German Chancellor to Syrian Refugees: ‘Go Home’

But will some Germans lose their local doctors?

Illustration by Rick Szuecs

Last week, German chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that it is time for Syrian refugees in his country to return home. An estimated 1.3 million refugees have arrived in Germany since Syria’s civil war began 14 years ago. Now that Bashar al-Assad’s regime has fallen and a new government is in place, Merz says Syrians must rebuild their country just as Germans did after World War II.

The Bulletin sat down with Russell Moore, Mike Cosper, and CT contributing writer Ken Chitwood, who is based in Germany, to learn more about the country’s demographics and deportation plans. Listen to the whole conversation in episode 223. Here are edited excerpts.

Who is Friedrich Merz, and how is he similar or different from his predecessor, Angela Merkel?

Ken Chitwood: Merz and his center-left, center-right coalition came together in the wake of a coalition that Angela Merkel led. Part of their platform addressed rising public concerns about the immigrant population in Germany—perceived fears about public attacks, housing strains, public finances, and other issues connected to immigration.

At the same time, the far-right alternative for Germany capitalized on those fears and concerns. Friedrich Merz felt he needed to head them off. To do this, he adopted more and more of their language and now is putting that into policy with his coalition government.

A lot of people remember when Merkel addressed the nation and said, We can take in a million Syrian refugees. We can give them a home here in Germany. That has come to haunt Germany in some ways. Many feel we still can offer that invitation, and that’s driven both left and right politics, including the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Russell Moore: Christianity tells us how to respond to refugees, but it doesn’t necessarily craft exactly what the refugee policy ought to be. This is why sometimes communities struggle to figure out how to balance care of refugees without overburdening the system. Sometimes that’s a legitimate need-and-prudence sort of conversation. In this instance, you must also ask the additional question of whether Syria has changed enough that refugees going back would be safe.

Mike Cosper: I think part of the reason we’ve arrived at this place is a fundamental failure of assimilation. At the beginning of this process, I think there was this assumption that if Germany welcomed the stranger, they could integrate them into society and show them the benefits of the West. Germany has a massive welfare state, and they’ve been extremely generous to these refugees. Germany has had a labor shortage, so refugees who could fill some of the labor needs were seen as a potential benefit. Even conceptually, it wasn’t just purely an act of mercy.

I think they didn’t understand how powerful culture is, particularly when a large population comes into the country and lives in isolated enclaves. Assimilation becomes that much more difficult. Though it has been overstated by some in the right-wing, many folks who fled Islamic radicalism found themselves in communities with a reactionary spirit to the libertine West, and that anti-Western spirit turned them into Islamic radicals.

Germany has seen these terror attacks, often one-off things where a person pulls a knife in public and starts randomly stabbing people. You can imagine that being extremely unsettling. The far-right has really preyed upon that as well.

Chitwood: It’s important to know that attacks of this sort predated Merkel’s original statement. Many Syrian refugees are now German citizens; there is a longer dialogue around these issues. A lot of these individuals are not just critiquing the West as a whole but the German asylum system itself, the limitations placed on their ability to work and contribute to the workforce. Germany places limitations on where they can live and how they can connect with German neighbors.

I live in Eisenach, a town of 40,000 in the geographic center of Germany, in an apartment building with Nigerian and Albanian neighbors. I was talking today with Syrians and Iraqis, and we don’t feel here locally that we have an integration problem on either side. There are differences in how we approach religion, language, or food, but there’s been a rich exchange there as well. That’s where the church comes in.

The church has been transformed over the last several years because of this surge in refugees. Reports suggest that now half of European churches have at least 20 percent of their membership made up of people with a migrant background. It’s changed the way we do church here in Germany as well, whether that be Protestants, Catholics, or evangelicals. Churches also have critiqued the asylum system and deportations, offering church asylum and helping those navigating the system and the realities that they face back home.

The realities of home are becoming a particular pain point for Syrians who do not feel that their country is ready for them to move back, as much as they may or may not want to. Merz’s recent language has been met with fear among Syrian Christians and other Syrians here in Germany. His own party has also critiqued him, saying Syria is not ready for this. It’s not the same situation as Germany after World War II.

Germany has a significant aging population. Ten thousand Syrians are working in German hospitals. Germany has the only G7 economy that’s shrinking. It would seem that Germany needs immigrants to flourish.

Chitwood: This morning I drove outside my city, which I don’t do very often. I walk everywhere: My bakery, grocery store, and hairdresser are all around the corner. But to go to a doctor this morning, I had to drive about 40 minutes from home. It doesn’t sound like a big burden, but we have a doctor shortage in our part of the country. It’s difficult for me to get appointments at a doctor’s office in my city, and that’s true across former East Germany. Some of our doctors are from Palestine, from Syria. We appreciate them; they mean we get better health care. We’d feel the pinch across all sectors if our Syrian neighbors left.

I’m not a big advocate of the economic argument to be hospitable to migrants, but it’s part of the equation and certainly speaks to those who may not be moved by humanitarian reasons to see people avoid speedy deportation. Many people still await decisions on their asylum applications and cannot work. They would love to go into the workforce. I know several Nigerian Christians who have been waiting for years to be able to work. They’re still not able because their asylum cases haven’t been decided.

There’s also the neighborly angle. These are people who are part of our cities, churches, and communities now. Since Merz’s announcement, my neighbors have expressed fears for all of us. We’d lose connections and neighborhoods we’ve built over the last decade if they left.

Merz desires to incentivize people to leave on their own, but Syria is a complicated place right now with a fledgling government. Is it a good place to return to? What is the real possibility of rebuilding at this time?

Cosper: It depends on who you are. Many refugees that fled the Syrian civil war were Christians, and the situation for them right now is still precarious. Some of that is less about religion and more about ethnic identity, which inside Syria is a very complicated thing. Syria is a diverse place. Those who would like to or would be capable of contributing to building a new area, by all means, incentivize them to go. But if this is pursued too broadly, you may send some people right into the jaws of serious ethnic conflict that has erupted since the regime fell.

Moore: We actually don’t know what Syria is going to be. Everyone is inhaling right now and hoping against hope for the best. Unfortunately, we also know there’s a dark history with which to contend, and who knows if hope is going to hold?

Cosper: Yes, the president put on a suit, but he was a member of al-Qaeda. We’re in a place where we don’t have great faith and confidence that it’s a new day for the country.

Chitwood: The day that Syria was liberated, Syrians of all stripes here in Eisenach celebrated: cars going up and down the road, Syrian flags, music.

I went to get a haircut the next day because that’s where I talked to people from Syria and Iraq, Yazidis and Kurds, and people of all types coming from those conflict zones. As much as they celebrated the day before, the next day the sentiment was “We don’t know what comes next.” That feeling has persisted: simultaneous celebration at what could be but simultaneous apprehension about what they don’t know. The vast majority don’t want to head home right now, regardless of whether they are Christian or Yazidi or something else. They’re uncertain about their country’s future. They hope for the best, but they know they have it good here in Germany and want to remain.

Cosper: I’m glad you mentioned the Kurds and the Yazidis, especially. The Yazidi community in Syria and Iraq was brutally devastated by ISIS and ISIS-associated affiliates and other terror groups. They have been a profoundly persecuted minority across the Middle East. One would hope that whatever policy emerges here will take that into account.

