Author: Chris Boyd

Though Catholic and evangelical leaders have endorsed existing options, this vaccine is the first without links to fetal-derived cell lines.

Could a much-delayed COVID-19 shot finally win over religious vaccine skeptics?

That’s the question swirling around a vaccine made by Novavax, a Maryland biotech firm that submitted its request to the US Food and Drug Administration last month for emergency use authorization of its COVID-19 shot, also known as NVX-CoV2373.

Although more than a year behind competitors such as Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, which were both cleared for emergency use in late 2020, Novavax’s two-dose vaccine has already been approved for use in other countries such as the UK, and the company hopes to aid global inoculation efforts.

But Novavax may have another unusual selling point: the potential to woo vaccine skeptics who reject other widely available vaccines because of distant links to abortion they say violate their morals and their faith.

“No human fetal-derived cell lines or tissue, including HEK293 cells, are used in the development, manufacture or production of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373,” a Novavax spokesperson told Religion News Service via email.

About 64 percent of the US population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of February 18, with 28 percent having received an additional booster shot, according to The New York Times.

Public health experts say the unvaccinated population is harboring vaccine hesitancy or outright anti-vaccine sentiment, some of it driven by faith. According to a December 2021 survey by Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, 10 percent of Americans say they believe getting a COVID-19 vaccine conflicts with their religious beliefs.

Among their objections is that in developing or testing their vaccines, Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and …

Continue reading…

To avoid hurting our marriages and families, we can learn from forerunners in the faith.

Back in 2015, while my wife played with our three children on our neighborhood playground, I stared in dumbfounded disbelief after reading a puzzling tweet by former pastor Tullian Tchividjian: “Welcome to the valley of the shadow of death… thank God grace reigns there.”

I quickly learned that this quote referred to the recently revealed marital indiscretions of both Tchividjian and his wife. This popular icon in the Reformed resurgence movement had, like so many, been found out for disastrous misdeeds that led to the dissolution of their marriage.

When the news broke, I had just accepted an associate pastorate at Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park and was a couple months shy of beginning doctoral studies in Christian history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

For the next seven years, I went on to study the history of evangelicals. All the while, I kept on the lookout for the same historical pattern, one I didn’t want to ignore in the literature—especially since its repetition and consequences continued to play out in the 21st-century evangelical world I inhabited.

The all-too-common pattern I discovered is this: Great evangelical figures throughout history often had tragic personal and family lives. This trope winked at me repeatedly as I came across it in biographies and historical accounts of evangelical pastors, revivalists, and activists.

Evangelical history happens to provide numerous cautionary tales for what happens when ambition goes unbridled. And while some evangelicals would rather gloss over these tales or conceal them, that would be to our detriment. These warnings can be a service to the future of the evangelical story—and heeding them may prompt us to curb our ambition, …

Continue reading…

Here’s how it changed me.

“What will racial reconciliation in the church in the US look like?”

The questioner was a student at Duke Divinity School around 2005. The scene was a large auditorium-style classroom, and the course was Preaching, a staple of the MDiv program I was in at the time. The professor up front was William “Bill” Turner, a Black Baptist pastor-theologian. He was beloved by the many mainline students who discovered him at Duke almost as much as he was by the Black Baptist ones who came to the school in part because he was there.

In response to the question, Turner looked straight at the student and said, “One thing it will look like is whites being willing to sit under Black preaching. You don’t see that very often.”

His answer, emblazoned on my mind, has been a challenge and goad to my wife and me across the years. The invitation to submission is a convicting one for white Christians like me. I have to ask myself, Would I sit and be taught the Word of God under the authority of a Black pastor?

Of course I would, the answer surges up within me. After all, I’m not a racist.

I suspect this kind of response is one many other white Christians share. But my question isn’t abstract or “in principle.” As Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, love in dreams is easy compared to love in reality.

If I frame the issue much more concretely, then, I have to ask, Would I find myself listening to Black preaching most Sundays for any appreciable stretch of time?

Even after leaving Duke Divinity, my own answer to that question would most often have been no. But several years ago, that changed.

My family and I had recently relocated to Austin and moved into an east-side neighborhood …

Continue reading…

A mistaken raid by Chicago cops sent me on a long path toward redemption.

February 21, 2019, was a typical cold winter day in Chicago. I got home from work around 6:30 p.m. and felt ready for a break after a long day of doing social work at the hospital. I took the dog out for a short walk, came back home, turned on the TV, and started changing out of my work clothes. Then I heard an excruciating noise—what sounded like a vehicle crashing into my building.

I was standing naked in my living room when police officers with guns, scopes, and lights broke down the door, rushed in, and started yelling at me to put my hands up. All I could think was, Please do not shoot me, please do not kill me.

