Transubstantiate

Texas lawsuit claims that the minor was a victim of a serial predator as well as student leaders in the campus ministry Chi Alpha.

A church in a Texas college town, a chapter of the campus ministry Chi Alpha, and its sponsoring denomination, the Assemblies of God, are being sued by a father who alleges that the leaders he entrusted to disciple his teenage son instead got him naked in ministry settings and used their positions of authority to sexually abuse him.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, follows a tumultuous several months for Chi Alpha. Since last spring, a serial predator has gone to jail for child sex abuse, chapter leaders across a half-dozen Texas universities have been dismissed, and the organization’s national director resigned.

The majority of the departing leaders had ties to Daniel Savala, a registered sex offender who groomed and abused Chi Alpha students for decades at his home in Houston. He was indicted last year on child sexual abuse and trafficking charges.

Though Savala wasn’t officially a part of Chi Alpha or the Assemblies of God, the list of leaders who have left reflect the reach of his informal network across Chi Alpha in Texas.

The recent lawsuit alleges that Savala molested a 13-year-old in 2021 and that four Chi Alpha students continued to sexually violate the youth group member through naked and inappropriate games in ministry settings.

The teenage victim attended Mountain Valley Fellowship in College Station. The Assemblies of God church had been led by Eli Stewart, a longtime Chi Alpha leader who launched the chapter at nearby Texas A&M University.

The victim’s father, Stephen Holt, is suing the church and the local Chi Alpha chapter as well as the General Council and North Texas District Council of the Assemblies of God for “malice” and “gross negligence” for failing to warn parents …

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The biblical call to maintain “a good reputation with outsiders” is becoming a bigger challenge in the US as public perception of clergy falls to a record low.

Americans are having a harder time trusting anyone these days—including pastors.

The country’s perception of clergy hit a new low in recent Gallup polling, with fewer than a third of Americans rating clergy as highly honest and ethical.

People are more likely to believe in the moral standards held by nurses, police officers, and chiropractors than their religious leaders. Clergy are still more trusted than politicians, lawyers, and journalists.

The continued drop in pastors’ reputation—down from 40 percent to 32 percent over the past four years—corresponds with more skepticism toward professions (and institutions) across the board.

Americans are also less likely than ever to know a pastor, with fewer than half belonging to a church and a growing cohort who don’t identify with a faith at all.

“As American culture becomes increasingly pluralistic and post-Christian, we can’t assume that Americans in general default to a positive view of clergy,” said Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University. “Ministers must work harder to gain public trust than was the case even a generation ago.”

Finn also pointed out how scandals like clergy sex abuse, growing political polarization, and evangelicals’ countercultural moral positions can contribute to the decline in credibility among clergy, “especially among those who have either had bad church experiences or whose worldview assumptions are already at odds with historic Christian beliefs.”

The most dramatic decline in clergy trust came around the crisis of sex abuse by Catholic priests in the early 2000s, when positive …

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Is the church ready for a repeat?

After former president Donald Trump bested former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the GOP primary outcome that many have expected all along may soon be here.

“This race consolidated faster than any race I can remember,” Dan Darling, director of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, told Christianity Today. “It’s feeling a little bit like an incumbent candidacy.”

Haley outlasted a large field of presidential hopefuls, but after a second-place finish in the Granite State, her underdog campaign may soon run out of road, political analysts say.

“New Hampshire has a much more moderate and much less religious electorate than South Carolina, and she still could not win,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The bottom line is that I think she needed to do better in New Hampshire to demonstrate wider appeal among the base Republican electorate.”

In New Hampshire, she also performed well with college graduates and self-identifying moderate and independent voters. But nearly 9 in 10 of New Hampshire voters who considered themselves “very conservative” supported Trump, The Washington Post’s exit polling found. And white evangelical Christians—about 20 percent of voters in the contest—went for Trump by 70 percent.

Trump won support from a strong majority of white evangelical voters in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, but his popularity also heightened ideological divisions within churches.

“Christians should be preparing now for a really divisive and contentious campaign season,” …

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We’ve romanticized stories of destiny-driven love—even at the expense of fidelity. This Oscar-nominated drama shows the beauty of limits.

Last year, I watched The Notebook for the first time. For nearly 25 years, it has epitomized Hollywood romance, with stills of Allie (Rachel McAdams) cupping Noah’s (Ryan Gosling) face as they passionately kiss in the rain serving as a pop culture shorthand for love and destiny.

