers and sisters gather for worship, they shouldn’t interact like strangers on the street.

Intellectually, I understood the impulse. Yet it felt like an elaborate conspiracy to make introverts self-conscious. I’d stumble through some perfunctory small talk, counting the moments until I could browse the church’s bookstall in blissful solitude.

Adam S. McHugh probably had similar experiences in mind when, just over 15 years ago, he wrote Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. (A revised and expanded edition appeared in 2017.) As McHugh sees it, evangelical churches often foster forms of fellowship and spirituality that favor chatterboxes over quiet types. Think, for instance, of post-service coffee hours, which McHugh amusingly likens to nonalcoholic cocktail parties. Or small-group environments that encourage immediate, plentiful “vulnerability.” Or evangelistic models that elevate quick wits and slick salesmanship above patient listening.

A former pastor and chaplain, McHugh delivers keen insights on extroverted archetypes within Christian ministry. As he notes, many congregations expect charisma from the pulpit and backslapping bonhomie in the greeting line. I nodded sympathetically as he described preferring study and sermon prep to the more social and collaborative dimensions of church leadership. (McHugh later left the pastorate to become a sommelier in one of California’s winemaking regions, an experience he details in Blood from a Stone.)

Much of the book revolves around two “journeys” McHugh prescribes for Christian introverts. First comes an inward journey, by which we come to embrace our personalities as divine gifts rather than social and emotional handicaps. But this doesn’t mean luxuriating on an island of seclusion, because McHugh also outlines an outward journey, by which we learn to pursue Christian fellowship as our authentic selves. Rather than “masquerading” as social butterflies, he writes, we should “stretch our personality preferences without distorting them.”

From here on, it might sound like I’m finding fault with McHugh’s counsel. That’s not quite right. Yes, I jotted down several questions and counterarguments in the margins. But McHugh, to his credit, eventually addressed each one. Where we differ—if we differ—boils down to questions of emphasis.

Take, for instance, McHugh’s account of the inward journey, which leans heavily on therapeutic notions of healing and self-acceptance. Introverts, he says, bear scars from being rejected and misunderstood by peers, colleagues, and loved ones. At one point, he writes of “distinguishing between the healthy components of our personalities, those that are natural and to be celebrated, and the coping mechanisms that are the symptoms of our wounds.”

Having nursed those wounds myself, I wouldn’t minimize their severity or begrudge anyone the consolation they deserve. But McHugh’s framing obscures a third possibility: that introversion, in certain circumstances, reveals hearts that need cleansing more than healing.

This uncomfortable thought occurs whenever I catch myself plotting Sunday morning escape routes. Aren’t church gatherings supposed to offer a foretaste of heaven? McHugh might reply with reasonable alternatives to self-reproach: Perhaps, after worship, most introverts prefer holy silence, quiet prayer, or deeper dialogue to shooting the breeze in a noisy foyer.

Yet my own inward journeys of reflection suggest a less flattering answer: I don’t always love God’s people as I should. I treat them as roadblocks to reading books or watching Sunday afternoon football.

McHugh rightly objects to blaming God-given dispositions for unrelated spiritual shortcomings. He’s clear that being reserved doesn’t justify withdrawal from Christian community or neglecting to love our neighbors. The book acknowledges habitual temptations introverts should resist—yet it seems reluctant to regard introversion itself as subject to sin’s corruption.

If McHugh’s model of journeying inward flirts with underselling human fallenness, his model of journeying outward flirts with overselling personality types as gifts that nourish the church. I agree that introverts and extroverts bless Christ’s body in complementary ways. Yet I remain uneasy about introverts purposefully engaging church cultures as introverts.

Granted, McHugh admits the limits of personality labels. They don’t define us, he says, and they shouldn’t outweigh how Scripture defines us. Still, I suspect I’m warier of our cultural mania for identity badges, from the alphabetical readouts of Myers-Briggs to the numerical permutations of the Enneagram.

