Just Laws Alone Won’t Save Us

In this polarized moment, strong legislation isn’t a substitute for wise and discerning leaders.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

This month, the United States Senate is considering a bill to protect same-sex couples’ right to marry. Seven years have passed since the historic Obergefell decision, so these initiatives might look like grandstanding or redundant efforts. But in late June, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, hinting at the possibility of revisiting other cases.

The Dobbs ruling unleashed a flurry of legislation, as lawmakers rush to codify questions that had previously been settled through the courts. While Democrats at the federal level are working to enshrine same-sex marriage, Republicans in conservative states are working to restrict and prohibit elective abortion.

A political environment that didn’t seem like it could get any more polarized suddenly has.

The swell of policy initiatives has also highlighted the need for discerning leaders—those who know not just how to win elections and judicial seats but how best to rule. Leaders like King Solomon.

Solomon assumes the throne of Israel after a season of political instability that included an attempted coup, a contested transfer of power, a political rival refusing to concede defeat, family drama, and hefty doses of palace intrigue. According to 2 Chronicles 1:1, Solomon eventually “strengthen[s] his hold on his kingdom” (CSB).

But once in power, he faces a new dilemma and asks himself: Once I secure the ability to reign, how should I reign? Once I gain power, what do I do with it?

Rather than lean on his own understanding, Solomon seeks the face of God, offering burnt sacrifices to inquire before the Lord. In response, God promises to grant him whatever he wants. Solomon famously asks for wisdom and knowledge:

Now, Lord God, let your promise to my father David be confirmed. … Give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours? (2 Chron. 1:9–10)

Solomon’s request is striking in part because he seems to understand that ruling is not simply a matter of implementing your own agenda or creating laws that enshrine certain positions. As king, Solomon is responsible to govern, and to do so, he needs a different set of skills than the ones that got him into power.

He knows that wisdom is more than holding the right positions. It involves knowing how to wield power for the good of the nation. It means applying policy in a lived context that has hundreds of variables and complications. And it means shepherding a group of people through the unknown.

Consider the most famous example of Solomon’s wisdom. First Kings 3 tells the story of two mothers who bring a case before him. Both had recently given birth, but one of the babies had died in the night. Both are now claiming to be the mother of the living child.

As the women stand arguing before him, Solomon calls for a sword. “Cut the living child in two,” he orders, “and give half to one and half to the other” (v. 25). Hearing this, one woman begs the king to stop and relinquishes her claim, preferring the child be alive in her rival’s arms than massacred. The other woman is unfazed by the gruesomeness of Solomon’s solution.

Suddenly, the real mother is revealed. And Solomon’s wisdom is also exposed. He understands not just the law but human nature; he reaches a just ruling by going beyond the law to the truth not fully captured by the law.

In our polarized age, part of the reason we don’t have wise leaders is because we often settle for law when we need something more. While enacting and adjudicating just laws is necessary work, it’s also limited work and not sufficient on its own.

Even more startling, a society so deeply convinced of the sufficiency of lawmaking will soon find itself content with a legalistic approach to other areas of life, counting on law to accomplish what only wisdom can.

Unfortunately, that method can neither establish goodness nor adequately punish evil. After all, if law is our hope, those who keep themselves within its letter cannot be condemned even if their actions harm others.

While our legislative systems play an essential, irreplaceable role, we need something beyond law. We need something beyond ourselves. We need what only God can give.

In James 1, the apostle writes, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (v. 5).

Echoing the request of Solomon, we would do well to fall on our faces before God and humbly beg him for the wisdom we need as a nation in this moment. This is especially true for those of us who follow Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God made flesh.

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

Ideas

White Southern Evangelicals Are Leaving the Church

Daniel K. Williams

Contributor

Data suggests that, when their attendance drops, these nominal Christians become hyper-individualistic, devoted to law and order, cynical about systems, and distrustful of others.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Brett Holmes Photography / sterlsev / Getty

What happens to American politics and culture when white Southerners in the Bible Belt quit attending church? What religious views do they adopt? How do they vote? And will the mass exodus from church that already seems to be occurring in the South make the country less politically polarized—or more?

These questions are particularly relevant this summer because of two major news developments: the sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Convention and the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which led to state restrictions that made abortion almost completely illegal the South and Midwest.

Twenty years ago, revelations of the Catholic church’s sex abuse crisis accelerated a massive exodus of white northeastern Catholics that was already well underway, and it contributed to a secularization of New England culture and politics. A region that up until the late 20th century had some of the nation’s strictest policies on abortion and divorce became a leader in expanding abortion access and legalizing same-sex marriage.

The same phenomenon occurred more recently in Ireland, in the wake of that country’s clerical sex abuse crisis. A nation that had some of the highest church attendance rates and strictest abortion and marriage policies in Europe legalized both abortion and same-sex marriage, even as church attendance rates plummeted.

It might be easy to imagine, then, that something similar could occur in the southern Bible Belt. As in New England immediately before news of the Catholic church’s sex abuse crisis broke, church attendance rates in the South were already falling before the SBC crisis was fully publicized.

Already, 30 percent of Southern Baptists “seldom” or “never” attend church, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Survey. The southern Bible Belt is quickly becoming a region of unchurched or lapsed Protestants who may still hang onto their evangelical identity to some extent but who don’t think going to church is necessary.

But these de-churched Protestants are not adopting the political views of de-churched Catholics in the northeast. Instead, they remain strongly individualistic Republicans who still oppose abortion, even if some of their other views differ from those of their churched counterparts. A careful study of these non-churchgoing white Southerners might offer a clue as to what southern politics will look like during the next decade.

What the data shows

I did a careful analysis of data from the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out the political and religious views of unchurched southern whites who still identify as Protestant. The GSS asks thousands of respondents from across the country a wide range of questions about politics, religion, social views, and behavior.

By running the data through a “similar statistical software program” (SPSS), it’s possible to isolate responses for particular groups of people—say, white male Protestants in the Southeast who attend church only once a year or less, or New England Catholics who attend church weekly and vote Democratic.

The survey includes more than a hundred questions on a wide range of topics, so if one wanted to look at the questions, say, about racial attitudes or prayer practices, it’s easy to compare the differences between particular groups of people. Political scientists and other social science researchers do this all the time. (As a historian, I hadn’t done much of this analysis until recently, but I’m now finding it a very useful tool in my research.)

What do the 2018 GSS data reveal about white Southerners who still identify as Protestant but who never attend church or go no more than once a year?

First, they’re numerous: According to the GSS survey, 45 percent of white Southerners self-reported attending church no more than once a year. If “lapsed evangelical Protestant” were a denomination, it would be by far the largest religious body in the South.

Second, they’re not Democrats. Among the non-churchgoers (or once-a-year attenders) who voted in the 2016 election, support for Donald Trump outnumbered support for Hillary Clinton by more than 2 to 1.

They’re also deeply committed to “colorblind” conservatism and the politics of law and order. Sixty-six percent said that the courts in their area did not deal “harshly enough” with criminals; only 11 percent said the courts dealt “too harshly.” Seventy-seven percent agreed that it was “sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.”

They opposed “preferential hiring” for Blacks by a margin of more than 4 to 1. Likewise, by a margin of more than 4 to 1, they agreed with this statement: “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same.” When asked why Blacks, on average, had “worse jobs, income, and housing than white people,” nearly half said it was because they “just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty.”

They were deeply suspicious of most institutions, including medicine, government, labor unions, religious organizations, and especially the media. Sixty-five percent said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press. The only institution in which they expressed strong confidence was the military; 72 percent said they had a “great deal” of confidence in the military.

Although they strongly supported legalizing marijuana and saw nothing morally wrong with homosexuality or premarital sex, the same was not true of abortion. Sixty-two percent opposed the legalization of elective abortion. A majority said the Supreme Court had acted wrongly in ruling against classroom prayer in public schools.

Excepting views on marijuana and sex, most of these sentiments were also shared by white evangelicals in the South who regularly attended church. Even beliefs about the Bible did not differ too much between those who regularly attended church and those who did not. Eighty-nine percent said the Bible was the inspired Word of God; only 8 percent considered it a book of “fables” and “legends.” Nearly one-third said the Bible was to be “taken literally, word for word.”

In short, the white Protestants in the South who don’t attend church anymore haven’t changed their politics or most of their religious beliefs. They’re still generally fundamentalistic when it comes to the Bible, and they’re still strong law-and-order, pro-military Republicans who believe in a Southern civil religion where people are free to pray in schools but not get abortions.

They still identify as Protestant Christians—and, based on other surveys, they probably still call themselves “evangelical” (although the GSS survey didn’t ask directly about that). But their understanding of evangelical Protestant Christianity has taken away most of the grace and left behind a deeply suspicious individualism, where law and order and self-defense are paramount.

