Transubstantiate

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 …

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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 …

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Church tech teams kept worship plugged-in and streaming during the pandemic. But when does the job become too much for volunteers?

The pivot to online services in 2020 put the pressure on church tech and production teams.

“COVID-19 really grabbed churches by the ankles and shook all the change out of their pockets,” said Van Metschke, a ministry and church production veteran who now works for an audiovisual tech design firm in California.

The shift to streaming forced churches to make difficult choices over whether to allocate resources to improve the production level for online worshipers. Even if churches could afford new audiovisual equipment, they had to find people to run it.

“Money isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem,” said Metschke. “Good gear doesn’t fix organizational problems.”

Metschke, cohost of the Green Room Church Tech podcast, has seen a growing number of young people in church technology and production leave their roles over the past two years. Paid tech staff are overwhelmed by the demands of managing volunteers. Volunteers are overutilized, undertrained, and afraid to make a mistake that could derail a carefully orchestrated service.

As in other areas of ministry, tech volunteers want to offer their abilities and interests to serve their congregation. But some churches struggle to delegate duties to volunteers without taking advantage of their enthusiasm. They end up asking them to do what a paid professional should, like troubleshooting when something goes wrong with a computer or camera or wireless microphone, navigating streaming on multiple platforms, or editing video and creating graphics to produce a high-quality recorded service.

Prior to 2020, it was already difficult to recruit, train, and retain enough production and tech volunteers to make services run smoothly. Some tasks …

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A sociologist explores some of the factors driving them away, but her “accrued resentments” get in the way of a fair picture.

Evangelical women have long attended church at higher rates than evangelical men. But today that gap is narrowing, not because more men are coming but because more women are leaving. Such women are increasingly likely to “deconstruct” their faith or identify as “nones”—a rising population of the religiously disaffiliated.

Many grew up in strict or more fundamentalist traditions, where hard questions were discouraged, women were undervalued, and denominational subcultures shaped their resentments in young adulthood. Speaking with a variety of spiritual coaches focused on deconstruction earlier this year, I learned that clients are often ex-Mormons or women hailing from harsh, patriarchal churches where their voices were silenced.

Katie Gaddini is a pastor’s kid who departed evangelicalism years ago, but the fingerprints of her past remain. She began to untangle the reasons behind her own discomfort in the church and the resentment she saw from others while doing research for her new book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church.

A kinship and a disconnect

Gaddini is a sociologist at the Social Research Institute, which is part of University College London. To prepare for writing her book, she embedded herself within a close-knit community of single, evangelical women for over four years, marinating in the culture she once knew so well. As a single woman herself, her study centers on what she describes as “irreconcilable” differences between faith and feminism, religious patriarchy, and inequality for women within the church.

These factors and more drive the book’s mission to uncover why so many single, evangelical women are leaving. While the …

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Survey finds they seek counseling and support at higher rates than in secular schools.

The high levels of involvement by teachers and professors at Christian schools have correlated with more referrals for mental health care during the pandemic.

Students at faith-based schools may be more willing to seek support because they are encouraged to do so by teachers or professors, said Stephen Brand, a licensed professional counselor in private practice and outpatient therapist at Renew Counseling Center at Southern Nazarene University (SNU) in Oklahoma.

Brand said the smaller student-to-professor ratio at schools like SNU means students develop more personal relationships with professors and often open up about difficulties in their lives. Scott Secor, who codirects the SNU center, said many of the students they treat are referred by residence life staff, professors, and coaches.

During the last school year, up to 30 percent of Gen Z students received mental health support from their schools, according to a new study from Springtide Research Institute. At religious schools, they sought out that support and said they felt cared for by the adults who worked there at higher rates.

Between fall 2021 and spring 2022, Springtide surveyed 3,139 students aged 13–25, including 313 students at religious (primarily Christian) secondary schools and colleges. The survey has a margin of error of 3 percent and 5 percent for the religious schools subgroup.

According to the Springtide research, 59 percent students at religious schools reported that they had talked with a mental health counselor for help, compared with 46 percent at nonreligious schools, according to Springtide.

Teens and young adults at religious schools were also more likely to see their schools as places where adults care about them; three quarters said adults …

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Founded by an enslaved minister in 1776, the historic Baptist site had been covered by a museum parking lot.

It’s different when you get down to the bone.

Jack Gray, director of archaeology at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, can get excited talking about the excavation of old post holes and brick foundations. He’s thrilled when his team finds bits of bottles, old coins, and the porcelain foot of a long-lost baby doll, giving them a glimpse of what life was like at a historic Baptist church where enslaved Black people lifted their voices to God.

But the buried remains of these faithful Christians—once covered over by a parking lot—reveal their full humanity.

“It doesn’t hit you until you see a bone you recognize: That’s a piece of a person. You are touching another human,” Gray told CT.

The Colonial Williamsburg archaeologist and his team started excavating the 40 or 41 graves at the church on Monday, slowly and carefully removing about a foot of soil from the first three sites. They believe it is one of the oldest Black congregations in America, founded at the time of the Declaration of Independence by an enslaved man named Gowan Pamphlet, who was a given special allowance for ordination by the woman who owned him.

The building that housed the congregation was demolished in the 1950s as part of the ongoing reconstruction and restoration of the former capital of colonial Virginia. No one in authority at the time appears to have thought the church was an important enough part of that history to preserve, continuing the generations-long practice of diminishing or even erasing Black people from the American story.