These exercises can help illuminate who we are and what makes us tick. At extremes, however, they can seduce us into navel-gazing. McHugh casts an appealing vision of introverts and extroverts edifying each other about the contours and intricacies of their personalities. But I worry about these conversations diverting attention from the biblical drama of redemption, the riches of church history, and other weightier topics.

The 2017 version of Introverts in the Church opens in a cheerful mood, noting the favorable reputation our tribe increasingly enjoys. McHugh’s new preface pays homage to Susan Cain’s 2012 bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. “Somewhere along the line,” he quips, “introverts got sexy.” He promises more celebration of “what we are” than apologies for “what we lack.”

That’s an improvement over stigmatizing introverts as antisocial weirdos. But I’ll pass on attending any victory parades. I’ve never let stereotypes get me down, and I don’t want to let cultural acclaim puff me up. If introverts know anything, it’s the value of standing apart.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor for Christianity Today.

The Beckoning Nightstand

- More from Matt Reynolds

Theology

It Was ‘Good,’ Not Perfect

John Swinton

The language of creation can reframe the way we view people with disabilities in the church.

Illustration by Kume Pather

My good friend Emma is a deeply committed Christian who lives with cerebral palsy. Recently she went to a church she had not visited before. As she was leaving, an elder approached her and asked, “Can I pray for you?” She replied, “Why would you want to do that?” He said, “I feel that Jesus wants to free you from your disability.”

Emma’s response was calm but firm: “I’m happy as I am, thank you.” She left the church with dignity, but she was really upset. “Every time that happens, it makes me feel like I don’t belong in church,” she told me. “It’s like people think I’m less than everyone else. But I’m not, right?” A tear rolled down her cheek.

My friend’s experience lays bare a theological fault line Christians must confront: When the church sees disability solely as something to be fixed rather than something that can be honored and received, it obscures the truth of creation’s goodness and distorts the image of God.

The term disability is both theologically and culturally contested. For some, like the elder who presumed to pray away Emma’s cerebral palsy, it signifies only a defect—something in the body or mind that has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. This deficit model treats disability as an aberration from an assumed norm of bodily or cognitive integrity and reinforces disability as the primary part of a person’s identity.

Others argue that a good deal of disability lies within society and not within the individual. In this view, a wheelchair user, though impaired in mobility, is rendered disabled when people build stairs instead of ramps or withhold community on the grounds of bodily deviation.

Disability is not simply a condition; it is also a relation. Disability can be both a site of divine image-bearing and a context of genuine struggle. I believe it is possible to honor the goodness of disabled lives without denying the fragility they may carry.

To do so, we must begin with Creation itself. The key question is not simply whether disability is good or bad, but what kind of world we believe God has made—and what it means to belong within it.

Some of our errors in theology around disability stem from a reading of the Genesis creation narrative that idealizes Adam and Eve as perfect examples of human beings. The implication is that there was no disability in the Garden of Eden and therefore disability must have arisen after the Fall.

Within this reading, we can start to think of Eden as a flawless realm, untouched by struggle or dependency—a vision of harmony in which disruption, limitation, and fragility are cast as intrusions. Bodily or cognitive differences are viewed solely through the lens of departures from divine design.

But there is another way to interpret the Genesis account of creation, a way that sees the goodness of creation in a different light.

Let’s begin with the suggestion that the original state of the world was one of perfection. Although some default to this language when interpreting the Genesis creation narratives, the text itself never uses this term. While Eden was originally untainted by sin, the Bible does not suggest that creation was perfect in the sense of flawlessness or static idealism.

Instead, the divine pronouncement is that the creation is good (tov in Hebrew). This word, in its biblical and theological context, does not imply perfection or uniformity but denotes relational integrity, aesthetic richness, diversity, and the capacity for fruitful, dynamic life and connection.