Conservative individualism without trust

This strong individualism is apparent in areas where they most clearly differ from their churchgoing counterparts.

First, sexual responsibility. Even while retaining their opposition to abortion, white Protestants in the South who go to church no more than once a year have rejected traditional evangelical teaching about premarital heterosexual sex. Sixty-eight percent said premarital sex between a man and a woman was “not wrong at all.”

By contrast, only 21 percent of white Protestant Southerners who attended church weekly or more thought that heterosexual premarital sex was “not wrong at all,” and 50 percent said it was “always wrong.” Those who never (or hardly ever) attended church overwhelmingly favored marijuana legalization, while a majority of those who attended church weekly did not.

But perhaps the most interesting contrast came in the area of personal trust in other people.

When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54 percent of white Protestant southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them.

In response to the question “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” 58 percent said the latter.

The responses from white Southern Protestants who attended church every week were almost the direct opposite. Sixty-two percent said that most people would “try to be fair” rather than take advantage of them, and 57 percent said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.” Those who attended church weekly were also more likely to vote than those who hardly ever attended.

It seems, therefore, that when white Southerners stop attending church, they don’t lose the church’s political conservatism, moralism, or individualism. Instead, they become hyper-individualistic, strongly devoted to law and order, and overwhelmingly politically conservative (if they vote at all). But they’re also cynical and distrustful of others.

Why de-churched white Southern evangelicals stay conservative

Why did Northerners become more politically liberal when they left church, while white Southerners have remained just as politically conservative and individualistic as ever? Perhaps it’s because when people leave church, they retain the political ideology and moral orientation they imbibed from their religious community, even if it survives only in a distorted form.

The liberal Democratic politics of the northeast reflect the theology of communal obligations that both mainline Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church championed for most of the 20th century. Even when people there have left the church, they’ve retained those political sensibilities in secularized form.

By contrast, the Bible Belt draws on a Southern white individualism that is even older than Southern evangelicalism. When whites there leave church, they don’t usually become political liberals. Instead, the individualistic moralism they have imbibed from their regional milieu survives in secularized form.

Contrary to popular stereotypes about religion’s polarizing effects, Southern churches may actually temper these inclinations at times. To be sure, the majority of Southern white churches have encouraged the Republican political ideology that contributed to Donald Trump’s election as president and the maintenance of structural racism.

But at the same time, even the most politically conservative churches have promoted a sense of community that encourages people to be concerned for others and trusting of them. They have encouraged sexual fidelity and have frowned on self-indulgence, especially when it comes to alcohol and marijuana.

When people leave church, they retain that moralism—at least insofar as it pertains to other people—but lose the sense of self-sacrifice and trust in others. They keep their Bible, their gun, their pro-life pin, and their MAGA hat, but also pick up a condom and a marijuana joint and lose whatever willingness they had to care for other people in community.

For decades, many pundits have warned about the political dangers of a Southern Christian Right that was intent on blurring the boundaries of church and state. But whatever those dangers might have been, perhaps the greater threat to democracy in the South right now is a de-churched populist Right that is just as angry about efforts to correct racial injustice and even more individualistic.

Whether we call it “evangelical” or simply “Southern populist,” this post-church Southern Protestant Right is not going to go away just because the Southern Baptist Convention loses members. In fact, it’s likely to become stronger than ever.

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. A version of this piece originally appeared at The Anxious Bench at Patheos. Republished with permission.

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Books

Review

This Side of Eden, the Ideal Bookstore Doesn’t Exist

Byron Borger

As a longtime Christian bookseller, I figured I’d enjoy a fellow bookseller’s ode to browsing, buying, and reading. Here’s why it left me feeling conflicted.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Francais a Londres / Unsplash

When the book In Praise of Good Bookstores released earlier this year, I started hearing from bookish friends and customers of Hearts & Minds, the Pennsylvania bookstore my wife and I have run together for almost 40 years. They would send us links to an interview with the author, Jeff Deutsch, a bookstore manager himself.

In Praise of Good Bookstores

Jeff Deutsch (Author)

Princeton University Press

216 pages

For many, the conversation evoked memories and hopes of one of the great pleasures this side of Eden: browsing a well-stocked and interesting bookstore. Naturally, as a longtime bookseller, I shared the interview and devoured the book. But I’ll admit that Deutsch’s perspectives made me a bit uneasy, and I am still trying to decipher my curious reaction toward a book most friends figured I’d commend unreservedly. This side of Eden, few things are as simple as they seem.

Scale and status

In Praise of Good Bookstores gives a fascinating account of a former Jewish kid who grew up to love books and bookselling, and Deutsch waxes eloquent about the joy of connecting book and reader. He offers an intellectually stimulating essay that will appeal to those who like books about books, the reading life, and publishing-world curiosities.

For many CT readers, In Praise of Good Bookstores would no doubt fit seamlessly alongside such titles as Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well, Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, Jessica Hooten Wilson’s The Scandal of Holiness, and Claude Atcho’s Reading Black Books. Deutsch is as learned as any of those authors, and his obvious passion for books is contagious.

What makes Deutsch’s book stand out (despite an oddly tacky cover) is his status as a bookseller. Like the best of our trade, he is mostly self-taught and exceedingly eclectic in his reading habits, a practitioner of what John Milton called “promiscuous reading.” As the title indicates, Deutsch is offering not only a paean to the reading life, but also to the book-browsing life. In a real bookstore.

So, what’s not to love?

Well, for starters, I think I was jealous. As would be the majority of bookstore owners, booksellers, and frankly, bookstore fans. When Deutsch describes his well-stocked and eccentric store, the legendary Seminary Co-op, set in a tony neighborhood near Hyde Park in Chicago, it is at once charming, vast, busy with book-buying customers, and just a bit intimidating. Who are these apparently important authors of literature, philosophy, poetry, religion, economics, and history that roll off his tongue, whose signature volumes are readily available in his jam-packed store? And what kind of customers—besides the famous ones—buy these substantive books? How does the store afford all that space, all that inventory?

Most of us who run indie bookstores, frankly, are not surviving so well these days. And those of us offering uniquely Christian literature are doing even worse. Deutsch properly resists overcommercializing the bookseller’s vocation, and he gives the obligatory nod to our famously low margins. He knows how hard it is to make a living selling the blocks of paper and ink that we so cherish. Since most booksellers are constrained by what is ingloriously called “the market,” they will be a bit demoralized by The Seminary Co-op’s remarkable inventory, scale, and status.

After all, Deutsch can manage a store that is so “impeccably curated” (as one admirer described it) in large part because of his prime location and exceptionally well-educated customer base. I love our ordinary folk in our ordinary small town and never cease to be amazed at what people do read, but the “good bookstore” that Deutsch celebrates is, well, not like most.

Truth be told, I’m also a little jealous that, in the store he manages, Deutsch carries very few items apart from the books themselves. A few decades ago, the major Family Book Stores chain rebranded itself as Family Christian Stores to better reflect the range of products it was selling. Against that backdrop, the high-minded, bookish purity of the Seminary Co-op strikes me as nearly a prophetic witness against the shallowness and superficiality of our culture. Closer to home, the vision of a well-stocked bookstore evokes the tragedy of what Mark Noll famously named “the scandal of the evangelical mind.”

It’s no wonder there are very few evangelical-minded bookstores that offer anything even close to the sort of well-curated, stimulating, and artful selection praised by Deutsch; too many of our people seem not to have been taught or nurtured in their discipleship to be people of the book. Leave aside the odd ways in which evangelical Christian authors (and their publishers and publicists) routinely promote Amazon, quickening the decline of the Christian bookstore industry; the bigger issue is that many evangelicals would rather lay down their hard-earned cash for celebrity worship albums or self-help DVDs than browse the shelves of a serious bookstore.

In our store, for instance, we have large sections of books offering Christian perspectives on nursing, engineering, art, business, education, law, media studies, and the like. Christ is, after all, Lord of these areas, and we are called to serve him in all that we do. The virtue of intellectual curiosity, particularly as it relates to the relationship between faith and public life, simply isn’t cultivated in most churches. I suspect many otherwise fine Christian people would be bored in a reader’s paradise like the ones Deutsch describes.

At times, the grandness of In Praise of Good Bookstores inspired me to renew my vocational vows. Yet even as a bookseller of 40 years, there were moments that felt like reading an exotic ethnography of a rare tribe with exquisitely interesting customs and values in their exceptional habitat. Who are these strange people?

