Should Christians Support Indonesia Criminalizing Cohabitation and Extramarital Sex?

CT Staff

Local leaders weigh in on the Muslim-majority nation’s new penal code and whether governments should legislate morality.

Activists protest against Indonesia's new criminal code outside the parliament building in Jakarta.

Adek Berry / Getty

Last week, Indonesia’s parliament approved a new penal code that received backlash from the United Nations and human rights groups inside and outside the Southeast Asian nation.

The new code, which replaces a colonial-era code enacted while the archipelago was under Dutch rule, includes the criminalization of cohabitation and sex outside marriage, bans insulting the president, and keeps in place blasphemy laws that have been used at times against religious minorities, including Christians. The law will go into effect after a transitional period of three years.

Home to the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia places a high value on religious harmony—known officially as Pancasila—among its 277 million citizens, and its constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, have mostly kept quiet on the new code.

CT asked five Indonesian Christians for their thoughts on the new criminal code’s article on cohabitation and extramarital sex, as well as other articles on blasphemy and criticizing the president. They explained how enforcement matters and why many Christians share the same stance on morality but disagree with the government’s attempts to legislate it.

Ihan Martoyo, director of the Center for Research and Community Development, Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) in Tangerang:

Many reports in Western media found the Indonesian new criminal law controversial, especially the point related to sex outside marriage. But only a few explained that the offense regarding extramarital sex is in fact a complaint offense (delik aduan), which does not apply unless a close family member—a spouse, a parent, or a child—reports the offense to the police. So the fear that it would apply to unmarried foreign tourists is unlikely to happen unless the tourist offends Indonesian family members by sleeping with an Indonesian.

I think the media controversy also highlights the undercurrent of cultural differences. In Western culture, which is typically more individualistic than in the East, sex is a matter of personal choice and freedom. However, Eastern culture is more communal and considers how sexual relations can cause repercussions to the community, especially to close family members. It seems there is a widely accepted consensus among Indonesian Muslims and Christians to view extramarital sex as compromising good moral values.

It is quite interesting to note that many biblical passages also articulate communal religious or virtuous values. Paul often admonishes the church to pay attention to the body of Christ (1 Cor. 11:27), perhaps something that modern Christians find difficult to comprehend.

Should the government legislate morality? For some issues like marriage, the answer seems to be quite complicated. Reformer John Calvin faced issues sharing responsibilities between the Consistory (a church court) and the City Council regarding marital disputes in Geneva. In our modern time, debates on the “acceptable kind” of marriage touch on civil law and create some of the most difficult debates among churches. This dichotomy between civil criminal codes and morality seems to be an artifact of modernity that we are still struggling to navigate. For religious Indonesians, they do not believe that the public sphere must be kept sterile from religious values.

William Wijaya (name changed for security reasons), a seminary professor in Indonesia:

As someone who holds to a traditional view on sexual ethics, I agree that extramarital sex is prohibited by the Scriptures. Nevertheless, the issue here is whether or not the government should make laws regarding this. I don’t think that just because something is prohibited in Christian ethics, Christians should support its criminalization.

I accept my own bias: I’ve been educated in the West, where privacy is important. This law is an intrusion of privacy. It’s very hard—if not impossible—to enforce laws on private matters. The law stipulates that only a parent or a child could make an accusation against someone. How could the government prove that sexual activity has happened?

I’m very glad that the law in Indonesia is not the Islamic law. I’m glad to live in a country where the majority doesn’t impose their ethics on me, a Christian. I can do things that my Muslim neighbors are prohibited [by Islamic law] from doing.

I’d like to say to my Christian sisters and brothers, in the US especially, that in a pluralistic society I don’t think we should use our Christian ethics as the basis of our law. We should find a way to move forward together, to find a common ground, and even to allow some of the things that are prohibited by our faith.

Samuel Soegiarto, head of the Institute of Spiritual Development and Christian Leadership at Petra Christian University in Surabaya:

From a Christian perspective, God designs sex to be one of the most beautiful things that can happen between a man and a woman in a marriage. So yes, extramarital sex is against God’s design. Religious leaders—Christians and Muslims—should not stop encouraging their followers to live according to God’s design. But when this divine precept is legalized—when it becomes law—we need to be cautious. As a Christian, I want more and more people to live a holy life. But if what drives them is the fear of prison, [then] something is wrong.

The blasphemy laws in the code are designed to protect the rights of religious followers. But some parts are ambiguous; for example, “expressing hatred and hostility toward other people’s religious beliefs” can be interpreted in many ways, including expressing disagreement with religious claims. In the end, the interpretation will be decided by the majority.

I think Christians should not insult the president. We have to be critical of government policies and, if necessary, protest. Regarding the law, the government should make clear the definition of insult. If not, this law has much potential to be abused to silence the opposition.

Martin Lukito Sinaga, pastor and chairperson of the Interreligious Relations Commission at the Communion of Churches in Indonesia:

Extramarital sex and cohabitation acts can be regarded as criminal only if family members report it. Some experts told me that this aligns with an existing domestic violence law in which an “act of negligence” from the parent due to his or her cohabitation can be regarded as criminal. In this case, religious morality is used to protect family members. The critical issue is its enforcement and whether it will be used to punish cohabitation or to protect the family from negligence by any members engaged in it.

The blasphemy laws are a long-standing issue. Some NGOs believe the articles on blasphemy should be replaced with a law that would combat intolerance, discrimination, and violence against a person based on religion or belief. This would require more public deliberation on the issue of defamation.

The law criminalizing insulting the president is also debated in the context of freedom of speech and freedom to criticize the government. Therefore, democracy is at stake here. This is also a complaint offense, and hopefully, the meaning of insult is clearly defined. Insult is understood as giving false information about the personal life of the president. Again, how complaints about the president are processed by the police is the key to whether this will harm democracy or not.

Christine Elisia Widjaya, a civil law notary and private law lecturer at Universitas 45 in Surabaya:

Most people agree that what is legal is not necessarily what is moral. However, laws should be based on—and in harmony with—the moral principles of society. As the representative of the Indonesian people, the government has the responsibility to pass bills. By governing morality, the government plays an important role in protecting its citizens. That doesn’t only include extramarital sex but also drug abuse, alcohol, and pornography due to the physical and mental health risks associated with those acts. As a result, society faces consequences such as public health issues, the cost of the criminal justice system, and the decline of economic productivity.

However, not every immoral act should be necessarily made illegal. What is defined as “morality” is relative, depending on the environment, religion, and philosophy. In my opinion, the government may legislate morality, but not every immoral behavior should be punishable by law. Criminalization should be used as the last resort. I believe that placing limits on these behaviors is the best policy for protecting society from morally corrupt behavior.

The blasphemy laws will affect Christians in many ways, such as to silence political opposition and justify attacks on religious minorities. In short, it will promote intolerance and discrimination, violate the fundamental rights to freedom of religion and expression, as well as prevent harmony among religious society in the multicultural country of Indonesia.

As Christians, we must follow the teaching of Jesus and submit ourselves to the governing authority (Rom. 13:1–7). The government is established by God and serves the purpose of ruling and promoting general welfare, so it is our responsibility to be good citizens by submitting to and obeying the laws.

However, the only government that we must respect and honor is a good one. If the government does evil in the sight of God, fails to lead and provide abundance, or makes unfair policies, we have the right to question them. The article in the new Indonesian penal code on insults to the president makes it very hard to exercise this right to criticize the government and limits freedom of expression.

With reporting assistance by Ivan K. Santoso and Maria Fennita

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

News

Gordon College Settles with Professor It Said Was a Minister

Daniel Silliman

State judge says the school’s legal strategy was a mistake.

John Phelan / Wikimedia

Gordon College has a reached a settlement with a social work professor who alleged discrimination when she was denied promotion. President Mike Hammond and board chair Carrie Tibbles notified faculty and staff in an email this week.