The theological grammar of Genesis is thus relational rather than idealistic. The goodness of creation is not grounded in metaphysical perfection but in the dynamics between Creator and creation, and among created beings themselves. Eden is a world of movement, interdependence, vulnerability, and growth. It is, in short, a world that includes the possibility of difference and dependence as intrinsic to its goodness. This reframing of Genesis as a story of dynamic goodness rather than static perfection compels us to revisit its embedded theological anthropology.

If Eden’s goodness lies in its interrelational depth rather than its metaphysical flawlessness, then the human vocation must likewise be understood in relational rather than idealized terms. The move from a general depiction of creation’s goodness to the particular creation of humanity (Gen. 1:27–31) signals not a break but an intensification of this theme.

Diversity of form, function, and even capacity is not a deviation from divine intent but a constitutive feature of it. Genesis 1 is not concerned with perfection as sameness but with a flourishing ecology of difference. The opening chapter of Genesis celebrates a creation teeming with life: light and dark, sky and sea, birds, fish, and finally human beings, uniquely made in the image of God.

Thus, humanity’s imaging of God is rooted not in perfectionistic traits like rational mastery or autonomy but in the divine capacity for relation, response, and care.

While the imago Dei has sometimes been defined in terms of intellect, rationality, or physical capacity, this view inevitably excludes those with profound intellectual disabilities or those living with dementia, whose capacities are either undeveloped or diminishing. But the problem runs deeper: If the image is equated with cognitive or physical function, then all human beings are, in effect, growing out of that image as we age and our bodies and minds decline. This renders the imago Dei not a gift bestowed but a status to be lost, an anthropology that is both theologically incoherent and pastorally troubling.

There is another way to think about the image of God. God’s Spirit (ruach) sustains all living creatures, including animals (Gen. 7:15; Ps. 104:27–30). What distinguishes humans is God’s desire to relate to them (Gen. 1:26–28). The imago Dei is manifested in God’s loving gift of relationality. What distinguishes humanity is not superior functionality but God’s relational intent. God speaks with human beings, entrusts them with responsibility, and desires communion with them in a way not extended to other creatures. The imago Dei is a gift, not a human capacity.

Some might challenge the inclusivity of this view by arguing that relationality requires reciprocity, asking, “If you can’t respond to God’s gift, then how can you receive it?” Once again, Genesis has a reply.

In the second creation account, in Genesis 2, humans are called to care for the world—to tend, to keep, and to sustain it (v. 15). If caring for the world and all its creatures is a foundational human vocation, then we as creatures are counted among those who also need to receive care. If you find yourself in a situation where you can only be cared for, where you cannot respond to others and to God, this does not mean you are somehow a lesser portrayal of the image of God.

This vision of the image of God as a relational gift rather than a functional capacity opens the door to a more profound understanding of humanness. If Genesis 1 affirms that difference and dependence do not preclude divine image-bearing, then Genesis 2 goes further. It reveals that human wholeness emerges through incompletion, need, and embodied vulnerability—the opposites of modern ideals of autonomy.

This idea stands in stark contrast to prevailing cultural narratives. Consider, for instance, the increasing momentum behind assisted suicide legislation in the US, Canada, and beyond, where public discourse often frames dependence as indignity, suffering as meaningless, and the loss of cognitive or physical control as a fate worse than death.

The vision of dependence and vulnerability as part of God’s good design is supported by wider theological tradition. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in Creation and Fall, reflects on Adam’s formation from the dust as a sign of human finitude and need, not failure.

For Bonhoeffer, to be human is to exist not in isolation but in relationship—drawn into life with God and others. More recently, theologian Christa McKirland argued that human need is not the result of sin but part of what it means to be created. She says we are made for necessary kenosis— a posture of receiving from God and others that reflects the image we bear.

These perspectives remind us that what our culture often views as weakness may in fact be how the image of God is most clearly seen. This is an understanding that sits uneasily with much of what modern society prizes. These cultural frameworks are underwritten by a view of the human person that regards self-sufficiency as the highest good, and care, especially long-term or intensive care, as a social, economic, and existential burden.