The slow browse

Despite its name, the beloved Seminary Co-op is no longer a seminary bookstore or even theologically oriented. Yet it’s hard to come away from In Praise of Good Bookstores without suspecting that Deutsch makes an idol out of books, learning, and the joy of human discovery.

I believe God honors the writing and reading of books (we are to love him with all our minds, after all), and the Bible affirms what some might call secular learning. Creation actually speaks, as Job 12 and Psalm 19 attest, so learning from good science and social science is a Christian duty. “All truth is God’s truth,” as the late Wheaton College philosopher Arthur Holmes declared in a book by the same name. My wife and I have staked our livelihoods on that claim, despite the confusion it has caused some of our customers, who might wonder why a Christian bookstore would carry books about film or art or environmental science or urban design.

Still, it is disconcerting when Deutsch calls his shop a “book-lined house of worship.” He insists that we “make our own canon” of essential books and, like his hero Walt Whitman, disapproves of submission to any deeper authority or tradition. As Whitman advised in a preface to his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, “Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.” He encouraged his readers to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,” and “dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” Deutsch preaches this gospel of free inquiry, quoting Virginia Woolf’s counsel to “take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”

For Deutsch, the bookstore offers a “spirit of freedom.” Well, sure. Nobody wants to be told what they have to think, and for all the churches fretting these days about the holdings of local libraries or the content of school curricula, few wise leaders want to get into the business of book-banning. Still, this “spirit of freedom” is only one way to think about books, one that prioritizes self-actualization and the cultivation of one’s individualized worldview.

It is fascinating (and ironic) that Deutsch was raised as a conservative Jew, and his book has glorious sections describing the communal reading habits at Shul and the celebrations of those who were learning together under the umbrella of a coherent religious tradition. My fear is that his upbeat celebration of the individual book buyer’s autonomy erodes the truths that matter most, leaving each reader to discover them on their own. The bookstore, on this model, is something like a cafeteria. Some serve better food than others, but the invitation is more or less identical: “Eat up! Enjoy whatever you want.”

And yet, the freedom-thinking extremes of Whitman or Woolf aside, Deutsch is doubtlessly noble in envisioning a well-stocked and curated store as a place for serendipity and discovery. In fact, he sounds almost neo-monastic in his observation that the best bookstores invite people to the best sort of browsing and bookish consideration, actually summoning forth a renewed view of time itself, about which he waxes almost spiritually. You don’t get this from one-click Amazon shopping or the cheapo remainder stores:

The good bookstore fosters the expenditure of a certain kind of time: the slow browse. It is the time we take, for instance, to single out which Clarice Lispector novel we would like to read next. Or the time we take when our eye is first caught by the curious cover of Saint Augustine’s Confessions on the front table, to read the jacket copy of the book and the first few pages: “Who will grant me repose?”

Deutsch continues with a long paragraph of other imagined curiosities (most almost laughably highbrow) found in a very good bookstore, nicely describing titles and authors the browser notices, the things she talks about with the bookseller behind the desk, and what said bookseller is most impressed by lately. It is all quite glorious, almost luminous. He evokes a sense of the holy, calling such moments “thin places.”

“Such discoveries take time,” he writes. “They happen by being in that space where we let ourselves submit to aimlessness. Sometimes the spine of a book will catch our eye as we are making our way to the register and we’ll grab it on impulse, then buy it on good authority of the bookseller.”

All of this assumes, of course, that browsers have the free time and disposable income for such unplanned purchases. And that the bookseller loves books and is as well informed as this studious, open-minded book buyer. At The Seminary Co-op Store, that may be the case. Not so, everywhere else.

Still, where there is conviviality among a group of browsers loyal to a team of wise booksellers in a given good place, something akin to community can emerge, and Deutsch cites older writers celebrating the bookshops that invite a commingling of various sorts of folks. He mentions a patron who reflects on the notable kindness found among the community of bookstore supporters.

We, too, have seen that; we are grateful to our own shoppers who have become, as one of our early slogans had it, “more than a customer.” I’m inspired when Deutsch writes, “It makes me happy to think of wandering through the aisles as a journey of kindness, one that takes us beyond the narrow limits of the self.” Yet this aspiration also strikes me as idealistic. We’ve seen ugly debates develop on site; even Christian bookstores experience rudeness and dishonesty.

Even so, I don’t want to dismiss Deutsch’s celebration of the communities formed around bookstores. In her recent book Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy, Mary McCampbell explores how empathy develops, showing how narrative art—stories, poems, songs, movies, and certainly novels—can help us cultivate a biblical ethic of loving our neighbors. Serious reading, it can be argued, deepens our awareness of others and their unique lives.

A labor of love

Deutsch is also correct, I think, in imagining the local bookstore as part of the public square. The very diversity of titles on offer, which appeal to different sorts of readers, all loyal to the same local bookstore, facilitates a kind of deliberative spirit. As he puts it, “This diversity of viewpoints needn’t separate and splinter us.” Instead, “this sort of public discourse in the public square of the bookstore can bind us together, creating a more civic-minded populace.”

Few booksellers get rich creating these kinds of places. Deutsch rails against Amazon only a bit, although he does cite an old H. L. Mencken piece, “Lo, the Poor Bookseller,” which could’ve been written yesterday. For those of us called to this vocation, it is a labor of love. Hopefully this book, dense and learned as it is, will inspire many to love more deeply the printed page and honor more intentionally the bookseller who sets the table for your hospitable encounters.

Describing reopening The Seminary Co-op’s doors after the worst of the pandemic a year ago, Deutsch writes:

Bookstores are roused by their patrons; it is the encounter that fulfills a bookstore’s purpose. Reopening the doors in June 2021 felt like a resuscitation first, then a revival. If an argument ends when a bookstore closes, what argument is continued when a bookstore remains open?

Ultimately, I wish Deutsch had made his book a bit more personal, a bit warmer, and a little less erudite. I wish, too, that he had leavened it with a few fun stories. For that missing element, we may have to take up the handful of novels set in bookstores or turn to other volumes by bookseller raconteurs. Like pastors, or maybe like bartenders, we hear a lot; most of us have seen it all. The job is more than curating and hosting the best books, and it is that “more” that I struggled to find in Deutsch’s intellectually vivid tribute to his book-lined spaces.

Byron Borger owns and operates Hearts & Minds bookstore in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Beth.

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News

When ‘Pro-Life’ Isn’t Enough: Abortion ‘Abolitionists’ Speak Up

Ericka Andersen

Most Christians in the movement disagree with a vocal minority that pushes to criminalize women and opposes legal measures short of outright bans.

Jon Cherry / Getty Images

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has brought new attention to a small but growing group of pro-life Christians who identify as “abortion abolitionists.”

This vocal minority rejects incremental steps toward outlawing abortion and reserves strong criticism for those who accept anything other than a federal ban equipped with criminal penalties for all involved.

“The very foundation of the gospel is the law of God,” said Tom Ascol, the president of Founders Ministries, in a recent documentary from abolitionist group End Abortion Now. “God defines what’s sin: You shall not murder. And that’s true from the moment of conception until the natural ending of life.”

Ascol is also a pastor who ran for president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in June. For two years in a row, abolitionists like Ascol spoke up at the SBC’s annual meeting to push the denomination to take an abolitionist stance.

In 2021, they proposed a rigid resolution for “immediate abolition of abortion without exception or compromise.” It passed only when amended to allow for an “incremental approach,” the opposite of what they wanted. This year’s proposal was not brought for a vote, though several pastors criticized the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty (ERLC) Commission’s campaign to make abortion not just illegal but “unthinkable.”

The move to entirely abolish abortion, rather than cut back or adjust laws to restrict the procedure, is inspired by slavery abolitionists like William Wilberforce, who was monumental in ending Britain’s participation in the slave trade in 1807. As a whole, many pro-lifers (not just abolitionists) view abortion as parallel to slavery, in that it treats a particular kind of human being as less than human and undeserving of human rights.

The pro-life movement has long contained differing strategies and approaches to the common goal of ending abortion. Before this year’s Dobbs decision, some pro-lifers pushed to prioritize the kinds of state bans not at risk of being shot down by the Court under Roe v. Wade, others wanted to see more restrictive but legally risky “heartbeat bans” move forward on principle, and an abolitionist minority considered more “incrementalist” moves—anything short of an outright ban—as immoral compromise.

Without Roe limiting the states, abolitionists have become more outspoken and strident. Christians in the pro-life movement also want to see abortion eliminated but are largely in favor of the intermediary legal steps.

“We believe that if full abolition of abortion is possible, then ‘incrementalist’ and ‘abolition’ mean the exact same thing,” said Emily Albrecht, a speaker with the Equal Rights Institute (ERI).