Moore: These are complicated policy decisions, but we must remember that these are either our brothers and sisters in Christ or our neighbors in our mission field. These are real human beings. While most people are powerless to do anything about what’s happening in Germany, you can reach out locally and care for refugee communities in your own neighborhood. You can pray for a peaceful and stable Syria.

- More from Ken Chitwood

News

Churches Vandalized Amid Colombia’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

Hernán Restrepo

“This difficult episode awakened a deeper love for the house of God, the place where we gather.”

Vandalism on the walls of Iglesia Dios Está Formando Un Pueblo (God Is Forming His People).

Photo courtesy of IDEFUP pastor Marco Acosta Rico.

As thousands of people took to the streets of the Colombian capital of Bogotá to express solidarity with Palestine on October 7, nine church staff at Iglesia Dios Está Formando Un Pueblo (IDEFUP, translated as “God Is Forming His People”) stayed locked inside its building as hooded individuals broke windows, dumped garbage in front of its door, and spray-painted slogans against Israel and the US on the church’s façade.

One likely reason they targeted IDEFUP, a church with 1,500 parishioners and 38 years of history, is the church’s logo—a blue Star of David with a globe at its center.

“It was deeply painful and disappointing to witness an act of disrespect committed by people influenced by antisemitic rhetoric,” said Bogotá city council member and IDEFUP pastor Marco Acosta Rico. “This event not only affected my family and me but also had a profound impact on our entire congregation.”

IDEFUP wasn’t the only church targeted during the pro-Palestinian protests called for by the national government last month. In Medellín and Bucaramanga, media reported that protesters vandalized religious buildings along the route of demonstrations, including an evangelical church. On October 24, a group of students damaged the cloister and plaza of Santo Domingo, which is next to a Catholic church, in the historic center of Popayán in southwest Colombia.

While religious freedom groups warn that attacks on Christians in some regions of Colombia have increased in recent years as intertwined with drug trafficking and armed conflict in agricultural areas, the recent vandalisms have more to do with growing secular intolerance and antisemitism in the country under leftist president Gustavo Petro.

Petro has called on the UN to create an army to “liberate Palestine,” banned the sale of coal to Israel, broke off diplomatic relations with the country, and appointed anti-Zionist “rabbi” Richard Gamboa as the new director of the Interior Ministry’s Office of Religious Affairs, which is responsible for coordinating interfaith dialogue and promoting religious freedom in the country. (Colombia’s Jewish community does not recognize him as a rabbi, as he reportedly purchased his rabbinical degree for $160 from a Florida institution.)

Petro also called citizens to join pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks, which brought students, artists, and social groups onto the streets, as well as masked groups that destroyed ATMs, smashed shop windows, and painted or destroyed monuments.

A former M-19 guerrilla leader in the ’80s, Petro is the first left-wing president in Colombia’s history. Colombians voted him into office in 2022, a year after a series of protests against increased taxes, corruption, and health care reform proposed by the previous president. Since US president Donald Trump entered his second term, Petro has clashed with his American counterpart over US military aircraft deporting thousands of migrants to Colombia, strikes on a boat Trump claimed was carrying illegal drugs, and Petro’s call for American soldiers to disobey Trump at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York.

Marcos Peckel, executive director of the Confederation of Jewish Communities of Colombia (CCJC), said that the pro-Palestinian protests in Colombia did not surprise him. “The demonstrations, not only here but in various parts of the world, have become exhibitions of hatred against Israel, against Jews, against the West, against the United States, against Europe, and against all those they consider allies or friends of Israel; and churches are part of that group.”

In a country of 53 million people, Jews are a tiny community, making up around 6,000 people. However, Jewish families like the Gilinskis own large companies in the food, hotel, banking, and media sectors. Many evangelicals support Israel, with church leaders holding annual events like Colombia Bendice a Israel (“Colombia Blesses Israel”).

The political polarization over Israel has led protesters to attack any sign perceived as contrary to the pro-Palestinian cause without distinguishing between institutions and people. In recent weeks, that has included the vandalism of IDEFUP.

“From its inception, the Star of David has represented the spiritual identity of our church,” Acosta said, referring to the church logo and the blue and white colors of the church’s façade. “It reflects a deep conviction: Just as the people of Israel were chosen and set apart by God, IDEFUP identifies with that same biblical truth.”

Later in October, a pro-Palestinian protest in Popayán led to the defacement of a Catholic heritage site. A group of students painted curse words on the walls of the cloister and plaza of Santo Domingo, which the Dominican order built in 1589. When members of the mayoral office and local residents tried to protect the site, the students threw paint in their faces, shoved and pushed them, and shouted insults.

“The damage was not only physical, they also attacked the memory and identity that belong to us all,” said Permanent Board for the Holy Week, a foundation seeking to promote Popayán as a tourist destination during Holy Week.

Authorities have responded with investigations into the vandalism and calls for order. The Bogotá City Council condemned the events and demanded guarantees for the exercise of peaceful protest. The city’s attorney general’s office opened investigations into the acts of vandalism, and the Colombian National Police requested public assistance in identifying those responsible.

Acosta told a local news radio station that when he called the police emergency line the day after the protest, “the local commander told us that the National Government had given orders not to take action.” Yet under the mayor’s orders, the national prosecutor is investigating. In Popayán, police have not yet made any arrests for the vandalism.

Following the defacement of IDEFUP, the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia demanded concrete measures from the government, including a greater police presence during demonstrations, coordination between march organizers and churches, and protocols in place to protect places of worship during mass events.

Acosta said volunteers from their church cleaned up the trash and painted over the walls and door covered in by graffiti. The church received messages of solidarity and encouragement from the Christian and Jewish communities online, as well as offers to repair the damage to the building.

“Our community did not allow fear or anguish to take root in our hearts,” Acosta said. “On the contrary, this difficult episode awakened a deeper love for the house of God, the place where we gather, disciple, and grow together in faith, service, and purpose.”

On October 12, the first Sunday after the vandalism, assistant pastor Jeisson Camacho acknowledged those who were brave enough to come to church that morning.

“Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for understanding that gathering together is part of a life of surrender, a life of obedience, and a life of sacrifice.”

Books

How Technology Transformed the Global Church

F. Lionel Young III

A new book examines key pivot points from the print revolution to the digital era.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Cambridge University Press

Robert Webber once reminded evangelicals that “the road to the future runs through the past.” If evangelicalism is fracturing, we may just find our way to unity through what Kevin Vanhoozer called “Protestant catholicity” by retracing our steps. This, of course, raises the thorny question “What is an evangelical?” People have made valiant efforts to sort evangelicals into groups or types.

Evangelicals are a diverse bunch, and the rapid growth of the movement in the Global South has only increased this diversity. It needs to be said more often and more clearly that evangelicalism is not an American movement—it is a global one—and the vast majority of the world’s evangelicals today are African, Asian, and Latin American. Evangelicalism was a transnational movement from the very outset and has never been confined to a single nation or ethnicity.

David Bebbington, whose intellectual labors laid the cornerstone for building out a robust evangelical historiography, is a British evangelical whose perspectives have helpfully challenged American-centric descriptions of the movement. In this new era of world Christianity, deeper engagement with the global church (and the older church) could lead us closer to an evangelical catholicity.

Billy Graham’s life, shaped by encounters with the global church, offers an important precedent. One example is Graham’s friendship with John Stott, whom he met during his travels in Britain. In his autobiography Just as I Am, Graham wrote that Stott became “one of my best friends.” Stott, an evangelical and a Cambridge-educated Anglican, was influential in Graham’s journey toward a more ecumenical evangelicalism, one less marked by the fundamentalism Graham encountered as a student at Bob Jones College.

