Geniuses Have Divine Gifts. Even When They’re Insufferable.

We don’t have to excuse their bad behavior to recognize God’s hand in what they create.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

I have never had much patience for geniuses. Very smart! Very productive! Also: very annoying. Think of the rude eccentric who talks out of turn, sharing his unsolicited opinions on subjects about which he knows very little. Or the bigwig scholar running late and not responding to emails, too absorbed in his own work to be considerate of others.

No wonder I nodded along to The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, Helen Lewis’s insightful (and very funny) new book about the excuses we’ve made for preeminent artists and inventors, from the creative minds of Renaissance Florence to the tech titans of Silicon Valley. “A suite of behaviours that would otherwise be inexcusable,” she writes of entrepreneur-turned-government-adviser Elon Musk, “are forgiven when they are the price of greatness.” Steve Jobs, “like Pablo Picasso before him, [would] successfully convince everyone around him that the a—holeness was indivisible from the genius.” Albert Einstein wrote out a contract for his wife that included the clause “You will stop talking to me if I request it.”

But Lewis’s indictment runs beyond what she calls the “deficit model of genius”—where “oddness is transformed into specialness,” alcoholism and drug addiction might be creative necessities, and psychological breakdown is perhaps to be expected. In a series of well-chosen case studies, she cleverly lays out other aspects of the myth. Geniuses, we suppose, are iconoclasts and rebels, venerated by history for going against the grain. They are offensive (because mere mortals can’t comprehend their brilliance). And they are singular.

Of course, reality is more complicated. Sometimes the “Semmelweis reflex”—named for the skeptical contemporaries of the doctor who discovered germ theory—is warranted. That is, sometimes weird ideas are just … wrong.

And geniuses are hardly solo enterprises. They are always supported by other people, whether colleagues in their labs (see Thomas Edison tinkering with the light bulb) or women typing manuscripts (see Leo Tolstoy and his long-suffering wife, Sofia). Moreover, they often benefit from being in the right place at the right time. The Beatles’ talent alone wasn’t enough. As Lewis notes, “You need the right collaborators, the right environment in which to flourish and a dollop of plain old good luck.”

In death, geniuses benefit from having their legacies carefully curated, an advantage enjoyed by figures like William Shakespeare and the painter Jackson Pollock. And speaking of death, you need a “memorable” one—maybe even a little bit early, before your shine has faded. “Go too soon and you haven’t had time to do your great work,” writes Lewis. “Stick around too long, and the memory of your later, lesser output might overwhelm your early success.”

I left the book more convinced than I already was that genius isn’t a helpful category. It’s detrimental for whoever is labeled as one, conferring status that just isn’t conducive to well-ordered relationships and a correct sense of a person’s place in the world. And it’s not helpful for us “normies,” either. Deeming someone a genius inclines us to overlook their bad (even criminally bad) behavior and overrate their off-the-cuff pronouncements on topics outside their domains.

Just as Hollywood and Silicon Valley shelter their respective stars, Christians are liable to idolize our greats, like brilliant Bible scholars and well-spoken pastors. Sometimes we risk excusing what we shouldn’t, turning a blind eye to wrongdoing. Society has incorrectly assumed, writes Lewis, that “superior knowledge and expertise in one domain confers authority in others.” But maybe the very gifted apologist doesn’t also know everything about dietary supplements or running for elected office.

Most dangerous of all, attempts to define genius have often turned racist and eugenicist. The first section of The Genius Myth traces that troubled history, from the taxonomies of eugenics researcher Francis Galton to the troubling applications of IQ tests and an ill-conceived sperm bank for Nobel laureates. Lewis mentions one such laureate, physicist William Shockley, who “proposed that those with IQs under 100 be offered cash payments in return for being sterilised.” He wasn’t the only thinker to float the idea—a horrific one, of course, if you believe that all people are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).

That image bearing is foundational. But it doesn’t quite answer one of the book’s underlying questions: What do we make of extraordinary innovations? What of the phonograph, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the Sistine Chapel, the MacBook?

God’s image bearers are equally human, equally dignified. That doesn’t mean we are all equally skilled at solving logic puzzles or sculpting clay. Some very gifted people really do produce exemplary things. Annoying as I have found the geniuses I’ve come across, I’m also a little jealous—of their monomaniacal focus, their sheer force of will, the research they produce, and the art they make. I wish Tolstoy had been kinder to his wife and Mozart had been better adjusted. But I’m still glad we have Anna Karenina and those piano concertos.

Lewis addresses this distinction at the beginning and end of The Genius Myth. Her argument is interesting (and, I think, convincing) for Christians. “We all hunger to experience the transcendent, the extraordinary, the inexplicable,” she acknowledges. Brushing up against genuine genus elicits a “vertiginous falling-away as you contemplate an artwork, or an equation, or a new concept … and have no idea how it was created by a human brain.” Looking out an airplane window, perhaps you’ve wondered along with Lewis, “How did the Wright brothers do it—how did they know to do it?”

“I wish that we would move back to the ancient idea of genius, something that is found in particular actions, or specific works,” she advises. Genius is divine and inexplicable and outside our control—inspiration strikes; the pieces fall into place. It’s one person’s possession only for a time, a temporary gift rather than a lifelong identity, an expression of God’s power and beauty and creativity.

As onlookers, we can only be grateful. We’re shaken. We’re awestruck. Now it’s just a matter of where we direct our worship.

Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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Church Life

Ten Years After Charleston

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

Chris Singleton’s mother was killed at the Mother Emanuel church shooting a decade ago. He’s still preaching unity and love.

Courtesy of Christ Singleton

Chris Singleton had just wrapped up a summer-league baseball game when the phone call came. It was ten years ago to the day, June 17, 2015, and on the phone was Felicia Sanders, a member of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Come down as soon as possible, Sanders said, because something terrible had happened.

Singleton rushed over. And there he was told that his mother and eight other people had been murdered by a white supremacist in what was then the deadliest mass shooting at a church in American history.

In the days to come, Singleton would learn the details of the heinous attack as its horrors were reported in the national news. The murderer was a man named Dylann Roof. He’d entered the church—the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the South, known as Mother Emanuel—after casing it on numerous trips from his home near Columbia, South Carolina. On the day of his assault, Roof was welcomed into a Wednesday-night Bible study in the church’s fellowship hall, where a member, Myra Thompson, was leading a discussion on the parable of the sower.

With his head hung low, Roof sat silently next to the pastor of the church, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, for roughly 45 minutes as attendees considered the passage. Then, as the group began closing prayer at around 9 p.m., Roof took out his gun and opened fire.

He killed nine: Pinckney; Thompson; Cynthia Hurd; Susie Jackson; Ethel Lee Lance; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Tywanza Sanders; Rev. Daniel L. Simmons; and Chris’s mother, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. A handful of others survived the shooting, including Felicia Sanders, who hid under a table with her granddaughter while Roof killed her son.

The massacre catapulted Mother Emanuel into the national spotlight. It set off conversations about racism, gun violence, and what the Confederate flag means in contemporary America. It also sparked debate about forgiveness—and its limits—as some family members of the victims extended forgiveness to an unrepentant Roof.

One of those family members was Chris Singleton. The night after the shooting, Singleton, then 18, told a reporter his family had forgiven Roof. It wasn’t a statement he had planned or prepared to make. “It was the Holy Spirit that placed that on my heart—and my lips,” Singleton told me during a recent interview.

In the decade that followed, several family members of the shooting victims shared their stories, Singleton among them. Following that off-the-cuff comment, he began traveling the country, speaking to students, nonprofits, churches, sports teams, and teachers about the dark day that has become central to his life’s purpose.

