The Outsized Role of Christian Schools in Arab Israeli Politics

Established in the Ottoman era, Western-birthed educational institutions continue to play a leading role in shaping the public discourse of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Amid the recent chaos of Israel’s elections has been one overlooked constant: Arab lawmakers educated in Christian schools.

Of the 13 Arab members in the Knesset (MKs), Israel’s 120-member parliament, five are graduates of church-owned institutions.

Four of them are Muslim.

Across the Jewish state, 30 Christian schools educate 25,000 students—40 percent from Muslim families. This represents 5.5 percent of all Arab students, making the representation of their alumni in the Knesset much higher than in the general population.

Arab Christians total 140,000, or about 1.5 percent of Israel’s 9 million population and 7 percent of Arab Palestinian citizens. Catholic schools predominate, comprising 75 percent of Christian institutions, alongside Greek Orthodox, Anglican, Church of Scotland, Baptist, and independent bodies.

Better known—at least in Israel—are leading graduates in other sectors of society. Fahed Hakim directs the Nazareth Hospital, Johny Srouji is a senior vice president at Apple, and Salim Joubran served as a justice at the Supreme Court of Israel.

As Israel faces on November 1 its fifth election in three years, a handful of Christian school graduates populate the various electoral lists. Previous MKs served in three of the four now-disbanded Joint Lists of Arab political parties (excluding Islamists), and in two of the Jewish leftist groups, Labor and Meretz.

In the last four elections, no Israeli politician has been able to form a sustainable government. This deadlock is the result of deep and uncompromising fragmentation in the political scene, strangely caused by a single politician: former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, nicknamed “Bibi.”

Known internationally for his ...

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Five States to Vote on Abortion Rights This Election Day

Christian pro-life activists have their eyes on a record-high number of ballot measures, including state constitutional amendments.

For decades, pro-life advocates argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would enable each state to determine its own abortion policy. Abortion measures will appear on five state ballots on Election Day this year, the most in US history.

But the country got its first glimpse at post-Roe abortion referendums months before November 8. Back in August, Kansas became the first state to vote on abortion rights, rejecting a ballot measure declaring the state constitution “does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion.”

Activists saw the outcome, fueled by record turnout from young women, as a sign of enthusiasm from pro-choice voters. Last week, Pew Research Forum released its latest polls, which show that Democratic voters are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to consider abortion a very important issue (55% to 29%).

Soon, voters in Michigan, California, Vermont, Montana, and Kentucky will also vote on the issue of abortion rights without a federal abortion law in place.

“My hope is that the Kansas amendment’s failure can serve as a reminder that the deliberate and thoughtful work of the pro-life movement must continue as we change one heart at a time, state by state,” Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Brent Leatherwood said in August.

While some states could bolster the legal rights of the unborn and infants born alive at any stage of development, voters in other states could codify a woman’s right to reproductive choice in the state constitution and allow abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Christian pro-life advocates warn the proposed changes up for vote in Michigan and California go far beyond the right to an ...

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More than 1 in 10 New Southern Baptist Churches Are Hispanic

Leader of Send Network Español opens up about church planting’s diverse future in North America.

The Southern Baptist Convention has launched its most focused effort to plant churches among the Hispanic community in North America with the expansion of Send Network Español this fall.

“Since 2010, Send Network has planted almost 10,000 new Southern Baptist churches throughout North America, of which more than 1,000 are Hispanic churches,” said Félix Cabrera, a native Puerto Rican with more than a decade of church-planting experience. “Because of this and the tremendous growth of the Hispanic community, the organization's leadership saw the importance of allocating resources specifically to this sector.”

In October, Send Network, church-planting arm of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, announced new ministry values and leadership. Cabrera will serve as vice president of Send Network Español and has commissioned eight regional “champions” of Hispanic church planting across the United States. The rollout of changes follows record-high funding for Send Network, with $68.9 million given by Southern Baptists through their annual Annie Armstrong Easter Offering.