The Notebook is also a story of infidelity. The story toggles between the present, where an elderly Noah comforts an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Allie, and the 1940s, where Allie cheats on and ultimately leaves her fiancé to reunite with Noah after years apart. In the modern scenes, Noah models faithfulness despite its difficulty, but in the earlier part of their timeline, Allie’s unfaithfulness is presented as the peak of romance.

The 2023 film Past Lives, which was nominated for five Golden Globes and Academy Awards including best picture, subversively shows the extent to which that impermanent perspective has permeated our thinking about life and love. Nora (Greta Lee) lies in bed with her husband Arthur (John Magaro), who is processing his feelings about an upcoming visit from his wife’s former love interest, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo):

Arthur: I was just thinking a lot about what a good story this is.

Nora: The story of Hae Sung and me?

Arthur: Yeah, I just can’t compete.

Nora: What do you mean?

Arthur: Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other.

Nora: We’re not meant for each other.

Arthur: In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.

“I’m the guy you’re leaving,” Arthur reiterates later, “when your ex-lover comes to take you away.”

Arthur’s confession surely echoes the inner narrative …

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Even with the recent release of imprisoned priests, Ortega’s regime continues to target Christian organizations with an “absolute intolerance for dissent.”

Bad news has been the norm for Catholics in Nicaragua, where clergy and church groups have been frequent targets of a wide-ranging crackdown for years. But on January 14, 2024, they received a happy surprise: The government unexpectedly released two bishops, 15 priests and two seminary students from prison and expelled them to the Vatican.

Those released included Bishop Rolando Álvarez, a high-profile political prisoner who was detained in 2022 for criticizing the government and then sentenced to 26 years in prison for alleged treason.

They also included priests detained by President Daniel Ortega’s government in late December 2023 for expressing solidarity with Álvarez and other political prisoners. Days later, Pope Francis criticized the regime in his New Year’s message and then called for “respectful diplomatic dialogue.”

Nearly six years after mass protests erupted against Ortega and then were brutally repressed, these prisoner releases offer some hope to Nicaragua’s opposition. As my research has shown, however, the Ortega regime is unrelenting in trying to retain power, which suggests this is not necessarily a turning point. In fact, the government reportedly took yet another priest into custody on January 16.

Why target the church?

Ortega first led Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, after his left-wing revolutionary organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, spearheaded the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In the 1980s, the FSLN clashed with the Vatican and church hierarchy over the group’s socialist politics, even as many poorer Nicaraguan Catholics embraced them.

When Ortega took office again in 2007, however, he did so with the blessing of …

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As a once-beloved president ends his term in controversy, church leaders don’t see a clear front-runner in February’s elections.

Last October, the reputation of Indonesia’s widely respected president took a fateful hit.

Led by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s brother-in-law, the Constitutional Court of Indonesia dropped the age limit for presidential and vice-presidential candidates if they previously held elected regional office. Conveniently, this paved the way for Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, to run as vice president for front-runner Prabowo Subianto in the February 14 presidential elections.

“That is the worst thing to happen to our democracy,” said Yonky Karman, a lecturer at Jakarta Theological Seminary. “This [upcoming] election is orchestrated by the incumbent to offer his preferred candidate, and the worst thing is that he made a way for his eldest son to run as vice president by changing the election law.”

Five years ago, 97 percent of non-Muslims voted for Jokowi. This time, Christians are divided in their support.

In the world’s third-largest democracy, Muslims make up 87 percent of the population while Christians make up 10 percent. For Christians, the most important issue when voting in an election is maintaining their rights as a minority religion. Because of this, they largely supported Jokowi in the past two elections.

Yet this time, the decision is trickier. Ex-general Prabowo is a former longtime rival of Jokowi, who later joined the president’s coalition and served as defense minister. Christians worry that, in the past two elections, he had the backing of radical Muslim groups.

Prabowo is running against Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, both former governors. Anies is no stranger to the headlines either, after accepting support from radical Muslims who …

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Rules and moral codes won’t save us in an era of judgment, hate, and superego. What will save us is mercy.

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

Years ago, I talked with someone who told me how hard it was to keep a moral grounding in the sex-fueled drinking atmosphere of his college. That’s not unusual, but then he told me more about his college.

Turns out it wasn’t a party school but a fundamentalist separatist Christian college, where holding the hand of a date would get a student suspended and dancing would get a student a ticket back home. It’s the kind of place where the student conduct manual is longer than the federal code for maintaining nuclear reactors.

I said, “So in spite of all that strictness, the people there were wild?” He said, “The people there were wild because of all the strictness.”

He went on to talk about getting in trouble for listening to a contemporary Christian music artist (the beat is too worldly) or for his hair being too long or for breaking some other regulation.