“We are pleased to finally reach a resolution of this dispute,” the email said. “This has been a protracted legal journey through the judicial system which we did not seek out but were compelled to pursue, and one which we know has been at times uncomfortable for Gordon as a strongly relational community.”

Margaret DeWeese-Boyd claimed the administration punished her for critiquing the school’s sexuality policies and arguing those policies hurt her LGBT students. She also said the school treated her more harshly than male colleagues who took similar stances.

The prominent evangelical college disputed the facts of the case but spent most of its time in court arguing DeWeese-Boyd should legally be considered a minister, and thus not protected by federal laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. Gordon’s lawyers said the “ministerial exception”—first articulated by the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—should apply to Christian college professors.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court rejected the ministerial exception argument in 2021. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in March 2022.

A few months later, as the discrimination case moved forward in state court, judge Indira Talwani told Gordon’s lawyers they had messed up by trying to make too big of a move too quickly.

“If I was sitting in your client’s position, I’d be sitting here thinking to myself, ‘Wow, maybe that was a waste of money to go up to the Supreme Court when we did,’” Talwani said. “Maybe the shortcuts aren’t going to win the race in the end.”

The terms of the settlement between Gordon and DeWeese-Boyd have not been disclosed.

—–

Original post (March 1, 2022): At some point, the US Supreme Court will have to consider whether Christian college professors are legally ministers, and who decides that, and how, Justice Samuel Alito said in a statement on Monday.

But the case of a former social work professor suing Gordon College for denying her promotion is not quite right for those arguments—at least for now.

The court turned down Gordon’s appeal to have Margaret DeWeese-Boyd’s lawsuit dismissed based on the “ministerial exception,” which says that clergy are not protected by employment law, because that would be excessive government interference into religious matters. Alito, however, released a statement saying there are still concerns about how ministers are being defined legally.

“The preliminary posture of the litigation would complicate our review,” Alito wrote. “But in an appropriate future case, this Court may be required to resolve this important question.”

The statement was joined by three other conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—signaling an interest in appeals from Gordon or other Christian colleges seeking exemption from antidiscrimination legislation.

For now, however, DeWeese-Boyd’s lawsuit against Gordon College can go forward in state court. She claims the school administration denied her promotion in 2017, against the recommendation of her department and the full faculty, because she critiqued the school’s stance on LGBT issues. Gordon argues it denied her promotion because she hadn’t done enough scholarship. The school also sought to have the case dismissed because it considers DeWeese-Boyd a minister.

Gordon revised its faculty handbook in 2016 to say that all professors are ministers. Professors have long been required to integrate faith into their teaching, showing students how Christian commitments relate to their academic disciplines.

D. Michael Lindsay, the former Gordon president who is also on CT’s board of directors, testified before a Massachusetts court that “there are no non-sacred disciplines” at Gordon. He said for faculty, joining Gordon should be like joining a religious order.

Becket vice president Eric Baxter, told CT the ministerial exception should apply to anyone whose work has a “religious function,” even if they’re not ordained and not considered a minister in any church.

“The phrase ‘ministerial exception’ is perhaps unfortunate,” he said. “The ministerial exception does not require you to be a minister. It applies to anyone doing an important religious function. I think maybe a better term would have been ‘important religious function.’”

The state supreme court, however, found that the school was collapsing the difference between Christians and Christian ministers.

“While it may be true that Gordon employs Christians, and ‘Christians have an undeniable call to minister to others,’” Justice Scott Kafker wrote, “this line of argument appears to oversimplify the Supreme Court test, suggesting that all Christians teaching at all Christian schools and colleges are necessarily ministers.”

The Massachusetts judge also worried that the college was asking for an expansion of the ministerial exception to the point of “eclipsing and elimination of civil law protection against discrimination.”

The president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, representing DeWeese-Boyd before the Supreme Court, agreed.

“The ministerial exception was meant to ensure that houses of worship could freely choose their clergy,” Rachel Laser told Courthouse News Service. “It was never intended to be a free pass for any religious employer to discriminate against its entire workforce and sidestep civil-rights laws.”

John Bursch, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which also represents Gordon, said that kind of argument seems to deny that Gordon is a Christian college, entitled to First Amendment protections.

“Gordon’s professors are key to teaching the Christian faith to students, who choose to attend Gordon because they want to integrate their faith and learning,” he said. “And the First Amendment is clear: The government has no business telling a faith-based college how to exercise its faith.”

Alito, similarly, said, “I have doubts about the state court’s understanding of religious education.”

In Massachusetts, Gordon will still be allowed to argue that DeWeese-Boyd was, in fact, legally a minister. The two sides may, however, focus more on the specific details of the denied promotion, the metrics for measuring scholarship, and Gordon’s established standards for promoting professors.

If DeWeese-Boyd wins the lawsuit, Gordon could also appeal the case to the Supreme Court again.

Meanwhile, if any other Christian schools want to make the case that Christian college professors are ministers, there are four Supreme Court justices who would like to hear about it.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Have Popular Carols Lost Their Sense of Worship?

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Even with today’s nonstop Christmas soundtrack, churches can still embrace the storytelling and nostalgia that comes with seasonal hymns.

Katie Treadway / Unsplash

“Once a year,” wrote Brennan Manning in Reflections for Ragamuffins, “the Christmas season strikes both the sacred and secular spheres of life with sledgehammer force: suddenly Jesus Christ is everywhere.”

It’s true. When I walk through the grocery store, trying to remember if I have vanilla extract in the pantry, I hear Nat King Cole crooning, “O Come All Ye Faithful” in the background. My daughter comes home from preschool singing, “Joy to the World” (they have been practicing for next week’s school Christmas performance). On Sunday mornings, the hymns include “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.”

Christmas music is the soundtrack to my life in December. Yet those of us who try our best to center the Incarnation throughout the season experience both joy and exasperation as we hear rich carols shuffled together with “Santa Baby” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

We worry that the saturation of Christmas music in everyday December life has watered down the meaning and worshipfulness of spiritual carols. It’s hard not to wonder: Has the singing of Christmas carols become an exercise in sentimentality and nostalgia? Do they still have a place in congregational worship?

During the first week of December this year, the most popular songs used in US churches, according to Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), were all Christmas carols. The top five were “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Joy to the World,” “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and “Joy to the World (Unspeakable Joy)”—Chris Tomlin’s 2009 arrangement.

Most churches continue to embrace the carols we know and love, yet some leaders are ambivalent, worried that too-familiar tunes are distracting from worship instead of adding to it.

A few years ago, I visited my parents’ church in early December. The foyer and auditorium stage were decorated with poinsettias; Christmas trees with shimmering ornaments and white lights; and trendy wreaths with matte, dusty-green leaves.

Before the service, my mom mentioned that the church wouldn’t include many Christmas carols for December services. Leaders had decided that Sunday services ought to remain focused on worship-as-usual rather than becoming carol sing-alongs.

Bob Kauflin, director of Sovereign Grace Music and author of True Worshipers: Seeking What Matters to God, addressed a similar concern earlier this month. In an article titled “Reclaiming Christmas Carols for our Worship,” Kauflin wrote, “There’s a difference between songs that focus on the arrival of a season and ones that focus on the arrival of a Savior.”

The church, Kauflin argues, can “fight against becoming numb to the stunning truths of Christmas carols” by paying attention to the lyrics, which may spill from our mouths on autopilot but actually tell the story of one of the most profound parts of the gospel.

Carols like “Away in a Manger” are easy targets for carol critics who believe they may not be theologically rich enough to begin with. Lyrics like “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes” are sweet but liberally poetic (surely the fully human baby Jesus cried, as any parent will attest).

But even this Christmas lullaby moves me to tears when I snap out of the holiday music trance and consider the utter vulnerability, nakedness, dependence, and intimacy of the Word made flesh, poured into the form of a newborn. Perhaps we discount the value of the storytelling and imagination that carols can bring to worship.