During the 1954 All-Scotland Crusade, Graham publicly announced he no longer considered himself a fundamentalist—a transformation that would have significant implications for American evangelicalism during the second half of the century. To reframe David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad, we might say that Billy Graham set out to change the world and changed American evangelicalism instead.

David N. Hempton’s Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era shows how encounters often take place at crossroads or networks and have significantly transformed global Christianity. His work, conceived for the prestigious Gifford Lectures, is a selective retelling of Christianity over the past five centuries. Hempton, a distinguished professor at Harvard Divinity School, blends narrative history with imaginative historiography. His methodology as a social historian shifts away from nations, denominations, and institutions and focuses instead on “transnational flows and networks.”

He frames his analysis through three interlocking concepts: nuclei (religious ideas), networks (the channels by which ideas travel), and nodes (the places where ideas are received and reshaped). He admits that preparing this work in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic further animated his work about how ideas spread.

The book begins with print culture in the 16th century and closes with digital media in the 21st. Luther’s theological ideas—justification by faith and the freedom of the Christian—functioned as nuclei, with the printing press as the network spreading them. The print revolution transformed religion as Reformation ideas spread like “a religious virus” through sermons, treatises, Bibles, and hymns. Cities such as Wittenberg, Germany; Nuremberg, Germany; and Basel, Switzerland became key nodes of encounter and dissemination.

Hempton applies this framework to other events in Christian history: the Jesuits’ Spiritual Exercises as nuclei linking formation and mission, Our Lady of Guadalupe as a single image generating widespread devotion, and British evangelicals recruiting Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone through transatlantic networks.

He turns to Protestant internationalism—Pietism, evangelical missions, dispensationalism, fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism. Though marked by conflict, evangelicals constructed what he calls a “global fraternity.” He examines women’s networks in the 20th century, showing how the nuclei of feminism has worked in both egalitarian and patriarchal contexts. He concludes, “Women have found imaginative ways to create spheres of influence, and sometimes even to control, the religious traditions they inhabit.”

The final chapter on the digital revolution explores how technology has “re-imagined sacred space” and democratized the religious marketplace. Large ministries have harnessed digital technology most successfully, promoting the idea that “bigness” is a sign of blessing. A new group of specialists has emerged whose authority is based more on technical expertise than pastoral credentials. Case studies include the spread of the prosperity gospel, the global influence of Hillsong Worship, and the worldwide rise of digital platforms. But as Byung-Chul Han observes, digital technology produces “more communication but not more community.” The chapter on digital technology is chock-full of thought-provoking implications for the church.

Hempton’s mastery of secondary literature is impressive. At times it feels like reading a well-written annotated bibliography on major developments in Christian history from the Reformation to the present. His impressive engagement of hundreds of academic monographs is one of the most important contributions of this work.

He particularly notes the need for more research on the influence of money in the history of Christianity—how giving and spending have shaped expressions of faith. “Following the money” along networks can tell us a lot about the history of Christian movements. Historians such as Mark Noll and Larry Eskridge have touched on these issues in More Money, More Ministry: Money and Evangelicals in Recent North American History, and their work deserves a wider hearing, but Hempton underscores the need for additional research.

But not everyone will agree with his generalization that Christianity has had a “subversive alliance with imperial power” and has been guilty of “cultural rape.” While some academics sustain the Christianity-and-colonialism trope, Dana Robert and many others have challenged older models, showing that the issues are far more complex. Missionaries often “converted colonialism” for evangelistic purposes, criticized abuses, and made significant sacrifices for those they came to serve. Still, Hempton’s critique deserves to be heard. Christians have often failed to live up to the claims of the gospel, and the best apologetic is to confess, not defend, our sins.

Hempton delivered his lectures at the University of Edinburgh, itself a significant node where new ideas have emerged in the study of world Christianity. Scholars like Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Brian Stanley, and Kirsteen Kim have shown that Christianity is both local and global, polycentric and interconnected. Walls especially noted how the gospel (nuclei) was carried by missionaries (networks) to new lands (nodes), where it flourished through Indigenous witness.

This transmission created something new without losing the essence of the old. To use a metaphor from dendrology (which Hempton mentions in chapter 1), when the old vine of the gospel is planted in new soils, it produces a new wine with distinctively local notes. Hempton’s framework offers a taxonomy that encourages historians to situate their research within these broader global developments and to show how nations, denominations, and institutes are connected to the whole.

He offers another key takeaway for evangelicals: Understanding the evangelical movement as a diverse “global fraternity” also provides a more hopeful way of thinking about the present and imagining the future. Christianity has always been a global movement. Even in its evangelical expressions, it has never been confined to one nation, denomination, or institution. The ancient church had centers in Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Canterbury, and Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Evangelicalism itself began as a transatlantic movement within global Protestantism, which was itself rooted in what fourth-century Christians called the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”

Global evangelicalism is part of a very old story, one that began before the 18th century. Evangelicals today can find wisdom and encouragement by remaining rooted in the long story that began before the foundation of the world. And just as we are part of an old story, we are connected to a big story, one that now includes a “global fraternity” of some 600 million evangelicals. Global evangelicals have not given up on the movement, nor are they abandoning the label.

As Brian C. Stiller recently noted in his contribution to Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now and Could Be, “A decision on what name best suits us globally is not a choice we can leave for Americans to decide.”

When I went to Kenya some 20 years ago to teach church history at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology, I suggested to my colleague Mark Shaw that I might include postmodernism in the curriculum. His clever response was that postmodern theory is an interesting “tribal concern,” more relevant to Western academia. Yes, there are tribal matters for us to consider—such as who American evangelicals voted for in the last presidential election. But these are tribal matters. Let us consider them but not lose sight that evangelicals are part of a global fraternity that John Stott simply called “gospel people and Bible people.”

F. Lionel Young III is a senior research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He is the author of World Christianity and the Unfinished Task: A Very Short Introduction.

- More from F. Lionel Young III

News

Alvin Plantinga, God’s Philosopher

Daniel Silliman

He made the case that evidence and arguments aren’t necessary for rational, reasonable belief.

University of Notre Dame / Alvin Plantinga / Edits by CT

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga turns 93 on Saturday, November 15. He is the first long-time university professor to be part of CT’s new series, Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which started one month ago with happy birthday wishes to Joni Eareckson Tada.

Plantinga has been called “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God,” “arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century,” and simply “God’s philosopher.” He is one of the of the most-cited contemporary philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is widely credited with a renaissance of Christian philosophy and the revitalization of the philosophy of religion.

“In the 1950s there was not a single published defense of religious belief by a prominent philosopher,” said philosopher Kelly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s students. “By the 1990s there were literally hundreds of books and articles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Heidelberg, defending and developing the spiritual dimension. The difference between 1950 and 1990 is, quite simply, Alvin Plantinga.”

The philosopher made major contributions to the field of epistemology—the study of knowledge and the justification of knowledge. He deployed modal logic and meticulous, analytic arguments to attack logical positivism and classical foundationalism, making the case there were flaws in their standards of rationality.

“The field was transformed,” fellow philosopher and longtime friend Nicholas Wolterstorff said in 2011. “Once the positivist strictures about talking about God were removed, philosophical theology flourished as it has not since the middle ages. … For philosophy of religion and the central disciplines of epistemology and metaphysics, his fingerprints are indeed everywhere.”

