Author: Chris Boyd

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 …

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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. …

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Popular among charismatics, the “heart-level” Bible version was criticized as a paraphrase posing as translation.

A Bible version designed to “recapture the emotion of God’s Word” was removed from Bible Gateway last week. The Passion Translation (TPT) is listed as “no longer available” among the site’s 90 English-language Bible offerings.

First released as a New Testament in 2017, The Passion Translation includes additions that do not appear in the source manuscripts, phrases meant to draw out God’s “tone” and “heart” in each passage.

Translator Brian Simmons—a former missionary linguist and pastor who now leads Passion and Fire Ministries—sees his work in Bible translation as part of a divine calling on his life to bring a word, the Word, to the nations. His translation has been endorsed by a range of apostolic charismatic Christians, including The Call’s Lou Engle, Bethel’s Bill Johnson, and Hillsong’s Bobbie Houston.

TPT’s publisher, BroadStreet Publishing Group, confirmed that Bible Gateway “made the disappointing decision to discontinue their license for The Passion Translation” as of January 2022.

“While no explanation was given, BroadStreet Publishing accepts that Bible Gateway has the right to make decisions as they see fit with the platforms they manage,” BroadStreet said in a statement.

Bible Gateway’s parent company, HarperCollins Christian Publishing, told CT, “We periodically review our content, making changes as necessary, to align with our business goals.” The company declined to offer further details about its reason for the decision. TPT remains available on YouVersion and Logos Bible Software.

Screenshots from Simmons’s social media showed he initially responded to The Passion …

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African American church graveyards are disappearing. Can they be saved before it’s too late?

They needed a John Deere Gator to reach the perimeter. Then, in the forested area behind a power plant in Williamsburg, Virginia, Colette Roots and her small expedition had to jump over ditches full of rainwater, where they could see tadpoles and mosquito eggs. They went in.

The plot of land belonged to a Black congregation in the 1940s. The historic church, Oak Grove Baptist, is still active. Roots grew up in the congregation, and as a child, she helped her mother maintain the graves at the church’s main cemetery—a much larger plot roughly a mile from this one, with about 150 graves.

The church lost access to this smaller graveyard decades ago, thanks in part to a massive land seizure by the federal government. By the summer of 2021, most everyone who knew the exact whereabouts of the Christians buried back here had died themselves.

Hidden away like this, in the trees and brush, the graves remind Roots of the Sunday school song about hiding your light under a bushel. When she saw them that day, she had the same reaction: No.

There were a dozen markers, some lying flat and others standing upright. The inscriptions showed that most of the deceased were children, and at least three were related to Roots by marriage. For a moment she was overcome with grief.

The dead needed to be taken care of. They belonged with the other deceased saints at the main burial grounds.

Everyone at Oak Grove agreed with her. But this left them with a conundrum. With an aging congregation, just a fraction of its former size, Oak Grove Baptist has struggled just to pay its utility bills. Relocating a cemetery is not in its budget.

The congregation’s dilemma is not unusual for Black churches. Recently, 26 potential graves were identified …

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The ideas of a Scottish skeptic explain why some Westerners struggle to embrace signs and wonders.

Why do many people embrace a worldview that won’t even consider evidence for miracles? Sometimes they assume that science opposes miracles, but that assumption goes back not to scientific inquiry itself but to an 18th-century philosopher. Knowingly or unknowingly, many people have followed the thesis of Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–1776).

Hume was probably the most prominent philosopher of his generation, and surely the most influential from his time on subsequent generations. He wrote on a wide variety of topics, sometimes very insightfully but sometimes (as with his ethnocentric approach to history) in ways that would not be accepted today.

Hume’s intellectual stature, earned from other works, eventually lent credibility to his 1748 essay on miracles. In this essay, Hume dismisses the credibility of miracle claims, appealing to “natural law” and uniform human experience. Although an appeal to natural law might sound scientific, Hume was not a scientist; in fact, some of his views on causation would make scientific inquiry impossible. Hume’s essay on miracles also contradicts his own approach to discovering knowledge.

Moreover, Hume’s essay has generated serious intellectual counterarguments since the time it was first published. One of these counterarguments was history’s first public use of Bayes’ theorem, today an essential staple in statistics.

Mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes originated the theorem but died before publishing it. His close friend Richard Price, also a mathematician and minister, published it and then used Bayes’ theorem to refute a probability claim Hume had made in his essay about miracle witnesses.

Hume himself acknowledged …

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With two delivery drivers suing over schedules, Sabbatarian Christians find their observance increasingly countercultural in a 24/7 economy.

Mailboxes used to go empty on Sundays.

Not anymore. America’s biggest retailer, Amazon, ships seven days a week, and as the site expands Sunday delivery across the country, more drivers are losing what would have been a steady day off.

For many, the shift just means their break will fall during the week. But for some Christians on the job, the new delivery option conflicts with Sunday church services and their conviction not to work on the Sabbath.

Amazon’s seven-days-a-week schedule has already led to two lawsuits from drivers who were fired for not working on Sundays. Both claimed religious discrimination under Title VII, alleging their employer had not provided “reasonable accommodation” for them to work other days.

In a case in Florida, a Sabbatarian Christian lost his job working for a delivery service contracted by Amazon, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched a lawsuit on his behalf. Last week he secured a $50,000 settlement, and his former company, Tampa Bay Delivery Services, will undergo religious sensitivity training.

For a postal worker in Pennsylvania, though, the case is making its way through the Third Circuit Court of Appeals after a district court ruled last year in favor of the US Postal Service.

Gerald Groff is an evangelical Christian who began working as a rural mail carrier in 2012, a part-time role rotating through holiday and weekend routes based on demand.