Connie Matthews Harshaw, a descendent of the Christians who worshiped there, started pushing and organizing for the recovery of the church in 2019. She convinced Cliff Fleet, …

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With church funerals and burials no longer the norm, pastors hope to restore occasions to gather and remember.

Surging cremation rates are upending traditional practices around death, as more people opt out of traditional church funerals and some skip communal experiences of grief altogether.

Randy Anderson, who has worked in funeral homes in Alabama for over 30 years, tells the story of a widow who chose to forgo a funeral for her husband, instead cremating his remains and keeping the ashes at home. Then every few months, she’d bump into acquaintances who would ask how he was doing.

Frustrated by awkward conversations reopening her grief, the wife called a local funeral home to plan a funeral service three years later. More than 300 people attended the ceremony.

If trends hold, more than half of Americans who die this year will be cremated, compared to just 4 percent in 1960. The proportion is expected to reach nearly 80 percent by 2040, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).

Families who chose cremation are less likely to gather together with others: 38 percent do not host a service, compared to 35 percent who offer a memorial service and 27 percent who provide a casket and viewing prior to cremation.

“There is a myth that if you have no service and move along, the grief will go away,” said Anderson, who serves as president of the NFDA.

But like the widow with the delayed funeral, people need to grapple with death alongside fellow mourners. “Grief shared is grief diminished,” he said.

Many choose cremation for economic reasons: An average funeral with burial and viewing is $7,848 compared to a direct cremation at $2,300. It’s also more convenient, as geographically dispersed families need flexibility to delay the service or to gather in a different location. The COVID-19 pandemic …

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Record price increases put pressure on churches trying to meet rising need.

Grant Hasty sees the impact of inflation in the increasing requests for food at Crossroads Community Baptist Church in Stearns, Kentucky. And he feels it every time he fills up the truck the ministry uses.

“It’s about double what it was a year ago just for the fuel to pick up the food to give away,” the pastor told CT.

According to a July 13 report from the United States government, inflation has gone up more in the last year than any time since 1981. The cost of cereal has increased about 14 percent in the last 12 months, and fruits and vegetables are up more than 8 percent. The cost of butter and margarine increased by 26 percent.

Gasoline prices have increased more than they have at any time since 1980, going up nearly 60 percent from June 2021 to June 2022.

In Stearns, Kentucky, that means a lot more people are asking for help. The church has seen people from all age demographics hit hard, but particularly those on fixed income.

“Their fixed income hasn’t risen the way the cost of everything else has,” Hasty said.

Yet isn’t only individuals, struggling with inflation. Ministries have been hard hit too. Church food pantries and soup kitchens across the country are trying to meet the increasing need, while at the same time they are also forced to pay more and more for food, gas, electricity, and other operational expenses.

Northside Food Pantry, at a Presbyterian church in Indianapolis, told CT it was spending about $6,500 per month on food in the spring of 2021. The ministry spent another $1,000 on household and hygiene items to give away to people in need.

This spring, the ministry spent an average of $12,000 per month—a spike driven by both need and increased costs.

“We’ve …

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A different kind of “third place” ministry creates community and connections with washers and dryers.

Some come with track marks from years of drug abuse. Others come with children in tow. Some are struggling through a bad week. Others, a bad decade. All bring their dirty laundry.

They wash it and dry it for free at church-run laundry services throughout the United States.

“Christ said we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and I think those clothes should be clean,” said Catherine Ambos, a volunteer at one such ministry in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Of course, it’s not really about hygiene, but dignity.

“If someone is dirty, unkempt, you tend not to look at them. You don’t want to meet their eye,” Ambos said. “If you can’t afford to wash your clothes and you’re a budding teenager, it’s an embarrassment.”

Churches have been washing clothes across the US since at least 1997, when a minister at First United Methodist Church of Arlington, Texas, started doing a circuit around the city’s coin-operated laundries, passing out change. There may well have been others before this. Today, these ministries exist across the country, run by churches of all traditions and sizes.

They’re not as common or as well known as church-run coffee shops, which have been promoted as “third places,” locations separate from work and home where people create community. But a growing number of churches see laundry ministries as a better way to connect with their neighbors and witness to the gospel.

Some churches buy their own washers and dryers, renovate a space so it has enough electrical outlets, and open a church-run laundry. Others, like Christ Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, send out volunteers with quarters. Ambos started doing that four years ago.

They …

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Experts warn political violence is coming. Christians can look to Scripture, not the American Revolution, for guidance.

The seventh hearing of the congressional committee investigating the sedition at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was much about violence: who did it, who encouraged it, who knew it was coming yet did not intervene.

“The crucial thing is the next step: What this committee, what all of us, will do to fortify our democracy against coups, political violence,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) toward the end of the hearing. Political violence, he said, is “the problem of the whole country now.”

Raskin is far from alone in raising alarm about the possibility of political violence—seeking political ends through violent means instead of normal, peaceful processes like voting, running for office, lobbying, or protest.

“We know from other countries that have descended into really serious political violence that this is a trajectory, and we’re on it,” researcher Rachel Kleinfeld warned in a Washington Post article Monday. “We’re actually pretty far advanced on it.”

Kleinfeld said we could see rising right-wing militia violence as well as violence from a “disaffected left.” She ominously projected that the “percentages of Americans endorsing violence are approaching Northern Ireland’s Troubles at their height in 1973.”

(The scale of this kind of political violence can vary widely, from an individual’s attack to a revolution, but the Troubles are a good example of what many anticipate happening in the US—“episodes of violence were largely localized, and in the background” yet normal life continued though “everyone was more fearful and depressed.”)

There’s reason to be skeptical of the survey results she’s …

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