Against this backdrop, the Genesis account offers a radical counter-vision. It insists that vulnerability is not a failure of human life but rather a feature of its divine design.

To be human is not to be autonomous but to be made for communion. And communion—both with God and with one another—is made possible not through strength but through the shared grammar of need.

The second creation account amplifies the theological subtext of the first. Here, dependence is not merely accommodated within human nature; it is part of it. The divine image is not only preserved in those who receive care; it is clarified in the very structures of mutuality and community through which care becomes necessary. What Genesis 1 gestures toward, Genesis 2 makes explicit: We are created not to be whole alone but to become whole together. Any account of the imago Dei that cannot make theological sense of the person in decline, distress, or dependency is not merely incomplete; it is false.

Yet this vision unfolds in proximity to fracture. Genesis 3 is not far off. The Fall does not erase the relational architecture of creation but distorts it, transforming mutuality into blame and interdependence into alienation. Sin distorts the image of God in men and women. That movement, from communion to rupture, sharpens the theological stakes of Genesis 2: The goodness of human relationality is vivid precisely because it stands on the brink of rupture.

What is often overlooked in the creation account is the cost of interdependence, even before sin enters the narrative. Adam loses a rib to make relationship possible; communion is born not from wholeness but from incision. The first human does not begin as a self-sufficient, intact ideal. Rather, he becomes relational through the opening of his body.

Adam bears the wound that makes community possible. His body, altered to make space for another, testifies that limitation and change are not contradictions of goodness but are conditions for love. If the grammar of Creation is goodness and not perfection, then bodies marked by difference, by need, by variance, are not deviations from the human norm. They are part of it.

What the church should see is this: The first scar in Scripture was not caused by sin, but by love. It was not a punishment. It was the cost of communion. If we miss that, we miss something important about the gospel.

At this point, a caution is necessary. Many forms of disability are not experienced as benign differences and should not be idealized. For some people, disability is marked by chronic pain, fatigue, degeneration, or isolation. To overlook these realities would be both pastorally insensitive and theologically dishonest.

Suffering is real. And for some, it is relentless. Yet we are not without hope: In the new heavens and new earth, Christ will wipe away every tear, and mourning, crying, and pain will cease (Rev. 21:4). But this does not mean that disabled bodies fall outside the scope of creation’s goodness. All human lives bear the imprint of fragility; every body carries its own marks of limitation and vulnerability.

To suffer is not to stand outside the goodness of creation; it is to live within its present groaning. As Paul writes, “the whole creation has been groaning together” (Rom. 8:22, ESV). This groaning is not a sign of divine abandonment but a cry for the redemption to come. It signals not a departure from God’s purposes but their incompletion.

Our wounds (like Adam’s) are not always chosen, and they are often not healed. But they are not disqualifications from belonging. They are reminders that we are part of a creation still yearning for its fulfilment that will be complete in the coming kingdom of God.

One might object: Doesn’t Jesus’ healing ministry suggest that God intends to eliminate disability? Only if healing is read exclusively as the negation of bodily difference rather than also as the manifestation of divine presence amid human fragility.

Jesus’ healings are signs of the kingdom’s arrival within a world structured by exclusion, sin, and harm. Jesus’ healing ministry was one sign that he was, in fact, the promised Messiah (Matt. 11:2–5). When Jesus healed, he took away personal suffering and he often redeemed and redefined the lives of people whose neighbors labeled them deficient. Jesus restored them to community, to dignity, and to worship (Luke 13:10–17; Mark 2:1–12; John 9).

We must also remember that Jesus did not always choose to heal. That the risen Christ retained his scars (John 20:27) and that Paul’s plea for healing was refused (2 Cor. 12:7–9) further confirm that divine purposes are not exhausted by physical cures.

God does not need to remove what the world calls impairment, disfigurement, or disability in order to disclose the full humanity and full belovedness of a person.

