Author: Chris Boyd

Experts warn political violence is coming. Christians can look to Scripture, not the American Revolution, for guidance.

The seventh hearing of the congressional committee investigating the sedition at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was much about violence: who did it, who encouraged it, who knew it was coming yet did not intervene.

“The crucial thing is the next step: What this committee, what all of us, will do to fortify our democracy against coups, political violence,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) toward the end of the hearing. Political violence, he said, is “the problem of the whole country now.”

Raskin is far from alone in raising alarm about the possibility of political violence—seeking political ends through violent means instead of normal, peaceful processes like voting, running for office, lobbying, or protest.

“We know from other countries that have descended into really serious political violence that this is a trajectory, and we’re on it,” researcher Rachel Kleinfeld warned in a Washington Post article Monday. “We’re actually pretty far advanced on it.”

Kleinfeld said we could see rising right-wing militia violence as well as violence from a “disaffected left.” She ominously projected that the “percentages of Americans endorsing violence are approaching Northern Ireland’s Troubles at their height in 1973.”

(The scale of this kind of political violence can vary widely, from an individual’s attack to a revolution, but the Troubles are a good example of what many anticipate happening in the US—“episodes of violence were largely localized, and in the background” yet normal life continued though “everyone was more fearful and depressed.”)

There’s reason to be skeptical of the survey results she’s …

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As his widow, I live with grief every day. But I also live in the Good Shepherd’s grip.

One early morning on our family vacation, my husband, Rob, left our campsite for a long hike in the backcountry of Mount Rainier National Park. He and his hiking partner set out on the trail excited and energized for the path ahead. Both loved hiking and knew how to do it well.

Being in the outdoors was Rob’s favorite way to recreate and connect with God. But his cold and lifeless body returned to the trailhead late that afternoon, airlifted by a helicopter out of the wilderness. That day, marked on the calendar as a highlight of our family trip, became the most sorrowful of our lives.

In a moment, my world changed forever. I am still dumbfounded at the swiftness of death’s destructive work. Rob’s passing ushered me into a harsh and lonely landscape of loss. His sudden, tragic passing erased my plans for the future and set my feet at the trailhead of a new, unwanted path.

For the rest of my days, I will walk with grief. I will travel down a trail nobody wants to take.

I never knew deep grief until I lost Rob. I had suffered other losses but none that broke me so profoundly, none that rearranged the entire order of my life. I will admit, from the very beginning, I have been a reluctant traveler on this new path of sorrow.

Left with four children to raise alone, there is not a moment I do not long for the life I lived before. Rob and I enjoyed 17 imperfectly wonderful years of marriage. Our life together was deeply satisfying. We shared the same passions and dreams. He loved me with all his heart, and I adored him.

As Sorrow and Suffering have beckoned me forward on this grief journey, like Much-Afraid in Hannah Hurnard’s classic book Hinds’ Feet on High Places, I have cried …

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Experiencing death led Hugh and Charles Hodge to fight for the unborn, using science and systematic theology.

This article is the final of a four-part series based on the upcoming book by Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas, The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

When two young boys in a family learn that their three older brothers and their father have died of yellow fever, how does that affect their thinking about life and death? In the Hodge family two centuries ago, that consciousness led one brother to become the 19th century’s pioneering pro-life doctor and the other to become a pro-creation theologian who wrote three volumes of systematic theology still read in seminaries today.

The older of the two survivors, Hugh Hodge, graduated from Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to became ship surgeon on a voyage to India. There, during a deadly cholera epidemic, he saw the Hindu “burning of a widow with her dead husband” atop a funeral pyre. She did not resist when the fire was lit, and he hoped she suffocated from smoke before feeling the flames.

Hodge almost died when the ship nearly sank on the way back to America. For most of the 1820s, Hodge served as doctor of the Philadelphia Almshouse Hospital in the poorest part of the city, where sometimes all went well and other times typhus raged: “Few escaped the poison. … The mortality in the house was great.” Hodge again almost died, but then recovered, joined a Presbyterian church, married, and had seven children.

In the 1830s, Hodge became professor of obstetrics and the diseases of women and children at the University of Pennsylvania. Each fall, Hodge presented an introductory lecture on obstetrics, but he did not speak about abortion until three deaths made him face that misery.

The first …

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America’s young men are disaffected and lonely. But lack of manliness is not the problem.

As I write this, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison spins on the record player, filling my living room with the driving, train-like rhythms of one of America’s greatest storytellers. Originally released in 1968, it’s one of the dozen vintage Cash albums we inherited when a friend from our small working-class community moved to be closer to her children.

Moments into the eponymous “Folsom Prison Blues,” a lyric catches my attention:

When I was just a baby my mama told me, “Son,
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.”
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.