A new website, SendNetworkEspanol.com, offers specialized resources for Hispanic planters, many of whom are ministering among populations who come from Catholic backgrounds and families who moved to the US for job opportunities.

CT talked with Cabrera, who helped establish more than 50 churches, starting with Central Baptist in Oklahoma City, about the diversity among US Hispanics, the importance of work in Hispanic faith and life, and the time investment often required for church planting in this context.

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Something Fake and Wicked This Way Comes

When our Halloween celebrations domesticate evil, we often miss a chance to see true darkness through the light of Christ.

Last October, my three-year-old developed an attachment to our neighbors’ Halloween décor. On our frequent walks to visit the enormous inflatable cat, I fielded questions about other yard displays. When we passed a house featuring plastic tombstones with corpses climbing out of the ground, I wasn’t sure how to answer the question “Mom, what does that mean?”

Another mother recently shared on Twitter that her neighbors have erected an eight-foot-tall zombie skeleton dangling a terrified child figurine upside down by his foot. She asked, “How scary is too scary for Halloween yard decorations?”

It’s a question I share. But behind it is another important question for Christians to ask: Why are so many people so fascinated with evil and death?

Americans spend 10 billion dollars annually on Halloween. In a culture that usually ignores death and dismisses the supernatural, the holiday stands out as a pressure release. Once a year, we express our repressed need to talk about these things.

As evidenced by a recent New York Times article titled “How to Live with a Ghost,” our annual obsession with the undead, the paranormal, and the macabre reveals our increasing curiosity about dying and our belief in evil. By reducing these mysteries to yard décor and costumes, we seek to domesticate and control our fears. Even the most garish Halloween rituals can be understood as religious—an attempt to answer the questions that haunt us.

But domesticating darkness is a false solution for believers and unbelievers alike.

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils,” wrote C. S. Lewis in his preface ...

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Died: Gordon Fee, Who Taught Evangelicals to Read the Bible ‘For All Its Worth’

A New Testament “scholar on fire,” he believed Scripture was an encounter with God.

Gordon Fee once told his students on the first day of a New Testament class at Wheaton College that they would—someday—come across a headline saying “Gordon Fee Is Dead.”

“Do not believe it!” he said, standing atop a desk. “He is singing with his Lord and his king.”

Then, instead of handing out the syllabus like a normal professor, he led the class in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Fee, a widely influential New Testament teacher who believed that reading the Bible, teaching the Bible, and interpreting the Bible should bring people into an encounter with a living God, described himself as a “scholar on fire.” He died on Tuesday at the age of 88—although, as those who encountered him in the classroom or in his many books know, that’s not how he would have described it.

Fee co-wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary colleague Douglas Stuart in the early 1980s. The book is now in its fourth edition and has sold around 1 million copies, becoming for many the standard text on the best way to approach Scripture. Fee also wrote a widely used handbook on biblical interpretation, several well-regarded commentaries on New Testament epistles, and groundbreaking academic research on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of the Apostle Paul.

“If you had asked Paul to define what a Christian is,” Fee once told CT, “he would not have said, ‘A Christian is a person who believes X and Y doctrines about Christ,’ but ‘A Christian is a person who walks in the Spirit, who knows Christ.’”

In the same way, Fee argued that studying ...

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Thailand’s New Abortion Law Faces Both Buddhist and Christian Opposition

With abortions now legal up to 20 weeks, the two faiths share common cause but not common effort on the sanctity of life.

Starting today, abortions are legal in Thailand up to 20 weeks, an extension of the current 12-week limit. It’s a stark turnaround in the Buddhist-majority country, which until February 2020 banned abortions with some exceptions.

That’s when Thailand’s Constitutional Court struck down the statutes in its criminal code that had imposed fines and prison terms for those who perform or receive an illegal abortion, declaring the law to be unconstitutional. As a result, the Thai parliament passed the 12-week abortion law last year.