The message from church and culture alike to many people with disabilities has been that their lives are, at best, an exception to God’s design and, at worst, a problem to be resolved. Their differences are often received as intrusions into an otherwise idealized human norm.

Such a vision turns the hospitable logic of creation on its head. It suggests that belonging is conditional, and therefore one must change in order to be welcomed. In this way, communal belonging that was meant to reflect God’s goodness becomes a place of exclusion.

The church must learn to hear and resist this distortion. If God’s creation is good, then every life within it, regardless of capacity, cognition, or conformity, is already gifted with divine affirmation.

While the church should be a place of belonging, we must also realize that our present joys and sufferings within the body, on this side of Genesis 3, are partial. In the new creation—regardless of one’s present-day ability or disability—we will all be fully healed in our bodies and communities. Isaiah tells us that infants will not die, children will not be doomed to destruction, and old men will live long to enjoy the fruit of their labor (Isa. 65:17–23). The church does not drum up this goodness; it is called to bear witness to it. We must create communities where people with disabilities are not merely included but are recognized as those through whom God’s grace is disclosed.

Inclusion is not enough. Accommodation is not enough. What is needed is a theologically grounded sense of belonging. To belong is not simply to be present. It is to be recognized as someone whose presence is necessary, whose difference makes a difference. The church must become a community in which disability is neither ignored nor heroized but is received as part of the diverse ecology of God’s good creation. This will require changes—practical, liturgical, and theological. Rethinking leadership. Reimagining worship. Listening differently. Asking not just what people with disabilities need from the church but what the church needs to learn from everyone’s experience.

Can someone with profound intellectual disability lead us in prayer? Can a body marked by pain be the place where we see power made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9)? These are not rhetorical questions; they are theological imperatives.

Emma’s question remains: “It’s like people think I’m less than everyone else. But I’m not, right?” Her words emerge from a lifetime of negotiating what it means to belong. They arise within a world that often measures value by ability and a church that has too often mirrored that standard.

If the church is to be faithful to the God who made the world and called it good, it must learn how to respond to Emma’s query in word and deed. Far from being “less than,” she bears the imago Dei. Her life is evidence of the goodness of God.

John Swinton is a professor in practical theology and pastoral care at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a former nurse and mental health chaplain. His research focuses on the theology of disability, dementia, and mental health. He is the founder of the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability.

- More from John Swinton

Testimony

I Was the Enemy Jesus Told You to Love

Yassir Eric with Jayson Casper

As an extremist Muslim, I beat a Christian boy and left him to die. His faithful prayers for me led to my salvation.

Photography by Sandra Singh for Christianity Today

When I was 16, a new student named Zakariya showed up at school. His forehead bore fan-shaped scars that identified him as a member of the Dinka people group—south Sudanese minority rebels, many of whom were Christian. My enemies. Zakariya was nice to everyone and scored the top grades in class, which made me hate him more.

As devout Muslims, my family and I were committed to Islam’s central place in the government. But our application of our religion was radical, since we prayed for Allah to destroy those who opposed us.

For two years, I added a request for Zakariya’s destruction to my daily noontime prayers. One night, that prayer was answered. My friends and I climbed a tree with our bayonet-fixed rifles and watched as a flashlight approached in the distance. It was Zakariya, who we knew walked this way each evening.

When he was beneath our tree, we ambushed him, beating him mercilessly with our fists and rifle butts. In a frenzy, I stabbed him repeatedly with my bayonet.

“Allahu Akbar,” I muttered in pride as we walked away from his mangled body. We left him for dead, and he never returned to school.

I was born into one of independent Sudan’s three leading families. My great-grandfather had joined the 1881 Islamic revolt against the British. Members of my family helped enshrine sharia law in our country. My father led the military in Darfur, where he later served as governor.

As the only son, I was to inherit this legacy. Our family believed our highest allegiance transcended the nation to include all Muslims in a global Islamic community called an umma. This inspired a tradition—unknown to me at the time—of early commitment to religious learning. So when I was 8 years old, my father drove me 500 miles north of Khartoum and dropped me at a desert madrasa to learn the Quran. He gave me no explanation and barely said goodbye.