Starting with his book God and Other Minds and continuing with more than a dozen other titles, including The Nature of Necessity, Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga argued that theistic belief is reasonable, rational, and sensible. He went so far as to make the case that it was rational to believe without evidence or a good argument—or any argument.

Belief in God, according to Plantinga, was “properly basic.”

“There certainly are arguments for the existence of God—the so-called theistic proofs; but I don’t really need them,” Plantinga said. “People who believe in God but don’t believe on the basis of arguments—and that would certainly be most of us who believe in God—are perfectly sensible and perfectly OK from an intellectual view. … That’s what I’ve spent most of my life arguing. It may be a small point, but I think it’s important.”

Plantinga was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1932. His parents, Lettie (Bossenbroek) and Cornelius Plantinga, were committed members of the Christian Reformed Church, part of the Dutch Calvinist tradition.

Plantinga later said that he never remembered a time he wasn’t Christian. In some of his earliest memories, he was sitting in church, sweltering, and listening to a sermon he didn’t understand (because it was in Dutch) mix with the sound of the summer cicadas. Plantinga did not go through a transformative conversion experience or have any kind of epiphany about God, though he could point to several occasions when he felt a divine presence.

He started taking his faith seriously for himself when he was 8 or 9 and engaging in theological debates at 11 or 12—predestination, double predestination, divine foreknowledge, and free will were all popular topics.

Plantinga considered becoming a pastor but didn’t feel especially drawn to the ministry. “I probably wouldn’t have been a very good pastor,” he later said. “I probably would have bored people talking about philosophy.”

The family moved to South Dakota for a teaching job and then North Dakota, where Cornelius Plantinga instructed students in Latin, Greek, philosophy, and psychology at Jamestown College, halfway between Fargo and Bismarck.

Jamestown was a spot on the prairie known as the birthplace of Western novelist Louis L’Amour and would come to be home of the world’s largest buffalo statue. But Plantinga loved it.

“I remember with delight and a sort of longing, the haunting, supernal beauty of the prairie on a June morning just after sunrise—the marvellous liquid song of the meadow lark, the golden sunlight, the air cool and delicious and laden with the fragrance of a thousand wildflowers,” he wrote. “I left regretfully.”

He left in 1950 at the age of 17, when his father got a job teaching in the psychology department at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Plantinga didn’t stay long. He got a scholarship to attend Harvard and enrolled that fall.

Visiting his family over spring break, Plantinga happened to sit in on William Harry Jellema’s philosophy class. He was riveted.

“Jellema lectured in magisterial style, with the entire history of Western philosophy obviously at his fingertips,” Plantinga later wrote. “He seemed to display astonishing and profound insights into the inner dynamics of modern philosophy. … I came deeply under his spell; had he told me black was white I would have had a genuine intellectual struggle.”

Plantinga returned to Grand Rapids and enrolled at Calvin to study with Jellema. After graduating he went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan. He was unhappy with the analytic philosophy then in vogue—the thinking seemed so small and incapable of saying anything interesting about the world—but he did develop an interest in arguments over the standards of rationality and what counts as a rational belief.

“I conceived a particular dislike for the dreaded Verifiability Criterion of Meaning,” he later said. “I could never see the slightest reason for accepting it.”

Plantinga carried that idea with him through his doctoral studies at Yale University and into his first teaching position at Wayne State University, then a major center for analytic philosophy in Detroit. There, in rigorous debates that lasted days and even weeks, he started using modal logic to recover—and sharpen—medieval scholasticism.

“A working knowledge of these modal matters is absolutely essential to clear thinking on most philosophical topics; nearly all philosophical topics, if pushed far enough, wind up crucially involving matters of modality,” he later wrote. “The same goes for theology. … It is essential for decent work on many of the main topics of theology.”

Plantinga started working on the problem of the rationality of belief. Critics of Christianity said evidence for belief in God is insufficient and the argument that God is self-evident is circular.

Plantinga considered arguments for the existence of God—cosmological, ontological, and teleological—and judged each unsuccessful. Then he looked at the arguments against the existence of God, including the problem of evil, the paradox of omnipotence, and verificationism, and concluded that “none of these survives close scrutiny.”

The young philosopher then developed his own argument, borrowing and adapting the solution to what is known as “the problem of other minds.”

People cannot possibly be wrong about their own existence, as René Descartes demonstrated with his famous declaration, “I think therefore I am,” but one could easily be mistaken about another’s consciousness. We don’t have access to other minds. We can’t know minds inductively or deductively—but we can extrapolate and analogize and conclude that people are not cleverly designed robots but have thoughts, feelings, and experiences as vibrant and real as our own.

“I conclude,” Plantinga wrote in 1967, “that belief in other minds and belief in God are in the same epistemological boat. … But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.”

The argument was innovative, bold, and transformative. But Plantinga decided he hadn’t gone far enough. He had accepted that idea that beliefs were only rational if they were based on arguments. But most people don’t develop propositions about other minds. They just assume—and that is rational, Plantinga thought.

Similarly, someone might remember eating breakfast, but if pressed, that person couldn’t provide evidence of corn flakes. Nor could the person argue the past breakfast was self-evident or necessarily true. And yet it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe in breakfast anyway.

Some beliefs, Plantinga concluded, don’t need evidence or arguments.

“Beliefs of this sort are typically and properly taken as basic,” he argued. “It would be a mistake to describe them as groundless.”

Plantinga said that of course there were arguments for God’s existence—he even compiled a list of two dozen that he found compelling—but they weren’t actually necessary.

“One doesn’t need arguments for justified and rational Christian belief,” he wrote. “Theistic belief … can have warrant sufficient for knowledge for someone, even if he or she doesn’t believe on the basis of theistic arguments, and even if in fact no good theistic arguments exist.”

Plantinga continued to develop that argument in articles and books, including the trilogy Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief. He also tackled a range of other subjects, including the problem of evil, the nature of necessity, the nature of God, and the relationship between religion and science.

Plantinga taught at Calvin College, where he replaced Jellema in the philosophy department, from 1963 to 1982. He taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1982 until his retirement in 2010.

Notre Dame named a fellowship after Plantinga. Baylor University named an award for him. He received the Templeton Prize worth $1.4 million in 2017.

“His influence cuts across faiths. It cuts across generations,” philosopher Meghan Sullivan said when Plantinga received the award. “Professor Plantinga, your work in epistemology, metaphysics and religion emboldened many philosophers to wonder again.”

Plantinga noted that he hadn’t converted a lot of philosophers to Christian faith, nor was Christianity the predominant view at the end of his career. But he was satisfied with what he had accomplished.

“What I’ve always wanted to do as a philosopher is defend Christianity—defend a Christian way of thinking about things and argue that to be a Christian is not to be irrational or senseless or silly,” he told Christianity Today. “You can reasonably be a Christian.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

For John Jenkins, CT “Has Been Courageous”

Pastor John Jenkins shares how CT has made an impact on his life.

First Baptist Glen Arden

John Jenkins serves as the senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Glenarden in Maryland, where he has been developing “dynamic disciples” since 1989. John also serves as the president of Converge, a movement of over 1,800 churches that start and strengthen churches and send missionaries worldwide. He is also the Chairman of the Board for the National Association of Evangelicals. In 2023, he released his first book, Grace to Grow.

John recently shared with Christianity Today about how the ministry is making an impact in the Church and his personal life.

