The Christian Schools That Cried Wolf

Bonnie Kristian

Critics of religious academies compare modern parental concerns over sexual ethics to mid-century racism. But the echo they hear is not about education.

Illustration by Owen Gent

As our twin boys played with their little sister across the classroom, they did not know what we knew: that this admissions interview could help set the course not only for their formative years but for life. Their future first-grade teacher asked why we wanted to enroll our children at her school.

Well, we said, so many reasons. Some are prosaic: The campus is one walkable mile from our house, and the schedule is convenient. Others are about pedagogy: Younger grades get up to four recesses a day, and there is no homework until middle school. Then there’s the classical education they’ll receive: Our children will study Latin and Greek. They’ll read the great works of literature I self-assigned in high school and college in a belated scramble to learn the cultural canon all my favorite writers seemed to know.

We didn’t bother to mention that we are interested because it is a Christian school. We didn’t bother because of course that’s part of it. We knew it; the teacher knew it; our boys knew it. Mentioning it would’ve felt like telling a real estate agent, “We’re interested in this property because the house has walls.” We want our children to have a deliberately Christian education because in school they will learn more than math and reading. They will learn about who they are and what God expects of them.

It’s not of course for everyone, I realize, including many faithful Christian families who choose public school or homeschooling out of a sense of calling or simply because there’s no other good option. For us, though, this choice is in some ways very simple. Of course we’re enrolling because it’s a Christian school.

But the project of Christian education in America is not as simple as that. It’s a project that, in much of the country in the fairly recent past, was wrapped up in rank and shameless racism defended by my fellow white evangelicals on biblical grounds.

As journalist Paul F. Parsons wrote in a CT cover story in 1987, there was “a widespread perception that [evangelical] Christian schools are racist. After all, what once was a Southern phenomenon of the 1960s—segregationist academies quickly formed in the name of God—has spread nationwide. To some, ‘white-flight schools’ and ‘Christian schools’ are synonyms.”

That history echoes in our schooling debates. It pops up in conversations about today’s Christian—and especially white evangelical—parents’ attraction to private education because of ethical and theological concerns that the Trump administration’s robust executive orders on sex and gender may only temporarily allay. Our leaving public schools over curricula and policy on LGBTQ issues is reliably compared to Christians leaving public schools 60 years ago over race.

In a 2021 New York Times story, for example, religion reporter Ruth Graham made the connection explicit. The current moment is “the second Great Awakening in Christian education in the United States since the 1960s and ’70s,” a source told her. Given the specified timeline, Graham noted that the “previous ‘Great Awakening’ was spurred by a number of factors, starting when white Southern parents founded ‘segregation academies’ as a backlash to racial integration created by the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.”

Interrogating this comparison—this historical echo—is my chief interest here. It’s partly an intellectual interest. I think there’s a theological difference between these two waves of evangelical attraction to private schools.

I don’t have space to do all the theology here, but say for the sake of argument that contemporary evangelicals are right to believe that racism is an indefensible evil and the traditional Christian sexual ethic is correct. Assume with me that the former runs violently afoul of the God who is revealed in Christ and speaks in Scripture while the latter comports with God’s good will for human righteousness and flourishing.

In an important sense, for Christians, this distinction—that holding fast on sexual ethics is very different from embracing racism—answers the school choice comparison. For many, it may be enough to quiet the echo.

But I have to confess I’m not quite content to leave it there, because I can hear that echo too. I don’t make that comparison, but I understand why others do. Too many Christian parents cried wolf about the supposed dangers of integrated schooling. The cries were loud and long and sinful. Thus the rest of the village, rightly disgusted, is hesitant to listen this time around.

I have to confess too that I have a second reason for my interest. My kids were accepted to that Christian school for first grade this fall. They will receive a private, faith-based education, as I largely did. And my first school, the one that taught me to do sums and write cursive and devour chapter books, began as a segregation academy. Is there an echo not only in evangelical culture but in my own life?

I haven’t been able to dig up my yearbooks from that school, and its board declined to participate in this story. But from fuzzy childhood memories, I’m fairly certain the place had desegregated by the time I attended in the early 1990s.

My mom told me she wasn’t aware of the school’s history when she enrolled me; however, not being from the South, perhaps she simply didn’t recognize the clues.

Many Christian schools south of the Mason-Dixon Line began as my school did. Once integration became “inevitable, white segregationists throughout the South began to focus their energies on the establishment of separate schools,” explains historian Ansley L. Quiros in God with Us, a theological history of the civil rights struggle in a small Georgia town.

These segregation academies “would resist integration rulings and promote a particular theological vision for education.”

Often, the racism was overt. An enrollment application from Mississippi for the 1975–76 school year, for example, dispensed with all subtlety:

It is the belief of the Board of Directors of Council School Foundation that forced congregation of persons in social situations solely because they are of different races is a moral wrong. . . . Council School Foundation was founded upon and is operated in accordance with this fundamental ethical and educational concept. . . . The curriculum of Council School Foundation is designed solely for the educational responses of white children.

Others affected innocence. “We have had some blacks apply from the area,” a Christian school headmaster said in an Associated Press report in 1972, “but the pathetic situation is that they cannot make the preliminary testing.”

It may be tempting to brush this history away, to say, “Oh, but they weren’t really Christians.” Alas, they often were. As God with Us documents, they believed they were defending orthodoxy and Scripture itself against real threats to the faith.

“Christian theology contributed both to the moral power of the civil rights movement and to the staunch opposition it encountered,” Quiros wrote. Segregationists “felt they were acting out of the same impulses that motivated them to sing hymns, entreat the Almighty, and worship. They were upholding the sanctity of the Bible and the fundamentals of Christianity against Northern liberals.”

They were Christians, and they were wrong, and they left a stain on Christian education in America that has only partly faded.

Though there are many thoroughly integrated and even predominantly Black Christian schools in our country today—schools like the online Living Water School, Chicago’s Field School, or Imago Dei Neighborhood School in Richmond, Virginia—Christian schools’ student bodies, on average, remain whiter than the school-age population as a whole.

An ongoing reporting series on education and segregation by ProPublica has documented that it is not unheard of (particularly in the South’s Black Belt) for private schools to be more than 75 percentage points whiter than their communities. Numbers like that don’t happen by chance.

And while many Christian schools now publish racial nondiscrimination statements, it can be difficult to untangle the history and intent behind those pronouncements. Some were first issued defensively after the infamous Bob Jones University case of 1983, in which the Supreme Court held that the “government has a fundamental overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.”

Today, 47 percent of schoolchildren in America are white, and public schools nearly mirror the general public. Private schools are whiter (65%), and those the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) labels “Conservative Christian” are slightly whiter still (68% as of 2021). Christian schools seeking to diversify their student bodies often find that task easier said than done, though that’s not to suggest nothing has changed over the years. NCES data shows private schools are slowly but meaningfully diversifying, and conservative Christian schools don’t lag behind their secular and Catholic peers.

That’s true of my first school. In fact, that school has gone above and beyond the standard procedure of posting an affirmation of racial equality. Its statement is also confession, a frank recognition and repudiation of the circumstances surrounding the institution’s founding.

The websites I’ve browsed of other former segregation academies tend to paper over past sins with pictures of smiling Black students in monogrammed polos. To my school’s credit, it laments and repents.

My former school has a second statement on its website, bringing me back to the inevitable comparison. This statement is about sexuality and gender. It avows long-standing Christian understandings of marriage and biological sex in language buttressed by biblical references.

For many parents exploring private education, theology is one factor in a complex and often fraught decision-making process. Over the past half decade, pandemic policies and their aftershocks, reading instruction methods, and curricula on race and US history have all come to the fore alongside LGBTQ issues as widespread parental worries.

So why the particular attention to matters of sex and gender in the national conversation? Why is that the frequent comparison with the segregation era?

From the perspective of secular critics, I think it’s because, unlike other school-choice criteria, these two issues are understood as matters of unalterable identity. But on the evangelical side of the equation, I’ve come to think that the echo detectable here is not about repeated theological or political error. It’s not even about private education per se.

It’s about fear.

A characteristic expression of the anxiety in question comes from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who in 2022 coauthored Battle for the American Mind. It makes a candidly fearful case for Christian education.

“For many years, my fear was higher education,” Hegseth wrote, but he came to believe that “the real problem is high school, middle school, and now elementary school. The battlefield for the hearts and minds of our kids is the 16,000 hours they spend inside American classrooms from kindergarten to twelfth grade . . . it’s the 16,000-hour war.” And don’t think church is sufficient defense, Hegseth cautioned: “One hour on Sunday morning and one hour on Wednesday night at church is not enough.”

That last line made me chuckle, for I’ve approvingly quoted pastors making the exact same point. I wouldn’t argue for Christian schools with Hegseth’s Fox News–style bombast, but his desire for more intensive discipleship for his children is familiar.