At the madrasa, I was shaved bald and given a white robe and prayer cap for my daily uniform. Our group of ten boys sat in a straw hut and memorized Arabic verses with a long-bearded shaykh. The Quran was in his right hand; in his left he held a leather whip to punish our frequent mistakes. Allah must be like this too, I thought. I cried at night for 17 days straight.

When my father came to pick me up two years later, there was no embrace, but I saw he was proud of me. At home, I recited the entire Quran to my family and received a camel as my reward.

In my family’s eyes, I was now a man. Instead of playing soccer, I practiced disassembling and reassembling a Kalashnikov rifle and playacted ambushes against our enemies. Maybe it was preparation for Zakariya. By the time I graduated from high school in 1989, I was ready for jihad and to die as a martyr. I was the perfect son my father had dreamed of.

But my role model wasn’t my father. It was my favorite uncle, Khaled, an officer in Sudan’s intelligence services who was educated in Britain. He had personally converted south Sudanese Christians to Islam and imprisoned others who held to their faith.

One day, Khaled came to visit us, and my grandfather held court with the men in our home. That’s when Khaled suddenly blurted out, “I’m no longer a Muslim. I’ve become a Christian.”

My uncle had been monitoring the activities of an evangelical church in Khartoum when he heard a sermon about the preconversion life of the apostle Paul—and wrongly assumed that every detail was about him. Enraged, he put a gun to the pastor’s head and demanded to know how the pastor knew so much about his life. He ended up talking for hours with the pastor and became a Christian.

His pronouncement threw us into total shock. As Muslims, we knew the tradition that an apostate must be killed. Beset by shame, we quickly decided to do so. But the secret service arrested him first.

Photography by Sandra Singh for Christianity Today

Since Islam forbids a Muslim woman from being married to an unbeliever, we ensured Khaled’s divorce from my aunt and took custody of their children.

Two years after Khaled’s betrayal, his son Fouad—with whom I was close—fell into a coma. The doctors diagnosed the cause as malaria, complicated by some sort of infectious disease. They could do nothing to help.

Every day for a month, I went from my classes at Khartoum University to the hospital, where I recited the Quran over my 11-year-old cousin. He was gaunt and disfigured, with many medical devices attached to his body. I felt abandoned and confused. It was unfair that Fouad was being punished for Khaled’s sin.

One afternoon, two strange men came into the hospital room. I identified them as Egyptian Copts from the cross tattoos on their wrists. They told me they had visited Khaled in prison. When they asked to pray for his son, I shrugged, believing Christian prayer was worthless. But I also felt my conscience stir. They were praying for a Muslim boy, whereas I had always prayed against Christians.

Just as I stood to ask them to leave, I noticed Fouad’s complexion change. His eyes opened. Suddenly the machines in the room started beeping and nurses began rushing in. Fouad raised his hands slowly, and life filled his whole body. He recognized me. It was a miracle.

I spent hours talking with the Copts that evening. At dawn prayers the next morning, I prayed to Jesus for the first time, asking him to change me—if indeed what the Copts said about him was true.

I bought a copy of the Bible and began reading it quietly every day. For the next two months, I hid my Bible while continuing to perform the obligatory Islamic prayers. Still, my family grew suspicious.

In February 1991, my grandfather asked me directly, “Have you become like Khaled?” I confessed quietly, “I am a Christian.”

As before with Khaled, the room fell silent. Then my grandfather turned and rebuked his son, and my father punched me in the face.

I had been raised to be strong and to stand for what I believed in. So I brought out my Bible, and my grandfather stood up and walked out
of the room. My father said, “If this is your faith, you are no longer my son.”

