Transubstantiate

Data suggests that, when their attendance drops, these nominal Christians become hyper-individualistic, devoted to law and order, cynical about systems, and distrustful of others.

What happens to American politics and culture when white Southerners in the Bible Belt quit attending church? What religious views do they adopt? How do they vote? And will the mass exodus from church that already seems to be occurring in the South make the country less politically polarized—or more?

These questions are particularly relevant this summer because of two major news developments: the sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Convention and the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which led to state restrictions that made abortion almost completely illegal the South and Midwest.

Twenty years ago, revelations of the Catholic church’s sex abuse crisis accelerated a massive exodus of white northeastern Catholics that was already well underway, and it contributed to a secularization of New England culture and politics. A region that up until the late 20th century had some of the nation’s strictest policies on abortion and divorce became a leader in expanding abortion access and legalizing same-sex marriage.

The same phenomenon occurred more recently in Ireland, in the wake of that country’s clerical sex abuse crisis. A nation that had some of the highest church attendance rates and strictest abortion and marriage policies in Europe legalized both abortion and same-sex marriage, even as church attendance rates plummeted.

It might be easy to imagine, then, that something similar could occur in the southern Bible Belt. As in New England immediately before news of the Catholic church’s sex abuse crisis broke, church attendance rates in the South were already falling before the SBC crisis was fully publicized.

Already, 30 percent of Southern Baptists “seldom” or “never” attend church, …

Continue reading…

As a friend of the late seminary professor, I saw up close his deep character and life-long care for the disenfranchised.

For 15 precious years, Ron Sider was my colleague at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University, just outside of Philadelphia. One of the most passionate voices for defending the vulnerable, he broke negative stereotypes of evangelicals—as well as some conservative evangelicals’ negative stereotypes of social justice.

I first heard of Ron when New Testament scholar Gordon Fee declared that Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was one book every North American Christian should read.

Gordon was not given to exaggerated book endorsements, so as a college student, I saved up my coins and bought a used copy. I had recently been reading 40 chapters of the Bible a day, so I was very familiar with the book’s recurrent message about caring for the poor. As I read Rich Christians, I was struck: Here was an author who genuinely paid attention to Scripture’s emphasis on this theme.

Eventually, I discovered that Ron also advocated for racial justice and challenged apartheid, even at a time when those stances were still controversial among many white evangelicals in the United States.

Ron was always ready to learn. His commitment was not to a specific economic theory but rather to helping people in need. In that spirit of humility, he adjusted his approach to particular economic solutions in revised editions of Rich Christians. His PhD was in Reformation history, not global economics.

I knew less about economics than he, so I wouldn’t have known the difference had he not told me later why he made the revisions. His initial approach to economics needed adjustment, he told me, but still, he hoped people would remember that he and his colleagues were right about apartheid.

Some of the more extreme …

Continue reading…

We aren’t all equally afraid of the same things. But Scripture’s wisdom can apply to all of us.

The 10-minute commute from home to my office at church has always had risks. Driving carries its own inherent danger. Then I have to find parking (sometimes in the dark, and often as the first car there); navigate the security alarm; and if a male coworker arrives, consider the risk of being a woman alone in a building with a man.

Twenty years ago, I found driving somewhat scary and walking across the parking lot alone terrifying; but being in the office with a Christian brother did not worry me one bit. Today, however, while driving remains something I’m careful about, I hardly think about getting out of my car once parked, and I’m considerably more aware of the male-female office dynamics. What caused the shift?

Approximately 10,000 miles.

In many ways, moving from South Africa to the US decreased my fear levels because the actual risks were lower. Driving in South Africa is statistically more dangerous than it is in the United States. Walking alone as a woman is less dangerous in Northern California (South Africa regularly claims the highest rape rate in the world). Over time, my fear lessened, recalibrating to the new risk levels.

But my perceived concerns about being alone with a male coworker increased when we moved to the US, even though I had no reason to think the risk of impropriety had actually changed. I found myself in a local church culture far more anxious about male-female interaction and needed to adapt my awareness accordingly.

Where we live influences both what we fear and how much we fear it. Of course, the size of our fears is affected by the size of the risk; we are more afraid of shark bites than jellyfish stings. But our fears are shaped even more by our perception of the size of the risk. …

Continue reading…

Recovering languages and contextualizing theology help Canada’s First Nations communities reconcile faith and culture after residential schools made them “hate the name of Jesus.”