The goal, Singleton likes to say, is to be the opposite of his mother’s killer. He speaks often of eradicating racism and respecting people’s differences—of love and unity, though he understands unity must be appealed to, not demanded. Reaching one person who might otherwise be the next Roof, he told me, would make the whole project a success.

Singleton’s message is not a comprehensive solution to racial injustice in America, as he freely acknowledges. It’s a way to grab on to hope in the face of harsh winds, a real and raw demonstration of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of people despite unimaginable pain.

Born in Atlanta, Singleton moved to Charleston with his parents and two siblings around the age of 11. He remembers his father struggling with alcohol, which caused tensions between his parents and eventually led them to separate. That also left his mother with the challenging task of being the family’s sole provider as a high school track-and-field coach.

“One thing that was a blessing was that she never talked bad about him even though he probably deserved it in some cases,” Singleton said. “That’s the grace she showed toward our father.” She was a formative example for her son, who adored his father.

By the time Singleton entered middle school, the family had started attending church at Mother Emanuel. He served as an acolyte, and his sister participated in the praise-dance ministry. His mother, Sharonda, was working on a doctorate in speech-language pathology, but she soon became drawn to ministry and was ordained a few years later. Filled with joy, she dug deeper into her faith and spent more time praying and reading her Bible than ever before, Singleton told me.

In the months leading up to the shooting, things were looking up for Singleton despite his father’s absence. Then a freshman at Charleston Southern University, he’d started playing Division I college baseball, achieving a longtime goal. He’d recommitted his life to Christ and begun dating his now-wife.

The shooting scrambled everything. With one parent already largely out of the picture, Singleton stepped into a fatherly role for his younger brother and sister, who were 12 and 15 at the time. He pretended to be okay, trying to model strength and resilience for his siblings, who would move to Atlanta to live with an aunt. Later, however, Singleton realized he was only delaying the whole family’s grieving process.

The following fall he continued his college career, frequently traveling from Charleston to Atlanta for visits. In his junior year, Singleton was drafted by the Chicago Cubs, a job that allowed him to move his siblings back to Charleston. There they lived with his wife, Mariana, as he traveled the country for work with different baseball teams.

Around the same time, his father passed away, and Singleton finally broke down and fully grieved his losses. He saw a therapist for the first time and, in the off-season, began to take speaking engagements developing his themes of unity and love. When his baseball career ended in 2019, the talks became a full-time job. He prayed, Singleton told me, and realized that sharing his story was something he was “supposed to do.”

But in America’s polarized politics, Singleton’s hope-filled message is facing headwinds. In recent months, his speaking requests have dwindled, in part because of widespread cuts to diversity programs, which often funded his talks. In 2025, he said, he expects about half the 140 or so engagements he had last year.

And beyond that practical difference, a decade after Charleston, working toward unity—and its traveling companion, justice—can seem like a fool’s errand.

National conversations around race are shrouded in suspicion or outright hostility. Online, the loudest megaphones are often held by those who discount the reality of racism and present-day legacies of America’s horrid racial history—and by those who stand ready to cancel anyone for the slightest misspeaking or past sins they’ve acknowledged with remorse. Even inside the church, as And Campaign president Justin Giboney succinctly described in a CT article, the conversation about racial unity feels increasingly like “a battle between those who were blind to the sin of racism and those who believed racism and sexism were the only sins.”

Charleston’s churches are no exception to that national trend. Around the port city, reconciliation efforts have met roadblocks.

After the shooting, a theologically and racially diverse set of ministry leaders—Reformed and charismatic, Black and white—came together to found a reconciliation organization called 1Charleston. Named after a one-off conference that had taken place a year prior, it organized volunteers into further action, hosting workshops, conferences, and nights of prayer and worship.

The immediate motivation was the massacre, of course, but the organizers were working in a city that carries a particularly painful racial history. In 1822, South Carolina authorities squashed a slave revolt planned by Denmark Vesey, a leader in the church that would later become Mother Emanuel. Vesey and 34 others were executed, and the church was burned to the ground. And four decades later, Confederate troops fired the first shots of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, located in the Charleston Harbor.

“A lot of people ask themselves, ‘How could this happen?’—and that’s actually the sentiment that galvanized us,” said Philip Pinckney (no relation to the pastor killed in the attack), a former pastor of a multiethnic church, who led 1Charleston for several years. “What do you mean, ‘How could this happen?’”

As it set about responding to that question with answers grounded in local history, 1Charleston was not without its difficulties. The organization encouraged multiethnic ministry, which concerned a few Black pastors, Pinckney told me in an interview. They worried that it would cause brain drain in the Black church, siphoning off promising leaders to other congregations and projects.

Pinckney, who was born and raised in Charleston, said he likely had hundreds of coffee meetups with pastors, most of whom were white. But after a few years, he tired of having the same conversations over and over. He felt as if he were endlessly trying to convince white clergy that directly addressing racism should be a priority in the church.

“The most charitable retelling would be that there was a constant need for more information,” Pinckney said. White pastors often answered his pleas to speak out against police killings by saying they didn’t want to “get political.”

Their sentiment, he mused, “really boils down to ‘It’s not my problem.’”

A few years after 1Charleston launched, Pinckney left, and the organization ultimately stopped its work. Pinckney also left pastoral ministry, though he said he’s still devoted to helping pastors become courageous about pursuing racial justice, which he sees as the prerequisite to unity. He still wants to encourage clergy to nurture conversations about race in America, including those that could inspire backlash from their congregations or come with some other personal cost.

In Charleston and beyond, that remains more easily said than done. The decade since the Mother Emanuel tragedy has been marked by contention around race both inside and outside the American church. Those few years include three bitterly divisive presidential elections, the racial justice protests of 2020, debates over critical race theory and where it’s taught, and rapidly changing policies around diversity programs in academic, corporate, and government settings. White evangelical support for Donald Trump has caused many Black Christians to question their future in predominantly white churches.

South Carolina, for its part, has made positive changes by removing some Confederate symbols from public spaces. But lawmakers in the state continue to sit on a hate-crime bill named after the late Rev. Pinckney, which rightfully has frustrated and angered some of the family members of the shooting victims.

Even amid setbacks, the perseverance of Singleton and many others who have labored around the call for unity is a reminder that the church is called to reconciliation with God and one another (2 Cor. 5:16–21)—both for ourselves and as a model to our unchurched neighbors. But for many believers, resignation and exhaustion have instead crept in. I feel it myself.

But though we may be weary, “let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). Unity is more than a nice aspiration. It is a biblical command—but one to which we should appeal on the basis of love (Phm. 1:8–9). While pursuing justice, we must also “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3), get rid of divisions in our midst (1 Cor. 1:10), and be reconciled to other saints before God (Matt. 5:23–24).

We must preach the whole counsel of God, the parts that easily fit our political persuasions and the parts that don’t. Unity often comes at a cost—often, as pastor Thabiti Anyabwile wrote in 2018, at the cost of humility. Until what we see around us reflects what we will find in heaven (Rev. 7:9), perseverance, forbearance, and endurance must be our call.

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Theology

Walter Brueggemann’s Big Imagination and Even Bigger God

Brent A. Strawn

A grateful friend and colleague reflects on the towering Old Testament scholar.

Image courtesy of the C. Benton Kline, Jr. Special Collections and Archives, Columbia Theological Seminary.

Even now I remember the simple cover of Walter Brueggemann’s most famous book: dark gray with the title The Prophetic Imagination in red lettering. It was 1989, and I was an 18-year-old freshman at a small, denominational Christian liberal arts college in San Diego. In Spring of that year, I took a class on the Old Testament prophets, and one of my assignments was to read Brueggemann’s book and write an essay on it. Since I am something of a pack rat, I laid my hands on that essay and reread it the other day, shortly after Brueggemann’s passing on June 5, 2025, at 92 years of age.