The most popular worship songs of the past year, hits like “The Goodness of God” and “Build My Life,” for example, are self-reflective and self-referential. They invite the worshiper to sing, “All my life you have been faithful” and “I will build my life upon your love.” They are explicitly personal and set in the here and now of the singer’s life.

Some carols similarly invite singers to reflect on the meaning of Christmas individually, and some don’t. The first three verses of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” imagine the night and setting of the Nativity; the fourth brings the singer and historical moment together:

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray,

cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;

O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Immanuel!

“Silent Night,” a staple of most Christmas Eve services, doesn’t have a directly personal turn. The closing stanza is simply an imagined encounter with the Christ child:

Silent night, holy night!

Son of God, love’s pure light

radiant beams from thy holy face

with the dawn of redeeming grace,

Jesus, Lord, at thy birth,

Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.

The Incarnation is mysterious, but it is grounded in a physical event, time, and place. Singing the account of the Incarnation—even the imagined details—is an exercise in worship that centers that story, assuming that the worshiper knows the implications without needing to sing “I” or “me.”

One objection to the overuse of Christmas carols in worship is not that their lyrics lack depth or meaning; it is that their appeal is primarily nostalgic. Perhaps, even if the texts themselves are valuable, they resonate with congregations primarily because of their association with the Christmas season, reaching back into memories of our childhoods.

“Let us consider why people are in a rush to sing Christmas carols anyway,” wrote theologian Marva Dawn in A Royal Waste of Time. “Unfortunately, it is often merely for sentimental reasons or because they are not as morally convicting as are the texts of Advent. To rush the season is to cater to our penchant for instant gratification.”

Ouch. I have to admit, I bristle a little at the suggestion that my love of congregational carol-singing is tied to empty sentimentality or a preference for therapeutic spirituality. Personally, I would welcome the introduction of Christmas carols to Sunday worship throughout December.

I wonder, though: Is nostalgia the best description of our emotional relationship with carols? And whatever that emotional relationship is, nostalgia or not, is it necessarily at odds with worship?

Nostalgia has a bad reputation as an out-of-touch longing for bygone days when things were easier, better, more comfortable, more familiar. And when we say something has “sentimental value,” we imply that its only usefulness is in its ability to appeal to emotional attachment. It is only a cheap approximation of beauty. But nostalgia can also be a natural, healthy return to a meaningful memory.

“Like an article of clothing or an aroma,” wrote sociologist and music scholar Tia DeNora in Music in Everyday Life, “music is part of the material and aesthetic environment in which it was once playing, in which the past, now an artefact of memory and its constitution, was once a present.”

DeNora refers to music’s ability to act as a “container” for past experience, one that is a source of meaning in the present. But the experience of feeling an emotional tie to the past through music isn’t inherently escapist. On the contrary, it can add meaning to the present. That God-given emotional response can enhance musical worship.

Is it possible that someone singing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve can mentally escape to a past memory or bask in self-centered emotion? Of course. Is it also possible for me to do the same thing when I sing, “This Is My Father’s World” on any other Sunday? Yes. The tune of that hymn stirs my heart without fail.

There is danger in allowing insidious sentimentality to invade musical worship. In A Peculiar Orthodoxy, theologian Jeremy Begbie warns of sentimentality that “evades or trivializes evil,” is “emotionally self-indulgent,” and “avoids costly action.” When the music of our congregational worship becomes a means by which we cheapen, trivialize, or over-individualize the present, there is a need for reorientation.

Perhaps you are feeling a need to “reclaim” carols in worship, that they have been detrimentally commandeered by sentimentality and consumer culture, that they have been stripped of their meaning and significance.

Bob Kauflin suggests that, while our feelings about Christmas music may be complicated, love for our neighbors can help us navigate the season: “Our eagerness to join in with gusto as our neighbors belt out ‘Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh’ shows we want to rub shoulders with them, share their joys and sorrows.”

The words and music of Christmas carols, whether sung by a congregation or by Pentatonix over the radio, proclaim the arrival of Christ. The warm, joyful feelings you have while singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” are a response to a wondrous truth and an emotional response to the music and everything that surrounds it.

“Remotely or proximately,” wrote Brennan Manning, “He is toasted in every cup of Christmas cheer. Each sprig of holly is a hint of his holiness, each cluster of mistletoe a sign he is here.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Church Life

World Cup Showcases Christian Athletes and Actions in Qatar

J. Y. Lee

Remembering the heroics and good works of athletes, coaches, and fans.

Associated Press

While millions of Christians worshiped this third Advent Sunday, millions were also glued to a screen, anxiously watching as the Argentinian GOAT at long last lifted the World Cup trophy. Though past his prime, the 35-year-old team captain Lionel Messi was sublime in the competition, with seven goals and four assists under his belt and won the Golden Ball in his fifth World Cup.

Although the reserved Messi, whose right arm bears a tattoo of Jesus crowned with thorns, has not expressed his faith openly beyond pointing to heaven after his goals, this World Cup has featured numerous heroics of confessing Christians.

Leading the freewheeling French attack against Argentina was 36-year-old striker Olivier Giroud, who has Psalm 23’s “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want” tattooed in Latin on his right arm. During this World Cup, Giroud became the all-time top scorer for France with four magnificent goals.

https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/1599429835532783616

While the team’s talisman Kylian Mbappé has lived up to the hype with his blistering speed and lethal shooting, Giroud has provided a reliable focal point on offense and his selfless play has created openings for his teammates. “I try to speak about my faith whenever I can,” he said after winning the World Cup in 2018. “I feel I have to use my media profile to talk about my commitment to Jesus Christ.”

During most of the past decade when Giroud played for two clubs in London, he attended St. Barnabas Church in Kensington, which belongs to the evangelical wing of the Church of England. During France’s quarterfinal against England, when he netted a header to secure a 2–1 win for Les Bleus, he faced an upcoming generation of English wingers who are living out their Christian faith with grace.

With three goals each, Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka were stellar in Qatar. Both were nurtured in Black Pentecostal churches, and 25-year-old Rashford has already made a name for himself as an activist and philanthropist against racism and homelessness. At 21 years old, Saka has graced the cover of Time after winning England’s mens player of the year, and he shared that he reads the Bible every night to gain “peace and happiness.” Although Rashford and Saka received racist abuse online after missing the penalties in the final of Euro 2020, both have been praised for their resilience and for fostering wholesome camaraderie in the English squad.

England faced the US men’s national team (USMNT) in the group stage, and the stalwart American defense led by pastor’s kid Walker Zimmerman gave the underdogs a respectable 0–0 draw against formidable England. A Georgia native who brings his one-year-old son to practice, Zimmerman has been a towering leader at the back and an advocate for gun control and racial and gender equality, especially for equal pay at the US women’s national team.

Zimmerman has a fellow believer in Christian “Captain America” Pulisic, who scored the winning goal against Iran to send the USMNT to the knockout stage while suffering an abdominal injury after crashing into the opposing goalie. Pulisic told GQ last year that his $73 million move to Chelsea F.C. brought him closer to God despite steep competition for his playmaking position and injuries he suffered there. Two months prior to the World Cup, he posted Psalm 147:11 as an Instagram caption. The verse reads, “The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.”

At the other end of the field, Brazil’s No. 1 keeper Alisson Becker has made some spectacular saves to record two clean sheets and concede just two goals in four games. Although an unfortunately deflected Croatian strike in the 117th minute knocked out the favorites in the quarterfinals, Alisson will be returning to Liverpool F.C. where he is surrounded by faithful brothers in Christ. His charismatic coach Jürgen Klopp is a vocal Christian, and Alisson baptized his teammate Robert Firmino at a pool in his house. Their teammate Virgil van Dijk has even dubbed Alisson, who is a member at a Hillsong church in Liverpool, a “holy goalie.”