The Southeast Asian nation’s abortion restrictions have historically been stricter than much of the rest of the world as Theravada Buddhists (which make up 93 percent of the population) believe abortion is a sin that violates the first Buddhist precept forbidding the killing of any living thing.

Yet the shame in Thai society surrounding unwed mothers and teen pregnancies, as well as economic stress, has long led women to get abortions illegally or by claiming mental health exemptions. This month’s change in abortion regulations reveals a shift in concern from the life of the unborn baby to the mother’s situation.

Some Thai Christians and Buddhists are speaking out against the new abortion law, citing a common concern about the sanctity of life. They are also working at the grassroots level to prevent abortions by providing sex education and pushing for greater government aid for single mothers. Several Christian ministries work to counsel women with unplanned pregnancies as well as those who have already had abortions.

As abortion remains a taboo topic, Thai society lacks a united movement. Yet Katie Miller, director of the Education, Life, Mothers (ELM) Team, a pregnancy ...

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Study: Gen Z Wants to Know More About Jesus

Despite long-term trends away from religion, Barna Group finds openness in teens.

Half of teenagers around the world say that Jesus is loving, trustworthy, and wise.

“The rumors of Christianity’s demise among younger people are greatly exaggerated,” said David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group. “That’s, I think, a really important story.”

The evangelical polling firm has released the first part of a three-part study on teenagers from 26 countries around the world, looking at their views on Jesus, the Bible, and justice. It’s the largest survey Barna has done in its 38-year history, working with seven partner organizations to survey more than 25,000 representatives from Gen Z who are between the ages of 13 and 17.

Barna found that in the United States 65 percent of teenagers identify as Christians—a notably high number when compared to declining rates of religious identity. Globally, 52 percent of teens identify as Christians. Beyond that, the majority of teens surveyed have positive things to say about Jesus, and roughly six out of ten say they are motivated to know more about him.

The study found “a lot of just openness, country over country,” said Daniel Copeland, lead researcher on the project.

“We titled this study ‘The Open Generation’ because that is the kind of glaring thing when you look at this data,” Copeland said. “You don’t see any closedness around the globe. You don’t see any rejection.”

The Barna study is one of a number of efforts to identify the religious commitments of Gen Z. Researchers are curious whether the next generation, typically defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, will continue the trend away from organized religion. The two generations before them, millennials and Gen X, ...

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Interview: Q&A Natasha Sistrunk Robinson: Call for the Wailing Women of Color

The editor of “Voices of Lament” on how public injustice demands public sorrow.

In the fall of 2019, author and speaker Natasha Sistrunk Robinson moved to Alabama with her husband and daughter. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, she found herself doubly isolated in a new location.

After reading the book of Jeremiah, a particular passage “really jumped out at me,” says Robinson. It was 9:17–21, “where God tells the prophet Jeremiah to call the wailing women to wail until they are exhausted from crying so much. They’re wailing because the men have been taken out of the public square, and the children have been taken out of the streets, and ‘death has climbed in through our windows.’”

The story seemed very relevant to the moment. “Death was a thief climbing into our windows too,” says Robinson. “It was all around us, with the reality of the pandemic on top of all the racial injustice of that year.”

Inspired by the Old Testament model of lament, she started working on a book titled Voices of Lament (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), which features 29 women of color writing on themes of longing, injustice, and suffering.

Robinson, who now lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter, hosts the podcast A Sojourner’s Truth and runs T3 Leadership Solutions and Leadership LINKS. She is currently a doctoral candidate in urban leadership ministry through a joint program between North Park and Fuller Theological Seminaries.

CT spoke recently with Robinson about her latest book and the community of women who contributed to it.

During the summer of 2020, you were reading through Jeremiah and the Psalms and thinking about lament and injustice. Tell us more about that journey.

As a Black woman, I was thinking about all the ways that our ...