How is CT making an impact on the non-white evangelical community?

CT’s willingness to engage the minority community demonstrates a true heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. The purpose-filled action is engaging a segment of the community that would normally not be engaged. I celebrate the hiring and use of the non-white evangelical community that facilitates a level of unity in the body of Christ that is desperately needed.

I support CT because they were willing to enter into a world that they had not been in for 70 years. They were willing to come into the Black community, the Asian community, the non-white community. They were willing to come into that community, and I’m so thankful for their willingness.

Why is CT’s Big Tent Initiative so important in this cultural, political, and Christian moment?

The failure of the majority evangelical community to engage the wider Christian community leads to further disunity in the body of Christ. This is being presently seen throughout our country as the division appears to be getting wider.

CT is building bridges across dividing lines by writing more articles that are of interest to the minority community, hiring writers who can speak to the minority community, and sponsoring events to engage the non-white community.

How has CT shaped your personal life and ministry throughout the years?

My normal environment and connections would not usually bring me in contact with certain segments of the evangelical community. However, the influence and engagement of CT with me and others like me has brought me into relationships with many that I may not have been exposed to.

You mentioned that you have seen CT be courageous. Explain this a bit.

I was significantly impressed when I saw CT speak truth to the political system in our country, even while most evangelical organizations did not have the courage to speak the same truth.

This is why I support CT and stand behind it—because CT has been courageous. I’m proud—honored—to be able to stand behind what they are doing.

Theology

Chatbot Companionship Will Make Our Loneliness Crisis Worse

Russell Moore

Columnist

People want relationship without tension. Genuine intimacy requires more.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

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

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, journalist Damon Beres warns about the deceptiveness of AI companionship with the admonition “Get a Real Friend.” His analysis recognizes that real friendship is harder than it seems. But as the major tech companies develop sophisticated artificial intelligence for erotic purposes as well as for friendship, Christians are sleepwalking into a future the Bible describes as hell. The Prophets saw the chatbots coming. They told us where that path leads, and it’s not to freedom from loneliness.

What Beres describes is the exact right combination of societal dangers hitting all at the same time. People are disconnected, with institutions failing and friendships—much less intimate relationships—harder to make and sustain. It is now very possible to rapidly develop lifelike AI companions. That development is led by a small cohort of tech bros who have a motive for profit and almost no personal concept of a what a person is. And as Beres notes, “We are at the very beginning of the chatbot era.”

Beres documents the musings of the leaders in the race toward chatbot companions and lovers, going back to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” of 2023. It affirms, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” Beres points out the irony of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media innovations led to unprecedented disconnection and polarization, offering to cure those very problems with personal-seeming “companions” that can provide what the digital age has evaporated: friends.

And that’s all even before we get to Elon Musk—who has fathered multiple children with multiple women outside of marriage—now offering us sexbots that promise to get more and more lifelike until they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

One aspect of our accelerated time is that in-depth analyses such as Beres’s are often confirmed and illustrated by events that happen between when the piece is written and when it is read. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reports this week that OpenAI founder Sam Altman and other tech titans are funding startups working to create genetically engineered babies. This is not a side venture from the chatbot project but is of a piece with it.

After all, as Beres notes, part of the problem the AI-companion revolution seeks to solve is people lacking friendships, but part of it is that people want friendships without friction—the kind of unpredictable and nonengineerable differences and tensions that make genuine intimacy possible. In the imagined utopia of the tech bros, we need never have a lover who is not perfectly attuned to our desires, a friend who does not completely share our interests and opinions, and a child who doesn’t share all the genetic traits we want to pass on.

There is no one to stop this. The gerontocracies in Congress cannot even understand how social media works, much less regulate the companies 20 years into the project, well after it’s too late. The economy is increasingly dependent on this small group of utopian entrepreneurs, who often own “old” media companies or social media platforms.

The prophet Isaiah knew exactly what draws us to these kinds of promises. He depicted idols—technology constructed by human hands but meant to satisfy spiritual longings—as a form of self-deception. The prophet described an ironsmith or a carpenter using technical tools—hammers, axes, pencils, compasses—to create something that appears to be human (Isa. 44:9–16). The technician takes some raw materials to burn in a fire to get warm. “And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it,” Isaiah wrote. “He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” (v. 17, ESV throughout).

The problem, Isaiah thundered, is not just that this is an offense against God but also that it fails on its own terms. The thing made with ears, eyes, and a mouth cannot hear, see, or speak. The personal nature of it comes only from the willed self-deception of the idol maker: “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (v. 20).

A chatbot can seem to be a better friend, or a better lover, than anyone in real life—and in some ways, that’s true. Chatbots are artificial, constructed to echo to users exactly what they want to hear. There’s no risk of being misunderstood or disagreed with or hurt. And yet what is that relationship? In the end, these conversations are only an echo of ourselves.

One example is sexbots. Simultaneously and incoherently, they appeal to a nature that wants to be both an animal, driven by instincts and appetites, and a god, unleashed from the limitations of creatureliness. As reflected in the Bible, that leads to humanity becoming a beast that declares itself to be a god, demanding worship through an image of itself that can speak (Rev. 13:1–18).

But the pull toward this self-exaltation is powerful precisely because it encompasses our cultural and technological ecosystems (“following the course of this world”), gets driven along by unseen forces (“following the prince of the power of the air”), and promises gratification of our most primal appetites (“in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind”), as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:2–3.

The tech bros have marketed these products by appealing to rage—giving sad, lonely people artificial victories in opportunities to “own” people and troll them online. And they are marketing by appealing to lust—giving sad, lonely people artificial intimacy with images and machines pretending to be persons. Where does this lead? Ultimately, we find that in disconnecting from real community and cleaving to our own prompts and algorithmically discerned preferences, we are all alone. We cave in on ourselves.

The church cannot answer this as long as we deny it is taking place. But if we see what’s happening, we can offer something that will seem increasingly strange in an artificial world. We can offer a community gathered around bread and wine and an ancient gospel. We can offer a group of people who differ on the things the machines and their creators tell us are most important—politics, wealth, claims of racial or cultural superiority—precisely because we are convinced that technological progress cannot fix our deepest problems.

And we can offer an old kind of friendship, not just with each other but with God, friendship that a chatbot cannot replicate. One of the most startling things about the Jesus of the Gospels is that he fully knows those he encounters (John 1:48–49) while completely confounding their expectations of him (6:60–69). In a world of sycophantic chatbots, Christ disturbs what we want enough that we can find in him what we need: one who tells us the truth—one who is, in fact, the truth.

The church is not ready for the chatbot-companion revolution. It will make loneliness and disconnection worse. We should be ready for that world, ready with a radical counter-vision. We can say, “What a friend we have in Jesus” and really know what that means.

Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Culture

What Broke the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Jen Hatmaker’s trajectory illustrates the fraught world of spiritual influencerhood and the disappearance of the messy middle.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Few figures capture the rise and unraveling of the evangelical blogosphere era quite like Jen Hatmaker.

The author from Austin, Texas, was part of a wave of Gen X women whose blogs about faith and family became platforms of spiritual authority. Hatmaker’s laugh-out-loud storytelling and authenticity made her a household name among churchgoing women, and her viral reach turned into publishing deals, national speaking tours, and morning-show interviews.