It’s familiar to Christian educators too. University of Virginia sociologist Angel Adams Parham wrote at Comment in 2024,

As I have visited classical schools across the country, I have heard from heads of school who express concern that growing numbers of parents are coming to them not so much because they crave the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty that lies at the core of classical education at its best, but because they are beleaguered outcasts seeking shelter for themselves and their children from the ravages of critical race theory, “wokeism,” DEI [diversity, equality, and inclusion] initiatives, and more.

Fears of all kinds and levels of veracity get bundled together. And as Quiros observed in an interview with me, reinforcing all of them is the predilection to panic that defines much of America’s secular parenting culture today.

We live in enviable safety and prosperity, but we’re too scared to let nine-year-olds play in their own front yards. In that context, when the decision concerns things as important as education and sexual ethics, is it any wonder parents freak?

For the average Christian parent considering Christian education, then, I don’t think honing slam-dunk arguments about the sex-and-segregation comparison is the task at hand. Rather, it’s checking our motives for the distinction Parham drew: Do we want to enroll our kids in a Christian school for the good it offers? Or are we doing it because we’re scared?

The trick is being able to accurately parse the inclinations of our hearts. One useful indicator is how we think about insularity, which was brought to my attention by Tia Gaines, executive director of UnifiEd, a nonprofit supporting Christian schools. She also sits on the board of the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), a primary accreditor of US evangelical schools.

In one report from ACSI, Gaines told me, more than 400 Christian schools were assessed for 35 community characteristics. One of these “that had the biggest need for improvement was insularity,” Gaines said, which was defined as protecting students from the world’s brokenness, remaining aloof from the broader community, and/or lacking diversity in the student body.

“It was really interesting to see how Christian schools responded to that feedback,” Gaines said. “Some of them were surprised, and some were eager to address it. But some were like, ‘Well, yes, of course we have an insular culture. That’s the point. We want to shield our students and create a safe space for them, and that’s what our parents want.’ ”

That’s fear. But fearful pursuit of insularity doesn’t foster spiritual and intellectual maturity. It doesn’t leave room for iron to sharpen iron. It won’t teach our children, as the apostle Paul knew, that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). It won’t prepare them to be “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16) in a world both wicked and wonderful.

Getty

Bob Jones University Supreme Court case in 1983.

Christian schools do not have to be insular to be orthodox. Christian education does not have to be undergirded by fear or stuck on the sins of our fathers (Ezek. 18:20). We can follow the peculiar ethic of Jesus without withdrawing from the world. We can cry not “wolf” but “welcome.”

In the classroom, eschewing fearful insularity will mean examining what we teach and to whom we teach it. For classical schools, it will mean broadening the classics, as Parham argued in The Wall Street Journal, to include a wider array of time-tested ideas and voices, ancient and American alike. For all Christian schools, it will mean taking more seriously our own claims about loving the truth and learning to share it with the courage and cleverness of Paul on Mars Hill (Acts 17).

It will mean cultivating critical thinking alongside sound doctrine, and it’ll mean checking textbooks. This parental responsibility will look different than it would at a public school, but scrutiny is necessary still. Even Christian schools are run by sinners prone to wander from the truth.

For older students, Christian education shouldn’t play it safe. It should require encounters with hard history and perspectives from outside our cultures and the church itself, all under the guidance of faithful teachers.

“The truth sets us free,” said Anika Prather, the founder and administrator of a classical Christian school and the coauthor, with Parham, of The Black Intellectual Tradition. When Christ returns, she warned, “he’s not going to ask how many woke people you canceled. When we stand before the Lord, he’s going to say, ‘How many people did you reach for my gospel? And did you meet people where they were, or did you dehumanize them and not let them tell their story as a way of finding redemption and reconciliation?’ ”

Prather doesn’t shelter her students from secular thinkers or troubling history, she said. “I’m teaching my students, ‘Let’s bring this truth back to the Lord and figure out, “Lord, with this knowledge, how would you have me as a Christian navigate the world?” ’ This is what we teach our students,” she told me, “how we reach the next generation.”

And we should be aiming for everyone. “From Genesis to Revelation,” Prather said, God “has called the church to be a welcoming place for all ethnic backgrounds.” This call equally applies to schools that claim the name of Christ.

So where do these schools find their students? If they’re recruiting in local churches, which congregations make the cut? Black church traditions in America tend to be closely aligned with white evangelicals on core theology. If they’re not sending students to Christian schools, we should ask why. If the answer is tuition—for race and income are still correlated in this country—we should work to remove that barrier (Matt. 6:19–21). While many Black families remain skeptical of private schools, some would seize the opportunity for their children to have the good of Christian education.

“The manner in which most of us became Christian,” wrote theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon in their classic book Resident Aliens, “was by looking over someone else’s shoulder, emulating some admired older Christian, saying yes to and taking up a way of life that was made real and accessible through the witness of someone else.” We need those examples because the church and its ethics are indeed alien in a fallen world and because ethics, like language, are picked up through community immersion.

I moved around a lot as a child and consequently went through four Christian schools, one public school in America and one in China, and two years of homeschooling. Looking back, there’s much I could say in critique of my Christian schools. But I also recognize their many goods, not least their extension of the faithful examples in my home and church life.

As I make education decisions for my children, I want that faithful, communal immersion for them. Not because I’m afraid but because, for all its complications and all the work yet to be done, Christian schooling is a real good—a good I want for my kids and for my neighbors’ kids too. Of course we’re enrolling because it’s a Christian school.

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

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "The Schools That Cried Wolf".

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Culture

Former VP Mike Pence’s Conversation with Russell Moore

Mike Pence and Russell Moore

They discussed global tensions, prayer for those in authority, and Mrs. Pence’s frosty reception of President Trump.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Former vice president Mike Pence appeared on The Russell Moore Show four years after the January 6, 2021, US Capitol rioters threatened not only his life but also the lives of his wife and daughter. He discussed former second lady Karen Pence’s frosty reception of President Donald Trump, the importance of praying for government leaders, and the potential for a third world war.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Mike Pence and Russell Moore

Russell Moore: We’re four years out from January 6, on which you and your family were in great jeopardy because the president at the time called a mob to the Capitol and didn’t call it off. Was it painful to see President Trump again [at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral]?

Mike Pence: It was the first time we had been in the same place since we left the White House four years ago. We pray for the president often, as believers are admonished to do for all those in positions of authority.

January 6 was a tragic day. I’ll always believe that I did my duty and kept my oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and ceded the peaceful transfer of power that day. The next morning, before President Trump would denounce the rioters and say they would pay, he committed to a peaceful transfer.

About a week later, he asked for a meeting, and I readily accepted. We sat down after those tumultuous events, and we talked all the way through it. I sensed the president was genuinely saddened about what had happened that day.

The first thing he asked was about Karen and my daughter. He said, “Are they okay?” And I said, “They’re fine.” And he said, “I just found out they were with you the whole time.” And I said, “They wouldn’t leave, Mr. President.”

On January 6, I was determined to stay at my post and finish my work. But what a lot of people don’t know is that my wife and daughter had come to observe the proceedings for a short period of time. When we told them that their motorcade could take them back to the vice president’s residence, my wife refused. They were both there till four in the morning, until the gavel fell [to confirm the electoral votes].

I was with the president in the waning weeks of our administration. I looked at him as we were wrapping up a conversation about official duties and said, “I just want you to know I’m praying for you.” His shoulders sank, and he said, “Don’t bother.”

When we wrapped up the meeting, I walked out and stopped in the doorway. I said, “There’s probably two things that we’re never going to agree on. We’re probably never going to agree on what my duty was under the Constitution on January 6. And I’m never going to stop praying for you.”

He looked up at me and said, “That’s right, Mike. Don’t ever change.” We have prayed for him often in the months and years that have followed.

RM: There’s an internet meme going around of Mrs. Pence at Carter’s funeral. She did not seem very enthusiastic to see President Trump. Many of us can relate to having a spouse who feels things very deeply for the person they love.

MP: You’ll have to ask my wife about her posture, but we’ve been married 44 years… She loves her husband, and her husband respects her deeply.

RM: On January 6, did you ever consider saying, “There are some questions about these votes. I’m just going to turn them back to the states.” Did you ever consider not going in that day and leaving the certification of the vote to the president pro tempore in the Senate?

If you had, you might still be vice president or maybe even president right now. Was that a temptation that you had to fight?

MP: When I put my left hand on Ronald Reagan’s Bible in January 2017 and raised my right hand, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

It ends with a prayer: “So help me God.” That means it’s not only a promise that I made to you and to the American people, but it was a promise I made to Almighty God. As a student of American history, there is perhaps no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose which Electoral College votes to count. No vice president in American history has ever asserted that authority, nor should they.