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This Is Not the Most Important Election of Our Lives

Michael Wear, founder of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, on the state of American politics, what’s at stake in the midterms, and the temptation to “ultimatize” our issues.

Midterm elections are a time for reassessment—an invitation to evaluate the party in power, but also the political process itself, the health of the body politic, and the effect it’s all having on people’s souls. Two years after Joe Biden won a presidential campaign he characterized as “a battle for the soul of the nation,” voters are heading back to the polls with concerns about inflation, abortion, immigration, polarization, Christian nationalism, and the even future of American democracy.

According to Michael Wear, founder of The Center for Christianity and Public Life, this is an opportunity for believers to reconsider their civic engagement. “Politics needs people with joyful confidence who seek security not in politics but in Jesus,” he argues. “We can break the vicious cycle.” CT started the conversation by asking him to assess the upcoming midterms.

We’re in the final stretch to Election Day. What do you think the 2022 elections say about the state of American politics?

I struggle to find coherent, substantive conversation on anything in these midterms. There are individual races, of course, where there are issues that are getting substantive debate, but it seems clear to me our politics continues to devolve.

We now just get gestures towards issues. Candidates are not actually dealing with the substance, not actually showing an interest in offering a perspective or policy proposals—which means the winner of these midterms won’t really have a policy mandate.

What I do hear is a lot of talk about existential crisis. But the more we load onto our politics, and the higher the stakes, the harder it becomes to really have a democratic process. If an election ...

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California Baker Sued for Discrimination Wins Free Speech Case

Ahead of another Supreme Court case over same-sex wedding clients, judge defends cake-maker’s First Amendment rights.

A California judge has ruled in favor of a Christian cake designer in the latest court decision regarding the conflict between religious freedom and same-sex marriage.

Eric Bradshaw, a Superior Court judge in Kern County, said in an October 21 opinion the state violated Cathy Miller’s freedom of religion and speech when it decided she unlawfully discriminated under California law by declining to design a cake for a same-sex wedding celebration.

Bradshaw’s decision is the latest in a series of court actions over several years regarding wedding vendors—such as cake designers, florists, photographers and artists—who refuse to provide their services for same-sex wedding ceremonies because of their biblically based belief that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

While the US Supreme Court has issued multiple opinions in support of the free exercise of religion in recent years, cases involving the conscience rights of wedding vendors have resulted in conflicting opinions across the country.

“This court has rightly affirmed that people of faith should be able to live out their deeply held religious beliefs in the public square,” said Hannah Daniel, policy manager for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

“As tension continues to grow between our culture’s shifting beliefs on issues of gender and sexuality and the beliefs of many religious Americans, rulings like this provide important indicators that religious speech and expression will continue to be protected.”

A similar case will be before the Supreme Court in early December.

The justices will hear oral arguments Deember 5 in 303 Creative v. Elenis, an appeal by Lorie Smith, a Colorado graphic artist ...

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What South Asian Christians Do During Diwali

Festival of Lights marking the Hindu new year brings invitations to Jesus followers in India, Nepal, and neighboring nations.

Rivaling the scale of Thanksgiving or Christmas in the United States, Diwali has become India’s biggest holiday season.

The Festival of Lights (also known as Deepavali) marks the start of the Hindu New Year and is the faith’s most important festival, celebrated for five days by more than a billion people in India—not only by Hindus but also by Jains, Sikhs, and some Buddhists—as well as across the Hindu diaspora.

The festival symbolizes for its devotees the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, and knowledge over ignorance. Diwali is marked by feasts, lighting clay lamps outside the house to banish evil spirits, decorative lights, prayers, family gatherings, exchanging gifts, burning firecrackers, and doing charity, besides worshiping at homes or visiting temples.

Each year the holiday falls on different dates in the Hindu lunar calendar determined by the position of the moon, usually between October and November. This year, the festival is observed from October 22–26 with Diwali falling on October 24.