Now, a decade later, Hatmaker no longer considers herself part of the evangelical networks and subculture where she rose to fame. Her latest bestseller, Awake, released this fall, tells readers about her trajectory from the stages of mainstay evangelical women’s conferences to the mainstream, spiritually adjacent spaces she now occupies. Hatmaker faced pushback for her stance on racial justice and her shift to affirm same-sex relationships. She eventually stepped away from the church, divorced, and has begun to rebuild her life.

And she’s not alone. In a recent interview, Hatmaker said that among a group of six friends from the Christian blogosphere, three had ended their marriages to ministry leaders they met in Bible college. Their departure from the evangelical speaking and writing world is part of a bigger shift in the Christian media landscape. Hatmaker still has a massive following, now in a niche alongside thoughtful, spiritually curious or spiritual-adjacent influencers whose content speaks to women around midlife (think Mel Robbins, Brene Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert—Oprah Winfrey was the prototype).

But the evangelical women’s blogosphere that once launched Hatmaker and her peers no longer exists—not in the broad, ecumenical, grassroots form of the 2010s. In its place, we see Christian influencers self-sorting by ideology, and young women now face a fragmented media landscape without the shared spaces that once defined evangelical womanhood.

In the 1990s and 2000s, national events and conference stops gathered evangelical women together and platformed high-profile speakers such as Christine Caine, Patsy Clairmont, Lisa Harper, and Luci Swindoll. In the same vein, The Belong Tour, affiliated with Women of Faith, and the If: Gathering brought Hatmaker and other popular voices onstage.

That model has collapsed. “COVID sort of broke everything,” said author Hannah Anderson. “Even before that, the conference circuit was disrupted by online life.”

And as online life has turned partisan, so have the evangelical women’s spaces that have emerged in recent years. Author Allie Beth Stuckey’s conference, Share the Arrows, drew 6,700 women to Dallas last month for an event branded not only as Christian but also as politically conservative.

The 33-year-old has 850,000 followers on Instagram and hosts the popular podcast Relatable. Her recent book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion—a New York Times best-seller—foregrounds Stuckey’s faith and conservative politics.

Stuckey told Religion News Service that the conference spans a “pretty narrow” scope of theology and politics, unlike other Christian women’s events that “dabble in social and racial justice.”

“This is probably one of the biggest Christian women’s conferences out there, too, and it’s only our second year,” she said. “I do think that tells us a little bit about where Christian women are headed.”

Popular influencers like Sadie Robertson Huff and Madison Prewett-Troutt have managed to build big personal platforms by leveraging reality television stardom into Christian content creation (Robertson’s family is featured on the show Duck Dynasty and Prewett-Troutt was a on The Bachelor). Robertson has spoken publicly about her support for Donald Trump; Prewett-Troutt has interviewed Stuckey on her podcast multiple times.

Across the Christian internet, creators and followers alike are sorting themselves ideologically, with less exchange and collaboration among them, according to Katelyn Beaty, editorial director at Brazos Press and former print managing editor of CT.

“There is less cross-pollination,” said Beaty, who is also the author of the book Celebrities for Jesus. “If you share and promote the work of someone who occupies the other end of the political spectrum, you are either giving cover to bigotry or you’re promoting a heretic.”

This sorting seems to be driven in part by followers’ demands for influencers to speak out on political issues and distance themselves from those who hold different views. That dynamic can sometimes push other creators to demonstrate a sort of “brand loyalty” toward a political or ideological group.

Women on the conference circuit before social media had an incentive to remain publicly apolitical, appealing to the broadest audience possible and focusing on faith formation, marriage, or motherhood. Today’s internet landscape, on the other hand, rewards controversial content. A Christian writer or speaker looking for her audience has every reason to lean into more divisive subject matter.

Plus, rather than the essays and blog posts that once drew in readers, Christian women are spending more time with short-form videos and podcasts, formats that lend themselves to polarizing takes and attention-grabbing personalities. Always-on platforms like Instagram allow followers to hear from influencers anytime and anywhere, strengthening parasocial relationships. They also allow influencers to build large followings without clearing some of the traditional hurdles in the publishing world or speaking circuit.

Hatmaker’s trajectory may not be an indicator of a widespread trend toward deconstruction among women in her age group, but it does demonstrate the complications that come with persona-driven influencers.

Recent data suggest that young women are leaving the church in larger numbers than young men, but there is also evidence that Gen Z is generally spiritually curious. As young evangelical women seek voices and resources to build their faith as independent adults, they’ll navigate a more polarized and volatile landscape than the one that allowed Hatmaker to find her audience.

For women writing for Christian audiences, the pull toward more extreme rhetoric is strong, said Christian speaker and author Heather Thompson Day. Still, she remains convinced that most readers aren’t as polarized as it seems on social media.

“When I go speak at a church, I get to hear how people are actually thinking,” she said. “I think the majority of people in the church are largely in the middle.”

While it may be the case that most readers don’t land in the extremes, it’s still getting harder for writers and content creators to find an audience without picking an ideological “side.”

Cultivating a more vibrant ecosystem of such resources may require evangelical women to intentionally give their attention to people who bridge differences and allow disagreement, but the current online climate fights against that.

“There is a quiet middle space with people trying to occupy it, but they are having a harder time than people who choose their camp,” said Beaty. “‘Living in the tension’ isn’t a great brand. There’s no incentive to say ‘I don’t know.’”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Kenyan Churches Fight Extremism with Dancing

Pius Sawa

A youth pastor struggles to prevent young people from joining terrorist cells.

Young attendees dance and sing on church grounds in the Kibera informal settlement of Nairobi.

Luis Tato / Contributor / Getty

Every Wednesday, David Mulanda rushes from his job as a high school teacher to Friends Church Tande two miles away in Kakamega County, western Kenya.

When he arrives, 25 boys and girls ages 14–20 are already in the church garden practicing the choreographed dances he assigned them. Teens synchronize their movements to the beat of the gospel music playing on a portable Bluetooth speaker. Mulanda gives feedback as neighbors watch from a distance.

Mulanda hopes that beyond a fun diversion, dancing will keep these teens away from extremists.

“We are seeing an increase in young people being taken away by dangerous groups like al-Shabaab,” Mulanda said. He noted that many youth absorb extremist content online, and he believes idle hands and minds put youth at greater risk of falling for the propaganda.

Mulanda and other youth pastors try to counter terrorist groups’ recruitment of unemployed young Kenyans through providing healthy community. As al-Shabaab and other terrorist groups ramp up online and in-person recruiting, churches are providing more group activities to keep students in sanctuaries instead of terror camps.

Unemployment and poor education leave youth vulnerable to radicalization, according to Kibiego Kigen, director of Kenya’s National Counter Terrorism Centre. While youth unemployment has decreased slightly since 2019, the World Bank reported current joblessness among 15-to-25-year-olds at 12 percent—double the rate in 1990. Another report placed those numbers much higher, as high as 67 percent. Young women have higher unemployment rates than men. (Only 53 percent of Kenyan teens go to secondary school.) A new generation of Kenyan jihadists includes more women and converts from Christianity to Islam.

Terrorists or their sympathizers may lure young Kenyans with promises of work, marriage, or a better life. Then they nudge them toward Islam and jihad. One Kenyan woman, whom a friend recruited at age 18 under the guise of finding work in Somalia, told The Conversation she converted after intense religious indoctrination while living in an al-Shabaab camp: “After a few days, I was worn out. … I kind of started to accept it. I felt it was right to fight for our [Muslim] freedom. It was like a moral obligation.”