The presidency belongs to the American people, and where disputes arise, they are to be resolved by the elected representatives of the American people. My duty that day was very clear to me, but it didn’t make it any less painful. President Trump was not only my president; he was my friend. He had been persuaded by some outside voices that I had authority that no vice president in history had ever asserted. Some vice presidents in the past recused themselves from those proceedings. Hubert Humphrey in 1969 did not preside over the count. He had just lost the election in 1968.

But as the father of a United States Marine and the father-in-law of a Navy lieutenant, one of the things I reflected on during the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, was that my son and my son-in-law—and every member of the armed services and every law enforcement officer in the country—take the same oath. And when our boys get an assignment, they don’t get to say, “That doesn’t really work for me.”

RM: You have a son who’s a Marine. I have a son who’s an Airman. There are a lot of people who are worried right now when they look at Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Hamas, Iran, Taiwan, China. Are we headed into World War III?

MP: Peace comes through strength. When I was running for president, some people said my support for Ukraine was going to lead us to World War III. I think a more careful study of the 20th century would prove the opposite is true. Weakness arouses evil. Because the West and the United States largely ignored the aggression of the authoritarian regime in Germany, we ultimately had to send American troops to fight and to win back a free Europe and to fight back in the Pacific during World War II.

One of the hopeful things about President Trump’s return to the White House and Republican majorities in the House and the Senate is that we’re going to make an increased investment in our national defense. We’re at about 3 percent of gross domestic product today. I strongly support moving us to 5 percent in a fairly short period of time. We can send no better message to our adversaries and those who could become our adversaries than by redoubling our commitment to be the arsenal of democracy.

I think President Trump understands and believes in peace through strength. The only asterisk to that is that some of the voices around him are advocating for a new American isolationism. They’re saying we should cut off all funding to Ukraine as they fight for their survival against an unprovoked Russian invasion. There are even voices that call for cutting off all aid to Israel.

I’m hopeful that my old running mate will return to that “peace through strength” strategy that resulted in four years where Russia never crossed a border, where we were able to unleash our military to take down the ISIS caliphate. We used force against Syria twice. And in a very real sense, we made it clear to our allies in the Asia-Pacific that we were with them and we’d stay with them as China’s provocations continued there.

RM: You’re not concerned about the belligerent rhetoric toward Canada, Denmark, Greenland, and the Panama Canal zone?

MP: I do think Jimmy Carter was wrong to turn over the Panama Canal. I think the fact that Chinese companies are operating multiple locks in the Panama Canal is antithetical to America’s interests. China is not our enemy today. We hope for better in the future. But if they ever become an adversary, it’ll be important for us to have a clear understanding with our allies in Panama about the vital importance of that waterway to our national security.

Mike Pence served as vice president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.

Russell Moore is Christianity Today’s editor in chief and the director of the Public Theology Project.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".

Stories from the ‘Sandwich Generation’

Kate Lucky

Readers relate to Jen Wilkin’s article from January/February about the seasons of life.

Edits by Christianity Today.

About a quarter of US adults are part of the “sandwich generation,” according to Pew Research data, defined as those who “have a parent age 65 or older and are either raising at least one child younger than 18 or providing financial support to an adult child.” On a daily basis, many of these adults confront the vulnerabilities of the beginning and end of life alike, feeding and bathing and soothing both the young and the old.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that many readers appreciated Jen Wilkin’s essay “At My Mother’s Deathbed, I Discovered the Symmetry of a Long Life,” calling it “thoughtful” and “beautifully expressed.” The Bible scholar reflected on accompanying her mother through her final days and the symmetry of a human life, from dependence to caregiving and back again.

Claire Jerry in Washington, DC, wrote in response, “I was privileged to be with my mother, mother-in-law, and father-in-law in their final days. As I try to discern my purpose in what are surely the last years of my own life, I cherish a verse that echoed through this article: ‘like a tree … that bringeth forth its fruit in its season’ (Ps. 1:3, ASV). It comforts and challenges me to realize there is still fruit to be borne, even in this season.” Another reader, Angela Langer-Heltzel of Joplin, Missouri, read the essay after her mother’s passing. “Being in the same stage of life” as Wilkin, she said, “I found comfort in her words and even more comfort in the Lord’s design.”

Kate Lucky, senior editor, engagement and culture

The False Gospel of Our Inner Critic

This Enneagram One is listening … definitely understand “the inner critic.”

@simplykristylynn (Instagram)

The Bestseller that Made Church Cool—and Optional

I was one of those intrigued by the edginess and grittiness of Donald Miller’s book. But as Ashley Hales rightly points out, the alternative offered was really no alternative at all. It’s also important to note that the emergent church movement never really went away. It just morphed into today’s progressive Christianity led by such figures as Peter Enns, Richard Rohr, and Brad Jersak.

John Appleton, West Chicago, IL

I have seen the corruption of believers who turned away from everything that was church to a Christless spirituality. I reject mysticism; I recognize the gospel is a mystery, not receivable by the natural mind. We rely on the Spirit of revelation to reveal Christ in and through us. So while I have learned not to condemn, Miller’s encouragement of his contemporaries does not bode well.

Mark Sankey, Frederick, MD

This is a good article, very much on target. I’m really surprised, though, that the author said that as early as 2003, “Gone were the lights, smoke machines, and conservative politics of megachurch practice”—because those things are still very prominent in the world I inhabit today in 2025. Most churches where I live are either dying traditional churches (with hymns and organs) or growing contemporary churches that are megachurches or want to be, and they still use lights, contemporary music, and sometimes even smoke machines. And they are conservative. Blue Like Jazz introduced emergent Christianity to a wide audience. It’s like that movement was trying to make irreverence cool among bored or disaffected evangelicals. A lot of emergent Christianity has left evangelicalism altogether to become today’s progressive Christianity.

Morgan Trotter (Facebook)

I think those who continue to absolve themselves of the church are more a sign of something happening than a symptom of reading the book. I was very frustrated with Miller for the way he later denied the church, but I am still grateful for the book and think he deserves more credit for encouraging lifelong believers than the article revealed. I don’t agree with your conclusion. I 100 percent get why you landed there, though. In the end, Blue Like Jazz helped many of us to separate unhealthy church habits from the church.

Dale Huntington, San Diego, CA

You have to keep in mind that Blue Like Jazz was a memoir. [Miller] wasn’t intentionally trying to offer a solution, but his state of mind and experiences resonated with many. It changed my outlook, which I’ve applied to what I focus on (authenticity, real acts of service, etc.) while still traditionally filling a pew each Sunday.

Jared Throneberry (Facebook)

Living Like a Monk in the Age of Fast Living

Amen to Evan B. Howard’s article on monasticism. Fundamentalism assumes that the most important judgments in life are between good and evil. Monasticism reveals that the most important decisions are between attention and distraction. Paul said he could eat meat offered to idols and it wouldn’t be sin; but if eating meat pulled his brother back into ancestral idolatry, he wouldn’t eat meat (1 Cor. 8). When Christians shape their response to modernity and technology in such a way that the weak brother won’t be pulled back into pornography, we’ll know we have matured from and not just reacted to fundamentalism.

Anthony Hess, Wilder, ID

How NYC Churches Guard Endangered Languages

I have a friend who is from southern Mexico and speaks a pre-Hispanic language called Chinantec. She told me that her tiny church in her village back home was started by American missionaries who translated the entire Bible into their native language, thus preserving the language in writing. I am proud to have such a heritage as a Christian!

@emma.jane.craig (Instagram)

Something Holy Shines

Poetry is one of the primary theological disciplines in Ethiopia, and fresh poetry is often featured in their liturgy.

Hayden Joseph Noble (Facebook)

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

- More from Kate Lucky

Corresponding Issue

Christianity Today

May/June 2025

Ideas

When a Revolution Is Revolting

Marvin Olasky

Editor in Chief

Responsible, achievable, biblically inspired policy is not just morally better than extremist political tactics. It’s also a strategic advantage.

Spencer Platt / Getty

The advantage of being both a historian and an old guy is that I’ve studied many violent revolutions and experienced a political one up close, the “Republican revolution” of 1994. Both kinds are relevant to the current immigration debate and the choice before MAGA Christians now.

Many revolutions become so vicious that the old regimes—or at least the old abuses—make a comeback. The idealism of French revolutionaries turned, just a few years later, into murder by guillotine in Paris and mass murder in the area southwest of it known as the Vendée. Five years after that, Napoleon engineered a coup and became dictator.

The experience was similar, with varying timetables, in Russia, China, and dozens of other postrevolutionary countries: from czar to Stalin to Putin, from emperor to Mao to Xi, from rages to revolution to rags.

