Author: Chris Boyd

Justices pepper lawyers with possible scenarios and questions about coercing high school players.

The US Supreme Court justices spun more than a dozen hypothetical prayer scenarios during oral arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday.

They asked the lawyers arguing for their respective sides if a teacher could pray before class or after, silently or out loud, in a clear voice or a low mumble.

They asked if coaches could pray on the sidelines, in a press box, or a huddle. If they could pray with a prefatory statement that student participation wasn’t required. Or with the sign of the cross, the words of the Our Father, or hands lifted high. Could they pray with a crowd, into a mic, into a camera, with a group of players gathered around, or if no one was there and they were alone?

Justice Stephen Breyer, pointing out that the court has ruled on prayer in schools several times before, said, “This doesn’t seem like a new problem; it seems like a line-drawing problem.”

And then one of the justices even asked about literal lines drawn on the ground. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know why Washington state high school coach Joseph Kennedy insisted on praying in the center of the field, at the 50-yard line.

“He had to thank God,” she said. “But why there?”

The real line the court was trying to find, though, wasn’t marked with field paint. The justices tried to push the lawyers and each other to agree to a point where prayers protected by the First Amendment could be separated from prayers prohibited by the protections of the First Amendment.

Everyone agreed that the coach has a right to pray, but only as an individual and not as a representative of the public school, and not in a way that would coerce students into a religious practice.

“You’re not …

Continue reading…

Aimee Byrd is correct that the book diagnoses flawed understandings of human sexuality, but her interpretative choices are open to question.

Standing outside a Coptic church in Cairo, I saw a mosaic that sent me back to a college hermeneutics class. In the image’s foreground, a man lay slumbering as an angel hovered over him, pointing. I followed the finger to a horizon dotted with pyramids. And I recognized the Bible’s second “Joseph and Egypt” story, which recounts the holy family’s flight from Herod’s persecution.

The image reminded me of how I’d wrestled with a passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (2:15). The passage was suggesting that when the toddler Jesus returned from the land of pyramids, he had “fulfilled,” in Matthew’s words, a vision from the prophet Hosea: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). Yet Hosea, for his part, wasn’t issuing a prediction about the coming Messiah. He was thinking back to an event he knew from Israel’s history: God’s deliverance of his people from Pharoah’s yoke.

For years I struggled to see how the holy family’s return from Egypt truly fulfilled Hosea’s prophesy. But then my hermeneutics professor explained that Matthew was using “fulfilled” to mean something closer to “epitomized,” or “filled to the full in meaning.” In modern parlance, we might imagine Matthew saying, “Talk about calling your Son out of Egypt!”

When we try shoehorning a prediction into our reading of Hosea’s vision, my professor said, we end up distorting it. Instead, he argued, we should treat Matthew’s choice of language as an exercise in literary layering. In other words, he was drawing on earlier biblical …

Continue reading…

Torn between “pro-Putin” and “pro-prayer,” only a minority have spoken out publicly against the invasion. Ukrainian seminary leaders call for repentance.

Russian sermons—to the extent legally possible—reflect the national mood.

“Honor the tsar!” preached Alexey Novikov of Land of Freedom Pentecostal church in Moscow two days after the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, quoting from 1 Peter 2:17. While not pro-war, it was certainly pro-Russia. Once a lawfully elected president commits troops, he said, it is a Christian’s duty to support them.

One month later, Mikhail Belyaev of Source of Living Water Baptist church in Voronezh, Russia, asked, “Why are the churches silent?”

Many Ukrainian evangelicals are fuming at their cross-border colleagues for failing to speak out against the war. They also cite the apostle Peter, placing priority on the same verse’s earlier command: “Love the family of believers.”

But Belyaev’s sermon was not pro-Ukraine. His congregation 320 miles south of Moscow provides a different answer.

The churches are not silent, he said. They are preaching the gospel and praying for peace.

“Russians take the Ukrainian complaint seriously,” said Andrey Shirin, associate professor of divinity at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, a Baptist seminary in Virginia. “But they put God before the nation—and think many Ukrainians put too much stock in their nationality.”

Shirin left Russia 30 years ago and said that, then as now, most believers are wary of politics. And while some pastors have criticized the war, a pro-Ukraine sermon would be hard to find.

Throughout the war, polls have shown strong support for what Russia has legally mandated be called a “special military operation.” Between 65 percent and 89 percent have signaled approval; 71 percent …

Continue reading…

The moral authority of high school coaches raises First Amendment questions the Supreme Court will have to consider in “Kennedy v. Bremerton.”

For nearly as long as there have been football coaches, there have been praying football coaches. And praying football coaches have frequently been at the center of the rough-and-tumble, back-and-forth debate over the place of religion in American public education.

Joseph Kennedy, a high school coach from the Seattle area, is the latest to take the field. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday. His lawyers will argue that the First Amendment protects his right as an American citizen to bend a knee and say a prayer after high school games.

The opposing counsel will also invoke the First Amendment, arguing that because Kennedy is paid by the public school, his prayers infringe on the rights of players, who shouldn’t be pressured to pray by a government employee.

But why football coaches? Why not praying principals, drama teachers, shop class instructors, or crossing guards? The football coach, it turns out, has a special place in the American struggle over the meaning of the freedom of religion.

We can trace the story back to one of the first men to turn coaching into a full-time profession, Amos Alonzo Stagg. He trained to be a minister before deciding, as he wrote in his autobiography, he “could influence others to Christian ideals more effectively on the field than in the pulpit.” From 1892 to 1932, Stagg built a college football powerhouse at the University of Chicago—and prayer was absolutely part of the program.

In Stagg’s day, American football was just developing as a sport. Key to its appeal and growing acceptance was the idea that it was more than a game, that it offered a space for young men to build character and develop the moral virtue …

Continue reading…

False unity resolves division, but real unity involves holding diversity in tension.

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

I’m quite sure that I’ve never interacted with one article for two weeks in a row here, but few issues are as important as those raised by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his Atlantic essay on the Tower of Babel and the fragmentation of American life.

The essay uniquely summarizes the fractures facing virtually every church, denomination, business, think tank, neighborhood association, and family I know. And in almost all those settings, someone will inevitably ask, “How did we become so divided?” followed by “How do we get back to unity?”

Those are important questions, but there are good and bad ways to answer them.

As I mentioned in my conversation with Haidt on the podcast this week, I agree with him largely on where he identifies the problem and with many of his proposed solutions. At the same time, we should pay careful attention to how we interpret the text that holds together his thesis: the Tower of Babel account in Genesis.

The analogy works, even for people who (like Haidt himself) aren’t believers. Technological hubris leads to an inability to communicate—which leads to a society breaking apart into little pieces. That does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the primary point of the Babel story:

The problem wasn’t the fragmentation. The problem was the unity.

As I noted here last week, Haidt is right in saying that American culture is facing a loss of social capital, of a shared story, of healthy institutions. That has grave implications for the future of democracy and—more importantly in my view—of …

Continue reading…

Sharp decline may be connected to drop in church attendance.

When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw this year’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year.

“We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.”

In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.

But in 2022, it dropped 11 points. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.

According to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers—measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions—said they read God’s Word less.

Currently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading. Before the pandemic, that number was at about 14 percent.

Plake thinks the dramatic change shows how closely Bible reading—even independent Bible reading—is connected to church attendance. When regular services were interrupted by the pandemic and related health mandates, it impacted not just the corporate bodies of believers but also individuals at home.

“The elephant in the room is COVID-19,” he …

Continue reading…