I packed my bags. The next morning, as my mother and sisters cried, begging me to reconsider, my father brought out a contract. I signed my name, renouncing my inheritance and family name. For the first time in my life, I saw tears in my father’s eyes. Later, I learned that my family held a funeral for me, burying an empty coffin. It was somehow a gesture of love, meant to symbolize that they would not have to kill me.

I went to stay with a Palestinian friend at university and tried to go to church, but the south Sudanese believers at church rejected me—until a kind foreigner reassured them that my faith was real. Being among them, I thought of Zakariya, but I quickly suppressed the memory of him.

Soon after, I was baptized in the Nile River and began preaching, which led to my arrest. I was accused of treason against my country and spent 49 days in solitary confinement. After being released, and after several further detainments, I headed south to Kenya to study theology, where a German family took me into their home. Eventually, I took their last name, Eric, for my new passport and immigrated to Germany. Today I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, helping form a nongeographic diocese to give former Muslims like me a global community to belong to—a new umma.

Like the apostle Paul and like my uncle Khaled, I had once been a persecutor of Christians. But Jesus loved me when I was his enemy. And in 2008, he showed me the extent of that love.

I was at a pastors’ conference in Cairo, delivering the opening address. Afterward, a man came up to me, walking with a limp. He had oddly pointed questions about where I was from and where I went to school.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he finally asked. I noticed his crippled hand and how his right eye didn’t move, frozen in place as if from an old injury. When he said, “I’m Zakariya,” I was speechless.

He pulled out his Bible and showed me the front page. My name was there, first on a list.

“Because you hated me so deeply,” he said, “I always prayed for you.”

Yassir Eric is a presiding bishop over the Anglican Church’s Ekkios diocese and a professor of intercultural and Islamic studies at Columbia International University’s Academy of World Mission in Germany.

Jayson Casper is the Middle East correspondent for CT.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

- More from Yassir Eric with Jayson Casper

Theology

A Different Kind of Darwinism Is Winning

Russell Moore

Columnist

In a world conditioned by evolutionary advantage, Christians are called to welcome those who seem naturally selected for failure.

Illustration by James Walton

A hundred years ago in Dayton, Tennessee, high school teacher John Scopes was put on trial for violating the state’s law against teaching evolution in public schools. The widely publicized state trial—the first to be nationally broadcast via radio in America—encapsulated the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the time.

Nobody wants a new Scopes Trial in 2025. But maybe we need one.

For anti-evolution evangelicals, Scopes’s guilty verdict was a short-term victory that led to a long-term defeat, as S. Joshua Swamidass recently detailed for CT. It snowballed into the decay of American evangelicalism’s external credibility and led to internal vulnerability toward an anti-intellectual, populist view of science.

Prohibition, another 1920s pain point, was a disastrous experiment that empowered bootleggers and mobs. Still, the instinct behind it—that substance abuse devastates families and communities—was not wrong. We don’t ridicule the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in our church basement just because Carrie Nation took an axe to a tavern or our childhood pastor argued that the wine at Cana was really grape juice. In the same way, we can recognize the right instincts of the concerns about Darwinism at the Scopes Trial without adhering to a firmly literalist interpretation of the Bible.

William Jennings Bryan, who argued for Scopes’s prosecution, believed that the teaching of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory was the cause of many of modernity’s ills. Bryan may have been made a mockery of on the “Monkey Trial” stand, but he feared that a survival-of-the-fittest mentality was slowly undergirding society. He believed that Darwinism championed a vision of humanity in which the code of the jungle replaced the Sermon on the Mount.

“The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate,” Bryan said. “Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” That’s exactly what we’re witnessing today.

For years, some Christians have argued that a woodenly literal interpretation of Genesis, joined with scientific acrobatics, would protect the church from a slippery slope into naturalistic Darwinism. Yet many who believe that some form of evolution was involved in creation and who accept the scientific consensus on the vast age of the cosmos have proven to be the most effective opponents of Darwinism’s reductionistic materialism, which strips down the universe to mere matter and human beings to mere animals.