She noted that abolitionists seek laws that would “cause society to backtrack because they will easily turn into injunctions … and go to the Supreme Court.” (Already, abortion bans in several states have been temporarily blocked by lawsuits.)

Most pro-life Christians also want to address the societal factors that lead to abortion and care for women as the “second victims” when they choose to abort. Abolitionists, however, are more likely to see them as perpetrators, along with the abortionists who perform the procedures. Some abolitionists also reject humane exceptions, like abortion permitted to save the mother’s life.

“Many women who have abortions are pressured to abort by abusive partners, by family members, or through dire economic circumstances,” said Chelsey Youman, senior legislative director for the Human Coalition, a national pro-life organization. “These women need care, compassion, and support, not punishment.”

The abortion industry, which disproportionately impacts vulnerable demographics (Black women, for example, abort at four times the rate of white women), is the target of pro-lifers’ ire.

“They should be held to account for taking advantage of vulnerable women, as well as abusive partners who push them to abort,” said Youman.

SBC leaders made it clear at this year’s meeting that they do not support criminal penalties against women. “You are not going to get me to say I want to throw mothers behind bars,” said Brent Leatherwood, acting president of ERLC.

Leatherwood’s comments align with the dominant narrative of the pro-life movement, which has always been compassion and care for pre- and post-abortive women. Abortion abolitionists, however, say this position is “heretical,” “not Christian,” and that incremental attempts to eliminate abortion are “unbiblical.”

“It’s not a personal feeling; it’s a moral absolute,” said Dave Arcudi, a self-identified abortion abolitionist from South Dakota, in an interview with Christianity Today. “We are not making religious decisions but [scientific ones].”

Some, like Arcudi, aren’t part of a specific abolitionist organization but prefer the terminology in positioning themselves in the fight against abortion. Arcudi also noted that he holds abortionists, not women, criminally responsible for pregnancy termination.

Gregory Diacogiannis, a 38-year-old from Idaho, said he shifted from self-identifying as “pro-life” to “abortion abolitionist” because the former phrasing was too passive. “We should stop using euphemisms and be forthright with what our goals are,” Diacogiannis told CT. “The complete and total end to abortion. Period.”

Though he is an abolitionist, Diacogiannis said he doesn’t hold to the view that women should be charged with a crime either. Many in the movement do support holding women responsible in the name of “equal justice,” however.

Equal justice is a prevailing phrase in the movement, a call to provide consistent application of the Christian belief that every human being bears God’s image and deserves legal protection. That’s what Alan Maricle, a representative of the group Abolish Human Abortion, said he stands for in holding women accountable.

Maricle told CT that mothers shouldn’t be treated as “helpless, innocent victims.” Rather, they must take responsibility for their actions. Maricle viewed the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade not as victory but as “an ongoing demonstration of tyranny and wickedness,” given they didn’t abolish abortion completely.

“They should have said abortion is murder and nobody is allowed to murder anyone according to the Constitution and the law of God,” he said. “Instead, they say states can decide if they want to allow murder within their borders.”

Pro-life representatives are quick to push back against the abortion abolition narrative. National Right to Life, one the nation’s largest pro-life organizations, published a public letter signed by over 70 pro-life allies in May declaring that “criminalizing women is antithetical” to the pro-life charge and that women are victims of “a callous industry created to take lives”—an industry that also denies abortion’s devastating physical and psychological consequences for women.

It’s important to note that prior to 1973’s Roe, state laws did not criminalize women who had abortions. Juries of that time considered them “victims” and sought only to punish abortion providers, so the view of abortive mothers as criminals is rather new.

And though the country has seen more than 63 million abortions since Roe, both grassroots and political pro-life activists have helped lower the annual rate nearly every year since the early 1980s through incrementalist laws and tactics.

The SBC’s decision not to allow the abolition resolution to the floor this year shows their resistance, which is important given their massive influence as the largest non-Catholic denomination in the country. Prominent SBC pastor and professor Denny Burk urged Christians away from abolitionists, noting the group’s statement that positions contrary to their own are a “compromise with evil.”

“The ultimate goal is the abolition of abortion,” Burk and seven other academics wrote in a joint essay in Public Discourse. “But even if we can’t reach that goal today, we are going to take as much ground as we can today and tomorrow and every day until we achieve total victory.”

The abolitionist stance for criminalizing the actions of abortive mothers is perhaps the most controversial of positions—one that the majority of pro-lifers reject. Pew Research Center found that only 14 percent of Americans would support jail time for a woman in the case of an illegal abortion.

“In our desire for justice for the child, we can’t forget to see the needs of the woman and her value as a person,” said Lauren Green McAfee, founder of Stand For Life and a CT board member. “Seeing the mother as the villain does not uphold and apply a full understanding of the imago Dei.”

Despite the strong difference in opinion regarding how to eliminate abortion, some pro-lifers retreat from criticizing allies in the comprehensive anti-abortion movement. They worry disunity may distract from the ultimate goal of fewer abortions. Some told CT they even were concerned about highlighting abolitionists in news coverage.

Though there are no prominent, national pro-life groups that support abolitionist tactics, abolitionists’ influence could grow in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Experts say they’ll be looking for how abolitionist stances influence pro-life platforms in coming elections.

- More from Ericka Andersen

Theology

Ron Sider Was the Real Deal

Craig Keener

As a friend of the late seminary professor, I saw up close his deep character and life-long care for the disenfranchised.

Ron Sider

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Image: WikiMedia Commons

For 15 precious years, Ron Sider was my colleague at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University, just outside of Philadelphia. One of the most passionate voices for defending the vulnerable, he broke negative stereotypes of evangelicals—as well as some conservative evangelicals’ negative stereotypes of social justice.

I first heard of Ron when New Testament scholar Gordon Fee declared that Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was one book every North American Christian should read.

Gordon was not given to exaggerated book endorsements, so as a college student, I saved up my coins and bought a used copy. I had recently been reading 40 chapters of the Bible a day, so I was very familiar with the book’s recurrent message about caring for the poor. As I read Rich Christians, I was struck: Here was an author who genuinely paid attention to Scripture’s emphasis on this theme.

Eventually, I discovered that Ron also advocated for racial justice and challenged apartheid, even at a time when those stances were still controversial among many white evangelicals in the United States.

Ron was always ready to learn. His commitment was not to a specific economic theory but rather to helping people in need. In that spirit of humility, he adjusted his approach to particular economic solutions in revised editions of Rich Christians. His PhD was in Reformation history, not global economics.

I knew less about economics than he, so I wouldn’t have known the difference had he not told me later why he made the revisions. His initial approach to economics needed adjustment, he told me, but still, he hoped people would remember that he and his colleagues were right about apartheid.

Some of the more extreme critics complained that Ron’s handling of Scripture’s demands about the poor were “Marxist.” Apparently, they had never really read him, never really read the Bible, or were themselves more committed to economic or political agendas than to the Bible.

Ron’s loyalty was to Scripture. He was no more radical than John Wesley or Charles Finney (and certainly far less radical than Saint Anthony and Saint Francis).

As I once pointed out to him, he was much more conciliatory than the biblical figures of Amos; Jeremiah; John the Baptist (Luke 3:11); and, most important of all, the Lord Jesus, who said we cannot be his disciples unless we surrender all our possessions (Luke 12:33; 14:33).

Although Ron was often associated with the evangelical Left, he remained consistently pro-life and insisted that the church should maintain biblical sexual ethics. I’m pretty sure that he and I didn’t always vote the same way, despite our agreement on ethics, but I never doubted that his vote was informed by his biblical conscience.

In conversation, I found him ready to embrace what he saw as the best solutions from either side of today’s (tragically polarized) political aisle, and he maintained contacts on both sides of that split. He always remained the consistent evangelical Anabaptist that he was—living simply and sacrificially and working on behalf of the needy. The 2013 book of essays dedicated in his honor is fittingly titled Following Jesus: Journeys in Radical Discipleship.

Despite stinging criticisms, Ron refused to surrender what he found in Scripture. One of our former students, Michael Jordan—now dean of the chapel at Houghton College—put it this way in a Facebook post:

Dr. Sider stubbornly insisted that Christians should act for change on issues of systemic injustice not despite our religious convictions, but because of them. It made him thoroughly inconvenient to every cause, because he refused to be anyone’s useful idiot: he opposed abortion on demand and white flight with equal ferocity; he told us to listen to the Global South both about marriage and about American imperialism.

Ron humbly came alongside the global church and was eager to learn from fellow Christian leaders around the world. He spoke about totalitarian regimes in Latin America (whether right-wing or Marxist), apartheid in South Africa, the martyrdom of Christians in Nigeria, global hunger, health care access, and environmentalism.