What captivated me about The Prophetic Imagination, even in my young age, was Brueggemann’s definition of a prophet as one who nourishes “a consciousness and perception alternative to” that of “the dominant culture.” Prophets create that imagination first by critiquing the regnant world opposed to God’s will and second by energizing God’s people to a new way of life and being. All of that made great sense to me as someone raised in a holiness denomination, even as it made sense coming from Brueggemann, who was raised in German Pietism as the son of a pastor in the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

But something else struck me with equal force back in 1989, and it has stuck with me ever since: It is Brueggemann’s emphasis on the dangerous freedom of an unimaginably large God: “A free God is an awfully dangerous thing, and that is what the Lord is,” I wrote in my freshman essay. To put it more simply, in the words of Conrad Kanagy, Brueggemann’s recent biographer, who even wrote a children’s book about him, Brueggemann believed in a very big God.

The Prophetic Imagination, first published in 1978,went on to sell a million copies, go through two more editions, and be translated into six other languages. It is the one publication those unfamiliar with Brueggemann’s work have likely heard of, just as Brueggemann himself may be among the only biblical scholars nonspecialists would know by name. It was a watershed publication—still widely cited—affording its readers a new understanding of the prophetic task and new vocabulary to describe it.

Simply put, Brueggemann was one of the most prolific and influential Old Testament scholars of the past century, with a bibliography of over 120 separate titles. Even the most productive academic authors aspire to maybe three or four books in a career, whereas Brueggemann published fourteen in the last two years alone. Yet it is not just the quantity of published works but also their quality that amazes. Several of these books changed or redefined the field of Old Testament study.

The year before The Prophetic Imagination was published, for instance, Brueggemann authored the now-classic The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, the first study to treat the land as a serious subject in biblical theology. There can be no doubt that Brueggemann’s massive 777-page Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy will stand as one of his greatest works. There he offers the most compelling and comprehensive attempt to categorize and understand the various texts, traditions, and witnesses of the Old Testament. He treats these biblical voices as testimony—not only the core testimony of the good and trustworthy God familiar from the Law and the Prophets but also the counter-testimony concerning God’s absence and silence found in the lament psalms and Job, among other places.

Almost 20 years after publication of Theology of the Old Testament, Brueggemann published another extensive and remarkable book, Money and Possessions (2016). He once told me he had been tempted to title it Follow the Money. This volume, no less than any of the others, shows Brueggemann’s fluency in the language of Scripture as he moves easily back and forth between the Old Testament and the New. In my judgment, no other biblical scholar can match his canonical dexterity and profundity.

Brueggemann’s influence extended well beyond the world of academia, however. Like the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, Brueggemann was one of the few stratospheric Bible scholars who could write as easily for clergy and lay people as he could for the professional guild. He once remarked to me that to be a theologian for the church, one must write on the texts that matter most to the average Christian. It is thus unsurprising that he was popular with preachers, who are likely most familiar with Brueggemann’s numerous commentaries, which include major treatments of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

In addition, Brueggemann published important monographs, such as The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, David’s Truth: In Israel’s Imagination and Memory, Israel’s Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology, and Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Brueggemann was always innovative and creative, applying keen insights from Scripture to contemporary issues facing Christian faith and practice.

After college, I became even more familiar with Brueggemann’s many works, first as a seminarian, then as a doctoral student in Old Testament. But my knowledge of him became firsthand when I landed my first tenure-track job at Emory University. A week after arriving in Atlanta, Professor Brueggemann welcomed me to the area by inviting me to lunch. I was, needless to say, extremely nervous for that appointment at Athens Pizza in Decatur, Georgia.

As I came to learn—since that lunch became the first of many—Brueggemann always ordered the same thing (a Greek salad) after first confirming the size with the waiter (he preferred small) and asking for some crackers to go with it. Lunch was always kept to one hour, pretty much exactly on the dot. My initial fears over dining with the legendary theologian proved ill-founded. We spent most of the time laughing during that first lunch and those that followed.

Emboldened by his kindness—if not my youthful naivety—I asked Brueggemann to guest lecture in my introductory course the next semester, and he graciously agreed. The invitation was, of course, primarily for me to have a chance to hear him up close and in the flesh, though I was happy to let my students listen in over my shoulder. I still remember his delivery; his humor; his engaging, even thunderous voice; his passion; and his exegetical genius. The lecture was on Jeremiah, and to this day, my own introductory lecture on Jeremiah depends directly on his.

Those vignettes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Brueggemann’s kindness—and not just to me. His colleagues, especially younger ones, widely know and love him for his generous gifts. My own list is far too long to recount, but I am especially grateful for the following:

I’m grateful for the chance to hear him preach and lecture. He once wryly described the difference between a lecture and a sermon as “about 40 minutes.” No less than four volumes of his sermons have been collected (The Threat of Life and The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann: 3 Volume Set).

I’m grateful for the chance to hear him pray. I first had the chance through his reading a publication of prayers before his classes and then during my visits to his home in Michigan. Brueggemann never bothered with standard introductions like “Dear Lord” or “Merciful God.” Instead, he just dove into the heart of his prayer with direct address; he knew God was already, always there. One of his most popular collections of prayers is entitled Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth; there are now at least four other volumes of his collected prayers in print.

I’m grateful for his poetic power. This manifested itself in his artistry as a speaker, preacher, and pray-er; in his argumentation as a writer; and in his observation as the most astute of exegetes. His clear, even brutal honesty in the face of the biblical text is unmatched, save by the clear, even brutal honesty of Scripture itself. Brueggemann’s unflinching fidelity to the text won him and his works, especially his commentaries, a wide following of fans across the ideological spectrum, from mainline progressives to conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals.

I’m grateful for his love for the church coupled with his sober-minded awareness of its many failings. He once told me over lunch (yes, at Athens Pizza) that the origin of his deep concern with justice was his firsthand observation of how unjustly his father had been treated as a pastor.

I’m grateful for his interdisciplinary insight. Brueggemann was a voracious reader who seemed to be interested in every topic and seemed to remember everything he read. Before his lead, biblical scholars rarely ventured outside the often-narrow confines of their discipline. Brueggemann, by contrast, ranged widely—incorporating remarkable gifts from the fields of economics, sociology, politics, and psychology, to name just a few. His stunning essay “The Costly Loss of Lament,” which changed my life and many others, even entire church cultures, would have been impossible to write without the work of British pediatrician and object-relations psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.

I’m grateful for his graciousness and good humor. I once wrote a review essay of Brueggemann’s work where I registered my many appreciations but also a few critiques. One criticism concerned what I deemed an overuse of the adverb endlessly in Brueggemann’s writing. We humans are finite creatures, after all, so our interpretative endeavors are, no matter how capacious, also limited, most certainly not endless. Only God properly deserves such a predication, I argued. Brueggemann, in his inimitable way, sent me a handwritten note after reading it, thanking me for and congratulating me on the essay, by which he said he was “endlessly instructed.” Touché! That wasn’t the first nor the last time we laughed about that and all sorts of other things.

Along with others like Carolyn Sharp, Clover Beal, Timothy Beal, Conrad Kanagy, Patrick Miller, and especially Davis Hankins, I was blessed to edit a number of works for Brueggemann. The first book I edited for him was a volume on the theology of the Book of Jeremiah, then later one on the Psalms, followed by two others on Exodus and, again, one on Jeremiah. Most recently, he made me his coauthor, asking me to help him finish a short book on Isaiah, which is now in press. I had just finished the copyedits when I spoke to him for the last time, just two days before he died.

I first edited Brueggemann when I was 25 years old as editorial assistant for the journal Theology Today. He seemed to submit a new paper to the journal every few weeks, but during my 12 months in my post, I had the chance to edit only one. The essay was, notably, on preaching as much as it was on the Old Testament. I will never forget one specific line: “It’s hard to get God said right.” That single line has stuck with me for 30 years. It is both true and memorable—and it also changed my entire view of Scripture and theology.