After the station he was working for began contracting with Amazon for Sunday delivery, he transferred to another rural station. When that one also started Sunday routes, he tried to adjust his schedule and swap days but ended up missing 24 Sundays of work in 2017 and 2018, before being let go in 2019.

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Favorite Orthodox figure on Arabic Christian TV eulogized by fellow evangelist Sameh Maurice after COVID-19 death.

Last month, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church lost one of its most recognized and charismatic priests. Abouna (“Father”) Makary Younan (1934–2022), a well-known figure on Arabic Christian satellite television, died on January 11 of complications from COVID-19.

Just a few miles from where his funeral services were held at the historic St. Mark’s Cathedral, Abouna Makary’s good friend and Christian television megastar Sameh Maurice convened a heartfelt commemoration at downtown Cairo’s Kasr el-Dobara Church, where he pastors the Arab world’s largest evangelical congregation. Together, these two ceremonies affirmed that the late priest’s legacy of praise, miracles, and ecumenism will endure among Egypt’s Orthodox and Protestant Christians alike.

“Abouna Makary influenced the lives of millions in this generation,” said Maurice. “I know of no other person who touched so many people.”

For nearly two decades, Arabic Christian television introduced both Abouna Makary and “Pastor Sameh” to wider audiences, educating viewers in novel ways about Coptic Orthodoxy and Protestantism. At times both sides have been wary of the medium, especially the Orthodox hierarchy.

Representing the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, in recent years Coptic Orthodox leaders have taken contradictory positions on evangelicals. Some are open to dialogue and friendship, while others lead campaigns not only against popular evangelical leaders like Pastor Sameh but also charismatic priests like Abouna Makary. Stylizing themselves as protectors of indigenous church heritage and of the Copts’ place as the Middle East’s largest Christian sect, they doled …

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Faithful love requires a storyline, not just a series of sensations.

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

The young man looked down as he talked to me about his ongoing struggles with what he felt to be a compulsion toward pornography.

After this many years in ministry, I’ve had that conversation so many times I can almost script it in advance. But this Christian was able to summarize his situation better than most. “I guess I would say that my problem started with lust,” he said. “And then it was guilt and shame. It’s still all that, but it’s something else too. It’s boredom.”

The same afternoon I talked to a middle-aged Christian, really successful in his career, who said, “I’ve achieved everything I set out to do; and now it just all feels so empty and without meaning. It’s like I’m bored.” I’ve had that conversation too, countless times.

That day, though, I started wondering if, in some way, these conversations were really about the same problem.

I was prompted to ponder this question after reading a jeremiad against “today’s turn towards the pornographic”—not from a likeminded conservative evangelical viewpoint, but from a decidedly secular anticapitalist philosopher.

In his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, Byung-Chul Han clarifies that this “pornographic turn” does not just show up in explicit sexual depictions on the internet, but an even deeper aspect of spiritual malaise.

Han argues that pornography attempts to sever signs from meaning, sensations from communion, the bodily organs from the person. This results in a fragmentation that comes from a kind of hypervisibility and hyperavailability.

Pornography makes use of sexuality, …

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Over 75 years of the professional league—and for decades before—Black Christians brought a social conscience to basketball.

In 1949, 42 bronze bells were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands and installed in the bell tower at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem.

The bells have a remarkable history in their own right. As the first carillon in the world to be played by a Black musician, they have been described by scholars as a “cultural treasure” and “an irreplaceable historical instrument.”

But St. Martin’s didn’t just make history for its tolling church tower. When the bells were installed over 70 years ago, no congregation in the country better represented the melding of basketball and Black culture.

Many of us are familiar with basketball’s Christian origins. The sport, after all, was created at a Christian college (the YMCA’s International Training School) by an ordained Presbyterian minister (James Naismith) for the purpose of cultivating Christian values and spreading the gospel (“winning men to the master through the gym”).

Naismith and the YMCA, however, tell only part of the story. The sport would not have become what we know it to be today had it not been for Black Christian leaders and institutions.

This season, the NBA marks its 75th anniversary. By the time the league was formed, basketball had developed far beyond its Christians roots. And yet, when modern NBA players like Steph Curry splash a three-pointer, or when they champion the cause of racial justice, they bear witness to the past—to the lasting influence of a Christianity nurtured by churches like St. Martin’s that promoted excellence on the court and a social conscience off of it.

Culture making and Black churches

“Here in Harlem the bells are in the center of things, right …

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Willie McLaurin, former Executive Committee VP, steps in four months after Ronnie Floyd’s resignation.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has appointed Willie McLaurin to serve as interim president and CEO, marking the first time that any entity of the predominantly white denomination has been headed by a Black person.

McLaurin was named just over two years ago as the committee’s vice president for Great Commission relations and mobilization, a new role meant to focus on spreading the gospel and fostering relations with various demographic groups of Southern Baptists.

Prior to his work for the Executive Committee, McLaurin worked at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board for 15 years and previously held pastoral roles in churches in that state.

The Executive Committee, headquartered in Nashville, has recently faced turmoil over racism, allegations of mishandling sexual abuse claims, and debates about how much access investigators hired to report on those claims will have to past conversations and other denominational communications.

Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s former president and CEO, resigned in October, citing the committee’s decision to waive attorney-client privilege in the investigation as a reason for his departure. The denomination’s longtime general counsel cut ties with the SBC and at least 10 committee members also resigned, citing similar reasons.

“We hope that he will help us to reset the tone by which the EC serves Southern Baptists,” said California pastor Rolland Slade, the Executive Committee chairman, in a statement about McLaurin in Baptist Press, the SBC’s news service. “Immediately before us is the challenge to regain the sense of trust of Southern Baptists.”

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