Despite the disappointment of a quarterfinal exit, outgoing Brazilian coach Tite gave his team plenty to cheer for. A devout Catholic, Tite gave all 26 players on his roster playing time in Qatar and danced with his players to celebrate the cascade of goals during Brazil’s 4–1 trouncing of South Korea. During the 2018 World Cup, he attended mass in Russia and was seen with a rosary during training in Qatar.

https://twitter.com/septimusajprime/status/1599848926206578689

Perhaps the most devout team has been Ecuador. A day before the tournament began, midfielder Carlos Gruezo shared a video of him and his teammates praying. “Today begins a new story and who guides our steps is God,” he wrote in the caption. “Without you we can’t do anything. We give you all the glory and honor.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClLWSLJvyvb/

After Guerzo’s teammate Enner Valencia converted a penalty in Ecuador’s opening match of the World Cup against host Qatar, he and his teammates gathered in a circle on their knees, raising their hands to praise God.

As many hoped to derail the dominance of European teams in recent World Cups, Moroccan coach Walid Regragui made headlines for leading the first Arab or African nation to a semifinal. Though his faith is unknown, he certainly embodied the biblical imperative to honor one’s father and mother by inviting the families of his players to join them for free in Qatar. One of the most moving images during the World Cup was Moroccan right back Achraf Hakimi running over to his mother in the stands to give her a kiss after Morocco’s historic victory over Belgium. “Our success is not possible without our parents’ happiness,” said Regrarui.

While Moroccan fans joined the ranks of Argentinian and Brazilian fans as some of the world’s most fervent during this World Cup, the most beloved were Japanese fans. Their cleaning of stadiums with blue trash bags following their country’s upset wins over heavyweights Germany and Spain went viral and inspired similar acts of tidiness. The Samurai Blues also left their locker rooms spotless after each game, which earned the respect of FIFA.

Qatar’s World Cup would not have been possible without the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from South Asian countries who built the stadium, often at a significant cost to themselves. More than 2,000 Nepali workers have died in Qatar since 2010 while building extravagant stadiums in torrid heat and atrocious conditions. Others will suffer chronic pain for the rest of their lives while their families remain mired in debt and poverty.

“Their [the migrant workers’] deaths were accepted and not investigated, their families are not adequately compensated,” wrote 2014 World Cup winner and former Germany captain Philipp Lahm, a Christian, on why he boycotted visiting Qatar.

Among the last words of American soccer journalist Grant Wahl, who passed away during the World Cup, was a scathing rebuke of apathy to the suffering of others.

“They just don’t care,” he wrote, referencing the death of another migrant worker at one of the team’s training resorts that occurred during the tournament.

As we return to worship after cheering for Messi’s victory this Sunday, perhaps we could pause to ponder whether Wahl’s indictment applies to us.

J. Y. Lee is a PhD student at Princeton Seminary and a freelance writer who reported from Brazil during the 2014 World Cup.

- More from J. Y. Lee

Videos

Welcoming the Promised One

From Advent meditation to Christmas celebration. In this special webinar, writers from CT’s “The Promised One” devotional share the stories behind their devotions and reflect on scriptural themes of the season.

Advent—which means “arrival”—is a season of anticipation and it has been throughout church history. In our contemporary context, we immediately think of preparing our hearts for Jesus’ first Advent—his birth which we celebrate at Christmas. But in church history, this season has also been focused on preparing for Jesus’ second advent: his promised return and reign which we anticipate with great hope and joy. That is why, in many churches around the globe, traditional Scripture readings for Advent focus just as much on his return as on preparation for his birth.

In CT’s 2022 Advent devotional, The Promised One, a diverse lineup of Christian thought leaders delves into the multilayered promises and prophesies about Jesus that speak truth about his first coming—his birth in Bethlehem—and also about his Second Coming that we await. These promises drawn from Isaiah speak powerfully about who Jesus is, painting an expansive picture of Jesus’ identity and purpose.

CT recently convened four of The Promised One’s writers for a live event inspired by the devotional. The panelists, including pastors Glenn Packiam and Adriel Sanchez, bestselling author Dorena Williamson, and New Testament scholar Madison N. Pierce, expounded on what they wrote, discussed key scriptural and spiritual themes of Advent, and shared personal experiences and ideas for marking this season leading up to Christmas.

A video recording of the webinar can be found above. Hosted by CT’s print managing editor, Kelli B. Trujillo, this virtual discussion invites viewers to ponder both the joy and mystery of the Advent season. Why is waiting such a key part of spiritual formation? How do we prepare our hearts for Jesus’ promised arrival? What does “God with us” mean for the church today?

“Throughout church history, Advent has been a season of anticipation,” writes Trujillo in her introduction to The Promised One. “This Advent, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, may we deeply contemplate Scripture’s promises of who he is and what he came to do.”

The Panelists

Glenn Packiam

Glenn Packiam is the Lead Pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California. Glenn is the author of several books, including The Resilient Pastor, Blessed Broken Given, and the forthcoming book he co-authored with his wife, Holly, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose.

Madison N. Pierce

Madison N. Pierce is an associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. She joined the Western faculty in 2022. Her research areas include the book of Hebrews, the use of Scripture in Scripture, and the Catholic Epistles. Her books include Divine Discourse in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Dorena Williamson

Dorena Williamson is a Nashville-based church planter, speaker, and bestselling author who is passionate about showing children—and adults—that differences can be curiously explored and joyfully celebrated. Using a graceful approach, her books tackle tough subjects with faith-filled storytelling that enrich young hearts and minds. Her children’s books include The Celebration Place and Brown Baby Jesus.

Kelli B. Trujillo

Kelli B. Trujillo is the print managing editor of Christianity Today and served as editor of CT’s Advent devotional for many years. She is a lay leader in a small Anglican mission in Indianapolis and the author of several books focused on spiritual formation, including The Busy Mom’s Guide to Spiritual Survival and Rediscovering Lent.

Adriel Sanchez

Adriel Sanchez is the pastor of North Park Presbyterian Church (PCA). In addition to his pastoral responsibilities, he serves the broader church as a host on the Core Christianity radio program. He and his wife, Ysabel, live in San Diego with their five children.

Theology

For Your Next Nativity Scene, Add a Dragon and a Baptismal Font

Julie Canlis

In the story of the Incarnation, symbols of death and danger remind us of God’s renewal.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Images: Julie / Lightstock / RawPixel / WIkimedia Commons

The next time someone wants a good Advent book, Fleming Rutledge recommends Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which deals with the total breakdown of society. There is no hope in sight, only cruelty. Like voices crying in the wilderness, a father and son travel through the ravaged wasteland of what used to be the United States, stewarding the one thing they have left: tender love for one another.

“Advent,” Rutledge notes, “is not for sissies.”

What can apocalyptic bloodbaths teach us about Christmas? How can they prepare the way for Christ’s coming?

Stories like The Road invite us into the stark realism of what Mary and Joseph faced under the cruel inflexibility of Roman rule and the hopelessness that all of humanity has faced to varying degrees over time. Their literary genre confronts us with death, judgment, apocalypse, and hell—just as Scripture does.

Exhibit A: The Book of Revelation, known in the King James era as the Apocalypse. Some scholars place John’s writing of the book as prior to the Gospels. That would mean his “nativity” would have been the first one told.

His Spirit-inspired perspective on the birth of Jesus might surprise us: “The dragon stood in front of the woman,” he writes, “who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born” (Rev. 12:4).

The dragon of Revelation has indeed invaded our nice, tame Nativity scenes. Perhaps we need The Road, or McCarthy’s other masterpiece, Blood Meridian, to shake us out of our stupor and remind us that we too have been faced with a spiritual desolation of apocalyptic proportions. Or perhaps we need the literal voice of one calling in the wilderness.