It is easy now to see how Brueggemann’s many books, sermons, and prayers were—and still are—ways he tried to “get God said right.” All of us who have read, listened to, and watched him have benefited from those many attempts, even when we disagreed with some of his conclusions. It is, after all, hard to get the Lord said right. That’s why we will need to keep reading, keep studying, keep preaching, keep praying … perhaps even endlessly.

It is my belief that on June 5, 2025, one of God’s most gifted, beloved, and best “sayers,” Walter Albert Brueggemann by name, joined the goodly company of the prophets. His restless, endless search to get God said right is at an end; he now knows even as he is fully known. But his witness and his words still linger with us, beckoning us to live differently, alternatively, prophetically—above all, faithfully.

Brent A. Strawn is D. Moody Smith Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and professor of law at Duke University. He is the coauthor, with Walter Brueggemann, of the forthcoming book Unwavering Holiness: Pivotal Moments in the Book of Isaiah.

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News

Trump Made $1.3 Million on Bible Endorsement

Daniel Silliman

Financial records show royalty payments rolled in during presidential campaign.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

President Donald Trump earned $1.3 million off the sale of Bibles in 2024.

The White House released financial disclosure forms on Friday as the nation prepared for protests and a military parade celebrating the anniversary of the US Army. The 234-page report, covering the 12 months before Trump was sworn into office, shows his wealth vastly increased while he was running for president.

Trump earned $57.4 million as the “chief crypto advocate” and “inspiration” for a cryptocurrency company founded in 2024, in addition to other more traditional sources of revenue, such as the $50 million he earned from his Palm Beach, Florida, golf resort Mar-a-Lago, and $20.8 million from Trump National Golf Club Washington, DC, in Potomac Falls, Virginia. The president reported total assets of about $1.6 billion and annual income of $600 million.

One piece of that income came from the endorsement of the God Bless the USA Bible.

Trump endorsed the Bible around Easter, shortly after a New York State court threaten to start seizing assets if he couldn’t pay a $175 million bond while he appealed his conviction in a civil fraud case.

“This Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back America and to make America great again is our religion,” Trump said in a promotional video. “We must protect content that is pro-God. We love God. And we have to protect anything that is pro-God. We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor, or discriminate against us.”

The God Bless the USA Bible uses the King James Version and is published with a copy of the chorus of “God Bless the USA,” handwritten by country singer Lee Greenwood: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. / And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.” It also includes the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Bible sells for $59.99. Editions endorsed by Trump, including the Inauguration Day Edition, the Presidential Edition, and the Golden Age Edition, sell for $99.99.

The Bibles are printed for about $3 each in Hangzhou, China, according to the Associated Press. Religious books are exempt from tariffs on Chinese imports, the US Customs and Border Protection told Christianity Today.

Several editions of the Bible, including one celebrating Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, have sold out.

Trump has not disclosed how much he makes per copy. Royalties are paid to a licensing company called CIC Ventures. Trump was listed in the financial disclosure as CIC Ventures’ manager, president, secretary, and treasurer. The company also licenses Trump’s name to sell watches, sneakers, and guitars.

Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister in Nashville who reviews Bibles on his YouTube channel, said the God Bless the USA Bible appears to be cheaply made.

“I would expect this Bible to be maybe $15 to $20 tops,” Wildsmith said. “It disappoints me that it’s even out there, and it disappoints me that people are making money off of this. … This feels more like a money grab than anything else.”

Trump is not the first president to endorse an edition of Scripture. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both endorsed Bibles. They were not sold for profit, however, but given to American soldiers going to fight in World War I and II.

Trump said he licensed his name to the God Bless America Bible because the Bible is his favorite book and “a lot of people’s favorite book.” Even some of his strong evangelical supporters have questioned how much he’s read it, though.

Author Eric Metaxas, for example, once wrote that Trump “has evinced a startling lack of familiarity with the Bible.”

When Trump was running for president in 2015, he refused to say what his favorite Bible verses were, protesting the question was too personal. When he was asked about the Bible again on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said it was a great book that you could read 20 times and appreciate more every time and that he’d learned a lot from Scripture. Trump cited as an example the command “Never bend to envy.”

The phrase does not appear in the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version that Trump was given as a child, or any major English translation. Evangelical journalist David Brody said he thought Trump was probably conflating two passages. He asked for clarification and staffers told him Trump was referring to Proverbs 24, which says “Do not envy the wicked” (v. 1).

Brody argued that from one perspective, Trump’s inability to quote Scripture could be admired.

“Trump … had no desire to take the easy road and simply memorize a couple of Bible verses,” Brody wrote in The Faith of Donald J. Trump. “I had given him some of my favorite verses. A staffer could have come up with a few more, and even scripted some evangelicalish lines to sweeten the ears or stop the critics.”

Brody wouldn’t call Trump a Christian, though. Instead, in his book, he wrote that “Donald Trump seems to be on a spiritual voyage that has accelerated greatly in the past few years.”

God Bless the USA Bible has recently added several new editions to the lineup. One is endorsed by First Lady Melania Trump, another by Vice President JD Vance.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Wire Story

Suspected Assassin Preached on Spiritual Warfare

Paul O'Donnell - Religion News Service

Man charged with murdering Minnesota legislator said God would raise up apostles and prophets to correct the church.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Vance Boelter, the man arrested in connection with the killing of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband and the shooting of a state senator and his wife on June 14, is an evangelical missionary who has preached in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in recent years.

The FBI identified Boelter, 57, as a suspect in the killing of Rep. Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and Mark Hortman at their home in Champlin, a suburb of Minneapolis. The suspect, who impersonated an officer to gain entry to the Hortmans’ home, was still at the crime scene when police officers arrived, but he escaped after an exchange of fire.

Earlier, the suspect had shot and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, at their home.

Boelter identified himself on LinkedIn and other websites as the CEO and president of two security services companies, Praetorian Guard Security Services and Red Lion Group, the latter based in DRC, in Central Africa. On his LinkedIn page, which shows that he worked as a general manager at 7-11 in Minneapolis until 2021, he lists himself as open to work.

But in a video dated February 2023, Boelter is seen preaching at La Borne Matadi, a church in Matadi, on the western coast of the DRC. In one sermon he tells the audience that “people don’t know what sex they are” because the devil “has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”

In another sermon at the church, one of three he gave from 2021 to 2023, according to Wired, Boelter said, “They don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches,” he told the audience. “They don’t have the gifts flowing. God gives the body gifts. To keep balance. Because when the body starts moving in the wrong direction, when they’re one, and accepting the gifts, God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.

“God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America,” he added, “to correct his church.”

On the now-defunct website for Revoformation, a nonprofit apparently founded by Boelter, a biography said that he was ordained in 1993 and had attended Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, a charismatic “Spirit-filled Bible School,” according to its website, that helps develop ministry skills.

The biography said that Boelter had spent time in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where, it says, “He sought out militant Islamists in order to share the gospel and tell them that violence wasn’t the answer.”

Boelter also earned a degree in international relations at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, as well as a master’s degree in management and a doctorate in leadership from Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee.

Law enforcement in Minnesota said a list containing more than 70 names, presumed to be potential targets, was found in the vehicle parked outside the Hortmans’ house. It included Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2024, and US Representative Ilhan Omar.

Walz appointed Boelter to Minnesota’s Governor’s Workforce Development Board in 2019, according to reports. Walz ordered flags in his state to half-staff in honor of Hortman. “Today Minnesota lost a great leader,” said Walz.

Boelter was arrested after an extensive manhunt and has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the location of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the city of Matadi. DRC is in Central Africa and Matadi is in the western part of the country.