I will confess that, for a while, I thought he was just being trendy on environmental issues. However, after learning about South Pacific Christians whose homes are being destroyed by rising sea levels, as well as my wife’s experiences with oil pollution in Africa, I was soon convinced that this issue, too, had a human face. Ron was more prescient than I.

His impact on the North American church is particularly notable. He bridged long-standing gulfs by speaking to many evangelicals about social justice—a passionate concern of many mainline churches—and speaking to much of the mainline church about evangelism—a passionate concern of many evangelicals. He refused to let our cultural polarizations blind us to sides of Scripture that were uncomfortable for us.

At a time when I felt torn apart by my respective commitments to being theologically evangelical, experientially charismatic, and part of the Black church, there were no better guides for me than my senior colleagues, Ron Sider and Samuel Escobar. Ron respected and welcomed everybody’s gifts in the body of Christ, and he wanted to bring together the best of them.

Courtesy of Craig Keener

Left to right: Ron Sider and his wife, Arbutus, with Médine and Craig Keener c. 2011, at the Siders’ home.

I met Ron in person when I was a PhD student involved with the organization he founded, then known as Evangelicals for Social Action (now Christians for Social Action). In part through Ron’s support and encouragement, I ended up at Eastern Seminary (now Palmer Seminary of Eastern University).

Although he was already a respected Christian leader with demands on his time, he took me under his wing by encouraging and advising me. When we differed in our exegesis of the “least of these” passage in Matthew 25, Ron humbly and graciously honored my interpretation by mentioning it as a respectable alternative view.

He was a genuine activist—always doing his best to help people in need. Through senator Rick Santorum’s office, he even helped me get my wife, Médine, to the US after the events of 9/11 slowed down the immigration process. Many others could tell similar stories of Ron’s eagerness to engage, network, and mentor. (Ron’s dear wife, Arbutus, a counselor, also helped me with posttraumatic stress from some past events.)

After 15 years of working with him at Palmer Seminary, I moved to Asbury Seminary (where I teach now). But leaving him was one of the many reasons I found that transition difficult, even though we stayed in touch.

The impact he made on me, on his students and readers, and on North American evangelicalism is hard to overestimate.

When I was doing my PhD at Duke University, the objections to Christianity I heard from undergraduates were not the traditional ones I was trained to answer. They accused the Christian faith of being racist, sexist, and imperialist. However, Ron’s life and legacy have consistently challenged all of those perceptions.

Given some of the similar concerns voiced by today’s growing movement of young “nones,” I believe that wider acknowledgement of Ron’s voice could have helped prevent much of that hemorrhaging.

I miss you, dear brother. I will see you on the other side.

Craig Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary.

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Ideas

Nicky Gumbel’s Fitting Farewell to HTB Church: ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’

Krish Kandiah

Contributor

Retirement sermon and celebration of Holy Trinity Brompton vicar and Alpha Course pioneer reminds us that good and faithful servants still exist.

Pippa and Nicky Gumbel

Courtesy of HTB Church

What does a lifetime of fruitful public ministry look like? Last Sunday, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) tried to answer this question in a video montage marking the end of Nicky Gumbel’s 46 years of leadership at the London multisite church.

Images of people whose lives had been impacted by the senior pastor and author flashed across the screen as one incredible statistic after another scrolled past: 30 million people introduced to the Christian faith through the Alpha Course, across 140 countries and 170 languages; 2 million people fed spiritually by a Bible reading app; and 2 million meals delivered during the pandemic from HTB alone.

The July 24 video was a fitting homage to a nowadays unusual career, spanning almost five decades in the same congregation. It is rare in Anglican churches in the United Kingdom for a trainee leadership position to last more than the minimum requirement of three years, with many moving regularly to the next parish. But Nicky sat under the tutelage of HTB’s then senior leader, bishop Sandy Millar, for 19 years. He was 49 years old when he took over the church, and admitted to uncertainty about it all—feeling both too young and too old to do so.

Humility is carved into Nicky’s resume. He likes to remind people that he did not start the Alpha course he is most famously associated with. Before it was transformed into the world’s most widely-used and effective evangelistic tool, it already existed as a short course to help believers ground their faith. Nicky once admitted to me that he had been resistant to Alpha going online during the pandemic; however, when he saw how effective it was, he was excited, quoting a favorite line from G. K. Chesterton: “In order to stay the same you have to change.”

Nicky is clearly an innovator and an entrepreneur, but at heart he is an enthusiastic evangelist and a servant leader. A few days before delivering his final sermon at HTB last Sunday, he completed leading his 96th consecutive Alpha course. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his involvement in practical, personal service and his willingness to talk with and, perhaps more importantly, listen to others. As a result, his last sermon included story after story from the Alpha group that had just ended.

I have seen firsthand Nicky’s genuine interest in—and inclusion of—those around him. In my work with refugees and newcomers to the UK, he was one of the first senior church leaders to back a welcome initiative for tens of thousands of arrivals from Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the British armed forces relocated thousands of Afghani families, before long I was hearing that Nicky was among the volunteers spending time with evacuees being temporarily accommodated in hotels not far from HTB.

He did this without any fuss or fanfare, and when I asked him about it afterwards, he referred back to his own family history—which included Jewish relatives who had escaped from Germany in the Second World War to the UK (with the help of Albert Einstein, no less).

As Nicky stepped up to the front of the sanctuary following the video montage, he did so with his wife Pippa at his side. Having shared much of their public ministry, it was clear that she would be as much of a loss to the church as her husband.

I was curious to hear what Nicky would say in his last sermon to a congregation he has served longer than most of its members have been alive. Would he offer any insights into his success at a time when it seems that most prominent church leaders end their careers in scandal or in burnout rather than in celebration?

Nicky’s chosen text was from Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, but his resounding theme was one that punctuates the whole of Scripture: “The best is yet to come.”

There it is again: that wonderful humility. Nicky is not expecting to leave a hole at HTB, nor giving the impression that he is abandoning a sinking ship. He is not secretly hoping that everything will fall apart when he’s gone, thereby ensuring that he is associated with the church at its pinnacle of success.

Not at all. He seems eager to see the church flourish without him. He has nothing but praise and hope for the congregation as he hands it over to Archie Coates, a former trainee at HTB who has been leading a church plant in Brighton. Nicky is moving on to develop some innovative programs to support other emerging leaders, particularly those marginalized by racism, elitism, sexism, and agism. Above all, Nicky entrusts the church to the God he has devoted his life to serving and worshiping.

I join with HTB in thanking God for Nicky’s ministry: for his dedication, perseverance, warm and gracious humility, and unwavering ambition to see the good news of Jesus faithfully and clearly communicated in word and deed. In this time of great leadership turmoil within the church, it is right and good for us to celebrate those who make it to the finish line and inspire others to follow suit.

Krish Kandiah is director of Sanctuary Foundation.

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Theology

Faithful Orthodoxy Requires Reading Widely

Matthew Barrett

Evangelicals should humbly learn from all Christian tradition—yet many are ignorant or suspicious of pre-Protestant theology.

clu / Getty

Recently, one of my students asked me how long I’ve been teaching theology. “Ten years,” I said. And as I walked back to my office and sat down at my desk, a question hovered in my head: What have I left my students with after a decade?

In my self-centeredness, I had assumed I was the one bestowing the gift of knowledge to my students. But in truth, one of the best things I have done is send my students into modern ministry’s stormy seas with time-tested wisdom from an experienced crew from church history.

The longer I teach, the more I resonate with C. S. Lewis’s admonition, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” And yet there remains notable deserts in the world of seminary education, particularly when it comes to incorporating large swaths of Christianity’s Great Tradition.

Years ago, as a PhD theology student at a Protestant seminary, I was handed a list of required reading. Out of 128 books, only three of them (!) were by premodern authors (written from the first century to the 15th century).

Even when I crossed into history with my degree, seminars skipped from the church fathers to the Reformers, only to progress into American history. And since half—yes, half—of church history lies in the Middle Ages, this gap in my education felt like a Grand Canyon. So, I petitioned the school to invent my own independent study of medieval theology and history.

Has anything changed today?

Christopher Cleveland chronicles how evangelical seminaries sought to replace liberal with conservative theologians, and in the process—due to either neglect or avoidance—“a generation of evangelical scholars arose who had no serious acquaintance with the classical categories of theology developed in Patristic, Medieval, and Reformed orthodox thought.”

As Protestants, many of us were taught that everything started off grand in the early church but then the church entered the “Dark” Ages. Thankfully, the Reformers turned the lights back on and established the true church that had been lost since the days of the apostles.