In 2018, Violet Kemunto, a Christian woman in her late 20s, converted to Islam and married terrorist Ali Salim Gichunge. She and her husband allegedly helped plan the January 2019 bombing of DusitD2 complex, an upscale hotel and office complex in Nairobi Kenya’s capital. The mass shooting killed 21 people, including Gichunge. According to intelligence reports, her husband promised Kemunto a better life in Somalia after the bombing. Instead, she now lives in squalor.

Other young Kenyans find alternatives in church communities. Harry Wafula, an attendee of Bethel Prayer Center in Likuyani, Kakamega County, said he couldn’t get a job for two years after graduating from college, forcing him to look for odd jobs around Nairobi to buy food. Some friends introduced him to smoking bhang (cannabis), but he resisted.

When his church hired him as a technician for their sound system and music recording studio, it helped him find stability. “I don’t know what I would have become if I stayed in Nairobi without a job,” he said.

Many church outreaches use Kenyans’ love for music—choirs, dance troupes, and bands—to engage youth. Newlife Church in Trans-Nzoia County lets youth use its music and video recording studios. Lenox Barasa, 32, a high school teacher and church member, has used part of his savings to support the church’s choir, Neema Singers. He said the group has produced more than 12 songs. By selling CDs and holding fundraiser concerts at church, they are able to buy more video cameras and instruments.

During school breaks, Mulanda holds dance practices or other activities nearly every evening of the week. He also teaches the teens how to apply their faith to the challenges that arise in everyday life. During three-day seminars Mulanda hosts, his students gather in small groups to discuss issues like terrorism or sex outside of marriage.

“When I see their points aligning, then I realize this is what is eating my youths,” Mulanda said. He listens to their concerns, then teaches from the Bible.

Mulanda also helps young people leave criminal gangs. He recalled three women in their early 20s who used to steal motorcycles and cars. They would stand outside nightclubs waiting for men who had parked their vehicles outside and ask them for a lift. Then along the way, they’d ask the driver to stop because they needed to make a phone call. Their gang would be waiting to jump the drivers and steal the cars at gunpoint. The robbers would beat everyone—including the young women, to keep their involvement secret—during the robbery.

“One of the girls [in the gang] was killed. Two escaped, and I now have them in the church choir,” Mulanda said, adding that both girls became Christians.

Mulanda doesn’t always know what kind of trouble the teens in his group are involved in. But he believes if they come to church and find a community there, they’ll have less time—and hopefully less appetite—for criminal or radical groups.

“These young people are looking at youth pastors as people they can share their lives [with],” Mulanda said. He added that due to this relationship, young people listen “when we talk about being hooked into the terrorism of al-Shabaab.”

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Culture

Review

The ‘Never Again’ of ‘Nuremberg’ Comes with a Warning

Myles Werntz

The new film asks how the Holocaust happened: and whether it could happen again.

Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring in ‘Nuremberg.’

Scott Garfield / Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

The Nazis possess a special place in our moral imagination. We take them to be a world apart, created by a special confluence of time and circumstance that unleashed unrepeatable horrors. But this understanding obscures something important that this scale of evil may prevent us from seeing.

The Holocaust is of course singular. But many interpretations, in explaining this mass murder of Jews as the result of special psychology, historical circumstance, or political arrangement, have ended up at a misguided conclusion—that surely something like this could never happen again.

It is this question—What makes the Nazis unique?—that the new movie Nuremberg tackles. The film opens in the aftermath of the Second World War with the arrest of Germany’s second-in-command Hermann Göring as he travels with his family in Austria. As the Allies move across Europe, they document concentration camps, and with these discoveries, urgency grows: What should be done with Göring? What kind of punishment fits the systematic murder of millions of Jews, political prisoners, and people with disabilities? The film follows Göring’s subsequent imprisonment as the world prepares for the first international war-crimes trial. All the while, the Allies are unsure how to categorize actions of such moral gravity.

Nuremberg isn’t the first work to home in on this dilemma. The 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg, as well as other TV series and movies, covered the events of 1946. But this treatment has a unique psychological vantage point, drawing from Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, interpreting events through the relationship between Hermann Göring and psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who was brought in to evaluate the war criminal for trial. Quickly, in the film, the professional relationship becomes a personal crisis. Kelley, along with the rest of the world, grapples for understanding of how something like this could have happened.

Standout performances by Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, and Michael Shannon help transform this courtroom drama into an exploration of how evil works. Driving home the graphic realities of concentration camps, Nuremberg uses archival footage compiled for the original trial. For those unfamiliar with—or debating—the realities of the Second World War, the film offers its case in flesh and bone.

But the events of Nuremberg are primarily an occasion for asking not whether the Holocaust happened but how. Kelley, the psychiatrist, begins to arrive at an answer by noting that Göring is not so much an ideologue as he is a narcissist, seeing in his own person the greatness of the Nazi Reich. His worldview comes through in the way he relates to the other defendants, imagines himself able to outsmart his captors, and touts the Nazi political program as an unassailable demand which anyone should find reasonable.

Kelley, though not a Christian, sees this hubris for its ubiquity—though he fails to convince his countrymen that the desire to make the world over in our own image is not unique to German psychology or the Third Reich’s administrative structure. Goering was proud, and pride is no respecter of time and place. Nuremberg hammers home a basic point about human nature. Pride and its resulting violence are a possible problem everywhere.

Kelley’s insight has proved to be right, in that the mass slaughter of one people by another has certainly not been restricted to the Nazis. Since the word genocide entered the world’s vocabulary in 1942, the crime it names has been repeated several times over.

These ordinary and universal vices—this pride, this desire to subjugate others to our own vision of the world—are not the property of one country or nation. So long as humans are sinners, there is no reason to suspect that any place is exempt from evil.

That lesson comes through in the film’s unexpected final act. Throughout Nuremberg, a young sergeant with particular reasons to seek revenge fantasizes about bringing the captured Nazis to justice. But after the trial, as the moment of execution draws near, his most-hated enemy breaks down in sobs, unable even to dress himself. The sergeant kneels down next to him and says simply, “I am German also.” He accompanies him by the hand to the gallows, staying with his enemy to the end.

The recognition that, in the end, the Nazis are humans—even our neighbors—transforms this story from one of pure revenge to one which invites us to grieve, both for the millions killed by the Nazis and for the denigrated humanity of the Nazis themselves. As the generation that could give firsthand testimony to the Holocaust passes away, Nuremberg is an important film to help Christians remember not only what happened but also how the evil that happened in Germany is the kind of evil that can happen again—and must be repented of everywhere it appears.

Myles Werntz is the author of Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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Church Life

Chinese House Churches Play Matchmaker

Eva Chou

Facing pressure from parents, Christian women struggle to find a man.

simonlong / Getty

All names in this article are pseudonyms except for Wang Xiaofei, as members of house churches face persecution from the Chinese government.

In May, Luo Yiman was laying in her bed in Shanghai, struggling to roll over due to a spinal compression fracture from a car accident, when her mom brought up marriage again.

“All the eligible girls in the village have gotten married this year, except for you two,” she said, referring to Luo and her sister. “You really need someone by your side.”

Luo’s mother and others in her generation think 34 is too old to still be single. Yet Luo noted that since graduating college, she had been too busy working long hours, first as a consultant in Dalian and then a project manager in Shanghai, to find a boyfriend.

In 2020 a friend invited Luo to a local house church, and a year later she became a Christian. Life in the church brought her community and support—many church members brought meals and visited her in the hospital after her accident. But it’s even more difficult to find a husband, as the pool of single Christian men in China is so small.