“After a while, you start to lose the sense of what’s really bad and what’s not,” he said. “Your conscience gets broken when you know you’re going to be a rule breaker no matter what you do. Once that happens, it’s—well, it’s party time.”

I thought of that man as I read Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. Like in that conversation, my first thought when seeing this book was, What age of guilt? This is an age of shamelessness. His argument, though, was different than what I expected, and it’s one that those of us who are Christians should take seriously.

Politico’s Michael Schaffer sums up the fractured nature of American life right now this way: …

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The fifth annual index by a leading law firm finds that friendship is key to maintaining gains amid polarization and the shifting emphasis of Gen Z.

American support for religious freedom is trending in the right direction.

Rebounding from COVID-19 lows in 2020, the Becket Religious Freedom Index registered a new high in 2023 in its annual monitoring of “first freedom” resilience in the United States. Amid widespread political polarization, core support for the right of individuals to live according to their faith remains strong.

“Despite some efforts to turn religion into a scapegoat for our nation’s problems, most Americans believe that religion—and religious freedom—are key to solving them,” said Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket. “As we celebrate Religious Freedom Day, we should remember that religious liberty remains the cornerstone of our effort to form a more perfect union.”

Results were released on January 16, marking Virginia’s 1786 passage of the statute for religious freedom which became the basis for the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Initially led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the day has been commemorated in the United States ever since a presidential proclamation in 1993.

Either three centuries or 30 years later, there should be no “sky-is-falling narratives about American culture,” summarized the report.

Featuring 21 questions across six categories, the annual index measures perspectives on the First Amendment. Now in the report’s fifth year, Becket polled a nationwide sample of 1,000 Americans in October, scoring their opinions from 0 (complete opposition) to 100 (robust support).

The composite score is 69, one point higher than last year and up three points from 2019.

Becket’s report asserts the religious impulse is natural to human beings, and …

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He’s an East African researcher for Open Doors. The work has counterintuitively affected his faith.

Nearly two decades ago, Fikiru joined a prayer and Bible study group in his hometown in East Africa, an experience that led him to accept Christ as his personal savior. But Fikiru soon found that other Christians in the area vehemently opposed his and the rest of his community’s conversions. Over a period of months, these Christians accused the others of blasphemy, forced their spouses to divorce them and their families to cut them off, and in some cases beat and killed them.

One Sunday, in the aftermath of this persecution, several staff members of the global Christian persecution advocacy group Open Doors stopped by.

“We’d never met them,” said Fikiru. “We’d never heard of them.”

But Open Doors had heard of his church and how it was suffering. They had a simple message for Fikiru: You are not alone.

Within a couple of years, Fikiru (CT is using his pseudonym for security reasons) took a job at Open Doors.

“I’m trying to pay back for the love and concern that was shown to me while I was a persecuted believer,” said the research analyst for East Africa, an area that runs from Eritrea to Mozambique. “I do this role with passion and spirit.”

Fikiru recently spoke with global managing editor Morgan Lee about how he fact-checks persecution claims, the surprising impact this work has had on his faith, and how he cares for staff members who are worn down from this work.

How do you help staff who get burned out or secondarily traumatized hearing so many stories of devastation, destruction, and violence?

Prayer. One of our core values emphasizes that we are people of prayer. We know that we are serving the Lord, and these people are suffering for their faith. They are …

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Latest report on Christian persecution chronicles the rising danger of Islamic militants and autocratic regimes, from Nigeria to Nicaragua.

Almost 5,000 Christians were killed for their faith last year. Almost 4,000 were abducted.

Nearly 15,000 churches were attacked or closed.

And more than 295,000 Christians were forcibly displaced from their homes because of their faith.

Sub-Saharan Africa—the epicenter of global Christianity—remains the epicenter of violence against followers of Jesus, according to the 2024 World Watch List (WWL). The latest annual accounting from Open Doors ranks the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian.

The concerning tallies of martyrdoms and abductions are actually lower than in last year’s report. But Open Doors emphasizes they are “absolute minimum” figures. It attributed both declines to a period of calm in advance of Nigeria’s last presidential election. Yet Nigeria joined China, India, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia as the countries driving the significant increase in attacks on churches.

Overall, 365 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s 1 in 7 Christians worldwide, including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 16 in Latin America.

And for only the fourth time in three decades of tracking, all 50 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels on Open Doors’ matrix of more than 80 questions. So did 7 more nations that fell just outside the cutoff. Syria and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, entered the tier of “extreme” persecution, raising its count to 13 nations.

The purpose of the annual WWL rankings is to guide prayers and to aim for more effective anger while showing persecuted believers that they are not forgotten.

The 2024 version tracks the time …

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