We mistakenly believe the Reformers pursued a total, radical break with the past—a rebellion that started a new church—rather than seeking to renew the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

The practical implications of this mindset are serious: Most Protestants today have no idea what occurred in the church for nearly a thousand years. Yet they are confident of one thing: Whatever did occur during the premodern era is not worth our time and can only corrupt Christianity.

This is the mindset of many everyday churchgoers, which ultimately trickles down from the preaching in the pulpit. And since most pastors are trained in seminaries, the source of the problem is often in the outlook of Protestant academic institutions.

Those outside the evangelical vortex looking in often ask how this could happen. Many of them attended secular institutions where such a chasm is unthinkable. I wish I could say the oversight is merely administrative, but it is not. Ideas, after all, have consequences.

So, how do we change course? The answer has everything to do with humility.

We all know C. S. Lewis from his famous book Mere Christianity, which emphasized his staunch commitment to orthodoxy—that is, classical Christianity—as nonnegotiable.

Yet many forget that in the middle of this classic apologetic, Lewis spends two whole chapters retrieving the intricacies of the Nicene Creed and its doctrine of eternal generation. He also wrote a preface to one of the great works of Christian history, On the Incarnation by the eastern church father Athanasius.

Lewis advised—no, pleaded—with moderns in his generation to read more old books. He did so not because these premodern authors were without foibles. Every generation has its blind spots. But their blind spots are not always our blind spots.

“None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books,” said Lewis. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

For instance, Lewis often ruminated on the God-centered vision of medieval theology, which he considered an antidote to the disenchanted cosmos of skeptical modernism so prevalent in his day. As Jason Baxter points out in his recent book, Lewis believed it was “his duty to save not this or that ancient author, but the general wisdom of the Long Middle Ages, and then vernacularize it for his world.”

Under the threat of modernism’s disenchanted cosmos, Lewis had no patience for the chronological snobbery of his day. Fearful such a skepticism could undo Christian orthodoxy itself, Lewis considered such pretentiousness not only ignorant but ungodly.

And so should we.

Summoning tradition is not a badge for those who think they know everything. Quite the opposite: It requires the humility to stop talking—obsessed as we are by our own voices—and to listen instead.

“Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about,” said G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy. Chesterton and Lewis alike called on their generation to humble themselves and listen to the “democracy of the dead.” If not, the church could only slide into heresies, new and old.

Many of our forefathers in the faith had a similar mindset—including the leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

At the time, Rome accused the Reformers of being novel and thus heretical—lumping them together with the radical sectarians of their day. Such radicals considered the church lost in darkness from the time of the apostles until the radicals arrived. They claimed to believe only in the Bible and spurned ancient thinkers. The radicals considered themselves alone to be the true church.

The Reformers were furious at the hubris of the radicals and frustrated at being mistaken for them. Unlike the radicals, the Reformers were not rebels and revolutionaries bent on dividing the church—schismatics at heart. From the beginning, their intention was to renew the church, arguing Rome had no monopoly on claiming catholicity.

As I explain in The Reformation as Renewal, the Reformers constantly appealed to Scripture, yet they justified their interpretation of it by invoking theologians of the past. Scripture was their final court of appeal, but it was not their only authority; they believed the church was accountable to the creeds, which keep the church faithful to the biblical witness itself.

And while they expressed serious critique of Rome on doctrines like salvation and sacraments, they also voiced agreement on numerous other doctrines. Doing otherwise would have thrown their orthodoxy into question, only confirming Rome’s accusation.

Reformation expert Richard Muller makes a sobering point: “The Reformation altered comparatively few” of the major doctrines of the Christian faith.

Doctrines like salvation and the church needed serious correction. However, doctrines as central to Christianity as “God, the trinity, creation, providence, predestination, and the last things were taken over by the magisterial Reformation virtually without alteration,” says Muller. Virtually without alteration—will the real Protestantism please stand up?

Not only did our Protestant fathers continue retrieving the theology of the church fathers, but they were more indebted to the medieval scholastics—including Thomas Aquinas—than is often assumed.

Few theologians in the history of the church perpetuated the biblical, orthodox doctrines of God and Christ with such astute precision as Aquinas.

Because of this, I often bring up Aquinas in my course on the Trinity at the evangelical seminary where I teach. Each year students report back to me with excitement that they have made an ironic discovery: They find Aquinas far more orthodox on the Trinity than some contemporary evangelicals.

But one afternoon, I walked into my class and found on my podium a giant rosary, crucifix and all—with a note that read, “For Dr. Barrett.” The message was clear: A professor who assigns Aquinas must be a closet Roman Catholic.

I would have laughed had I not felt so sorry for this anonymous student. Are we so insecure as Protestants that we cannot benefit from one of the greatest minds in the history of the church—particularly on a doctrine as essential as the Trinity—simply because we may disagree with him on soteriology and ecclesiology?

Even our Reformation forefathers were secure enough in their Protestant convictions to critically appropriate Aquinas in innumerable areas—from biblical interpretation to the attributes of God, from the Trinity to ethics and eschatology. Reformed theologians not only wielded Aquinas against Roman Catholics, but Michael Horton has shown that many of them were even more Thomistic than their opponents.

Modern evangelical theologians who avoid Aquinas will often draw from Protestant Scholastics like the Puritan thinker John Owen. And yet the Protestant Scholastics’ method and theology were faithful to biblical orthodoxy precisely because they were students of Aquinas.

These connections are so undeniable that Crossway, an evangelical publisher, will publish a multivolume set on Thomas Aquinas for Protestants—written by a team of Protestant authors.

At the end of the day, we’re not looking to enshrine Aquinas or any other thinker. Rather, we will listen critically but with humility as Aquinas unveils timeless, transcendental insights that serve to recover the eternal goodness, truth, and beauty of God in our disenchanted world.

Evangelicals, with all our modern proclivities, often like to act as judge, separating the “good guys” from the “bad guys” of Christian history—which serves only to venerate the former and eliminate the latter. This approach to history is ruthless in idolizing and canceling historical figures.

Such a mindset not only encourages a divisive sectarianism—where, eventually, no one is considered the true church except us—but also lacks empathy. We are unable to understand the complexity of people, movements, institutions, and entire epochs of the past, let alone learn from them. Behind this judgmentalism hides our own insecurities, agendas, and platforms.

As the saying goes, people are always afraid of what they do not know. And this fear of the unknown, masked in a rhetoric of hostility, translates into the classroom of tomorrow’s Christian leaders, which further trickles down to influence our laypeople.

I recently had a conversation with a young person deeply discouraged by today’s evangelicals—that is, evangelicals-turned-fundamentalists indifferent to or suspicious of all things premodern—who wondered whether the evangelical church has any real historical roots to offer anymore.

If the evangelical leaders of today cannot follow the lead of their Protestant forefathers and claim the church catholic—with a small c, meaning “universal”—the next generation will find a church that can.

And while changing course will be anything but easy, I believe we must begin with the cure prescribed by Lewis to keep the clean sea breeze of orthodoxy blowing through our minds.

Matthew Barrett is the author of Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit (Baker Books), associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and host of the Credo podcast.

- More from Matthew Barrett

News

Wire Story

Seattle Pacific University Sues Washington State Over LGBT Hiring Investigation

Alejandra Molina - Religion News Service

School claims attorney general is “interfering in the religious decisions of a Christian university.”

Students chant "We want gay faculty, we want gay staff" at Seattle Pacific University.

Screengrab / Jeanie Lindsay / Twitter

Seattle Pacific University, a private school associated with the Free Methodist Church, was the site of daily protests for more than a month earlier this summer as students challenged a school policy that prohibited the hiring of LGBT people. Dissenting students called the policy homophobic and discriminatory.

Now, the university says its rights are being violated by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, whose office launched an investigation into the school’s hiring practices.

Seattle Pacific University is suing Ferguson, claiming his probe aims to influence the university “in its application and understanding of church teaching,” according to the claim filed Wednesday, July 27, in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. The university is represented by Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Becket Senior Counsel Lori Windham, in a statement, said Ferguson singled out the university “because of its Christian beliefs, demanding information about the school’s religious hiring practices and employees.” She said the university is asking a federal court to stop him from “interfering in the religious decisions of a Christian university seeking to remain true to its faith and mission.”

Ferguson’s office did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Students and others fighting against the hiring policy said in a statement that the lawsuit shows “the university is still painting a portrait of a school that is being persecuted by outside forces for practicing their faith.”

“We know this is not an issue of religious freedoms; rather it’s an issue of the people in power failing to uphold the university’s commitment to it’s own community.”

At issue is the school’s employee lifestyle expectation policy that states, in part, that “employees are expected to refrain from sexual behavior that is inconsistent with the University’s understanding of Biblical standards, including cohabitation, extramarital sexual activity, and same-sex sexual activity.”