CT interviewed Christian leaders in the majority Hindu nations of India and Nepal—as well as neighboring Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—in order to better understand what South Asian followers of Jesus do during the festival, whether they think Christians should join in Diwali celebrations, and whether churches conduct outreach to Hindus during the holiday.

India — Anil Kant, pastor, gospel singer-songwriter, and executive director of Trinity Sounds, Mumbai:

We as Christians celebrate only Jesus, so we do not celebrate Diwali in our homes. But we connect and engage with Hindu friends during Diwali. We live in a community with different religions and orientations and ...

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Why Should Pastors Get All the Good Theology Textbooks?

Churches across the country are reclaiming theological education to make it available to everyone.

For years, Caleb Bartel wanted to deepen his understanding of the Bible and theology.

“There’s really not a way to get that from just a Sunday morning sermon or just Sunday school,” said Bartel, who attends Central Church in College Station, Texas. “You can grow on your own, absolutely, but you’re not getting seminary-level teaching.”

Bartel never felt called to become a pastor. He’s a home remodeler and a married father of five, which makes seminary impractical. But the 33-year-old is now getting the chance to study theology thanks to a program at his church.

Congregations across the country are implementing in-house theology programs, designed to engage members like Bartel who aren’t pursuing professional ministry but still want to study theology, church history, and the Bible. Some programs, like Central’s, are designed to replicate formal theological education, just without the seminary setting or the tuition bill—which can easily run up to $16,000 per year. Others aim to be more accessible.

That’s the kind of thing Tyler Johnson at Redemption Church in Phoenix started doing 20 years ago. He wanted to make the gospel understood and applicable among people who might never read the Bible in Greek or know how to pronounce exegesis. Along with fellow church planters, he launched a one-year theology program called Surge, open to anyone who would commit to about a school year’s worth of weekly meetings.

“It just feels like a lot of the deeper theological stuff gets outsourced to Bible schools,” he said. The church planters wondered, “Could we do this inside, at communal levels, at tables?”

The church planters started with a list of books ...

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Public Schools Aren’t Godless. Ask the Christians Who Feel Called to Stay.

Amid pandemic shifts and concerns over controversial curricula, more families have opted for private or homeschool. But many believers see their place in the system.

When pastor Clark Frailey noticed that his local schools were underfunded—at the time, Oklahoma received less education funding than almost any other state—he stepped in to help provide materials like wipes, paper, and markers.

But he soon realized the problem was much bigger than empty supply closets. School buildings developed black mold. Teachers were rebinding decades-old textbooks. Kindergarteners jammed into classes of up to 30 students.

So in 2016 Frailey and fellow Baptist pastors launched an initiative, Pastors for Oklahoma Kids, to advocate for the students and schools across their state.

“We had a lot of demonization at the time,” he told Christianity Today. “People were saying our schools were Marxist, socialist, atheist—and that just wasn’t our experience as local church pastors.”

They knew the principals, teachers, and superintendents leading locally; school staff attended their churches and volunteered in Sunday school and the nursery. The discussion from fellow Christians, alleging radical ideology in the school system, “felt like a false narrative,” Frailey said. “There was a strong movement to discredit public education in Oklahoma.”

That movement has targeted public education in communities across the country.

Homeschool and private schooling have jumped at unprecedented rates since schools transitioned to online education during the first months and years of the pandemic. Concerns over curricula were heightened too, as stories spread of public schools teaching “gender theory,” encouraging transgenderism, and promoting critical race theory.

Despite the headlines, many Christian educators told CT they haven’t seen cause for ...

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Christians Say Sayfo Martyrs Should Get Genocide Status

Syriac-Aramean Christians, fewer in number than similarly suffering Armenians, assert their Ottoman-era plight deserves separate recognition.

In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, evangelicals laid down their lives for their Lord. Living in Nusaybin, once home to the ancient theological school of Nisibis, they were among the firstfruits of the Sayfo (“sword”) martyrs.