The exception has been the United States, where revolution was very deliberately followed by moderation. The rule of law led to incremental rather than catastrophic change. Maybe extremism in the defense of liberty, to use former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s phrase, is no vice in principle, but it’s certainly bad in practice. Moderation, less thrilling, tends to be sustainable.

One indication of such sustainability in recent American history is the dog that is not barking: welfare reform. In the 1980s, rhetoric about “welfare queens” was rampant, and by the 1990s, welfare was an issue as massive as immigration is now. Bill Clinton in 1992 ran as the person who would change “welfare as we know it.” Many Americans knew that billions of dollars in federal spending helped some but did not give others what they most needed: personal help, spiritual challenge, and the incentive to work.

In the 1994 midterm elections, after the social services bureaucracy weighed in and Clinton backed off from his welfare reform pledge, the GOP won a smashing success, taking control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years in what was called the Republican revolution. Some fire-breathers exulted: This is the moment to annihilate welfare.

Happily, evangelicals took the lead in a congressional education project. Part of the moderation of 1995 and 1996 emerged from political reality: The US still had a Democratic president, so Republican aspirations had to be tempered by what he would sign. But part was also biblical teaching. Jesus in chapter 5 of John’s gospel neither turned his back on an invalid nor helped him to get quickly into the pool of water thought to provide a miracle cure. Instead, Jesus said, “Take up your bed and walk” (ESV, v. 5).

I saw firsthand the effect of biblical teaching, combined with political calculation, three decades ago. Newt Gingrich, in January 1995 the new speaker of the House, loved a book I had written, The Tragedy of American Compassion, and made it mandated reading for the new GOP members of Congress. (Many foisted it on their abused staff members). I met with many of them, some one-on-one, and had my most fulfilling tutelage ever.

My message with Republican pols was this: Moderation. Work incentives. Time limits. Allow for exceptions. Look at individuals, not masses. Don’t make the work of Democratic opponents easy by creating poster children. I talked back to Newt at times, but he was reasonable, usually unconsumed by irrational exuberance, and always aware that Bill Clinton was not someone he could push around.

I’ll break one of my rules and quote a little from my own book, because Republicans quoted me on how previous generations “refused to settle for the feed-and-forget principle or its equally depersonalizing but harsher opposite, the forget-and-don’t-feed standard.” The emphasis was on treating all among the poor as human beings rather than “zoo animals at feeding time—some as carnivores who need cuts of meat thrown into their cages, and some as cute-looking pandas who feed on bamboo shoots.”

It sounds obvious, but it often wasn’t before 1984: Republicans largely orated about wasted money. The problem, though, was that welfare programs needed to be changed “not because they are too expensive … but because they are inevitably stingy in what is really important, treating people as persons and not animals.” As CPR can revive an otherwise-dying person, so CPS—challenging, personal, and spiritual help—makes a difference among the poor.

Sometimes informed by the Bible and often recognizing political reality, congressional welfare reformers in 1996 did not slash and burn but instead instituted work requirements—“Take up your bed and walk”—with exceptions for moms with young children. They set up time limits for receiving benefits. They increased the Earned Income Tax Credit, which had been around in stingier form since 1975, and made it a powerful incentive.

The political result is that welfare has been off the table for almost 30 years. Does it work well? No. Does it work better? Yes, and one indication is that the agitation of the 1990s is gone. Since politics abhors a vacuum and Congress now adores polarization, immigration has taken the controversial seat in which welfare reform long sat. Two decades of denial have increased exasperation to the point that in 2024 Something Had to Be Done.

But while rhetoric on welfare generally improved in the late 20th century, my sense is that rhetoric on immigration has gone the other way in the 21st. “At its core, immigration is a sign of a confident and successful nation,” then-president George W. Bush said in 2006. “It says something about our country that people around the world are willing to leave their homes and leave their families and risk everything to come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.” He welcomed refugees and asylum seekers, sought to keep out criminals, and called for “reasonable legislative solutions.” That didn’t happen.

Ten years ago, Donald Trump launched his campaign for the presidency with generalizations about they, they, and they: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing their problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people.” Good to know that last part, but at rallies Trump orated about “sons and daughters, husbands and wives … viciously killed by illegal immigrants.”

Ten years of hearing that almost all immigrants are bad has made crowd forcing—mass arrests rather than case-by-case examination—acceptable to some. Cruelty in 2025 has similarities with what could have happened with welfare reform had a megalomaniac been unchecked and surrounded by sycophants and had many Americans seen welfare recipients as subhuman rather than merely below the poverty line.

Many, happily, saw those on welfare as a great crowd of witnesses to either compassion or callousness. And despite all the discouraging rhetoric, many see immigrants the same way. A Gallup poll that probed hearts regarding immigration found 78 percent of Americans remain “sympathetic … toward people from other countries who travel to the U.S. border” in a search for safety and opportunity.

A Pew Research Center poll showed only 15 percent of Americans support deporting immigrants living in the US illegally if they have a job. Only 14 percent favor exile for those who are parents of children born in the US. Americans complain about government moving with the speed of a brontosaurus, but most do not want it to react like a raptor, tearing at the flesh of anything in its way.

I lived through a decade of diatribes about “welfare queens” and believe GOP political success was the result of changed perspectives. My pragmatic sense is that Trumpist overreach, unless checked, will lead to a decade of Democratic domination beginning in 2026—and although I voted for Republican presidential candidates every time from 1976 to 2012, I’d agree with many others that voting in defense of autocracy is no virtue.

Realistic Republicans should see that Make America Great Again extremism will Make America Democratic Again. I’d prefer a reliance on biblical principle, but after seeing hardworking fathers seized from their families, I hope that, one way or the other, Americans will see El Salvador prisons as a dumping ground too far.

Marvin Olasky is executive editor of news and global at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

Her Children Arise and Call Her #Blessed

Ashley Hales

Staff Editor

Monetizing child-rearing online is never a godly option. But maybe it’s more than an influencer problem.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Like most everything in America now, having babies is apparently a partisan decision, and it’s now become coded right. College admissions counselors eye the upcoming “demographic cliff” with alacrity. We all should be worried that in the US, the birth rate has dropped to historic lows since the country began tracking about 100 years ago. (In 2023, the birth rate dropped 3 percent from the previous year to 1.62 children per woman.) At the same time that men and women are more likely to forego parenting, motherhood particularly in the digital age has taken on a consumeristic edge.

Life as good and worthy per se is no longer key to our cultural thinking. Instead, children are signposts of one’s politics or used quite literally as accessories to lifestyle brands. In The Influencer Industry, Emily Hund explores the growth of the influencer industry (which Goldman Sachs estimates will grow from its current valued worth of $250 billion to $500 billion by 2027), particularly related to curated authenticity. Whether influencers sell goods via affiliate marketing, partner with brands, or simply monetize their feeds with advertising, everything is for sale.

While traditional societies may have regional and multigenerational safety nets, much of the Western world has turned to the internet in the past few decades for support. Back in 2002, when the internet felt like a free exchange of ideas and life stories, the mommy blogger was born out of a desire for community and potty-training advice. Over the years, what a mother went looking for online changed. As one former mommy blogger terms it, the writing of “gritty personal essays morphed into attractively staged, aspirational content.”

Today, mommy bloggers have been replaced with TikTok #TradWives who emphasize a stylized back-to-the-land aesthetic while carefully leaving out the manure or toddler meltdowns. Motherhood has become performative, and it’s harming real mothers, children, and families. These trad (traditional) wives sell us the allure of rootedness and of beautiful children parading like ducklings—without revealing any of their costs. They buy, sell, like, and share things that virtue builds slowly over time. Motherhood has become an industry.

“When monetizing one’s daily life is a growth industry,” Emily Hund asks, “where does it end?” Therein lies the rub. With phones in our hands, scrolling through reels with algorithms that increasingly serve us more of the same, we can easily become immersed in someone else’s life (or, at least, what they choose to disclose). As our attention equals monetary gain for someone or some platform, we must ask: What is the value of our attention? And when our attention is fixed on idealized squares of performed domesticity, who actually profits?

After all, authenticity is what makes one influencer more “valuable” than another. A little over a decade ago, a Nielsen study found that more than 90 percent of consumers would trust product recommendations from someone they knew (rather than a faceless brand). As the influencer industry has grown, authenticity and personality are no longer about connection but have become increasingly focused on metrics. “Only once influence could be measured could it be shaped into a good and assigned monetary value—and monetization was the goal,” writes Hund. What happens when we turn ourselves into brands? Or worse, turn our children into brands? What happens when we monetize motherhood?

Although many influencers are now removing their children from social media photos to restore a sense of privacy, the effect of monetizing parenthood is withering. Although not speaking about influencing specifically, writer Anne Lamott wisely observes that when we raise children “as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel,” our children’s achievements become the parents’ “reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes for the family’s survival.”