The controversy began after an adjunct nursing professor filed a lawsuit in January 2021, accusing the university of refusing him job opportunities because of his sexual orientation. Four months later, the university’s faculty in April 2021 took a vote of no confidence in its board of trustees after members of the board declined to change the hiring policy. The faculty also sought for the university to drop its statement on human sexuality. In the aftermath, a campus work group was assigned to study the issue and in May 2022 presented its recommendations. That’s when the board of trustees chose to retain the policy.

Students then staged a more than monthlong sit-in beginning in late May.

It’s believed students asked Ferguson to take legal action against the university’s board of trustees, according to the suit. Ferguson’s office sent a letter to the university, demanding “prompt production of voluminous and sensitive internal information on the University’s religious policies and their application to any and all faculty, staff, and administrators,” the complaint reads.

According to the complaint: “The letter clearly indicates that the attorney general considers ‘prohibiting same-sex marriage and activity’ to be in violation of the law … The First Amendment protects the ability of religious organizations to follow the teachings of their faith on marriage and sexual relationships outside marriage, and to maintain policies consistent with those beliefs.”

The university notes in the complaint that Free Methodists “believe sexual intimacy is a gift from God and is a great blessing in the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman.”

Ferguson’s probe, the complaint reads, infringes on the university’s First Amendment right “to govern itself according to religious principles, frame its policies and doctrine, and select its employees and leaders according to those religious principles without government interference.”

If the school were to change its employment policies to allow hiring Christians in same-sex marriages, the university “would be automatically disaffiliated from the Free Methodist Church” and “no longer be a denominational institution,” according to the lawsuit.

- More from Alejandra Molina - Religion News Service

News

Died: Carey Latimore IV, Historian who Held Up Black Christians’ Unshakable Faith

Daniel Silliman

He saw African American history as a “window into the essence of the gospel.”

Carey Latimore / Trinity University / edits by Rick Szuec

Carey Latimore IV, a Baptist minister and a historian who studied how Black people persevered by faith, died unexpectedly on Tuesday at the age of 46.

Latimore was a beloved professor at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, where he taught on the African American experience. Students were drawn to his enthusiasm and were frequently found in his office, discussing what they were learning in his classes and in the research projects he organized, like an oral history of race relations in San Antonio.

Latimore also actively found ways to bring his scholarship to the public. He appeared frequently on local TV, started a civil rights institute in downtown San Antonio before the pandemic, worked with the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, and wrote devotionals for Our Daily Bread.

In the last few years, he became an important resource for those seeking to understand the significance of Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in America. Latimore was especially adept at explaining the religious significance and encouraging Christians and the church to embrace Juneteenth.

“I think Black people in their faith were kind of presenting a mirror and a window into the essence of the gospels that many people have forgotten or left behind,” he told Rasool Berry, pastor of The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York, on the Christianity Today podcast Where Ya From? “On Juneteenth, people start talking about what we can be, what we can do. What we have done. It’s an inspiring moment because we think of the possibilities.”

The people who worked with Latimore were shocked by the news of his death. They mourned both loss of a public scholar and a personal friend.

https://www.facebook.com/rasool.berry/posts/pfbid02U4Z8hL7jiWHEv34dAZpZRuR1Sdc9NqjmNCPWtxS43dTJShMXKjvnAkhMjrx8TsXGl

“He led with his head and his heart,” said San Antonio TV news anchor Steve Spriester. “It is the ultimate understatement to say that Carey Latimore will be missed.”

When his death was announced at a Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee meeting, people gasped, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

“He was able to hear all sides and try to bring us to a stronger place,” Aaronetta Pierce, one of three chairs of the committee that was working to expand, improve, and complicate the history recounted at the Alamo as part of a $400 million makeover. “I hope that as we continue in this project, we take Carey with us, and his thoughts, and that some part of him helps us to get to the place where we have to get to in order to have a shared history and project.”

Latimore was born in Saluda, Virginia, in 1976, a rural community about 18 miles upriver from where the Rappahannock empties into the Chesapeake Bay. His father, Carey Latimore III, owned a fiberglass repair shop, fixing semi trucks that Latimore, as a child, imagined driving across America.

“I loved the huge rigs,” he once told the Trinity student newspaper. “Traveling the country, hanging out at truck stops and hearing the stories, and using a CB radio. Wow—just wow.”

While Latimore could only dream of the oral histories offered up at truck stops, he started to notice the stories that were told at the family’s Antioch Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in the county, founded right after the Civil War. Latimore’s mother, Ann Stephens Latimore, directed the choir, and during Black history month, the church sang spirituals and acted out the stories of great Black Christians from history.

Latimore learned how many Christians like his mother “grew up in the underbelly of the Jim Crow South” but persevered by faith. Latimore said his mother, who died in 2018, “boldly proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ her entire life.”

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Latimore began to study this history more seriously in college. He attended Rappahannock Community College and then the University of Richmond, where he majored in history. Latimore then went on to graduate studies at Emory University, writing his doctoral dissertation on how free blacks in the Richmond area experienced the end of slavery.

In 2004, Latimore took a position in the history department at Trinity. He told administrators that he had prayed about it and believed God wanted him to be there.

Latimore quickly connected with students and threw himself into teaching. He won the school’s most prestigious faculty award for his success as a mentor.

“I love listening to students. I love interacting with students. And doing projects with students as well,” he said.

Latimore also became an active member of Mount Zion First Baptist Church, a prominent National Baptist Convention congregation that played a notable role in the civil rights movement. Latimore, ordained at his childhood church in Virginia, served Mount Zion as an associate minister.

According to those who worked with him, Latimore’s call as a minister and his work as a historian were deeply integrated.

“His being a Baptist minister was really central to everything, “almost as if his professorship satellited out from that, because it informed how he did everything,” said Donna Guerra, who worked with Latimore on an archival project. “He was very beloved.”

Latimore started writing more about Black Christians and their faith during the pandemic, working on a popular book that would recount the histories of lesser known African Americans and drawing devotional lessons from their lives. Working on it was, at times, a religious experience. On his Facebook page, he described how the Holy Spirit was guiding him and how he was moved, writing about civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, to worship God.

“As I sit in my seat typing notes of her life,” he wrote, “I feel an urge to get out of my seat and lift my hands to heaven and praise God.”

Our Daily Bread published Unshakable Faith: African American Stories of Redemption, Hope, and Community at the start of 2022. The book starts with Cyrus Bustill, who was freed from slavery in New Jersey before the American revolution, and preached to free blacks about the importance of forgiving enslavers and recognizing God, not benevolent white people, as the true author of freedom. It continues, recounting a chronology of committed Christians sustained through faith down to Chance the Rapper, who described his 2016 mixtape “Coloring Book” as the declaration of a Christian man.

“To be American and Black. Faith has been the glue that ties our twoness,” Latimore wrote. “Unshakable faith has sustained us in this struggle. The faith stories of our ancestors provided the rocks from which our pillars of faith are secured. … We must invite the Holy Spirit to guide us to greater wisdom and toward redemption.”

Latimore and his wife, Almie Pachoco-Latimore, recently built a house outside San Antonio. They planned to surround it with flower gardens. The cause of his death has not been stated.

Latimore is survived his wife, his sisters Kimberly and Kerri, and his father Carey Latimore III. Trinity is planning a memorial service for the fall.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Beyond Pope’s Apology, Indigenous Christians Carve Own Path to Healing

Isabel Ong

Recovering languages and contextualizing theology help Canada’s First Nations communities reconcile faith and culture after residential schools made them “hate the name of Jesus.”

Pope Francis before his apology for the treatment of First Nations children in Canada's Residential School system.

Cole Burston / Stringer / Getty

Three weeks before Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize for the church’s involvement in indigenous residential schools, Christina Dawson’s church in Vancouver, British Columbia, burned down.

The fire was eerily reminiscent of the more than 50 churches that were defaced or destroyed across the country a year ago, weeks after the discoveries of the remains of residential school students began making international headlines.

This month’s fire started in a back alley on July 6, according to Dawson. By the next morning, the church’s two-story building was completely ravaged. Fire inspectors are still investigating the incident to determine whether the blaze was deliberately set.

Dawson is from the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations on the western end of Vancouver Island. She serves as lead pastor of Street Church, which is part of the Foursquare network of churches in Canada. Its pastoral team are all alumni of First Nations Bible College.

The pope’s apology has galvanized Dawson’s desire to share Christ with other indigenous peoples. “I find it more urgent than ever to find a new building [for my church],” she said.

“What the priests and nuns at these residential schools did to us was evil,” Dawson said. “But the worst thing they did to us: They made us indigenous people hate the name of Jesus.”