John the Baptist still stands at the crossroads and calls to us to “prepare ye the way of the Lord.” Every December, baptism is part of our entrance into Advent expectation and hope. It’s how we step into the church calendar. It immerses us in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. And it plunges us into the Jesus-reality now, which has been flung open to us.

In the early church, people were baptized in a church-adjacent building called a baptistery, shaped like a Roman funeral building. With a twinkle in their eye, early Christians built these baptismal houses to remind their converts: You are coming here to die! You have already died. Sin has killed you! You are just enacting your death that has already happened. And in this place where you are joined to Christ’s death, you will rise.

Some fonts were shaped like crosses, where the new believer descended into the cruciform shape and came out reborn. Others were shaped like wombs, echoing Cyril of Jerusalem’s comment that in baptism, “you died and were reborn, and that saving water became both grave and mother for you.”

John the Baptist stands at the gateway to Advent because baptism is our way into life in Christ, and the church calendar invites us into that drama. Because of who Jesus is, the historical events of his life are also part of eternity—our present and our future. We don’t just watch Jesus fast; his fasting makes it possible for our fasts to have meaning. We don’t just celebrate Jesus being born; his birth makes it possible for our human nature to receive God. We don’t just watch Jesus obey; we now can obey.

We think the church calendar is about simply having an alternative sense of time, and in some ways it is. But it’s more about becoming. It’s anthropology, not chronology. It’s the lived drama of being in Christ.

Just as our entry into Christ’s life is through our symbolic death in baptism, so Advent and Lent continue to draw us toward the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection. Early church icons of Jesus’ birth are riddled with images of death—a baby located in a tomb-like cave, wrapped in white linen—all to remind us of that later cave and shroud that brought the entire world back to life.

In his poem “Nativity,” the poet Scott Cairns calls the nativity scene “the core / where all the journeys meet / appalling crux and hallowed cave and womb.”

Advent isn’t just a private spiritual practice meant to get us ready to celebrate Christmas, nor is it a solo journey that we undertake by ourselves. It puts us in touch with the apocalyptic suffering that’s happening right now, as well as the immediate, frantic need for relief. We participate in it together with the global body of Christ.

Terry Waite, a hostage negotiator who himself was taken hostage for five years, speaks to the power of a global community intimately anchored in Christ. Chained for 23.5 hours a day to a basement wall in Lebanon in utter darkness, he anchored himself to the rhythms of the world church.

“I fell back on the language of the Prayer Book,” he says. “I saved a little bread and water in my beaker and I said to myself the communion service. … In my imagination, I was taking part in this act with congregations across the world, in parts of England or America. I joined with them.”

The small bit of bread and water given to him daily became his connection to a community gathering around the broken body of their Lord. Annually, as his basement cell made its slow journey around the sun again, the worldwide church was also making its slow journey in the footsteps of their Lord, from Advent to Easter.

These ways of staying connected to his Lord and his Lord’s body gave Waite a sense of solidarity that moved him beyond his confinement. His solo experience of these ancient church practices moved him into community and profound connection.

For the early Christians, too, caught in an apocalyptic landscape of their own, Christ’s birth pointed forward to death—both his and their own. They knew that following him might require suffering and, if not physical death, the inner agonies and ecstasies of death to self. But in this journey, they were never alone.

If indeed the Book of Revelation predates the Gospels, as some believe, then the very first Christmas story tells of a helpless woman fleeing a dragon. And if indeed Advent does “begin in the dark,” as Fleming Rutledge reminds us, we are all together awaiting the light that can only come from outside of us. We need to listen for the voice of one crying out in our personal apocalypses, reminding us of our baptisms and the way through our damaged landscapes.

Julie Canlis is the author of A Theology of the Ordinary (2017) and Calvin’s Ladder (2012), winner of a Templeton Prize and a Christianity Today Award of Merit.

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News

Wire Story

Urbana 22 Attendance Expected to Drop to the Lowest in Decades

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

InterVarsity leadership says the upcoming missions conference will draw around 6,000 people, a fraction of pre-pandemic crowds.

Urbana 18

Courtesy of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / RNS

For the first time since 2018, thousands of college students will gather a few days after Christmas to talk about God’s mission to the world and their place in it.

Organizers of Urbana 2022, a missions conference run by the evangelical campus ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, expect about 6,000 at the conference, to be held December 28-31 in Indianapolis.

That’s about 3,000 fewer students than organizers had first hoped for, said Greg Jao, chief communications officer for InterVarsity, and about 4,000 fewer than attended the Urbana 2018.

Founded in 1946, the Urbana conference has long been a highlight of evangelical ministry to college students. From 1948 to 2003, the conference was held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1970, Urbana drew about 12,000 students, and by the 1980s and 1990s, it was drawing more than 18,000. Urbana 2000, the largest conference to date, drew more than 20,000. (CT reported that the event drew around 10,000 attendees in 2018 and 16,000 in 2015.)

Past conferences have included evangelical legends such as Billy Graham, Elisabeth Elliot, Francis Schaeffer, Rick Warren, and John Stott as speakers.

Jao said that lingering concerns over COVID-19 and the country’s economic woes are helping to drive projected attendance down for the conference, usually held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pandemic. Like many churches, he said, InterVarsity and other campus ministries are still rebuilding their attendance.

With the first normal school year since the pandemic started in 2020, many students are taking their accustomed Christmas break at home for Christmas. Others are still wary of large gatherings, especially one that lasts several days.

“COVID has had an effect,” said Jao, “in the sense that people aren’t sure if they want to gather with large groups of strangers. Some also just think, ‘I want to be home for Christmas.’”

Inflated travel costs likely play a role as well. Jao said he’s heard from students who were planning to come but balked when they saw airline tickets running twice as high as in 2018.

Jao said InterVarsity leaders have known for months that attendance would likely be down. They’ve been focusing on getting students to come to local conferences or back involved in regular activities at InterVarsity’s 700 chapters across the country

Getting students to sign up for the conference has been a challenge as well. Generation Z students, he said, like to keep their options open and appear less willing to sign up in advance. So past recruitment strategies for the conference, such as offering “early bird” discounts, haven’t worked as well as they have in the past, said Jao.

Urbana has long been known for its focus on addressing the changing role of missionaries in the world, and in addressing social issues in the US. The 1970 conference included addresses from African theologian Byang Kato and Indian evangelist Samuel Kamaleson as well as a speech from Tom Skinner about the connection between social issues and the Christian faith.

“There is no possible way you can talk about preaching the gospel if you do not want to deal with the issues that bind people,” Skinner told students in 1970. “If your gospel is an ‘either-or’ gospel, I must reject it.”

The 2015 Urbana conference caused some controversy after speakers expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jao said that the 2022 conference will feature speakers and music from the church outside the United States, designed to help students experience worshipping a “global God.”

“The goal is not to have a Westerner up there saying, ‘Go,’” he said. “It’s actually to have the global church say, ‘We welcome you. Come.’”

He suspects that the decline in 2022 is more of a blip than a long-term trend. And he said that missions remain a core focus of InterVarsity, which serves more than 45,000 students in its chapters. About half the students involved in InterVarsity are students of color.

“We believe God’s bringing a group of core college students who need to hear his invitation,” he said. “Inviting people to God’s global mission has been part of our history from the very beginning, and we’re going to keep doing it.”

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

Christmas Grafts Us into God’s Nontraditional Family

Hannah Miller King

After losing my father as a child, I learned to see the Incarnation as my true lineage.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

As a kid, I loved combing through the Christmas cards my family received each year. In the days before social media, those annual pictures in the mailbox helped me feel connected to long-distance friends and family.

After my father died, however, Christmas cards served as a reminder of what I’d lost. Photos of smiling, intact families and their cheerful greetings were like salt in a wound. Holidays are always hard for the bereaved. But for me, they added a layer of shame to the grief I carried year-round. As a hurting child, I intuited: My siblings and I were no longer Christmas card material, because our family was no longer whole. For that reason, we never sent another holiday greeting after my father’s death.