Three weeks before Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize for the church’s involvement in indigenous residential schools, Christina Dawson’s church in Vancouver, British Columbia, burned down.

The fire was eerily reminiscent of the more than 50 churches that were defaced or destroyed across the country a year ago, weeks after the discoveries of the remains of residential school students began making international headlines.

This month’s fire started in a back alley on July 6, according to Dawson. By the next morning, the church’s two-story building was completely ravaged. Fire inspectors are still investigating the incident to determine whether the blaze was deliberately set.

Dawson is from the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations on the western end of Vancouver Island. She serves as lead pastor of Street Church, which is part of the Foursquare network of churches in Canada. Its pastoral team are all alumni of First Nations Bible College.

The pope’s apology has galvanized Dawson’s desire to share Christ with other indigenous peoples. “I find it more urgent than ever to find a new building [for my church],” she said.

“What the priests and nuns at these residential schools did to us was evil,” Dawson said. “But the worst thing they did to us: They made us indigenous people hate the name of Jesus.”

A mixed reception

On Monday (July 24), Francis apologized for the Catholic church’s role in setting up Canada’s residential schools and perpetuating decades of abuse against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children.

The pope’s weeklong trip to Canada came on the heels of a visit …

Continue reading…

He saw African American history as a “window into the essence of the gospel.”

Carey Latimore IV, a Baptist minister and a historian who studied how Black people persevered by faith, died unexpectedly on Tuesday at the age of 46.

Latimore was a beloved professor at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, where he taught on the African American experience. Students were drawn to his enthusiasm and were frequently found in his office, discussing what they were learning in his classes and in the research projects he organized, like an oral history of race relations in San Antonio.

Latimore also actively found ways to bring his scholarship to the public. He appeared frequently on local TV, started a civil rights institute in downtown San Antonio before the pandemic, worked with the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, and wrote devotionals for Our Daily Bread.

In the last few years, he became an important resource for those seeking to understand the significance of Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in America. Latimore was especially adept at explaining the religious significance and encouraging Christians and the church to embrace Juneteenth.

“I think Black people in their faith were kind of presenting a mirror and a window into the essence of the gospels that many people have forgotten or left behind,” he told Rasool Berry, pastor of The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York, on the Christianity Today podcast Where Ya From? “On Juneteenth, people start talking about what we can be, what we can do. What we have done. It’s an inspiring moment because we think of the possibilities.”

The people who worked with Latimore were shocked by the news of his death. They mourned both loss of a public scholar and a personal friend.

Continue reading…

Author of ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’ argued poverty was a moral issue.

Ronald J. Sider, organizer of the evangelical left and author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, died on Wednesday at 82. His son told followers that Sider had suffered from a sudden cardiac arrest.

For nearly 50 years, Sider called evangelicals to care about the poor and see poverty as a moral issue. He argued for an expanded understanding of sin to include social structures that perpetuate inequality and injustice, and urged Christians to see how their salvation should compel them to care for their neighbors.

“Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It’s a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers,” he said. “Sin is a biblical category. Given a careful reading of the world and the Bible and our giving patterns, how can we come to any other conclusion than to say that we are flatly disobeying what the God of the Bible says about the way he wants his people to care for the poor?”

Sider was a key facilitator of the born-again left that emerged in the 1970s but lived to see American evangelicals largely turn away from concerns about war, racism, and inequality. He continued to speak out, however, and became, as a Christianity Today writer once described it, the “burr in the ethical saddle” of the white evangelical horse.

His landmark book inspired generations of young Christians, selling 400,000 copies in nine languages. CT ranked it as one of the most influential evangelical titles of the 20th century, right after J. I. Packer’s Knowing God and Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible.

Rich Stearns, president emeritus of World Vision, called Sider “a great Christian soul and a passionate …

Continue reading…

Our view of gender roles and relations should begin with Christ’s pattern of humility.

Jesus’ own disciples frequently missed what he was doing. James and John wanted preeminent posts in his kingdom, advocating for places of power, prestige, and authority. Jesus responded by essentially telling them they were missing the point. His kingdom didn’t operate like the kingdoms of the nations.

For Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher, the intra-evangelical debates around gender and gender roles in the last few decades seem to repeat the mistaken focus of James and John, concentrating on questions of who gets to be in charge and missing the humble and lowly pattern of power exercised by Jesus. In Jesus and Gender: Living as Sisters and Brothers in Christ, Fitzpatrick and Schumacher attempt to move beyond the decades-old framework of complementarian versus egalitarian when it comes to matters of gender and gender roles in marriage, the church, and society.