And there it is: a voice from the past describing the past few weeks of horror in the United States. From Buffalo, New York, to Uvalde, Texas, to Highland Park, Illinois, we are once again grappling to understand what has become an all-too-common atrocity: senseless mass shootings by disaffected, violent young men.

As a mother to a 16-going-on-37-year-old son, I think a lot about the state of manhood in American society and the evangelical church. Much has been made of the excesses of John Wayne masculinity, but I wonder if it’s time for a conversation about Johnny Cash masculinity.

While The Duke is synonymous with true grit, masculine bravado, and dominance, The Man in Black offers an alternative vision—and perhaps a way forward in these deeply fragmented times.
Cash’s roots ran deep in the American South, and themes of poverty, religion, and all things Americana informed his music. His biggest hits include sentimental ballads about riding the rails, the mythical Wild West, and hard-working, hard-living men who miss their mamas.
But while …

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When the world calls everything unprecedented, God’s provision remains unchanging.

At a recent parenting forum on children and technology at my church, I offered a discreetly told example of failure from my years of parenting teenagers. Even in the retelling, I could feel the knot of panic in my stomach the same as when the events were playing out in real time.

Nothing stirs fear in us quite like when our responsibilities as parents intersect with the tough realities of our world. And parents today face their share of legitimate fears.

Between social media, shifting sexual ethics, sex abuse scandals, pandemics, pornography, and all of the usual challenges of raising kids, the consensus is clear: Parenting today is hard. Christian parents are afraid, perhaps more than I’ve seen in my 25 years in ministry.

We want to protect children from temptation and negative influence, but the task feels insurmountable. We can feel powerless, asked to sail through uncharted waters with monsters left and right. But in the middle of my parenting fears, the Lord brought to mind timeless help to serve as a compass: He reminded me about what does not change.

Did my children face unprecedented challenges with technology and social pressures? In one sense, yes. But on closer observation, these were old challenges with new wrappings. The Book of Ecclesiastes goes to great lengths to drive home the point that there is nothing new under the sun.

I had always regarded this message to be a bit of a downer, but in tumultuous times, it emerged as the stabilizing force I needed. These challenges were not unprecedented. These waters were not uncharted. The eternal God looks down on this generation and sees no new problems. Not only that, he stands ready, as he always does, to be faithful to this generation and all generations.

Were …

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“Burdened and broken” by the federal investigation into Indian boarding schools, Mike Keahbone drafted the denomination’s first resolution in support of native peoples.

Southern Baptists took a historic stand last month to acknowledge the trauma suffered by Native Americans and to officially offer their support and prayers.

“When you look at the long history of Southern Baptists, there was not a resolution in our history that ever took a stand with Native American people,” said Mike Keahbone.

A Native American who leads a church located near the headquarters for the Comanche Nation in southwest Oklahoma, Keahbone knows firsthand the need for gospel witness and for healing among native peoples.

The First Baptist Church of Lawton pastor proposed that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) speak out on the issue following a federal report, released in May, that investigated the history of Indian boarding schools.

The SBC resolution—approved at its annual meeting in June—condemns forced assimilation and conversion as “contrary to our distinctive beliefs as Baptists in religious liberty and soul-freedom.” The statement also recognizes how this painful history continues to affect native peoples, particularly after new report.

“For Native American people, this is opening up a pretty significant wound and one that we’re having to process and work through,” said Keahbone, who served both on the committee that drafted the slate of 2022 resolutions and on the SBC Executive Committee.

“Just to be able to say to everyone who was affected by this, to every Native American, to every Alaska native, to every Hawaiian native, ‘We see you, we understand this is painful, and we want you to know that we’re standing with you.’”

The federal report found that half of over 400 federally funded Indian boarding schools were run with the help …

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Unlike many American counterparts, evangelical institutions in Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine enjoy an influx of students as they serve beyond their ivory towers.

Bassem Ragy did not need a master’s of divinity degree in order to do math.

Seven years ago, when his church’s preschool children presented their paltry Sunday school offering of 7 Egyptian pounds (then equivalent to $2), he recalled the equation of five loaves plus two fishes.

Now one of 69 members of the 2022 graduating class of Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo (ETSC), the newly-minted MDiv can preach Jesus’ miracle from the original Greek.

“When I see the work of our graduates, it gives me hope for the church’s future,” said Tharwat Wahba, ETSC vice president for church and society—and one of its many alumni. “We must keep up our momentum.”

The fishermen are multiplying.

In 1995, there were about 50 students at the Presbyterian institution. By 2005, seminary research had identified 311 affiliated churches, 127 of which lacked a full-time pastor.

By 2019, enrollment had grown to 300 students. Three years later, it reached 509. And now affiliated churches number 450, only 70 of which lack pastoral leadership.