Luo’s church has more than 100 members, including 20 single women and only five single men, most of them in their 20s. This gender imbalance is common in urban house churches in China, and as a result, many single Christian women struggle to find a spouse.

In Chinese society, many young people are putting off marriage as they pursue their careers, fear the responsibilities of marriage and children, and focus on personal needs over the needs of others. These mindsets are also seeping into the church, according to leaders of singles ministries that CT spoke to. The parents of first-generation Christian singles also struggle to understand their children’s insistence in dating and marrying only fellow Christians.

House churches are banding together to help single Christians meet, while pastors are taking on new roles as matchmakers. Some singles are also learning to trust God and find contentment even if he calls them to a life of singleness.

“Marriage is a divine gift,” Luo wrote in her blog in March. “However, if God has something else for you instead of marriage, that too is a blessing. Embrace it wholeheartedly, as nothing should come between you and your relationship with God, including marriage.”

While the gender imbalance in churches tips toward female, in China as a whole, the one-child policy combined with traditional preference for males has led to a ratio of 105.7 men for every 100 women. The distribution of single men and women vary by region: In rural areas, low-educated single men often find it difficult to find a wife, while in cities, matchmakers consistently see more women than men inquiring for their services.

Luo longed to find a partner she could connect with on a deeper level. After moving to Shanghai in 2017, she downloaded the popular dating app Soul, as her busy job left her little time to socialize. Yet she was quickly disappointed. Married men reached out to her, as well as others seeking merely one-night stands. She couldn’t tell whether her matches were catfishing her with fake photos and backstories.

Frustrated with online dating, Luo deleted the app. But caught in a cycle of loneliness, she reinstalled it again and again.

Things changed after she accepted Christ in 2021. At her house church, she found a mentor, a badminton partner, and friends who encouraged her when she was feeling weak or down. She found herself becoming more patient and forgiving toward her sister and parents.

“Having a satisfying church life and close relationships with family fulfills my emotional needs,” Luo said. Her desire for a husband remains, although she feels the chances may be slim. “I also look forward to more intimate relationships or experiencing different types of connections.”

Because house churches congregations need to stay under about 50 people to avoid government scrutiny, individual churches don’t have enough congregants to run singles ministries. Some churches organize joint dating events for singles to meet each other. Vis-à-vis is a group in Shanghai that hosts events like afternoon teas, English lessons, and secondhand markets on the weekends where single Christians can mix and mingle. Through these casual activities, leaders model and teach about marriage. A few Christian online dating sites also exist, such as the app Mengai (“Beloved”), where Christians create profiles and the site operator arranges offline meetings between potential matches.

One long-running singles ministry in Shanghai is called Alumni Camp, which leaders from various house churches launched 20 years ago. Every two years, Alumni Camp organizes a cohort of Christian singles who meet every Sunday afternoon for six months. Applicants need to fill out questionnaires about their faith, with questions like whether they read the Bible out of obligation or genuine desire.

Pastors and Bible teachers give talks about the biblical view of marriage. Participants are also assigned reading about marriage. Most singles enjoy the planned fellowship activities, such as gathering in groups to walk around downtown Shanghai and eating together. During the cohort, participants have two chances to submit a list of three fellow participants they would be interested in dating. If there is a match, Alumni Camp shares the other’s contact information.

Despite providing Christian singles with spiritual guidance and mentorship, success rates of Alumni Camp are low, said Xie Yi, a mentor at the organization. Yet she explained that the cohort has a deeper purpose.

“What matters to me is that from the day they leave Alumni Camp, they have a new perspective on choosing a partner and understand why they want to marry,” Xie said.

In Xie’s 10 years of working with Alumni Camp, she’s found that a main reason Christian singles are unable to find a spouse is their unwillingness to let go of their personal preferences. “Especially for women, they carry many expectations”—such as a man’s height or how much money he makes—“and are disappointed when their partners don’t meet them,” she said. “Being willing to compromise on nonessential matters can lead to blessings.”

Another challenge facing Christian singles is parents who meddle in their love life. A 2019 survey by the China Youth Daily’s Social Survey Center found that nearly half of unmarried young people are “concerned that when parents assume a gatekeeper role regarding potential matches before a blind date, their advice and care may lead to acting on their behalf.”

Chen Ye, the pastor of a house church in Shanghai, said that one of the main reasons Christian couples break up is that they are “overly tied to their original families.”

Many parents, including Christians, use secular standards to evaluate their children’s potential spouses, looking at education, family background, appearance, and even political views. Young Christians find themselves having to choose between their parents and their partner, Chen said.

Huang Xintai felt that firsthand. An only child, she long desired to get married and find a companion for life. In 2017, the then-29-year-old met her boyfriend through Alumni Camp. However, when she introduced him to her parents, they were furious. In their eyes, the young Christian man did not measure up to their daughter and her prestigious university background, high-paying job, and good looks. Huang’s parents threatened to cut her off if she didn’t break up with him.

Her mentor at Alumni Camp advised her to stand firm and continue the relationship. Yet Huang felt overwhelmed. She didn’t want to disappoint her parents, who had recently undergone major surgeries, but she also didn’t want to let down her mentor. Under this pressure, her boyfriend decided to break up with her.

To add insult to injury, her mentor chastised her being too influenced by her parents, noting that she lost a good man. That response caused Huang to question her faith.

“I felt very distressed and began to doubt whether I was a saved Christian,” Huang said.

Three years later, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Huang could not participate in many of her usual activities like singing in a chorus. As she reevaluated how she spent her time, she started participating in more church ministries. She helped with childcare, translated Christian articles, and connected single church members with families in the congregation.

She got to know more people in her church who were in different life stages. They prayed for her as she shared about her desire to find a husband. At the end of 2021, one church member tagged her in a group chat, saying, “There’s a single Christian man working part-time at my gym. Want to give it a shot?”

Huang agreed. “I first worried that my short-sightedness would lead me to focus on worldly matters again, but my Christian brothers and sisters consistently supported me, helping me view him through a biblical lens,” she recalled. She found herself increasingly drawn to the young man, Zhang San, and his proactive yet humble nature. After a year of dating, they got married.

Zhang had faced his own share of challenges in before meeting Huang. Church friends introduced him to many single Christian women, but his passiveness left him unsure of what he wanted in a partner. He recalled that his dates lost interest as he never made the first move in the relationship. Yet as he grew in his faith and learned about the attributes of God, he became more willing to take on the responsibility of leading in the relationship.

Wang Xiaofei, the wife of a house church pastor in Xiamen, noted that the single people at her church are often the ones visiting members who are sick or in need, volunteering at the local orphanage, teaching children’s Sunday school, or working at the church’s school.

“Single Christians are among the most devoted and loyal individuals in Christian schools and churches,” she said. After years of serving singles at the church, she has learned to consider their perspectives more deeply instead of hastily arranging introductions.

“Everyone has their own thoughts on marriage,” she noted. “When they haven’t crossed that threshold yet, they need understanding and acceptance.”

Huang and Zhang now have a 2-year-old son. They frequently share with younger members of their church how God brought them together.

For the single Christians in their lives, “we should … regularly pray publicly for them,” she said. “Let them feel that they are not alone on this waiting journey; there’s a group accompanying them, just like the apostles waiting for the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, trusting in God’s promises.”

- More from Eva Chou

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