- More from Paul O'Donnell - Religion News Service

Theology

What You Should Know About the Tragedies of Jewish History

Marvin Olasky

Loving your neighbor includes understanding your neighbor.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

The attack on Jews in Boulder, Colorado, two weeks ago; combined with the attack two weeks before in Washington, DC; combined with the arson at the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro a month before that; combined with attacks on Jewish students on college campuses; plus antisemitic conspiracy theories aired on popular podcasts (Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens)—may all be ending a long honeymoon.

A survey of 1,732 Jews last fall found more than 90 percent saying antisemitism is a problem and has increased during the previous five years. Facts support fears: The most recently published FBI data shows a 63 percent increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes between 2022 and 2023. Although Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population, 15 percent of all hate crimes in 2023 were anti-Jewish.

That sad fact goes along with triumph. Jews make up one-third of all US Supreme Court justices and one-third of all American Nobel Prize winners. Jews have education and income well above the American average. But when we look at religion-based hate crimes in 2023, the victims two-thirds of the time were Jewish. So the question remains: Is this golden age of Judaism just a blip?

I’ve enjoyed this golden age. I was born into a Jewish family in 1950 as American Judaism began its long summer of success, but each year summer ended soon after Tisha B’Av in August. That’s the 24-hour-fast day on which Babylonians destroyed the first temple in 586 BC and Romans destroyed the second in AD 70. On that day in AD 132, Israelites lost their last war against Rome and saw Jerusalem leveled, with Jews prohibited from living there.

Critical to understanding Judaism is its marriage of faith with nationality. A born Jew like me, according to Judaism, is a Jew, period. Becoming a Christian in 1976, though, made the Good News real for me and mostly buried the parent-imbued sense that bad news is just around the corner—but I understand the feeling. Seven in ten American Jews say remembering the Holocaust, the World War II murder of 6 million Jewish civilians, is “essential” to Jewish identity. The sad historical fact is that for two millennia trouble has been frequent, as remembered each Tisha B’Av.

During those centuries, restrictive laws across Europe pushed Jewish families from place to place. They rarely became landowners. Jews worked at whatever urban trades they could. A few became moneylenders since the Catholic church did not allow Christians to compete with them. Those moneylenders sometimes became rich. Jewish economic success led to jealousy and covetousness among those Christians who sought opportunities to steal or who saw Jews as eternally bearing responsibility for deicide.

An opportunity arose after Pope Urban II in 1095 called for a crusade to retake Jerusalem. As participants in the First Crusade headed toward Palestine, some killed along the way 5,000 Jews in northern France and along the Rhine. Other crusades brought similar destruction. Popes sometimes offered, as an incentive for crusade participation, the cancellation of crusaders’ debts to Jews.

Roman Catholic doctrinal changes also contributed to increased tensions. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, a major church conference in Rome, established the doctrine of transubstantiation: the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper seen literally as Christ’s flesh and blood. During the next several centuries, angry priests and mob leaders repeatedly claimed that Jews desecrated wafers. The Lateran Council also decreed that Jews should wear a special badge to differentiate them from the general population.

Other new charges spread. The “blood libel” accusation—that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in Passover rituals—first appeared in 1144 in England and resurfaced throughout the 1200s. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II investigated the charge and found it without merit, but it remained popular among those seeking a cause for mob action, as in Germany in 1298.

Around 1220, someone—an Italian, an Englishman?—invented a story of meeting a Jew who had insulted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and thus had to wander the world for all time. That legend of the “wandering Jew” spread throughout Europe, retold in hundreds of publications with settings frequently altered. Some leaders spread zany stories for political effect. In 1321, French Jews supposedly encouraged lepers to poison wells used by Christians. Jews were innocent, but 5,000 Jews and lepers died. The following year, King Charles IV expelled those who had survived.

That was only a prelude to the Black Death riots of 1348–1349, when Germans and others accused Jews of causing the bubonic plague by poisoning wells. Pope Clement VI acknowledged Jewish innocence, but assault wiped out many Jewish communities already hurt by disease. Basel, Switzerland, residents burned 600 Jews at the stake and expelled the city’s other Jews, converting the synagogue into a church and destroying the Jewish cemetery.

The end for Spanish Judaism came in 1492, when the Spanish government gave all Jews the old choice of exile or baptism under pressure. Some hurriedly baptized, known as conversos, manned Christopher Columbus’s ships. At least 100,000 Jews left. Many headed to Portugal only to be kicked out five years later. Most wound up in Muslim lands. Spanish officials confiscated all Jewish property, ploughed under Jewish cemeteries, and either destroyed synagogues or turned them into churches or pigsties.

One city that did not expel Jews pioneered a new technique to restrict Jewish social interaction with the rest of the populace: Venice officials in 1516 began requiring Jews to live in a special area of the city that included a factory for metal (ghetto in Italian). Ghettoization also made it easier to slap on extra taxes and expropriate Jewish property. In 1555, Pope Paul IV advised cities everywhere within Christendom to set up ghettos.

Jews also served as a source of entertainment. As I’ve written elsewhere, “For two centuries, from 1466 to 1667, Rome’s annual carnival entertainment prior to Lent starred eight Jews wearing only loincloths who had to run a distance of a quarter mile between jeering spectators. The spectators threw rocks and garbage at the runners and then forced rabbis and other community leaders to kiss a statue of a pig.” On the Protestant side, Martin Luther turned into a fierce antisemite, leaving a mark on German culture that endured murderously into the 20th century.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Church Life

Christianity Is Declining in Australia. Or Is It?

Amy Lewis in Australia

New study finds hundreds of thousands of people, especially those over 55, are quietly turning to Christianity.

Illustration by Christianity Today

Christine Hill grew up in a non-Christian home in Geelong, Australia. As a child, she attended the local Methodist church on her own—until one day when the church sent her home with a packet of tithing envelopes the pastor expected her family to fill.

“The money was very tight, so I stopped going,” Hill said.

It took more than half a century—when Hill was 75 years old—before she finally came to know and accept Jesus. She recalled miraculous dreams and the influence of her son’s conversion nudging her toward faith.

Late-in-life conversions like Hill’s are becoming more common in Australia, according to a new study on the country’s religious trends. While news headlines point to the decline of Christianity in Australia and the fact that Christians no longer constitute a majority, people over the age of 55 are increasingly converting to Christianity, and people ages 15 to 24 are more open to the faith.

Andrew Grills, pastor of City on a Hill Geelong, is seeing this swell of newcomers firsthand. He noted that in early May he attended a meeting with some other pastors in the City on a Hill network throughout Australia, and all of them mentioned seeing new faces in the pews each Sunday.

“I’ve been here for 13 years, and we’ve never seen anything like it,” Grills said. “It’s an uptick across demographics but especially young folks, and I would say a preponderance of young men.” Even though City on a Hill targets people under 30, a group in his congregation of older people, who call themselves the Experienced People in Christ’s Service, put together their own conference last month. “It was booming!” Grills said.

Nearly every week, people are coming into Grills’s church and telling him their stories about how they met Jesus. For instance, one family in crisis said they discovered a box in the attic with a letter from their grandfather to his children. In it, he shared how he became a Christian in Ireland in the 1920s. As a result of that letter, the whole family is now following Jesus, Grills said.

On a Sunday in May, Grills met a man who had recently converted from witchcraft. “He’d heard an audible voice calling his name, and it started a process where he said, ‘I think God is real.’” The same Sunday, a 19-year-old with no faith background showed up with a King James Bible. The man told Grills that he had also heard a voice calling him, but no one was there. “He thought he was going mad,” Grills recounted.

“The humbling thing is that it’s not that we’re getting better at communicating the gospel,” Grills said. “It’s that God is doing the kind of stuff you hear about in the Muslim world.”