I spent the next 40 minutes in a state of horror—crying, begging, pleading with them to let me put on my clothes. With tears streaming down my face, I cried out over 40 times: “You have the wrong place.”

As a single woman living alone, I often prayed about safety both inside and outside my home. Asking for protection was a regular part of my prayer time with God. So after the police departed that night, I found myself asking the question people often do after a traumatic experience: Where was God? How could he allow this to happen to me?

I spent the next 13 months in legal battles with the city, all the while struggling with my mental health and questioning my faith. I was going to church every Sunday and serving in my same capacity, but during quiet times, I continued to question God.

When the death of Breonna Taylor made national news, the story shook me to my core because of its similarities with mine. Police officers had raided the home of an innocent Black woman. But in that case, they’d shot and killed her.

As I grieved for Taylor, my prayers shifted from “Why did you allow …

Continue reading…

What’s behind the exvangelical trend isn’t new. But it sheds new light on theology.

Thomas Aquinas was a theologian’s theologian. His writings comprise more than ten million words, which he wrote at a feverish pace, standing at a desk. He synthesized not only Christian teaching on doctrine but also the broader questions regarding how Christians ought to think about God. Aquinas was also the first theologian I studied.

Until I started graduate school in theology, my faith was simply part of the furniture of my world. It was familiar and somewhat ordinary, its ability to hold me when I put my weight upon it largely unquestioned. It wasn’t that I was afraid to ask difficult questions. God had been the one I went to with my concerns, my loneliness, my existential need. To treat God as the object of study, entirely separate from this kind of piety, did not come naturally to me.

So I found myself quite unprepared to actually study theology once I embarked upon it formally. Truth be told, systematic theology felt too abstract and unemotional when I first encountered it. The earnest love that motivated my study needed to be bracketed for a time—but that earnest love was nearly all I had!

Systematic theology is a world of precision and definitions. But it can feel at first that the discourse betrays much of what motivates the practice of faith.

My desire to study was led by a kind of earnest commitment that, in my experience, was rare in graduate schools, which often seemed given to rancorous turf wars. Of course I believed in God, and in Jesus Christ his only Son. It was not the articles of the faith that I needed to question at the time; it was what it meant to say, “I believe.”

I had a conversion of sorts, both to theology and to its method, when I read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. …

Continue reading…

We disciple our young people to love God and to work hard. But relational formation is important, too.

A recent conversation between New York Times columnist David Brooks and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Leon Kass piqued my interest as I listened to these men—Brooks in his 60s, Kass in his 80s—share concerns for the college students they teach. (Brooks was a student of Kass at the University of Chicago in the 1980s.)

These students, they agreed, were singularly preoccupied with career questions: What work would prove satisfying? How would they find their professional calling? They showed far less interest in competencies needed for life’s most important relationships. They didn’t ask what it took to sustain committed marriages or a healthy family life.

I wondered: Was this conversation another iteration of kids these days? Or do Brooks and Kass have their finger on a more pressing cultural problem—our glaring contemporary neglect of relational formation?

The conversation made me reconsider what kind of relational formation my children have received. My five children—two college students and three teenagers—have learned to navigate life (and leftovers) in a crowd. They’ve grown up in a church pew, understanding Christian faith as team sport. But perhaps we have mistakenly assumed that the skills and even appetite for relationships have required less formal education.

We’ve tried teaching our children to honor God, to love the church, to obey the Scriptures, to serve the least, to work hard, to stay curious, to be honest. But how much have we taught them—explicitly and systematically—about suffering interruptions, about sacrificing time for others, about staying patient and hopeful in misunderstanding and offense? What curriculum have we engaged for …

Continue reading…

Recent research suggests that young couples are doing fine, despite the stereotypes.

Most single American adults aspire to be married. But for many now, marriage is supposed to be a capstone achievement rather than a cornerstone of young adult life. The “capstone model” says you are supposed to have all your ducks in a row—education, some professional success, and a clear adult identity—before you marry.

The median age at first marriage has increased over the past 50 years in the United States—from 23 in 1970 to about 30 in 2021 for men, and from 21 in 1970 to 28 in 2021 for women—with no sign of this upward trend leveling off.

Indeed, a recent national survey of millennials (ages 18–33) found the vast majority of respondents agree that marrying later means both people will be more mature, more likely to have achieved important personal goals, and more likely to have personal finances in order. Moreover, these young adults believe that later marriages will be more stable and of higher quality. That is the widely accepted cultural narrative.

Do later unions consistently provide better prospects for marital success than earlier ones? We often hear about the advantages of capstone marriage, but there has been little empirical investigation of those supposed benefits.