Overall, modern estimates posit half a million deaths of Syriac-Aramean Christians at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish soldiers, concurrent with the Armenian genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives. Today this Christian community, still speaking the language of Jesus, seeks its own recognition.

In June 1915, the Muslim-majority city—now located on Turkey’s southeastern border with Syria—had about 100 Syrian Orthodox families, and an equal number belonging to other Christian sects. The Protestants were rounded up with Armenians and Chaldeans, marched to the front of town, and shot dead.

The Orthodox families were promised peace by the local leader, but 30 men fled and sought refuge in the rugged mountains. A monk, trusting authorities, led soldiers to their hideout seeking to reassure the frightened band.

According to reports, along the way they turned on the monk, demanding he convert to Islam. Upon his refusal, they cut off his hands, then feet, then head. Returning to Nusaybin, the soldiers assembled the remaining Christians, leading them out of town. In joyful procession the believers sang hymns of encouragement: Soon we will be with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Refusing conversion, one by one they were shot, and then dumped in a well.

In 1919, then-Syrian Orthodox Archbishop Aphrem Barsaum filed a report to the prime minister of Britain, after the Allied powers displaced the Ottomans. Similar massacres had been repeated in 335 other villages in the archbishop’s jurisdiction, ...

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An Ark Mentality Can’t Survive an Anxiety-Flooded Age

In a world of fear and turmoil, the story of Noah brings baptismal hope.

A few weeks ago, a commentator identified what he believes to be the dominant mindset of our time. He calls it “ark head,” borrowing from the biblical account of Noah and the flood.

“Ark head,” argues Venkatesh Rao, happens when we give up on solving our big global problems and look instead for an “ark” in which to ride out the storms of this age of anxiety.

Rao points to the numbness with which most people see the “snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards,” whether the prospect of a nuclear World War III, another global pandemic, or a collapsing economy. He speculates that even news of an alien invasion would be greeted with a What can you do about it? sort of bored acceptance. This, he writes, is a coping mechanism for people in a new dark age.

The point of an ark, after all, is to “survive a cataclysmic flood while preserving as much of everything you care about as possible,” Rao writes.

For some in the tech sector, the ark could be cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, or the metaverse. Others seem to be scaling down to their narrow subcultures of work or interest or personal life.

“If you can retreat within it, and either tune out or delusionally recode the rest of reality, it works as an ark,” Rao says.

If “flood geology” is the view advocated by some creationist groups to explain phenomena such as the Grand Canyon, I suppose one could call Rao’s thesis a kind of “flood psychology.”

His metaphor caught my attention because I’m currently teaching through Genesis 1–11 (which includes the Noah narrative) in a Sunday seminar at my church. I stopped to wonder if his metaphor might actually ...

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DOJ Steps Up Prosecution of Pro-Life Protestors at Clinics

In the wake of Dobbs, federal prosecutors have filed more than a dozen federal indictments against protestors obstructing access to abortion clinics.

In the past month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted more than a dozen pro-life protestors across the country for obstructing access to abortion clinics.

Such prosecutions have been rare historically, with just a case or two annually for the last decade. But after the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade this summer, the DOJ announced a task force to pursue more enforcement against anyone obstructing access to abortion clinics. Many of those protestors facing charges are Christian.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, prohibits obstruction of access, threats, and destruction of clinic property. In these recent charges, protestors face up to 11 years in prison. Pro-life activists say the recent prosecutions seem politically motivated; some are now facing charges for incidents that date back more than a year.

An October 5 indictment of 11 protestors in Tennessee was about an abortion clinic blockade in March 2021. One case filed October 14 against a pro-life protestor concerned an incident from two years ago, when a group of protestors allegedly tied themselves with ropes and chains inside a clinic, blocking access.