For Hill, the encounter with Jesus began decades before her conversion. At night, she’d often dream she was driving a new car and couldn’t put on the brakes. After she and a friend got baptized at a New Age spiritualist church, she suddenly stopped having that dream.

“But then I started dreaming that I was lost,” said Hill, a registered nurse at the time. “I was trying to go to work, and I could never find how to get there. Or I might finally get there but couldn’t find the ward.”

Hill often visited fortunetellers and New Age practitioners then, looking for answers about the future of her youngest son as he struggled with mental health issues. Her son would drive an hour to Melbourne to visit a Daoist temple. When he didn’t come home after one of those trips in 2022, Hill remembers praying to God in desperation: “Lord, bring him home safe.”Hours later, she found him down the beach not far from home. He told her that he’d found the Lord but didn’t explain how.

That started her on a quest of her own. She began reading books written by Puritans and articles about Christianity. She bought a King James Bible. She stopped going to yoga and tai chi classes. She threw out her Christmas decorations and knickknacks and got rid of all her novels because she wanted to remove every non-Christian influence from her home. “There’s enough of my own sin around every day that I struggle with,” she said.

Since she didn’t attend church, she tried to baptize herself in the ocean. Twice. She says she nearly drowned both times. A nearby church agreed to baptize her after she prayed with them to accept Jesus as her Savior. After those baptizing her brought her out of the water, they asked if she wanted to speak in tongues. “No, I didn’t feel like speaking, but I just felt wonderful,” she recounts.

Months later, the thought occurred that she needed to attend church “to fellowship and go somewhere where others are praising the Lord.” She searched online for “reformed churches” and became a member at a local Christian Reformed Church.

Australia’s most recent census data reveals that for the first time since Australia became a country, Christians did not make up a majority of the population. Christians registered just 44 percent of residents, down 17 percentage points from a decade earlier. In addition, nearly 40 percent had marked “no religion,” an increase of 16 percentage points over the past decade.

While mainstream media reports aren’t wrong to say that thousands of people no longer identify as Christians, demographer and social analyst Mark McCrindle believes that those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“It’s not just that Australians are less religious or less active in their faith,” McCrindle said. “It’s more that they’re reinterpreting the census question.”

His research-based advisory firm published a report this year examining the country’s religious trends using the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD) from the Census of Population and Housing and surveying nearly 3,000 Australians. The report found that respondents are moving away from cultural identification with Christianity and toward a measure of active practice.

“You go back 40 years, and we had almost 9 in 10 Australians saying their religion was Christianity,” McCrindle said. “But that’s all changed. People, unless they’re active in the practice, don’t tick the box.”

Yet the report found that in the past five years, more than 784,000 new people did tick the box. The trend toward Christianity has been consistent in the past two decades, McCrindle found. He believes the shift is meaningful because people are now giving more honest answers about what they practice and believe.

Hill’s conversion fits the trends McCrindle sees on paper, as nearly 195,000 Australians over the age of 55 moved from no religion to Christianity in the last five years, making up 25 percent of the country’s Christians converts. In the last decade, the proportion of Christian converts over 55 increased by 11 percentage points.

The other significant trend is among 15-to-24-year-olds. Even though they are the age group most likely to leave Christianity, more than half of them are open to conversations about views different from their own. And the ones who are Christians? They are more likely than any other age group to regularly attend church.

Australia’s post-Christian society is also post-secular, McCrindle said. “The ‘Aussie dream’ pathway has not delivered, and they want to know, ‘Where can I find meaning, substance, and truth?’” McCrindle noted. “For many, Christianity answers those questions.”

Stephen McAlpine, author of Being the Bad Guys, said young Australian men in particular feel left out of the culture.

“[A young man] has got to demonstrate that he’s not the toxic Andrew Tate guy,” McAlpine said. “The alternative is more a faux champion, the feminized man. If they don’t want that, what are they going to do?”

McAlpine said that what they need is transcendence, a meaningful interaction with God. So they end up visiting churches even though they grew up without faith backgrounds.

“Jordan Peterson was a gateway drug for many young men into the church because he was someone who stood up to some of the things that he saw [as] wrong in the culture and was brave,” McAlpine said.

That means the people showing up at church come from untidy backgrounds and live in complex situations. “They’re much more like the people on Crete that Paul writes about,” McAlpine said. “But they’re looking for community. And they’re going to make mistakes.”

McCrindle notes that churches shouldn’t be discouraged by news reports of the decline in Christianity in the country but rather be more aware of the opportunities: Young people are more open to exploring the faith, older people are searching for meaning and reengagement with Christianity, and immigrants are moving to Australia, bringing the world to its shores.

“There are undercurrents of opportunity, undercurrents of fruitfulness, and, I think, undercurrents of great hope for the church and the future of Christianity in Australia,” McCrindle said.

Grills is taking advantage of the new opportunities. Even as God uses supernatural means to draw people to Christ, the congregation is also engaging more in evangelism, such as running continuous Alpha courses.

“Seeing God do the supernatural stuff is actually helping us get better at the normal stuff,” Grills said. “The harvest is plentiful. It feels like a lot of time we’re sowing, sowing, sowing, and there’s very little fruit. And now suddenly there’s fruit, and that makes you more excited about more fruit.”

While Grills is hesitant to call it a revival, noting that the increase isn’t as pronounced as the growth of Christianity in the UK, “it’s definitely a change,” he said. The church has also seen an uptick in the number of people willing to leave their jobs and enter full-time ministry: “Often we’ve had one or two or three or four. But this year it’s twelve.”

Hill said Jesus has changed her. She said she’s a gentler, softer person. “I keep asking the Holy Spirit to make me more like Jesus,” she said. “I want to be changed—heart, mind, and soul.”

She recognizes that finding Jesus can take a lifetime. Now “I can look back and see he was with me the whole time, protecting me, directing me,” Hill said. “There was no way that he was letting the lost sheep off, because I was a little lost sheep.”

Her next-door neighbor is in his 80s and selling his house. Soon after she became a Christian, Hill gave him a Bible. A few weeks before he moved, he came to her house for a meal.

He asked, “Can you tell me how you go about it?” When she asked what he was referring to, he responded, “Speak to the Lord and give him your heart.”

Hill found the sinner’s prayer on the internet, and they prayed it together.

“I wasn’t evangelizing him,” she said. “I just asked him about the Bible and talked with him about the things of life.”

- More from Amy Lewis

News

Malaysian Minister Accused of ‘Pushing a Christian Agenda’ Wins Defamation Case

Kelly Ng

Muslim groups decried Hannah Yeoh’s memoir, in which she details her faith journey.

Hannah Yeoh, the Malaysia Minister of Youth and Sports, seen during the 46th ASEAN summit in May 2025.

SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty

Malaysia cabinet minister Hannah Yeoh won a defamation case in late May against university lecturer Kamarul Zaman Yusoff, who accused her of using her memoir to turn Malaysia into a Christian nation.

The long-running suit, which Yeoh filed in 2022, centers on two of Kamarul’s Facebook posts from May 2017 that suggested she was “pushing a Christian agenda” through her political position. One of the posts specified Yeoh’s autobiography, in which she wrote about her faith journey and why she decided to run for office.

High Court judge Aliza Sulaiman ruled both posts defamatory and said they portrayed Yeoh as a threat to Islam, the predominant religion in Malaysia.

“In a multiracial and multireligious country where the issue of religion is, of course, very sensitive, [Kamarul’s] accusations can expose someone to hatred, ridicule and contempt,” Aliza said in her verdict on May 30.

The court ordered Kamarul, a political scientist at the Universiti Utara Malaysia, to pay RM400,000 ($95,000 USD) in damages to Yeoh. He plans to file an appeal against the decision.

The High Court’s ruling “finally vindicates me of these false allegations said about my book and my faith that I had endured for years,” Yeoh told CT in a text message.