When we monetize children or look to their achievements to make sense of our own lives, we cut them—and ourselves—off from the gospel. If the influencer model, which works by teaching us to see ourselves and our children as moneymakers or influence bearers, tells us that we are only as valuable as the number of likes, follows, comments, or subscribers, what is the counternarrative for those who follow the Christian story?

Scripture repeatedly reminds us that God moves toward the failures, the murderers, the adulterers, and those without economic advantage, like the widows, the barren, and the sojourner. This is not to say wealth is bad: David and Solomon had great wealth and power, a circle of women supported Jesus’ ministry (Luke 8:1–3), and Phoebe supported the work of the apostle Paul (Rom. 16:1–2). The key is that no matter their amount, all these resources—whether monetary capital or social capital—were given in service to God and his kingdom.

While few of us are influencers, we’re all guilty of viewing what we do with our bodies—whether our fertility or our social media habits—as if we were our own. But we are not our own; we have been bought at a price (1 Cor. 6:20). If we’re parents, we’re likely guilty of wedding ourselves so tightly to the successes and failures of our children that we forget that children are not math equations where a particular input results in a specific output.

Children are people who need Jesus. Children of every age need to see the gospel enacted and lived out by their parents (and their faith communities), not through perfection but through obedience, failure, repentance, and grace.

Parenting by its very nature can’t be measured by algorithmic metrics or financial success, which are built into an influencer economy. To do so would be to say that the end goal of parenting depends on our own human action to influence or manipulate algorithms and spending habits.

But the good news of Jesus for mothers and fathers who are weary of trying to be perfect parents is this: Parenting is not about you. While your actions and the fruit of your life will impact your children, it is not clear how your children will turn out. Christian parenting is about continually pointing to Jesus as the author and perfecter of our faith, clinging to the reminder that he who began a good work in us and our children will complete it.

One of my favorite passages in Scripture that shows the emotional life of Christ is about how he longed to comfort and shelter Jerusalem. As a mother to four, I know the pull to shelter and protect while also needing to let go. Near the end of the Book of Luke, as Jesus heads toward his death, he compares himself to a mother hen: “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Luke 13:34). Yet Jerusalem rebels. Pilate and the religious leaders conspire to kill Jesus. They are successful.

But the good news of the gospel is that this is not the end of the story. Just a few verses before Jesus’ response, some Pharisees tell Jesus to save himself: “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you” (v. 31). Rather than protecting himself or looking to worldly metrics that would shield him from suffering, Jesus responds by both acknowledging the truth of Jerusalem’s rebellion (v. 34) and reiterating that his response to rebellion is to gather his people under his wings and shelter them.

When Jesus uses the language of mothering, it is not to see people as expendable based on what they can do for him. Neither is it to accept rebellion against what he says is good, true, and beautiful. The response of Jesus is not to self-protect, run away, sugarcoat, or cut off. Rather, in Jerusalem’s failure and ours, Jesus always moves toward us with both truth and grace. That is good news for all parents.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.

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News

Unless the Lord Builds an Affordable House

Anna Broadway

Survivors displaced by LA fires turn to churches and ministries for help navigating the worsening crisis.

Bishop Charles Dorsey leads a prayer rally for the Altadena community and for his church, amid the remains of Lifeline Fellowship Christian Center, which burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Six months before the owners of her Pasadena, California, apartment sold the building, retired missionary Laura Raab started looking for new housing. By the time the official move notice came, area rents had gone up by $500 a month—well beyond what she could afford on her modest fixed income. Raab started to think she’d have to leave Southern California altogether.

Raab’s longtime church prayed for her, and she found a Christian family converting their garage into an apartment. She couldn’t afford their asking rent either, but they generously dropped the price to meet her budget.

Four years later, Raab faced a new housing threat when massive wildfires broke out in January. The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed over 9,400 and 6,800 structures respectively, together killing 30 people. While the infernos raged, Raab evacuated to stay with fellow parishioners from Knox Presbyterian Church.

Other families from Knox—including its pastor, Matthew Colwell—did the same. These evacuations gave Raab and Colwell newfound closeness with their hosts—and a shared experience of the city’s grim housing landscape.

Raab’s housing survived, but Colwell’s family was one of eight in the congregation who lost their homes.

In the immediate aftermath, churches all over the Los Angeles area pulled together to respond to some of the most destructive fires in their state’s history. Four months later, many of the initial relief efforts—shelters, GoFundMe campaigns, material donations—have given way to the mid- and long-term response.

That slower, more tedious work includes clearing property, planning how to rebuild, and figuring out how to address massive housing loss in a region that was already one of the country’s least affordable places to live.

In Altadena, where the Eaton fire burned, senior pastor Jose Cervantes had no idea how bad things were until his church started housing people in the “tiny little rooms” Iglesia del Nazareno uses for Sunday school. Nineteen people stayed more than two months and 14 people for three months. The last just recently moved out.

Of those guests, one family of seven had been displaced when their motorhome burned. Another family of seven had been living on the street.

Even before the fires, LA ranked among cities with the worst housing shortages in the country, with fewer than 3 percent of nonhomeowners able to afford a mortgage.

“It’s like a housing crisis suddenly got pushed over a cliff,” Colwell said. For now, he and his family have moved into housing for retired pastors.

The church building survived, and Colwell believes his home insurance will cover most of the rebuilding costs, but others face a much greater toll. Jill Shook, cofounder of Making Housing and Community Happen, said some families who had paid off their houses—perhaps inherited from relatives—didn’t have home insurance.

And pastors at the 11 houses of worship destroyed in the Eaton Fire face a double challenge: losing their buildings on top of so many congregants losing their homes.

“We have this in common, this loss, and a lot of overlap in our experience of it,” said Carri Patterson Grindon, who leads Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, which burned.

Almost three miles north of the 210 freeway that cuts through what was a once a thriving Black neighborhood, the church sat a few blocks southwest of the now-barren hills that form Eaton Canyon. Before the fire, tree-lined arteries such as Altadena Drive and Lake Avenue connected restaurants, grocers, and thrift stores to residents of the bungalows and other homes that stretched up to the hills.

Lifeline Fellowship Christian Center also burned down, as did two of three other churches near the intersection of Altadena and Lake, said Charles Dorsey, Lifeline’s senior pastor.

Through the Clergy Community Coalition, a group of about 100 churches and ministries in the Pasadena area, Dorsey and Grindon have connected with other leaders responding to dramatic shifts in church life.

The coalition’s executive director, Mayra Macedo-Nolan, said they’ve seen an uptick in attendance at local meetings, as clergy want to connect to share building space, resources, and stories.

“We’re working hard to understand what it means to be in solidarity with each other,” she said.

Cervantes said donations from other churches helped Iglesia del Nazareno, which averages 95 attendees each Sunday, assist people with rent. The church also replaced a large family’s motorhome and helped a formerly homeless family find an apartment. He estimates his church received about $60,000 in donations and have commitments of $30,000 more.

Housing advocates like Shook hope Christians will rely on their newly strengthened community for the challenging work of ensuring their neighbors have homes to go back to.

“The response of the church around this fire has been beautiful,” Shook said. But she distinguished the “mercy response” of immediate help with the “justice response” of long-term work to rebuild.

Much depends on how Altadena rebuilds. Local officials propose accelerating the process by adjusting existing housing regulations. For one, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recommended California suspend a state law that allows owners to split their lots.

If approved, the move would limit Altadena’s housing density and who could afford to live there.

“Historically, ‘keeping the character of the community’ has served to exclude lower-income residents,” Shook said. “For people that have lived for generations on a property and they’re on a big property, why not let them sell the other half so they can stay?”

According to Azusa Pacific University assistant professor Margaret Lee, affordable housing refers to both subsidized housing and housing available at an affordable cost relative to income—no more than 30 percent. Lee teaches social work at Azusa and serves as an adviser for Making Housing and Community Happen.

For renters like lifelong Pasadena resident Tatiyana Riley, that meant working three jobs, even before the Eaton Fire. Riley, who took advantage of a day shelter at Pasadena Foursquare Church during the weeks she thought her building had burned, makes $17 an hour at her full-time job as a server, just above California’s $16.50 minimum wage.

But to rent her $1,250 apartment on that income—and meet landlords’ 30 percent of gross wages requirement—she’d need to work 57 hours a week, or 29 eight-hour days a month. To afford it, Riley works two side jobs and shares her small one-bedroom apartment, which has poor plumbing and baseboards that were covered in mold and mildew when she moved in. But at least it has a kitchen. The room she used to rent alone for $1,200 a month didn’t even have a fridge or stove, and she had to share the bathroom with others in the building.

Lee said the lack of undeveloped land in LA County makes it hard to build more housing without building densely. But even unsubsidized buildings like duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, or apartments bring resistance.