Founded in 1863 aboard a felucca, a traditional Egyptian boat, in the Nile River, ETSC’s floating campus served mission stations and fledgling churches associated with the then-American Presbyterian movement. The seminary has steadily supplied synod pulpits ever since.

Wahba linked the explosive growth to a low point in modern Egyptian history.

While most Coptic Christians were cautious about the 2011 Arab Spring, many evangelicals seized the opportunity to minister to revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, hoping for the success of the democratic moment. But Islamist politicians quickly dominated the parliament, and in 2012 the Muslim Brotherhood captured the …

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A new history argues that Protestant ministers have traded prophetic introspection for triumphalist civil religion.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans relied on certain rituals of mourning to manage the shock of what had occurred. Sixty years later, after planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, they turned to those rituals once more.

Desperate to make sense of the tragedy, Americans consumed all manner of media coverage. Within hours of the attack, political leaders reassured the public that the nation would remain strong, and then identified military action as the primary mechanism of retribution. And Americans went to church because, as Melissa Matthes explains in When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, “gathering in grief at a worship space after violence seems to be a quintessentially American practice.”

Americans find comfort in familiarity during tragedies, so it is not surprising that Matthes, a professor of government at the United States Coast Guard Academy, discovered patterns of consolation in the thousands of sermons she read in preparation for her book. But Matthes’s work is not solely about the words of comfort spoken during crisis points. Her book stands out because she explains how Protestant ministers adapted their rhetorical strategies to respond to significant challenges that they faced as the religious and political landscape shifted after World War II.

Disparities in how ministers reacted to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are particularly instructive. Following the Japanese attack in Hawaii, Protestant clergy called for introspection, specifically asking congregants to consider how they had helped create a world where such violence was possible. Careful to maintain their moral voice, Matthes argues, most Protestant ministers refused …

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A former director of Bill Hwang’s investment firm, seeking millions in compensation, said Grace and Mercy was used as a financial “escape pod.”

A former managing director at Archegos Capital–a family office at the center of one of Wall Street’s biggest white collar crime cases in decades–has filed a lawsuit alleging fraudulent activity at the Grace and Mercy Foundation, the Christian nonprofit connected to the firm. In seeking millions in compensation, he claims the foundation’s $800 million in assets includes funding diverted from Archegos’s employees’ compensation.

In April, federal prosecutors charged Archegos founder Bill Hwang, a billionaire outspoken about his Christian faith, with racketeering and “massive fraud.” In 2021, banks lending to Archegos lost $10 billion, and the firm’s collapse evaporated $100 billion from the stock market, according to prosecutors. Hwang is currently free on a $100 million bond and awaiting trial.

Brendan Sullivan, who started at Archegos in 2014 and resigned during its downfall in March 2021, is seeking millions in compensation he says he is owed. He says Archegos leadership forced employees to put their bonuses back into a fund at the firm, which he alleges Archegos then invested in stocks and transferred to Grace and Mercy. The foundation, he said, then sold the stocks and got the profits. That would protect appreciated stock from taxation and give Archegos a tax deduction for the donation.

“These share transfers to the foundation were all coming from the Archegos Fund, which included employee deferred compensation … which was done without the knowledge or consent of employees,” the lawsuit says. The employee fund lost $500 million total, Sullivan says. Sullivan was owed $30 million in deferred compensation at the time of his resignation and has not received …

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Evangelical advocates abroad hold out hope that America’s shift on abortion sets a new standard.

Some pro-life Christians hope the reversal of Roe v. Wade will help more countries outside the US resist legalizing abortion.

Under the landmark ruling for nearly 50 years, the United States modeled abortion rights as a standard, an inevitable sign of social progress. As abortion policy becomes a state-by-state issue, advocates say, it will decrease the pressure the US and US-based aid groups put on foreign governments around abortion access, allowing them to focus on other aspects of women’s health instead.

The Roe reversal “will help show the rest of the world that this isn’t a settled issue, even in the West, and will hopefully help countries in the Global South to resist pressure from the West to liberalize their abortion laws,” said Peter Saunders, the UK-based president of the International Christian Medical and Dental Association.

“It will also make it much harder to argue at the UN that abortion is an international human right when half the US believes, and will now enforce, the exact opposite.”

In its updated guidelines issued in March 2022, the United Nations’ World Health Organization called for the repeal of “laws and regulations that restrict abortion by reasons, prohibit abortion based on gestational limits, and require mandatory waiting periods.”

Under President Donald Trump (and previous Republican presidents), the Mexico City policy barred federal funding of international organizations that covered or advocated for abortion as a method of family planning. President Joe Biden rescinded the policy.

While the Mexico City policy focuses on foreign assistance programs, two other provisions—the Siljander and Helms amendments—also limits how US dollars …

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