“I trust fully in the Lord with the outcome. … Justice has truly been served.”

Christian scholars in Malaysia lauded Yeoh’s victory in the defamation suit even as the space for expressing non-Muslim viewpoints shrinks.

Yeoh, who was trained as a lawyer, entered politics in 2008 and is now Malaysia’s minister of youth and sports. As the rare Christian female politician in a nation where about 64 percent of the population is Muslim, the 46-year-old is no stranger to attacks.

At the center of the controversy is her 2014 book, Becoming Hannah: A Personal Journey. In it, Yeoh shares how her faith shaped her foray into politics—an about-face from her earlier desire to stay in Australia after her studies to practice law. Her Christian identity permeates the book, which quotes heavily from Scripture and details prophecies.

While testifying in November, Yeoh explained her reasons for writing the book. “Ever since I became a politician … a lot of churches don’t want to be associated with politicians,” she said. “In answering the call to serve my country via politics, I did not want to be a preacher anymore. But, many people wanted to hear my story on coming into a dark space to fight corruption [via politics].”

In January, a Kuala Lumpur police chief said 182 police reports had been lodged against Yeoh over her book, claiming it sought to “spread Christianity” and turn Malaysia into a Christian country. Several Muslim organizations had also called for the Ministry of Home Affairs to ban her book.

Last December, the High Court dismissed a separate defamation suit filed by Yeoh against former inspector general of police Tan Sri Musa Hassan over similar comments he made at a talk at Universiti Teknologi Mara. Yeoh claimed that he had accused her not only of using her book as a tool of evangelism but also of having connections with Christians and Jews who seek to undermine Islam and Malaysia.

A member of Malaysia’s Democratic Action Party (DAP), she first won a seat in Parliament representing her hometown of Subang Jaya at the age of 29. Some of the electorate derided her young age and inexperience and began calling for her to step down during her first term, she told the Singaporean Christian publication Salt&Light.

Yeoh admitted that at the time, she entertained the thought of quitting.

“Sometimes after obeying and saying ‘yes’ to God, there’s still the work to be done,” she told Salt&Light. “And the work is tough. Many times, I felt like giving up and even threatened God, saying: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’”

A pastor encouraged her to muster faith for the long haul, pointing her to how Jesus bore the cross for our sins even though many, including those closest to him, rejected him.

Five years later, Yeoh became speaker for Selangor State Legislative Assembly, making her the country’s first female speaker and the youngest to take on the role.

In 2018, Yeoh became deputy minister of women, family, and community development after the long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition handed the reins of power to Pakatan Harapan, a coalition the DAP was part of. During this stint, she championed policies to end domestic violence, abandonment of babies, and child marriages.

At the time of writing, Malaysia still allows girls below the age of 18 to get married if permitted by the sharia court.

In 2022, Yeoh was appointed minister of youth and sports, where she has made it her mission to help Malaysia obtain its first Olympic gold medal.

Despite the challenges, Yeoh noted that it is important for Christians to participate in politics.

“If we stayed away, people will not see God,” she said in the Salt&Light interview. “I think the greatest mistake is to believe the Enemy when he says the church should never be involved in politics. It is not a defiled and dirty place where we can’t be a light. In fact, the darker the place, the easier it is for you to shine.”

Although the decision in Yeoh’s case makes it clear that unproven allegations about religious minorities will not be accepted in the court of law, the court of public opinion may hold a different view, said Malaysian human rights lawyer Andrew Khoo.

“As Kamarul Zaman himself is reported to have said, he saw it as his duty as a lecturer and a Muslim to inform the public of the book’s contents for fear that Christianity may influence them,” Khoo said. “This feeds into the contemporary narrative that Christianity is lurking in the shadows … taking every opportunity to sow the seeds of religious confusion.”

Even though religious freedom is a constitutional right in Malaysia, Islam is often seen as “the religion of the federation, while the others do not matter,” said Chris Chong, who teaches political science at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman in Petaling Jaya.

The constitution restricts the proselytizing of Muslims and prohibits ethnic Malays from converting to other faiths.

Both Chong and Khoo feel the space for interfaith dialogue and for the sharing of non-Islamic views has shrunk over the years.

“Such discourse is now often restricted to select groups and only in closed-door situations for fear of ‘confusing’ the public,” Khoo said. “Tolerance and sufferance [have] taken the place of acceptance, and religious diversity has increasingly been viewed as a threat to the majority religion.”

- More from Kelly Ng

Culture

Review

Wes Anderson Finds God, Played by Bill Murray

Mia Staub

The Phoenician Scheme is absurd and imperfect. It also takes faith seriously.

Mia Threapleton as Liesl and Benicio Del Toro as Zsa-Zsa Korda in The Phoenician Scheme.

I was hesitant to see Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Phoenician Scheme. (Props to the marketing team; the Instagram clips of Bryan Cranston doing a “classic backhand lay-up” got me to the theater.)

Still, I was skeptical as I settled into my seat. I’m familiar with Anderson’s quirky style; his cinematography and editing play starring roles in movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Fantastic Mr. Fox. The appeal of his work lies in its design sensibility and dry humor, its absurdity and creativity.

But I also often find Anderson’s movies, including Moonrise Kingdom and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, coast on looks without much character development or depth. The characters are often, well, characters—more tropes than real, complex individuals. (The exception is Isle of Dogs, one of my favorite films.)

For fans of the Anderson aesthetic, The Phoenician Scheme doesn’t disappoint. I was charmed by the title sequences’ choreography and set design. There’s some genuine hilarity, including a basketball game to settle a contract dispute. But once again, I found the main plot—a wealthy businessman (Benicio del Toro) with morally questionable strategies embarks on an industrial endeavor—to be less than compelling, another entry in the “rich-people-suck” genre. The industrial titans’ outbursts made me wince; watching these stock characters argue is like watching Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s current social media spat.

In short, this plot isn’t strong enough to carry the film’s deeper themes—what reconciliation looks like for a broken family, what faith means apart from monotonous practices or a solid moral code. The style of The Phoenician Scheme doesn’t match the substance. But that substance is still compelling.

Underneath the wheeling and dealing is a more powerful story: The agnostic businessman’s relationship with his Catholic daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice nun about to take vows. Zsa-zsa asks Liesl to be his heir on a “trial period.” Curious to find out more about a family mystery, she agrees to follow her father around as he meets with business partners about a future industrial project.

Conversations about faith lend Liesl and Zsa-zsa more heft than typical Wes Anderson characters—they’re able to access nuance and intimacy and even to change their minds. Zsa-zsa survives many assassination attempts; after each one, we see some glimpse of his heavenly judgment. (One scene involves him asking God, played by Bill Murray, questions about ethical business practices.) When Zsa-zsa returns to reality, he offers sentimental confessions to his business associates that ultimately prevail over his violent and deceitful tactics.

Something of a Paul on the road to Damascus, Zsa-zsa is the last man you’d expect to come to faith. But he ends up sacrificing his own fortune and employing more ethical business practices to fund a project he believes will help the country of Phoenicia. We see him do what the rich young ruler couldn’t (Matt. 19:23–26): He gives up his material desires for the greater good.

Liesl is the lens through which her father is able to see faith differently; she’s often praying over conflicts and forgiving those who wrong her before they come to apologize. As the two get closer, she is able to accept his flaws while feeling more confident in challenging his violent, exploitative business practices. Though Zsa-zsa acknowledges that he’d like Liesl to leave the convent and be his permanent heir, he also gifts her a bejeweled rosary and asks her probing questions. He wants to support her future even if it conflicts with his desire for her life.

Toward the end of the film, Mother Superior (Hope Davis) insists that Liesl cannot take her vow because she is too attached to material things, like the bejeweled rosary. Shortly after, the head nun is paid off by Zsa-zsa and roped into his industrial scheme. It’s a painful reminder of the church’s shortcomings and its misguided push for institutional prestige and power.