“Once a multifamily development gets put in your neighborhood, it’s perceived as a threat” regardless of neighborhood political leanings, she said.

Multiple people interviewed for this story mentioned a recent lawsuit in nearby La Cañada Flintridge, where the city tried to stop its first multifamily housing development in years.

Shook thinks Altadena is ideally suited to adding duplexes and, in some areas, multiunit buildings. Lee has proposed to her state senator, Sasha Renée Pérez, that California amend its budget to give grants to Eaton Fire victims for accessory dwelling units like an in-law unit or tiny home. Use of several pre-approved plans would expedite permitting to build.

“Then, while they’re living in it, they can start constructing their primary house,” said Lee, who teaches Azusa’s social work policy classes. Under her plan, grant recipients would agree to rent out the added units once they moved back into their reconstructed homes.

Senator Pérez selected Lee’s idea out of several proposals as the one budget amendment she’ll submit during the annual process in May. If the proposal advances, it’s unclear how that would interact with the county’s recommendation to restrict lot splits.

Church land provides another opportunity. Since Making Housing and Community Happen launched its congregational land team in 2019, over 100 Southern California churches have approached the group for help as they consider using part of their land for affordable developments.

Shook’s organization does “all the preliminary planning for churches,” she said, but the process can take years. One of 45 churches her organization is working with is now close to breaking ground on a project that will convert school classrooms into 60 units of housing.

The proposed restrictions on lot splits come just as church leaders across the region have begun rethinking their property, damaged churches weigh how and whether to rebuild, and others consider how they can use the spaces they have to serve the changing needs of their neighbors.

For Door of Hope, a longtime Pasadena ministry focused on preventing family homelessness, the fires spurred a reassessment of their mission. Jim Howe, the nonprofit’s chief operating and financial officer, said the scale of housing loss personally affected their staff: CEO Megan Katerjian and three other staffers lost their homes.

The ministry already ran four transitional housing facilities and a homelessness-prevention and rehousing program that served about 200 clients a year. It quickly decided to hire another caseworker so they could help some families affected by the fire.

Howe said many of them had been paying below-market rent, so the caseworkers offered to help find options in their budgets, including negotiating with landlords and subsidizing the cost.

At first, the ministry planned to add 50 families to its usual caseload, budgeting for both an additional caseworker and some direct aid for each family. “But we quickly found out that the need is much greater than that,” Howe said.

After further discussion and an influx of donations, the board has broadened the scope. “Staff can grow this program to whatever they can effectively fund and efficiently operate,” he said.

Even churches beyond the burn zone reevaluated their roles and resources in response. Two days after the fire, Pasadena Foursquare Church opened its building as a day shelter and contacted the denomination’s relief fund, which gave the church $2,000.

“We’re a small little church,” said Carolina Majors, who helps her husband pastor the church. On a typical Sunday, perhaps 50 to 60 people attend, including children. “We thought we were so limited because of our building,” a structure that’s in poor condition and is small relative to the land they own.

But even if they couldn’t host a church that had lost its building, the Majorses found another way to help: using their building as a day shelter. For the first two weeks after the fires, they opened up daily. By late April, they were down to two days a week but still offering their space to people like Riley.

Majors said people came from as far away as San Francisco and Sacramento to volunteer. Through the Majorses’ denomination, churches throughout the state and across the country reached out to offer help.

“We were able to raise—like, not us, God did it—$20,000,” Majors said. The money went to temporary housing, household essentials, and groceries.

“They’re really open and receptive to the community,” said Riley, who described leaving the church’s shelter “with a less heavy heart, a less heavy spirit.”

In La Cañada Flintridge to the west of Altadena, four churches hosted Making Housing and Community Happen for an all-day housing-justice event in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire. Kyle Sears, pastor of La Cañada Congregational Church, brought up the community’s history as an unofficial “sundown town,” expecting non-whites to leave at night. More recently, the city had been fighting a years-long lawsuit that sought to stop one of its first multifamily developments in years—proposed to be built on the grounds of a former church.

On March 4—three days after the event—the city abandoned its lawsuit after a court ordered the city to post a $14 million bond.

“When people think justice—even racial justice—they don’t think zoning,” Lee said. “But really, when you drill down into the policy, that’s what it comes down to. … It ultimately comes down to loving your neighbor, whether it’s through giving someone a sandwich or sitting through a city meeting or writing an advocacy letter to your politician. It’s all a form of love.”

Raab, the retired missionary, said after returning home, she gave a thank you gift to the family who hosted her during the evacuation. She got a note in response: “You’re family now.”

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Books

Review

The What and the Why of Religious Decline

Ryan P. Burge

One is relatively simple to map out. The other is much harder to capture.

Illustration by Micha Huigen

In social science, it’s relatively easy to explain what is happening. Ask a question with a straightforward answer—How has the cost of lettuce changed over time? Are people getting married later in life?—and the answer should be forthcoming. Just download the right data set, write a bit of computer code, and present the findings in an informative, visually appealing manner.

But once you describe the what, it’s natural to begin wondering about the why.

As I like to tell my graduate students, there’s nothing simple about the social world. The internet is full of clickbait articles promising three simple tricks to increase your income or one easy hack for a better night’s sleep. There are no such shortcuts, however, in academic social science.

Take American religion for instance. Over the past several decades, the most important trend is a pretty simple line graph indicating the share of adults who claim no religious affiliation. Five decades ago, that figure was 5 percent of the population. Today, it’s about 6 times higher. But why? How did the share of “nones” rise so dramatically in such a short time?

Smith tackles those questions, among others, in Why Religion Went Obsolete. The book analyzes responses gleaned from four focus groups, over 200 interviews, and a survey sent to more than 2,000 adults. Smith’s conclusion is clear and simple: For a growing number of younger Americans, religion simply lost its usefulness.

Those accustomed to ruminating about the decline of religion have long sensed that today’s young people don’t seem to care much about faith one way or another. However, that feeling has never been developed into a mature, testable theory. Smith harnesses a term—zeitgeist, often defined as “the spirit of the times”—that helps ground this pervasive sense that some big shift has occurred. It’s an idea many of us innately understand, even if we have a hard time wrapping our minds around it. Smith does a great service by laying an academically rigorous foundation for what he calls the “Millennial zeitgeist.”

Getting down to specifics, Smith argues that the millennial generation has embraced a new zeitgeist based around four key characteristics: cultural individualism, rapid technological change, “postmaterialist” values of autonomy and self-expression, and a deep skepticism of authority. As an older millennial, I can say that those four factors resonate with my own experience. Even so, I’m not entirely convinced, on an empirical basis, that millennial life rests atop a philosophical scaffolding fundamentally unlike that of prior generations of Americans.

Take, for instance, one statement Smith posed to survey respondents: “I am more concerned with a good life here and now than what comes after death.” If millennials came of age amid an entirely different zeitgeist, we would expect their answers to differ dramatically from, say, those of baby boomers. In fact, the breakdown is strikingly similar (51% of people born between 1946 and 1954 either “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the statement, compared to 54% of millennials). Thus, people born three or four decades apart have nearly the same view about the value of living a good life.

Smith also reports survey results that might seem to suggest significant generational differences, when in reality the explanations are probably more mundane. His questionnaire included the statement “I spend a great deal of time thinking about myself.” Fifty-three percent of millennials agreed with this compared to just 33 percent of early boomers. Does this indicate a huge zeitgeist shift? Or simply confirm that people self-reflect less as they age? Without having surveyed baby boomers on these questions when they were younger, we can’t know for sure.

Social science models always contain lots of unexplained variance, no matter how sophisticated our conceptual starting points and statistical techniques. In graduate school, I remember one of my professors joking about the best way to wave away these mysteries: Just shrug your shoulders, say culture, and move on with life.

We understand readily enough that culture shifts all the time, following new fashion styles and intellectual trends, even if we find these shifts impossible to fully explain. In attempting to get a handle on an obvious cultural shift in how young Americans view religion, Smith’s book wields social science tools with incredible skill. It’s a methodological tour de force. However, I can’t help wondering whether a full accounting still lies outside his grasp.

It bears mentioning, for instance, that the ranks of nones appear to have stopped increasing. A number of independent surveys demonstrate that the share of Americans claiming no religious affiliation froze back in 2020. According to data I reviewed from the Cooperative Election Study, religion may actually be on the upswing among millennials and Generation Z.

Even so, I generally agree with Smith’s conclusions. Religion in the United States is declining for many reasons, including self-inflicted wounds from corrupt or abusive ministry leaders. (In one chapter, Smith devotes four and a half pages to a single table listing scandals among major conservative Protestant leaders.)