Avoiding most of the standard terms that characterize much of this debate, they focus on a “Christic” paradigm, arguing that the gospel and the shape of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension show that true power manifests itself in service and that true authority validates itself through self-giving humility. The good news of Jesus shapes everything, including how women and men relate to each other.

Joint authority

In the first three chapters, the authors provide the theological foundations for their approach. Jesus should be at the center of our theory and practice of gender and gender roles, and if we fail to catch the way he reframes power and authority, we’re likely to import a worldly definition of those matters into our lives. Forgetting the centrality of Jesus, they point out, has devastating impacts on marriages …

Continue reading…

Younger generations see female nones on the rise.

For decades, we’ve thought of women as more religious than men.

Survey results, conventional wisdom, and anecdotal glimpses across our own congregations have shown us how women care more about their faith, though researchers haven’t been able to fully untangle the underlying causes for the gender gap across religious traditions and across the globe.

Now, recent data shows the long-held trend may finally be flipping: In the United States, young women are less likely to identify with religion than young men.

The findings could have a profound impact on the future of the American church.

As recently as last year, the religion gender gap has persisted among older Americans. Survey data from October 2021 found that among those born in 1950, about a quarter of men identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, compared to just 20 percent of women of the same age. That same five-point gap is evident among those born in 1960 and 1970 as well.

For millennials and Generation Z, it’s a different story. Among those born in 1980, the gap begins to narrow to about two percentage points. By 1990, the gap disappears, and with those born in 2000 or later, women are clearly more likely to be nones than men.

Among 18- to 25-year-olds, 49 percent of women are nones, compared to just 46 percent of men.

There’s also a gender gap in church attendance. This pattern has been so stark that Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Christian women around the world are on average 7 percentage points more likely than men to attend services; there are no countries where men are significantly more likely than to be religiously affiliated than women.

In the US, older men are more likely to say they never attend church services …

Continue reading…

An 18th-century earthquake and a 21st-century pandemic can teach us about enlightenment and judgment.

November 1, 1755, was a sunny day in Lisbon. One of the busiest trading ports in Europe, the Portuguese city was both fabulously wealthy and extremely religious. It was a center for trading goods and, abhorrently, slaves. The city and those who did business there profited greatly from that industry.

Lisbon also had 40 parish churches, 90 convents, and 150 associated brotherhoods and religious societies; more than 10 percent of Lisbon’s residents were members of a religious order.

November 1 was also All Saint’s Day, and the many churches of Lisbon were filled with parishioners for the second mass of the day, around 9 a.m., when a giant earthquake struck.

The earthquake was large enough to be felt across much of western Europe and northwest Africa. It triggered a tsunami, with waves observed as far away as England, and then a fire that destroyed much of what had been left standing.

When all was said and done, 10 percent of the population of Lisbon had died, and almost every important church in the city had been destroyed.

Then, as now, people assumed there was meaning in tragedy and sought to explain it based on the nature of the world or the failure of humans to do right. And both meaning and God’s judgment are there—but not, perhaps, in the ways we expect.

A tidy, positive view of the world prevailed during the Enlightenment. Philosophers in the 18th century argued that the universe was ordered according to a consistent set of rules. By observing nature and using one’s reason, they said, God’s ways could be deduced. God could thus be known through the orderly world.

In his 1710 book Theodicy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that the world that God created was good enough to excuse the occurrence …

Continue reading…

How the cult of imagined heroism is bringing down our nation’s institutions.

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

As a kid in the 1980s, I heard dire warnings from my evangelical elders about the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. It was, we were told, a foothold of the occult.

Although I never played D&D, I didn’t take these admonitions all that seriously, because I reasoned that the same logic could be applied to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

Now, in the 2020s, I am wondering if my evangelical elders weren’t partly right about the way fantasy role-playing can paganize a culture—just not in the way they expected.

In this month’s Atlantic, Jennifer Senior explores a similar thought in relation to nationalist political strategist/right-wing media personality Steve Bannon, who is currently indicted on charges of contempt of Congress regarding his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection.

Putting aside what I think about Bannon himself, I was struck by one section of the article that explains much of what’s happening in America right now.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming …

Continue reading…