But The Phoenician Scheme isn’t just looking to point out the failures of the institutional church; it’s exploring, however glancingly, the struggles of the individual Christian life. When Zsa-zsa confesses to his daughter his desire to be a man of faith, she in turn confesses to him that no one answers. That’s a very relatable fear: What if God isn’t listening?

For a moment in the theater, the dry humor, cynical side-eye, and quirky aesthetics faded into the background. I remembered my own experiences of doubt and God’s silence. Liesl’s reflection shook me: honest and genuine and, again, not what I’d expect from a Wes Anderson movie.

As a Christian, I’m often pessimistic about Hollywood’s engagement with religion. I assume portrayals will be unabashedly negative, as in Mickey 17’s harsh representation of prosperity-gospel teaching, megachurch pastors, and the church’s platform in American politics. Or I assume Christianity will be relegated to a mockable character trait, an archetype for hypocritical characters—think Angela from The Office and Marianne in Easy A—or ditzy ones, like Shirley in Community.

Sometimes faith is less sinister conniving than outdated superstition. That’s the attitude of Han Solo in Star Wars and of another Harrison Ford cult-classic figure, Indiana Jones. But by the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dr. Jones has changed his mind. In fact, I think that’s the kind of film The Phoenician Scheme could be understood as: a coming-to-faith testimony wrapped in an action-packed plot.

For us as believers, it can be disheartening to see movies that take a glib or combative approach to Christianity. On the one hand, we imagine how nonbelievers might understand any unfair critiques. And on the other, we’re ashamed of the all-too-fair criticisms they level. Financial corruption, sexual abuse, and spiritual manipulation are terrible realities; we have a responsibility to be honest about our sins, even if it’s painful to watch them on screen.

But I also don’t want story lines about Christianity to be reserved for “faith-based” films. These stories preach to the choir (pun completely intended), and they aren’t the kind of movie I am going to with my nonbelieving friends here in Hollywood.

I left The Phoenician Scheme a little numb, still absorbing what I had watched. It took me a few days to realize the olive branch that had been extended to people of faith. The subtle conversion story almost got lost in the set design, editing, lackluster plot, and character-actor absurdity, as funny as Bryan Cranston might be playing basketball.

But it didn’t get lost, not entirely—which means I can add this film to the encouraging examples of recent movies and television series that take faith seriously, projects like A Real Pain and Minari, Nine Days and First Man, Women Talking and Conclave. Seeing big-name directors like Wes Anderson engage faith in their stories is surprising and refreshing and reminds me to check my assumptions about the film industry writ large. The Phoenician Scheme, while not the most obvious or richly emotional come-to-faith story, gives me hope that we will continue to see more authentic and serious displays like it.

Mia Staub is editorial project manager at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

The Millennial Dad Dividend

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Every young father I know is a great dad. I think it’s a major sign of hope.

Illustration By Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Earlier this year, a new acquaintance asked what signs of hope I see for our society. It’s easy enough to list what’s wrong, he observed. We all play the critic. But what’s good and getting better? What’s encouraging?

For a moment, I was flummoxed. My first ideas didn’t seem serious enough for the conversation we’d been having. Then it came to me: the dads.

Without exception, every millennial and zoomer dad I know is a great dad. I know that’s anecdotal, but there are numbers to back this up, and I’m not alone in noticing that something here has shifted. Yet I don’t see much attention to what this shift will mean long-term. What harvest will we reap in 20, 30, 40 years from today’s good fathering? How will the dad dividend pay?

I don’t want to overstate the change at hand. There are good fathers in every generation and plenty of bad ones kicking around now. But I’m confident the difference I see is real and will prove important.

Here’s what this looks like in the data: American dads are spending more time with their kids. Compared to just five years ago, millennial fathers specifically “are doing 17 more minutes of [child] care per weekday and 32 more minutes per weekend day,” as The New York Times’ Jessica Grose recently reported, “for a total of 2.5 hours more child care a week.” That stacks on similar growth at the start of this century and the end of the last. Men are doing more around the house, too, and support for paternity leave is also rising.

Here’s what it looks like on the ground: “Millennial fathers—at least the ones I hang around—are more interested in being great fathers than anything else in life,” in the words of Andrew O’Donovan, who writes about modern fatherhood on Substack. “In the case of almost all of these fathers, they came from broken homes, homes with absent fathers, homes with angry fathers, homes with emasculated fathers, or homes with a smattering of any of the above. We’ve known for some time that [we] want to be better fathers.”

In my observation, they’re succeeding. When the dads in my circles take their kids out without the moms—and they do, and it’s not “babysitting”—they don’t need to be handheld about what the baby’s eating these days or where to find the swimsuits. They know. And they know how to phone the pediatrician and how the church nursery works and what makes their toddler feel better when he has gas.

Beyond knowing, they do. They change diapers and handle bedtime, answer teacher emails and go to medical appointments. They don’t need to be persuaded to avoid a time-suck commute if feasible, or to take as much paternity leave as they can, or to be as helpful as possible during the birth and the newborn period. They may be professionally accomplished and ambitious, but it doesn’t come at the expense of their families.

Time spent on chores and childcare may or may not be evenly split between spouses, depending on a given family’s work arrangements. A homeschooling mom, for instance, will almost always spend more time with the kids than her formally employed husband, and mothers tend to gravitate toward jobs with more flexible schedules. But however those roles shake out, the dads I know are true partners, neither dominating their wives nor expecting them to manage the household alone. They do not wall off whole swaths of parenting and family life from the male purview. They do not utter the dread phrase I’d help if you’d just tell me what to do.

And it’s not only the responsible side of child-rearing in which these dads excel; just as significant is that they have friends and hobbies. They watch sports, go to concerts, and enjoy a beer. They exercise, join book clubs, learn new skills, and actively cultivate their marriages. They’re enthusiastic about their churches and small groups. And crucially, they do all this in front of their kids. They model fatherhood as a life of rest along with work, play along with discipline, joy along with duty.

These dads make parenthood look natural and normal, not the death knell of fun and freedom. They father in a way that debunks the inequality of mothering and fathering as verbs, the one commonly used to mean lifelong care and the other the act of a single night. They delight in their kids and show them that this delight does not subsume all the other goods of life. They demonstrate daily that entrance into fatherhood, while not always easy, adds far more than it takes.

Now, again, many men in older generations were excellent fathers, and the time-use improvements aren’t equally distributed. Dads who don’t marry or go to college are not increasing their weekly childcare time, and changing attitudes around cooking in particular suggest that religiosity strongly correlates with willingness to help around the house. (And many millennial men, of course, are not becoming dads at all.)

In other words, the dads I know—dads who are, almost universally, married college grads who go to church every week—are to a degree exceptional. What I’m seeing in my husband and our friends and family is not the average.

Yet neither is it some wild outlier, and even if only a minority of dads are as dedicated to good fatherhood as my dad friends are, that still matters. That will still change things.

How differently will my sons and my friends’ sons think about fatherhood because of the fathers they know now? Perhaps they will be less ambivalent about the whole project of becoming parents than our generation has been.

Or how differently will our daughters think about marriage, about trusting someone enough to take the plunge of raising children together? Perhaps they’ll take vows with justifiable assurance that, as O’Donovan proclaims, the “Homer Simpsonification of the modern father is dead.”

And how differently will all these children think about God if their earthly father, though imperfect, is an aid instead of a hindrance to understanding the Father’s love?

We cannot help but draw the connection, I suspect, and surely we are intended to draw it. Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount. “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” he asked. “Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9–11).

How much more will a generation shaped by good dads multiply the good gifts they’ve received? I wait in hope to see it.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

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