At the same time, some of those who trumpet their resistance to theistic evolution have adapted quite readily to a number of social Darwinism’s conclusions—whether in dismissal of the constant biblical calls to care for the poor and the vulnerable, or in the most extreme sectors of the very-online “Christian” manosphere, where we find the outright embrace of Kinism, eugenics, and even a kind of Naziism.

Much of the gender debate among Christians has devolved from disputes about the meaning of Pauline texts for the church and home into grand “natural law” metanarratives, in which male and female roles determine virtually everything. This is far closer to social Darwinism than to the created order of the biblical canon. A thin veneer of biblical proof texts overlays a “caveman stronger than cavewoman” argument or “caveman wired to spread his seed, woman must not tempt him” rhetoric that is far distant from the biblical language of the created co-heirs of Adam and Eve.

Some on the left love to say that “Christianity must move beyond the supernatural or die,” while some on the right say, “Christianity must know what era we’re living in and ditch empathy.” Most of us would refute both of these perspectives, but for all of us, the pull to an invisible theistic social Darwinism is always present.

We are tempted to adopt the viewpoint that the size of our churches or movements is an indicator of their truth or merit, applying a kind of prosperity gospel to congregations or political ideologies that we rightly resist applying to individuals. As the Jurassic Park movies remind us, what we see as tamable and containable can grow up and bite. We have strained a fossilized gnat while swallowing a fossilized camel.

I am not a young-earth creationist. But here’s where I agree with them: The Bible is the final word on everything, including on God’s presence and work in creation, and we shouldn’t pile additional requirements on top of it. If people are offended by the gospel, they should be offended by what it really asserts, not by contrarian idiosyncrasies that signal tribal allegiance.

Jesus’ teachings simply don’t make sense on evolutionary terms. From the perspective of social Darwinism, loving your kin and hating your enemies seems logical—yet Jesus calls us to follow him in doing the opposite. Likewise, early Christian churches trying to influence a pagan Roman Empire would have appeared wise to make much of those with cultural or economic influence who were interested in the faith. But our Lord’s brother tells us, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5).

This inversion of worldly wisdom is not peripheral—it’s the marrow of the gospel. In a world conditioned by evolutionary advantage and our sinful nature, which desires power at the expense of pushing others down, the gospel calls us to cruciform weakness.

The gospel shows us that focusing on the “losers,” as defined by the standards of this present age, is how we model and become like Jesus (Luke 9:48), how we gain eternal treasures (14:12–14), and how we worship God in Spirit and in truth (Acts 10:4). The woman with dementia, whose hand we hold and to whom we sing hymns, is not defined by her usefulness. The prisoner on death row who cannot tithe or lead evangelistic crusades is worth our attention. The man with an ALS diagnosis should not be tempted to contemplate assisted dying because he fears being a burden to those around him.

The strangeness of a church that doesn’t invest in people who might help it, but rather chooses to serve those who never can, is the very strangeness that upended the first-century world. Nothing could have seemed more alien to the atmosphere of Caesars and heroes than a community who would rather be crucified than be crucifiers, who welcomed those who seemed naturally selected for failure.

Whatever our views on how evolution and the fossil record fit with the Book of Genesis, every Christian ought to agree that Bryan’s concern about Darwinism as an all-encompassing ethic is indeed contrary to the way of the gospel.

Science and the Bible are often put into artificial cage matches with each other. Yet the sheer strangeness and mystery of what science now shows us—from black hole cosmology to quantum mechanics—ought to convey that making the Bible “fit” current scientific narratives is myopic. We may not even have the language yet to describe the wonders God has waiting for us to discover.

In the meantime, we can bear charitably with one another on some disagreements. But when it comes to whether a person’s worth is defined by strength or power or usefulness alone, let the church say with one voice, “You cannot serve both God and Darwin.”

Russell Moore is editor in chief at CT.

Onward: A column by Russell Moore

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PART I

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PART III

PART IV

PART V

PART VI

PART VII

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