But churches are also emptying for reasons that can’t be blamed on ministry misbehavior. American culture was already heading in a direction that ensured headwinds for houses of worship. To take one example, Smith notes how the digital revolution ate away at communal gatherings by turbo-charging trends in atomization that began in the 1980s. More than ever, people could entertain themselves without leaving the comfort of home. While churches have occasionally responded with flashy worship bands, polished event production, and easily digestible sermons, this hasn’t always coaxed people away from scrolling news feeds on their couches.

In total, Smith’s book makes a laudable contribution to current discourse about the decline of religion. His concerted effort to describe, define, and measure the shifting cultural zeitgeist should motivate students of American religion to think outside the box when theorizing about the American religious landscape. However, I think all of us who share in this work would do well to remember Paul’s words in in 1 Corinthians 13:9–10: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.”

Ryan P. Burge is associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Quantifying the Cultural Shift".

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Books

Review

Young Nones Might Not Hate Religion. But They Don’t Like the Vibes.

Michael Horton

How Christian Smith’s concept of a “Millennial Zeitgeist” helps explain their recent retreat from faith.

Illustration by Micha Huigen

I doubt I’m the only parent of Gen Zers who occasionally hears the protest “I’m not feelin’ it” on a Sunday morning.

As Christian Smith argues in Why Religion Went Obsolete, it is widely recognized that traditional religion in America is in “a spiral of decline.” What is less understood is why. The book, as Smith describes it, “moves beyond statistics and interviews to explore the larger cultural environment” that made traditional religion (and especially Christianity) feel irrelevant to younger generations of Americans.

Smith frames much of his cultural analysis around his notion of a millennial zeitgeist that gained momentum in the early 1990s and peaked just before 2010. The idea of a zeitgeist, or a “spirit of the age,” resembles what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “subsidiary awareness.” It proposes that within a particular culture or time period, certain background assumptions become so pervasive that we aren’t even consciously aware of them. They simply “ring true.”

Following the work of London School of Economics professor Monika Krause, Smith rehabilitates this concept as something with real empirical force rather than a vague perception of something “in the air.” Various periods are distinguished by ideas and practices that extend across spheres of social life and geographical boundaries. As examples, Smith mentions the Wild West, the Roaring Twenties, and the 1960s.

The millennial zeitgeist isn’t defined by opposition to this or that doctrine. Rather, it flows from a network of ideas, practices, technologies, and habits that make Christianity feel out of date, like a horse and buggy in the automobile age.

Much of our apologetics aims at skeptics and atheists who can give coherent arguments for their stances. But the younger Americans Smith surveyed are not deliberately rejecting religion for clearly discernible reasons. According to one of several summary statements Smith uses to outline their consensus attitudes, “It is not necessary to be well-informed about religion to criticize and dismiss it.” One respondent confessed, “The Bible makes my eyes roll,” even though he’s never read it. Many others failed to articulate their beliefs in clear or consistent ways, beyond a hazy sense that “the vibes were off,” the idiom Smith uses to close one chapter.

After revealing the results of extensive empirical surveys, including his own, Smith sketches the “contours” of the millennial zeitgeist, accentuating this portrait with several dozen popular marketing slogans (“Obey your thirst,” “Drive your ambition”) and bits of youth lingo (“You do you,” “Don’t judge me”). His examples coalesce around a fundamental dogma: individual autonomy. Many respondents gesture toward an inner divinity that withdraws from external authorities like a snail into its shell.

Smith also shows how churches themselves have contributed to this environment, often by shifting their focus from a transcendent God to the earthly horizons of moral, political, and therapeutic benefits. They have downplayed norms of communal fellowship in favor of an individualistic “Jesus and me” piety. As one self-proclaimed churchgoer tells Smith, “You don’t have to physically go to a building to praise God, you can pray at home. I just go because I get satisfaction out of it.”

In a similar vein, many religious leaders encourage going deeper within yourself rather than trusting external authorities, institutions, and traditions. As an example of where this mindset leads, Smith cites Oprah Winfrey, who once remarked, “I have church with myself. I have church walking down the street. I believe in the God force that lives inside all of us, and once you tap into that, you can do anything.”

From Smith’s findings, I was struck by three paradoxes. The first is that respondents who dislike traditional notions of a personal God who exercises judgment often praise religious systems that ratchet up the consequences for sins.

One recalls discovering Wicca in college: “I learned they believe whatever they do comes back to them 10 times,” a cosmic pattern that sounded advantageous. “Because if [other people] do something bad to you, it’s gonna hurt them a lot worse. If I had to go to a religion, I would definitely go there.” The attraction, of course, is autonomy. This person can affirm punishments for wrong behavior, so long as those punishments can be controlled and manipulated without answering to a higher judge.

A second paradox is that younger Americans bet everything on the here and now even though they have fading hopes for this life. “Younger generations face diminished economic opportunities,” Smith writes. “Their chances of achieving the American dream are slim.” But instead of raising their eyes to God, they double down on the quest for sacred experiences in this world.

Smith writes of young people seeking transcendence “in concerts, nature, dance, drugs, sports, family, clubbing, unexplained coincidences, serendipitous moments of joy.” Amid pessimism about their overall life prospects, they preoccupy themselves with transitory reprieves, cultivating “a healthy ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO), even if it is stressful and tiring.”

A third paradox is seen in the desire of Smith’s subjects to enjoy the blessings of community without sacrificing the comforts of autonomy. As Smith writes of their mindset, “Religion is a personal ‘opinion’ of individual choice—whether religion is true or false is not at issue. . . . The possibility of a historical tradition guiding one’s life is nearly inconceivable.”

But of course it’s impossible to enjoy meaningful community if each individual is the author of his or her own religion. Younger Americans might “crave strong relationships and community,” Smith writes, but in practice they tend to “maintain [their] autonomy, safety, and options, even at the cost of some loneliness.”

Notably, none of these paradoxes suggests a complete loss of interest in spiritual matters. As Smith concludes, younger Americans might be giving up on organized religion, but they haven’t “lost interest in things supernatural, enchanted, or quasi-religious.” Many who find traditional Christianity obsolete are attracted to Neopaganism and non-Western religions. By contrast, a dogmatic secularism strikes them as “too empty and dreary to be engaging.”

But the reality of the millennial zeitgeist guarantees intense headwinds for anyone who would evangelize young people today. Why Religion Went Obsolete offers a sobering road map of the challenges ahead. Every pastor, elder, and seminarian should digest its findings.

Michael Horton is professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author of Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "The Paradoxes of Religious Decline".

- More from Michael Horton

Books

Review

The Upside to Religious Obsolescence

Kara Powell

Why a post-Christian generation might be the ripest for revival.

Illustration by Micha Huigen

Among Gen Xers and millennials, “deconstructing” one’s faith has been a popular response to spiritual doubts and church dissatisfactions.

When we see this trend reach a close friend or family member, deconstruction often looks more like devastation. The results can resemble smoldering rubble after a building demolition, leaving behind a pile of fading childhood church memories and a sense of confusion and isolation.

Most Gen X and millennial spirituality has not been capable of withstanding the wrecking balls aimed in its direction. As Christian Smith argues convincingly in Why Religion Went Obsolete, religion has come to seem outdated in the US. Among younger generations especially, it functions like a CD player in a world of Spotify or a typewriter in a world of laptops.

But there could be an upside to obsolescence. Unlike their Gen X and millennial parents, who were often scarred by the church, today’s young people are more of a blank slate. As Josh Packard, cofounder of the organization Future of Faith, once told me in conversation, “Today’s young people don’t hate the church; they nothing the church.” Perhaps young people are so post-Christian that they’re almost pre-Christian. Or maybe even pre-revival.

In his book, Smith analyzes declining faith among teenagers, emerging adults, and young adults of the 1990s and 2000s. During those decades, a multitude of philosophical, cultural, sociological, and relational pressures pushed religion toward the periphery of their worldview, relationships, and everyday practices.

But that may (emphasis on may) be changing. At least a little. In a 2024 nationwide survey of 1,112 13-year-olds conducted by Springtide Research Institute, 74 percent identified as at least slightly religious, and 82 percent described themselves as at least slightly spiritual.

Even more encouragingly, this generation thinks highly of Jesus. After studying 25,000 teenagers globally, The Barna Group concluded, “It’s rare that teens think poorly of Jesus. Most teenagers around the world have a positive perception of him.” According to this research, young people appreciate Jesus for offering hope, caring about people, inspiring trust, showing generosity, and making a real difference in the world.

That openness to Jesus is translating into fresh movements in faith communities. Many parachurch campus ministries are expanding, including InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which is experiencing its highest year-over-year growth since 1980. As InterVarsity president Tom Lin once told me in conversation, “Since many of today’s unchurched students are unscathed by church hurt, coupled with their humility and curiosity about faith, we see a generation uniquely open to spiritual transformation.”