In a new State of Our Unions: 2022 report published by the National Marriage Project, the Wheatley Institution, and the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University, Alan Hawkins’s team of researchers reports on an empirical investigation of potential differences and similarities between two groups: early-marrieds (ages 20–24), who are more aligned with a “cornerstone marriage” model, and later-marrieds (25-plus), who are more aligned with a capstone marriage model. The study analyzes …

Continue reading…

Just as Jesus’ baptism launched his public ministry, our own baptisms ordinate us to a life of humble obedience and costly service.

All four Gospels tell the story of Jesus’ baptism, as if every reader needs to hear it. Jesus’ cousin John, outfitted in a garment made of camel’s hair and a rustic leather belt, has set up camp in an unmarked wilderness to preach and prophesy. Everyone comes out to listen: the pious and the profane. The bankrupt and the ruined. The broken and the eccentric. Religious misfits and spiritual castoffs. All get a dose of John’s caustic threats and stern warnings. Each hears the message of impending judgment. Many confess and are baptized, one repentant sinner after another. And then Jesus, the Messiah, gets in line as if he’s in a Costco checkout.

Each Gospel offers its own angle on the story. Mark starts his Gospel with it, skipping Christmas as incidental and quickly launching into Jesus’ ministry. Luke copies much of Mark’s detail, following the gist of his telling but refusing to mention the involvement of the eccentric cousin. John emphasizes the Spirit lingering on Jesus like a dove, avoiding any awkward mention of an actual baptism.

The unique feature of Matthew’s version is the cousin conversation. John admires Jesus. He believes in Jesus. That’s exactly why he rebuts Jesus. He can’t stomach Jesus’ baptismal plan. Not one to hold back his opinions, John protests: Jesus shouldn’t be in the same line as the dreck of humanity. John’s baptismal liturgy is consistent: Repent, be baptized, live a new life. Why is Jesus in that line? What does he have to repent of?

The baptizer’s harsh, prophetic words can’t apply to the Savior. So he asserts that Jesus’ baptismal plans are backward. If one cousin is to baptize the other, Jesus should …

Continue reading…

As society doubles down on online sports gambling, older activists see a chance to renew the Christian conscience around the practice.

The 1990s were a busy time for Christians combatting gambling at local levels: fighting a casino here or lottery expansions there.

Tom Grey, a Methodist minister, traveled 250 days a year with the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, which now goes by the name Stop Predatory Gambling. He can remember major wins, like keeping a casino out of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with the help of filmmaker Ken Burns.

“The problem is [gambling companies] just have to win once, and they’ve got it,” Grey said. “Mayors and other people would stand up and say, ‘We don’t want your casino.’ Now there aren’t choices any longer. Churches feel it’s over.”

Grey, 81, is retired, but now he is watching the latest iteration of the industry take off: sports betting.

The Super Bowl on Sunday will be the first big windfall in many states for online sports betting. Companies like Draft Kings and FanDuel have been running ads throughout game broadcasts and all over sports news sites, urging fans to put money on their favorite teams or fantasy leagues.

The American Gambling Association has projected a record 31.4 million Americans will put down $7.6 billion on this year’s LA Rams–Cincinnati Bengals matchup. That’s up more than one-third from last Super Bowl, as more states have legalized online betting. Sports betting is now legal in 30 states and Washington, DC. In some states, such betting happens at a physical venue, while others have begun allowing it online.

After the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the practice in 2018, states lined up to legalize sports betting to get a slice of the tax revenue from the multibillon-dollar industry. State-level Christian organizations …

Continue reading…

What if some evangelicals are so burned out on church that they don’t even know it?

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

With all this talk of deconstruction these days, one problem is that very few people mean precisely the same thing when they use that word.

For some people, deconstructing means losing their faith altogether—becoming atheists, agnostics, or spiritual-but-not-religious nones. For others, deconstructing means still believing in Jesus but struggling with how religious institutions have failed.

And there are also many for whom deconstructing means maintaining an ongoing commitment to orthodox Christianity, as well as a robust commitment to the church—but without the cultural-political baggage associated with the label “evangelicalism.”

On one level, these divergent meanings may suggest that the term deconstruction doesn’t signify any one thing specifically—not without a great deal of qualification, that is. This is true, come to think of it, of the word evangelical these days as well.

But that doesn’t mean that deconstruction is a lesser phenomenon than we think. As a matter of fact, I think the case could be made that all of American evangelical Christianity is deconstructing—at least in some sense of the word.

It’s just that I believe there’s more than one way to deconstruct.

At one level, we can see deconstruction happening in terms of institutions. Someone asked me a few weeks ago what percentage of churches or ministries I thought were divided by the same political and cultural tumults ripping through almost every other facet of American life. I answered, “All of them. One hundred percent.”

I don’t mean that every church is in conflict; many aren’t. …

Continue reading…