Our cultural fixation with the nuclear family takes on a religious tone around Christmas. We conflate Mary, Joseph, and Jesus nestled in the crèche with our own sentimental notions of family togetherness. We invite families up to light the Advent candles in church. We gather around extended family tables to celebrate. In all the hype, it’s easy to assume that “peace on earth” comes exclusively in the form of a whole and healthy family in front of a Christmas tree.

To be clear, family is a gift from God worth celebrating and supporting. God created the family in part to teach us how to love and be loved. The world needs to see families doing the hard and holy work of togetherness. But as New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley writes, “Our image of family at Christmas—well-decorated, wealthy, happy, and intact—actually sits uneasily beside the gospel of the first [Christmas].”

Jesus’ own family was not exactly Christmas card material. His first “Christmas” (his birth) was not spent in a cozy home with a traditional family but in an outhouse for animals with an unwed mother and an adoptive father. His childhood was marked by the social shame of his mother’s pregnancy (Matt. 1:18–19), the terror of his family’s displacement in Egypt (Matt. 2:13–15), and the realities of poverty (Luke 2:24).

Moreover, Jesus didn’t grow up to have a traditional family himself. He remained single and celibate until his death.

As someone who lost my dad when I was young, I’ve found great comfort in the fact that Jesus’ family story is so complex. From the moment of his conception, Emmanuel demonstrates that he is God with all of us—including the disenfranchised, the poor, the unwed, and the bereaved. The magic of Christmas, of Christ’s nearness, is that it belongs precisely to those who seem excluded from it. Jesus’ own family is proof of this truth.

But Jesus and his parents—named in church history as the holy family—also model for us a new, broader framework that Jesus himself inaugurated. When questioned about his familial loyalties, Jesus taught, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:50). Jesus’ human parents were the first characters in the gospels to demonstrate this obedience.

Mary’s famous “yes” to Gabriel’s message is what made her Jesus’ mother. She consented to God’s will and welcomed him in the most personal, costly, and embodied way. This makes Mary a unique person in salvation history as well as an example for all Christians.

Similarly, Joseph obeyed the angelic command to take Mary as his wife and welcome her son as his heir (Matt. 1:18–25). Joseph’s profound humility and servanthood illustrate God’s countercultural kingdom and remain a prophetic witness for us today.

In their collaborative obedience to God, Mary and Joseph lived together the way that Adam and Eve were intended to. Their partnership represents the beginning of redeemed humanity—the family of God. In other words, the main characters in the Christmas story don’t just give us a model for the nuclear family. They give us a model for the church.

In my own childhood, during and after my father’s death from cancer, the church became to me a holy family—a community that fathered and mothered me in obedience to God. They surrounded and supported my mom as she learned how to raise six children as a widow. Christians fed, clothed, and—for a season—housed my siblings and me. In particular, a handful of men faithfully discipled us as spiritual fathers. Their sustained presence was life-changing for me.

These years later, the influence of those men makes me think of Joseph, a man whose fatherhood was not limited by biology. As Pope Francis writes of Joseph’s ministry, “Fathers are not born, but made. … Whenever a man accepts responsibility for the life of another, in some way he becomes a father to that person.”

Jesus did not come to abolish the family. But he did come to expand it. He came so that we could share in his sonship and sit at his family table. He came to turn strangers into siblings and childless men and women into spiritual fathers and mothers. This doesn’t erase the ache of familial estrangement, bereavement, or unwanted singleness. But it does reframe that ache. And it should reframe the way all Christian households understand the ministry of their common life.

In his book Habits of the Household, Justin Whitmel Earley challenges nuclear families to embrace hospitality as a form of mission.

“We don’t care for our household because our responsibility is to our bloodline and no one else—that is a cloaked form of tribalism,” he writes. “Rather, we care for the family because it is through the household that God’s blessing to us is extended to others.”

As Christmas approaches, we can reflect on the small, nontraditional household that extended God’s blessing to the world through the birth of Christ. And we can marvel at how that household expands to encompass each of us.

I marvel at that truth every time I look at an icon of the holy family that sits on my desk. It was given to me by a friend when I was pregnant, and it usually inspires me to pray for my own ministry as a mother to three children. But occasionally, I think of it as a family portrait in which I’m somehow mysteriously present, as well.

To be clear, Jesus’ human family was and is distinct. But his spiritual family includes those who are born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13, ESV). This family is made from every tribe and language and nation, and its destiny is eternal fellowship with the Father (Rev. 7:9–10).

One particularly difficult Christmas a few years ago, when I was grieving the sudden loss of my brother, I discovered another image that features the holy family. In a drawing called “Mary and Eve,” Eve is naked, sorrowful, and entangled by the serpent at her feet. Mary is pregnant, dressed in white, and stepping on the head of the same serpent.

That image has become a personal sort of Christmas card. It reminds me not to look for ultimate fulfillment in any iteration of the nuclear family but to entrust myself and my loved ones to the Son who makes us all sons and daughters.

In the face of profound loss and enduring loneliness, this unbreakable family lineage sustains us. It teaches us how to live together as a community of brothers and sisters until the Lord comes. And it embeds our grief in a larger hope of the reunion—and resurrection—that awaits.

Hannah King is a priest and writer in the Anglican Church of North America. She serves as an associate pastor at Village Church in Greenville, South Carolina.

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Culture

Unitarians and Episcopalians Created American Christmas

Daniel K. Williams

Contributor

But evangelicals have rightly made it more gospel centered.

The New York Public Library / CCO / Raw Pixel

Conservative evangelical Christians have sometimes been eager advocates of the modern campaign to “keep Christ in Christmas” and preserve the traditional religious meaning of the holiday.

There’s one major problem with this campaign: The original religious message behind the American Christmas was not evangelical at all.

Instead, it was the creation of Unitarians, Episcopalians, and other liberal Protestants who had little interest in several key tenets of the evangelical understanding of the gospel.

Those of us who are evangelical in our faith can still have a merry Christmas. But if we want to do so in a way that foregrounds the gospel, we may have to discover a new approach to the holiday that does more than simply preserve the old.

Here’s the story.

Among the 17th- and 18th-century American colonists, the Christians who most closely resembled modern evangelicals uniformly refused to celebrate Christmas. The New England Puritans were strong opponents of Christmas, not only because of its connections with Roman Catholicism but also because, in 17th-century England, it had become a day known more for excessive drinking and gaming than for any religious observance.

Even at the beginning of the 19th century, long after the Puritan religious fervor had largely dissipated in New England, Congregationalists in the region continued the Puritan practice of not observing Christmas in their homes or their churches. Massachusetts, which in the Puritan era punished those who dared to celebrate Christmas, did not recognize it as a state holiday until 1855.

Though perhaps slightly less hostile to Christmas than the Puritans, the major American evangelical denominations of the late 18th and early 19th century likewise showed no interest in the holiday. Baptist, Methodist, and especially Presbyterian churches of the early 19th century shunned the idea of Christmas services.

It was therefore left to the Episcopalians to celebrate Christmas—which they proudly did. In the South, they celebrated the same way they did most holidays: by drinking copious amounts of alcohol and shooting guns. And in the Northeast, they did so by going to church.

As Penne Restad describes in Christmas in America: A History, early 19th-century New England Congregationalist children whose parents ignored Christmas marveled when the Episcopalians in their towns wrapped their church buildings in garlands of greenery and gathered to sing on Christmas morning. Some of them expressed a longing for a little of this Christmas cheer. The yearning became more acute when German Lutheran immigrants brought new Christmas traditions to America—especially the Christmas tree and Santa Claus.