Considering the past four decades of religious decline, Smith contends that we can’t reverse these trends through “theological idealism,” defined as promoting correct doctrine, or “program idealism,” meaning a shiny new program. He’s right, but he’s missed a way we can move forward: relational discipleship.

Young people’s deep need for relational discipleship is being confirmed through ethnically and ecumenically diverse efforts like the TENx10 collaboration, which seeks to help faith matter for 10 million teenagers in the next 10 years. Supported by evangelical, mainline, Catholic, and Orthodox youth leaders, this movement promotes a discipleship framework fueled by adult mentoring, spiritual formation practices, service, and partnership with families.

Evangelicals often speak more of having a “personal relationship with Jesus” than of cultivating relationships with fellow believers. As a product of 20th-century evangelicalism, I’ve used this language often. After seeing Smith’s account of how it contributed to religion’s obsolescence, I might never use it again.

In Smith’s interviews, those who reported leaving childhood faith as a teenager or adult gave two main reasons: because “religion is not about institutions but a personal matter,” and because “religion is a personal journey.” Such responses show how inviting people into purely personal relationships with Jesus can backfire. However well-intended, it can create a rationale for regarding church as optional or deciding for yourself who you think “God” is.

Of course, the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus isn’t so much wrong as incomplete. We should want to offer young people both a personal and a communal relationship. Unfortunately, one recent test shows faith leaders failing in this regard. According to a nationwide sample of 13-to-25-year-olds, only 10 percent had a religious leader (from any faith) reach out to them during the first year of the pandemic. For young people identifying as Christians, the figure was barely higher.

But in the same study, 70 percent of teenagers and young adults reported valuing relationships more than they had prior to the pandemic. This finding parallels one of Smith’s observations: “Many post-Boomers have friends and family ties. But many also long for something more: to belong to real communities.”

Our invitations into intentional, formational community will be more appealing if we practice listening instead of lecturing. In a recently released study of 1,138 teenagers by Future of Faith, 75 percent indicated that being listened to helps them process spiritual challenges like doubt, disillusionment, and grief; and 71 percent reported that it deepens their own faith. Perhaps most importantly, the study concluded that experiencing a listening ear without judgment is two times likelier to produce spiritual growth than hearing sermons.

In our new book, Future-Focused Church, Jake Mulder, Raymond Chang, and I affirm that “leadership begins with listening.” As we’ve seen in over 1,000 churches with whom we’ve journeyed, caring adults who empathetically relate to young people offer a lifeline as they navigate economic uncertainty, political instability, unprecedented mental health challenges, and other forms of adversity.

Fortunately, many young Americans still are open to and seek out transcendence. Reports from youth ministry observers regularly highlight how this generation is compelled by faith experiences. Teenagers and twentysomethings don’t just experiment with spiritual practices of prayer, Scripture reading, sabbath, baptism, and Communion—they invite their peers to join them. They share their experiences on social media. They stay open and curious.

Will we model that same posture toward young people? Will we provide spaces where they can find fresh faith—and will we let them lead us into fresh ways of being the church? If religion is nearly obsolete, that might signal a new world of opportunity for anyone willing to reimagine faith for—and with—a new generation.

Kara Powell is executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute and chief of leadership formation at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her books include 3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager: Making the Most of Your Conversations and Connections.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Opportunity from Obsolescence".

- More from Kara Powell

Books

The Key Lesson of My Book: Don’t Underestimate ‘Deep Culture’

Christian Smith

Christian Smith responds to CT’s reviews of Why Religion Went Obsolete.

Illustration by Micha Huigen

Of all the themes I stress in Why Religion Went Obsolete, the importance of “deep culture” is among the most fundamental. Whether we’re analyzing the sociological data of religious decline, examining the broader intellectual currents in play, or charting possible responses, we shouldn’t underestimate the sheer weight of the cultural forces pushing millennials and Gen Zers away from traditional forms of faith. In this spirit, I’ll offer a few clarifications, cautions, and agreements, all aimed at furthering this essential conversation.

First, Ryan Burge makes an important point that younger generations don’t always differ radically from older ones. This was a key theme in my prior work about the religious lives of teenagers and emerging adults. Where we see fewer generational differences, that is partly because post-boomers (all generational cohorts born after 1965) did not change much from their parents, partly because many boomer parents are also shaped by the millennial zeitgeist. Generational influences work in both directions.

But a more interesting point remains when we recognize that millennials and Gen Xers, as the children of baby boomers, were socialized into their parents’ underlying norms and values. Much of the deep culture shaping post-boomers emerged amid the cultural revolutions of their parents’ generation in the 1960s and ’70s. Those boomers, however, had been socialized in a prior era (1945–1965) that took certain religious, moral, and epistemological foundations largely for granted—which put some ballast in their boats, so to speak.

Their children absorbed some of the boomers’ revolutionary values. But they grew up in a sociocultural environment lacking most of the older foundations. Instead, they were inundated by the internet, postmodernism, economic pressures, politicized religion, and other trends I describe in the book. Having inherited their parents’ distrust of authorities, they proceeded to carry that distrust in more immoderate directions.

I would also contest Burge’s claim that I present a “clear and simple” argument that “religion simply lost its usefulness.” My book emphasizes massive complexity. I speak broadly about religion lacking cultural resonance, not “vibing” with young people’s perspectives, and conflicting with the millennial zeitgeist.

Burge seems inclined, along with his grad school professor, to dismiss “culture” as a cop-out explanation for social change. But culture was and is ultimately where the action is. Culture is indeed harder to measure than, say, numbers of votes or births. But we need to look for our lost keys where they probably are, not only under the sociological lampposts where the light shines brightest.

I won’t say as much about Michael Horton’s response, which seems to grasp the gravity of the cultural situation my book portrays. I can only echo his invitation for ministry leaders to carefully consider the implications.

Kara Powell addresses these leaders in her own response, which considers the path forward for churches in a climate of religious obsolescence. She takes an appropriately tentative tone throughout, leaning on language like “could be,” “perhaps,” “maybe,” and “almost.” Still, it’s worth probing a bit more into her reasons for guarded optimism.

I am not surprised, for example, that most American 13-year-olds claim on surveys to be at least slightly religious and spiritual. Few people that age—just past childhood, only beginning to form independent identities and commitments—are ready to identify as atheists or pagans. Check back 15 years later, and their mature sentiments will likely be more revealing.

I am also not surprised to hear that “teenagers globally” have a “positive perception of Jesus.” Yet “appreciating” Jesus for embodying ideals of hope, trust, and generosity is hardly the traditional Christian gospel.

Powell is understandably scanning the horizon for signs of hope. But questions remain. First, can admiring the virtues of Jesus open spiritual doors to something bigger and better? Or will it only validate more of the “niceness” commended by moralistic therapeutic deism? Second, do these teens view Jesus as one among a pantheon of moral and spiritual role models, along with Gandhi, the Buddha, and Mother Teresa? Or as the incarnate Son of the triune God?

Elsewhere, Powell floats an intriguing idea: Perhaps if some younger Americans are less “churched,” they are also less “scathed” by hurt from the church. Will this open them to spiritual change? Maybe. But even someone without scars (yet) from a church or parachurch organization isn’t necessarily a blank slate ready to be engaged with, converted, and discipled. That assumes an individualistic view of how people gain knowledge.

Every unchurched person lives and operates in the larger zeitgeist. When people lack firsthand experiences to shape what they know, they turn to common cultural sensibilities, memes, and ideas that everybody supposedly knows. I argue in my book that, regardless of individuals’ experiences, the cultural zeitgeist has left traditional religion polluted. This is why many Americans who are quite ignorant about religion nonetheless feel authorized to judge it negatively. Constructively engaging with such people requires addressing the cultural baggage they associate with religion, fairly or not.

Finally, I could not agree more with Powell about the importance of relationships and listening. Pastors, youth ministers, evangelists, seminary teachers, and denominational leaders are used to telling people things. They may be good listeners too, but telling is their job. In most cases, their schedules also leave little time to wander around, strike up conversations, and seriously listen for extended periods.

Yet devoting time to building relationships across social, ethnic, and demographic lines is exactly what dealing with the current zeitgeist demands. Opportunities for outreach exist because the millennial zeitgeist is not one of grand, happy satisfaction. Many post-boomers contend with disappointment, pressure, isolation, resentment, distrust, frustration, and cynicism. They carry many felt needs and unmet longings. But the accumulated evidence shows that standard church practices—new outreach programs with more pizzazz, even more carefully crafted sermons—won’t work for most, even if they work for some.

Seen this way, Powell’s plea to listen and build relationships is not simply a useful pastoral strategy. It’s also a sociologically necessary means of confronting hard realities. Even if my book is only partly correct, now is the time for chastened humility and serious, critical, creative self-reflection.

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and founding director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Don't Underestimate 'Deep Culture'".

- More from Christian Smith

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