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A mixed reception

On Monday (July 24), Francis apologized for the Catholic church’s role in setting up Canada’s residential schools and perpetuating decades of abuse against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children.

The pope’s weeklong trip to Canada came on the heels of a visit by indigenous leaders to the Vatican in late March.

Speaking in Spanish at Maskwacis, Alberta—the site of the former Ermineskin Residential School, which was operated by Roman Catholic missionaries from 1895 to 1975—Francis acknowledged the “physical, verbal, psychological, and spiritual abuse” that children suffered at residential schools.

Beginning in 1831, more than 150,000 of these children attended residential schools. And although the last school closed in Saskatchewan in 1996, the trauma of being forced to relinquish their cultural traditions, languages, and practices continues to pervade generations of indigenous peoples.

At Maskwacis, Francis kissed a bright red banner displaying the names of 4,120 children who had died in residential schools and issued a plea for forgiveness for the “deplorable evil”:

I am sorry. I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.

About two-thirds (63%) of indigenous peoples in the country identify themselves as Christian, according to a 2011 poll by Canada’s National Household Survey. More than half are Catholic and the rest are Protestant or Orthodox.

Indigenous evangelical leaders in North America both witnessed and experienced myriad responses to the papal apology, ranging from anger and grief to gratefulness and relief.

“My initial thought was that we don’t need another apology. We need an apology that is lived out,” said Susan McPherson Derendy, who is Nehiyaw-Swampy Cree and teaches theological education through an indigenous lens to First Nations Christians. “But some felt that many residential school survivors and their families needed to hear it.”

Shari Russell, a consultant for the Salvation Army’s Indigenous Ministries, is from the Yellow Quill Nation in Saskatchewan. Her older sisters were sent to Catholic residential schools.

“I have some sadness as my sisters have journeyed on to the other side. This would have been helpful for them to hear,” she said.

Terry Wildman, who is Ojibwe and Yaqui and the US-based director of spiritual growth and leadership at InterVarsity’s Native Ministries, expressed gratitude for the pope’s apology while also recognizing that it had stirred up controversy.

“This doesn’t complete anything, but it opens new doors for further conversation and feedback from indigenous peoples,” he said.

An enduring grief

Last summer, the discovery of numerous unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Marieval, Saskatchewan, horrified the world—their existence evidence of the 25,000 First Nations students who never returned home.

“I know the weight of the burden of grief that our indigenous peoples carry, as I have personally experienced it myself through the loss of my son,” Dawson said.

Dawson’s son was killed three years ago. In moments when the pain has been too great for her to carry, she has called on Jesus for help. Her Christian faith is something she hopes she can share with other indigenous persons she encounters on the street who have suffered similar losses.

Street Church has served its community for 29 years and has run services on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to reach out to the homeless in its vicinity. During the pandemic, the congregation moved from offering food services to providing care packs for visitors, who heard praise and worship songs and testimonies about God while receiving physical nourishment.

As she awaits the fire investigators’ findings, Dawson is looking for a new ground-floor location for Street Church in the Downtown Eastside, one of the city’s poorest areas with one of the largest urban populations of First Nations people across Canada (and where the original church was located). Being there means her church is well poised to reach out to those who are experiencing prolonged suffering brought on by the residential school system.

Hidden benefits

Many of the indigenous leaders interviewed by CT said that Canadian evangelicals are often dismissive of or indifferent toward the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples.

“Many evangelicals say their denomination didn’t run a residential school,” said Russell. “But they need to recognize that the Doctrine of Discovery has permeated the church and its theology. We need to recognize our own ethnocentrism and racism.”

Samantha Martin-Bird, who works for a nonprofit that addresses inequities confronting indigenous young people, grew up in an evangelical church setting and now lives and worships in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The citizen of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba cited King David making amends for Saul’s wrongdoing (2 Sam. 21:1–14) as an illustration of how evangelicals might still be held accountable.

“Evangelicals tend to think mainly about their own personal sin or wrongdoing,” she said. “But in this story, the whole community suffered harm and experienced famine because someone (Saul) who had already died broke a treaty [with the Gibeonites]. David was not related to Saul, but he was still asked to make it right.”

Denominations like the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) have followed in David’s footsteps. Canadian CRC congregations committed to several initiatives from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action, including championing equity in education and educating the laity on this history.

“Even though the CRC didn’t run a residential school, we are beneficiaries of the colonial system that the residential schools represented,” Mike Hogeterp of the CRCNA’s Centre for Public Dialogue told CT last year.

Since 1994, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) has worked to strengthen its ties with the indigenous community. They formed a task force in 1995 to create educational resources for churches. More recently, the EFC presented a paper, “Stewarding Sacred Seeds,” at NAIITS’ 2020 symposium, which outlined seven commitments that were subsequently adopted. These included recommitting to the Reconciliation Proclamation, reviewing existing church resources, repudiating the idea of neutrality on issues pertaining to indigenous justice, and developing a theology of stewardship of land and creation.

“To come alongside Indigenous sisters and brothers is to listen and ask questions,” wrote EFC president Bruce J. Clemenger last year. “When we own the shame of what was done in this land to our neighbours and their ancestors, we will be motivated to pray and seek healing for our country.”

Reimagining education

One area that indigenous Christian leaders are investing in as they journey toward reconciling faith and culture is the field of theological education.

Last July, Russell was seconded to Indigenous Pathways, a nonprofit charitable organization incorporated in Canada and the United States that works globally to improve the future of indigenous peoples through training, community engagement, and formal education.

Part of this work includes her role as associate director at NAIITS (formerly the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies). The indigenous learning community offers MA and PhD programs that encourage the development of written work around biblical and theological themes from indigenous perspectives.

Derendy attended church as a child and teenager, left the faith, and returned in her 20s. A prayer and counseling session she attended in the mid-1990s helped her see herself “as a Cree child of Creator God, as opposed to the negative and toxic stereotypes [of indigenous women] that were a part of societal conditioning.” What Dakota elders later said to her—that God’s will for them was to be good Dakota men—was also pivotal in confirming her journey of faith and providing her with greater guidance and direction.

Today Derendy is Keeper of the Learning Circle at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre in Beausejour, Manitoba, where she is working to implement a curriculum that reflects a decolonized, indigenized approach to theology. The center trains and equips people for indigenous leadership roles in the United Church of Canada and elsewhere.

Indigenous leaders are also embarking on efforts to contextualize the gospel through language recovery.

Last summer, Wildman and his team, made up entirely of North American indigenous people, published the First Nations Version of the New Testament. The decision to publish it in English, he said, was intentional.

“Boarding and residential schools have been very successful in taking our languages from us,” said Wildman, who grew up in Michigan and now lives in Arizona on the traditional lands of the Pima and Tohono O’odham. “Less than 10 percent of us can read our own language. We wanted to take this colonial language, make it serve us, and incorporate wordings and idioms that are more Native-friendly.”

Feedback on the First Nations Version from both indigenous and nonindigenous believers has been “phenomenal,” in Wildman’s words. Just this week, he signed another contract with InterVarsity Press to translate Psalms and Proverbs, slated for publication in 2024.

For Dawson, reconnecting with the language of her culture is key to processing the trauma she experienced. “I wish I could learn my language [more]. I know very little,” she said.

Martin-Bird said that evangelicals should invest in the efforts to revitalize indigenous languages in response to their erasure. Reading the Bible in Ojibwe, Hebrew, and English, she said, is a practice that has enabled her to develop a greater love for Scripture and a deeper appreciation for its richness and complexity.

While she did not feel disconnected from her indigenous identity, she described it as “fractured” due to the church’s colonizing influence. An example of this, she said, is that she is not fluent in Cree or anishinaabemowin (the Ojibwe language). But exploring beloved Bible stories—such as Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Genesis 22 and the account of Jesus’ birth in Matthew—in Ojibwe during Lent and Advent was enriching.

“I wanted to sift through familiar stories and see how different they felt [in another language],” she said.

Looking ahead

In the view of these indigenous evangelical leaders, the grief that persists and the depth and breadth of what they ache to accomplish do not negate opportunities for celebration.

This August, the Salvation Army will host a Celebration of Culture and Pow Wow in Pine Lake Camp, Alberta, where indigenous peoples will have a place to celebrate their heritage and faith.

“Years ago, the church would not have allowed this. Now they’re sponsoring it,” Russell said.

To her, the fact that a Christian ministry is organizing this event gives her hope for the evangelical church at large. “Churches ought to look at how they teach and educate clergy and congregations about what has happened and how we can begin to live in right relationship with one another,” she said.

“The gospel story of Jesus brings life and wholeness. Bringing about and seeing that redemption happen is something I hope and long for.”

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