At that moment, anti-Calvinists in the Northeast decided the time was right to bring some Christmas jollity into their communities while avoiding the excessive drinking and loud revelry of holiday celebration elsewhere. It was time, in other words, to invent a new, family-friendly, explicitly religious tradition—but in ways that Calvinists and other evangelicals wouldn’t have necessarily found reassuring.

Nearly all the promoters of Christmas in the early 19th century were Episcopalians or Unitarians who saw in the holiday an antidote to the allegedly dour Congregationalism they identified with Puritan Calvinism. The blessings of Christmas, they thought, must be universal, just as they believed God’s offer of salvation was. And Christmas must be a time of joy, not a moment to reflect on the sinful condition of humanity.

Some American promoters of Christmas were influenced by the popular British author Charles Dickens, whose story A Christmas Carol portrayed the holiday as a time when the cantankerous, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge discovered the joy of generosity.

Dickens, who was raised a nominal Anglican but joined a Unitarian chapel as an adult, believed in the humanitarian teachings of Jesus. He used his fiction to promote the idea of Christmas as a day for all people to follow their better impulses, become a little less selfish, and adopt a charitable disposition toward all.

Unitarians, some of the most anti-Calvinist of the early 19th-century Protestants, were optimists about the possibility of moral reform through human effort. They envisioned Christmas as a day that would unite Christians across the theological spectrum and encourage loving attitudes that would improve society.

In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Scrooge experiences what amounts to a Unitarian Christmas conversion: He becomes a better man. If Jesus is necessary for such a conversion, he’s needed only as an inspiring moral example of human possibility, not as an atoning savior.

Unitarians, after all, didn’t accept the idea of substitutionary atonement, and they likewise rejected the idea of Jesus’ divinity and all aspects of Trinitarian theology. Yet many became passionate advocates of Christmas in the mid-19th century because they saw in the holiday a story of God’s love for the world and the optimistic hope of universal human brotherhood.

The best-known 19th-century Christmas hymns penned by Unitarians have become beloved classics because they appeal to our longing for a world of love, beauty, peace, and justice.

“O Holy Night,” translated from the French into English by the liberal Massachusetts Unitarian and antislavery advocate John Sullivan Dwight in 1855, honors Jesus as a great teacher of social ethics and emancipation—a popular theme among New England abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Likewise, another 19th-century New England Unitarian Christmas hymn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” expresses optimism in the midst of the Civil War that God’s peace and righteousness will eventually prevail.

Christmas hymns penned by 19th-century Episcopalians gave much greater recognition to Jesus’ divinity and saving power than Unitarian carols did. But rather than highlight Jesus’s saving work on the cross (as evangelicals wanted), they presented a more peaceful, quiet image of the sleeping Jesus who could be encountered through tranquil contemplation.

This was the message of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” written by Boston Episcopal rector Phillips Brooks in 1868, and “Silent Night,” which was translated into English by a New York Episcopal minister in 1859.

By contrast, early 19th-century evangelical Protestant hymnals had focused far more attention on the atoning death of Jesus than on his birth. And the few hymns that did touch on his birth—such as Charles Wesley’s “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”—gave extensive treatment to Christ’s saving mission, his kingship, and the “second birth” that he would bring to humanity.

Yet in the late 19th century, many evangelicals who had not celebrated Christmas in their churches began singing the Episcopal Christmas hymns as eagerly as anyone else. By 1870, when Christmas officially became a federal holiday in the United States, Protestant churches across the theological spectrum observed the day with at least a Christmas sermon—if not an entire Christmas service.

Without realizing it, then, many evangelicals absorbed much of the theology of the 19th-century Unitarians and Episcopalians because it pervaded most of the traditional hymns and Christmas readings they had come to adore.

Yet over the course of the 20th century, the “Christmas spirit” became increasingly separated from the historical Jesus in American public life.

In the mid-19th century, even the Unitarians affirmed the teachings of the historical Jesus and believed they would lead to a happier, more emancipated society. But by the mid-20th century, some public figures who welcomed the chance to talk about the “Christmas spirit” shied away from any specific invocation of Jesus.

In numerous Christmas messages, for example, US presidents echoed the phrase “peace on earth and good will to men.” But it was often separated completely from any mention of Jesus Christ.

Today, even the oldest Americans can’t remember a time when public expressions of “Merry Christmas” were grounded in anything more substantive than an ahistorical, vaguely Unitarian wish for a universal “Christmas spirit” of peace and goodwill.

Evangelicals who believe in the gospel of the Incarnation cannot therefore find much comfort in public campaigns to replace “Happy Holidays” with “Merry Christmas” or set up creches in the town square. What we need is not a return to the 1950s or even the Victorian era but rather a recovery of wonder at the incarnate God coming to earth in the form of a baby in order to save humanity.

For better or worse, evangelical Christians didn’t play much of a role in creating American Christmas, and as a result, the form of the holiday wasn’t very evangelical. But that’s okay, because it points to the gospel anyway—not by what it says but by what it’s missing.

The 19th-century Unitarians who wanted Christmas because they longed for better social relations were right to earnestly desire this aspect of the kingdom of God. But as evangelicals know, for this to work, people need a Jesus who was just as divine as he was human, and they need his atoning death.

The Victorian Episcopalians who became sentimental in their reflection on the sleeping Christ child were right to bow their knee to the baby in the manger. But maybe the night when he entered a world of pain and sin was a lot less silent than they imagined.

And the 20th-century liberal Protestants who tried to appeal to a universal “Christmas spirit” were right about the invisible power at work on that day. But maybe it could be better identified as the Holy Spirit rather than as some universal human beneficence that could save the world apart from Jesus.

This Christmas, believers in the gospel will gather together. They’ll marvel at the incarnate Son of God, whose entry into the world made possible the “Christmas spirit” that numerous people across the theological spectrum have longed for.

But Christ’s birth marks more than a humanitarian project or a sentimental story. It’s about the ultimate divine gift to a sinful world—a world that in the 19th century, as in the first and the 21st centuries, comprehended it not.

Daniel K. Williams is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade.

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Books

Apathy Used to Be a Virtue. But It’s Our Culture’s Hidden Vice.

Uche Anizor

How acedia became the enemy of our souls.

Illustration by Chidy Wayne

The concept of apathy has a long history in the Western world. We are not the only culture to treat it as “cool.” The great philosophers of the past debated its meaning and value. In fact, among certain Greek philosophers, apathy was one of the greatest things one could aspire to. The Greek term apatheia means “without pathē” (passions), and in the thought of some philosophers, passions often referred to violent emotions such as love, fear, grief, anger, envy, lust, pain, or pleasure that arise as responses to the outside world.

Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care

Uche Anizor (Author)

Crossway

192 pages

According to the Stoics, for instance, the wise—those who desire a life of flourishing—are totally free from passions. In other words, the wise are not vulnerable to the ups and downs of life in this world. They are self-sufficient; the external happenings of life “merely graze the surface” of their minds, as Martha Nussbaum observes in The Therapy of Desire. The goal of life is what we might call “equanimity,” or a calmness of soul. Even great non-Stoic philosophers such as Aristotle acknowledged the value of limiting the passions, for the good life was thought to await the apathetic.

Early Christian thinkers were well aware of the ancient philosophical tradition of thought that valued apathy. Interestingly, like their philosophical forebears, they sought to apply the concept of apatheia not only to human beings, but also to God.

Those who have taken an introductory course in theology might have encountered the term impassibility in discussions about God’s attributes. Impassibility is a Latin translation of the Greek term apatheia, and it was a concept much discussed among the church fathers.

According to theologian Pavel Gavrilyuk, to speak of God as impassible is to say that “he does not have the same emotions as the gods of the heathen; that his care for human beings is free from self-interest and any association with evil.” Impassibility means that God is not overwhelmed by emotions, and neither are his emotions affected by anything outside himself.