Edward Mechmann, a former federal prosecutor who now is the director of public policy for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, told CT it was “strange for the feds to go searching for old cases, especially for relatively minor crimes that would usually be dealt with by local prosecutors.”

Mechmann said he was surprised by “the heavy hand” in the blockade indictments. Though blockading a clinic is a violation of FACE, he thinks the DOJ could have pursued civil remedies without going straight to criminal prosecution.

“My suspicion is that a directive has ...

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The Push for Women’s Rights in Iran Is a Push for Religious Freedom Too

Christian advocate: The uprising in Tehran coincides with the rising disillusionment with Islam and the growth of the underground church.

Growing up in a home with a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Iranian American Shirin Taber had a special appreciation for being able to choose what she believed. When she told her dad that she wished everyone back in Iran could have the same freedom, he—knowing the harsh reality of the regime—said it would never happen.

Since then, Taber has worked on the cause of international religious freedom, hoping to see the trajectory change in one of the most restrictive countries in the world. And with the current uprising of Iranian women and young people, the American advocate is more optimistic than ever.

In Iran, Generation Z—whose grandparents lived through the revolution—has become particularly emboldened, creative, and strategic, inspired by the impact of movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.

“Millennials did their part, Gen X did their part, their parents, but this generation is very unique,” Taber said, referencing the viral impact of young activists, including the move to dye Tehran’s fountains blood-red. “Gen Z is no-nonsense. They’ll just go out tough. The girls, they’ll cut their hair, and they’ll jump on cars.”

Iranians eager for reform have held out hope that they could work within the Islamic government, but Taber believes the country has reached a tipping point.

It’s been a month of protests, spurred by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. The viral videos of women cutting their hair symbolize longstanding grievances beyond dress code regulations to women’s unequal status in inheritance, marriage, custody, and travel.

The political pushback, Taber says, correlates with a ...

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Christian Orthodoxy Is Your Ticket to a Land of Adventure

Playing in the fields of heresy and ambiguity might offer short-term kicks, but only sound doctrine can supply a lifetime of thrills.

Over a century ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote his famous book Orthodoxy, a defense of plain, historic Christianity as the only compelling way to make sense of the world and its mysteries.

Trevin Wax stands firmly in Chesterton’s tradition with his new book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith. Wax, a Southern Baptist whose wife hails from Romania, is a far cry from Chesterton’s Anglo-Catholicism. In his own way, however, he is attempting to emulate Chesterton’s defense of the truth and goodness of Christian orthodoxy for our own age.

Earlier this year, Wax came out with his own annotated edition of Chesterton’s classic, meant to introduce it to beginners while bringing fresh insights to longtime admirers. It makes sense, then, for Wax to plot his own path, showing why historical Christianity—what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity” and Thomas Oden called “consensual Christianity”—is the farthest thing from a relic of the past.

Digging down, not digging in

The book’s foreword, written by theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, is an elegant reminder that Christian orthodoxy is about realism—what is real and what is true. It is there to help believers stay true to their Lord Jesus Christ. Wax builds on this insight in his first chapter, arguing that defending the orthodox faith matters urgently today because we live in an age of fads, fabrications, and fragmentation.

Orthodoxy is what keeps us rooted in the faith, ensuring that we do not forget our first love. The spiritual malaise of our age needs to be cured, Wax says, with “confidence in the truth and goodness of the Christian faith.” By anchoring ourselves in the historical ...

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Evangelical Creation Care Expert Shares Lessons Learned from Global Tour

Around the world, Christians look to scriptural lessons on stewardship to depoliticize environmental issues.

If the world is at stake, stewardship of creation must be global. And with an evangelical passion akin to world missions, Ed Brown is preaching ecology to the nations.

One region at a time.

Following initial consultations in Jamaica in 2012, Brown became the Lausanne Movement’s catalyst for creation care and helped build out the Lausanne/World Evangelical Alliance Creation Care Network (LWCCN). The goal was to amplify a conviction forged two years earlier in Cape Town, South Africa, at the third Lausanne Congress: Creation care is a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ.