While it may be appropriate to ascribe “emotions” to God, impassibility (or divine apatheia) rules out those that are unbecoming of him. So, for example, when we speak of God as love, we really are speaking of a passionate God. But it is an impassible passion, a love not dictated by the outside world. In other words, God is not subject to violent passions as we are. Apatheia is another way of speaking of the unchangeableness and steadfastness of God’s affection for all that he is and all that he has made.

According to some thinkers in the ancient church, human apathy is a virtuous state of being and an imaging of God’s own virtue. A person who has apatheia has ruled his or her passions through discipline and attained a true love of God. According to Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth-century monk, “Love is the offspring of impassibility.” Apatheia was something to be sought, the culmination of an examined, chastened, and well-ordered life.

Yet the kind of apathy we deal with is not about consciously trying to steel ourselves against the ups and downs of life or about trying to cultivate a detachment from the world that produces a love for God. I believe the early Christian concept that best overlaps with what we would call apathy is not apatheia, but a less-than-savory term—sloth (or acedia).

When we think of sloth, we may think of a slow-moving creature or a couch potato who spends all day in pajamas eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s. However, Christians have described sloth in a far richer way.

Acedia is a Greek term that literally means “indifference, lethargy, exhaustion, and apathy.” One of the earliest and most influential thinkers on acedia was Evagrius of Pontus. He compiled a list of eight deadly temptations that later morphed into what we know as the seven deadly sins. Although he is unknown to many of us, his reflections are insightful into the spiritual dimensions of apathy:

Acedia is an ethereal friendship, one who leads our steps astray, hatred of industriousness, a battle against stillness, stormy weather for psalmody, laziness in prayer, a slackening of ascesis [strict self-discipline], untimely drowsiness, revolving sleep, the oppressiveness of solitude, hatred of one’s cell, an adversary of ascetic works, an opponent of perseverance, a muzzling of meditation, ignorance of the scriptures, a partaker in sorrow.

Acedia is a constant companion. It targets the spiritual practices that are supposed to bring us life, such as prayer, stillness, Scripture reading, hard work, and perseverance in doing good. In his practical instructions to fellow monks about various vices, he devotes more space to describing acedia than any other.

Similarly, another monk and important thinker, John Cassian, describes acedia as a restlessness that entices us to pursue everything but our most important duties. Acedia distracts. It makes us lazy and sluggish toward our spiritual and practical responsibilities. It is a selective laziness that makes everything else appealing.

One recent writer, Nicole M. Roccas, helpfully sums up acedia in Time and Despondency, pointing out that it can take different forms in different people. For example, it can manifest as (1) restlessness, the inability to complete a book, pray at length, or finish a task; (2) productivity accompanied by anger or boredom over the things one is doing; or (3) an inclination to sleeping, eating, worrying, and distraction.

A common thread weaving these various manifestations together is purposelessness or aimlessness. Things are either left undone, done for the wrong purpose, or done for no purpose whatsoever. As Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung observes in Glittering Vices, the heart is numb to the “demands of love”—that is, the things God has called us to.

In Creed or Chaos?, Dorothy Sayers calls acedia “the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.” This is purposeless, aimless indifference.

Acedia, as Christians have thought about it through the ages, is really a helpful category for understanding what we know as apathy. As a diagnosis of the soul, it points to the fact that whatever is going on in us is not merely psychological or emotional, but also spiritual. In fact, acedia seems to be characterized most by its resistance to the spiritual. And isn’t that what we find so troubling about apathy?

There has been significant psychiatric research on apathy, especially among people with severe illnesses such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

However, the research may have a broader application to all who are trying to make sense of apathy. One of the most commonly cited definitions describes apathy as a lack of motivation that “is not attributable to a diminished level of consciousness, an intellectual deficit, or emotional distress.”

If the lack of motivation is accompanied by a lack of effort, lack of interest in learning, or lack of emotion, then the patient might be clinically diagnosed with a real condition. Some patients simply report apathy as “the get up and go that got up and went” or “the spark is missing.” These phrases do a great job articulating a feeling many of us share.

However, the value of clinical precision is that, as we get better at defining the ailment, we are better positioned to deal with it. For instance, apathy overlaps with other conditions, such as depression.

Also, studies on apathy have been able to narrow down the various factors that contribute to it, such as environmental or biological factors. For example, immigrants or members of ethnic minorities sometimes adapt to differences in culture or language by becoming apathetic. The change in culture, or a feeling of being isolated within a culture, interferes with the pursuit of their values or goals, and apathy is just one way of coping or adapting to their environment.

Studies also show that the kind of apathy we’re concerned with is largely an acquired response to the world. It is not necessarily something you’re born with and, therefore, destined to have for the rest of your life. Relatively healthy functioning people who are apathetic have lost interest in things—but only in some things. In fact, psychologist Robert S. Marin defines typical forms of apathy as “selective apathy.”

Our apathy is the exact opposite of the apathy our forebears lauded.

What, then, is apathy? Who exactly is this enemy that stands against us? We are miles (and hundreds of years) away from the ancient virtue of apatheia. Our apathy is the exact opposite of the apathy our forebears lauded. Ours is loveless; theirs was defined by love. Ours denounces self-discipline; theirs required it.

Apathy is neither deep depression, despair, nor discouragement. It is not the mysterious movement of the faithful Christian groping in the darkness toward God. Rather, it is a middling posture that flits between confusion and disengagement.

Apathy, as the psychological literature has made us aware, is at root a deficit in motivation, effort, interest, initiative, and desire toward things we formerly found meaningful. It is a psychological disorder, possibly not of the same magnitude as clinical depression, but still debilitating in its own way. Acedia merely describes the blahness we feel toward the things of the Spirit; it is a name for the spiritual dimension of apathy.

Apathy is a psychological and spiritual sickness in which we experience a prolonged dampening of motivation, effort, and emotion, as well as a resistance to the things that would bring flourishing in ourselves and others.

It is a sin that expresses itself as restlessness, aimlessness, laziness, and joylessness toward the things of God. It is not just a part of highly evolved adult behavior, something like being too cool to care. It is an illness.

Scripture speaks of sin as a sickness that spreads to all people from its source in Adam (Rom. 5:12) and remains alive in us, producing all kinds of evil (7:8, 20). It also declares that we were slaves to sin, needing release from captivity (John 8:34–36; Rom. 6:6). Finally, sin is described as lawlessness (1 John 3:4), bringing condemnation (Rom. 5:18; 6:23), and requiring propitiation (3:23–25; 1 John 2:2).

In Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, Cornelius Plantinga describes sin as the “vandalism” of shalom. Shalom, biblically speaking, means “universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight”—the way things were meant to be. We violate shalom when we turn against the very good order God has established. We subvert it when we live in such a way that undermines our and others’ well-being and joy. And because shalom is ultimately about our relationship to our maker, its vandalization is directed toward God.

As Plantinga writes,

Sin is not only the breaking of law but also the breaking of covenant with one’s savior. Sin is the smearing of a relationship, the grieving of one’s divine parent and benefactor, a betrayal of the partner to whom one is joined by a holy bond.

This smearing happens through our actions as well as our attitudes. Apathy is a sickness of the soul; it is a deformity of heart that needs healing. Apathy, as many of us experience it, is a form of bondage. We can’t seem to lift ourselves out of it, finding ourselves regularly surrendering to its advances.

Ultimately apathy, as a refusal to love the one who is most loveable, is a moral and spiritual crime. It is a sin in the most basic sense. Its origins may be mysterious, but its orientation is not. It is a coldness to God and an indifference to the things that bring shalom—both of which need to be forgiven, conquered, and healed.

We ought to grieve our apathy, but we do not grieve it as those who have no hope. God is with us and for us in our apathy.

Uche Anizor is an associate professor of theology at Talbot School of Theology. Content taken from Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care by Uche Anizor ©2022. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

This article appeared in the January/February, 2023 issue of Christianity Today as "The Stoic Sin".

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