Since then, LWCCN has conducted conferences in 12 regions drawing delegates from over 120 nations. Concluding earlier this month in Jordan for the Middle East and North Africa, Brown and his colleagues addressed local issues for a region experts warn is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.

And the UN is cued in. Its 27th climate change conference, COP27, begins November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with COP28 scheduled next year in the United Arab Emirates’s Abu Dhabi.

Brown served previously as chief operating officer for the evangelical Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, and today is a fellow at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He founded Care of Creation, Inc. in 2005, and is author of Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation.

In Amman, he spoke with CT about the challenge of politics, the response of missionaries, and the drastic impact environmental changes will soon have on ministry to one’s neighbors.

Reflecting on your many meetings, did the message of creation care resonate with the international evangelical community?

Much more ...

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American Idol: How Politics Replaced Spiritual Practice

Christian formation is central to civic renewal, not the other way around.

When voters go to the polls for US midterm elections this November, many will be motivated by a sense that the other side seeks to bully them.

According to a poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, nearly identical percentages of Democrats (74%) and Republicans (73%) believe members of the opposing party are “generally bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree.”

Similarly high percentages of Americans in both parties believe that members of the other side tend to be “generally untruthful and are pushing disinformation.”

These statistics reflect what a group of social scientists have termed “political sectarianism”—a “poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralism” that “poses a threat to democracy.”

Sectarianism poses a threat to democracy because self-governance only makes sense in a culture where citizens care and think about someone other than themselves. According to a recent survey from Pew, however, most American voters believe public servants (let alone other voters) are in office to promote their own personal interests.

Here’s the deeper danger: Political sectarianism—and the culture it promotes—enables a destructive and suffocating social imaginary. Toxic politics deforms the whole person, along with their relationships and practices. It causes spiritual harm. Our civic culture doesn’t shape governance alone; it affects ever-expanding realms of the social and emotional.

We also need to come to terms with how much it claims and dictates our theology.

On the first Sunday after the tragic 2017 shooting massacre in Las Vegas, my pastor, David Hanke, shared the following ...

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Canada Euthanized 10,000 People in 2021. Has Death Lost Its Sting?

Here’s what I’ve learned as a Christian doctor receiving requests for physician-assisted dying.

When the hospital staff called me to my patient’s bedside, I could see her distress was severe. She was agitated and breathless, her face etched with discomfort and frustration. “I can’t take this anymore,” she cried.

She had suffered for years with chronic illness and had been admitted to my intensive care unit with acute complications. She was debilitated and exhausted, and her grief and frustration had come to a head. “I just want to die,” she wept.

Her friend was standing next to me at the bedside, and he was clearly upset by her distress. “Just ask for MAID,” he told her, using the popular acronym for medical assistance in dying, often referred to as physician-assisted death. “Then you can end it all now.”

I was startled by his statement. Though physician-assisted death is available in Canada, where I live, I had not expected the conversation to move in that direction. Yet I saw that he was feeling desperate and helpless at the sight of her distress.

After some gentle exploration, we quickly realized that the patient didn’t really want to die; rather, she needed relief from her pain and anxiety and to understand her acute illness and what it meant for her future. She still wanted time with her loved ones. We worked to address her symptoms and concerns, and she soon felt calmer and more comfortable. Watching her rest and converse with family made it hard to believe she was the same person who only hours earlier had cried out to have her life ended.

What is more unbelievable is that the ability to have one’s life ended on short notice is an increasingly acceptable option for Canadian patients—with implications that will reverberate around the globe. ...

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Liberalism Comes in Right-Wing and Left-Wing Varieties. Christians Should Reject Both.

Governments can’t be indifferent to the moral and spiritual health of the governed.

“Liberalism” is a word with many meanings, some compatible with Christianity, some arguably demanded by it. In its original sense, to be liberal is to exemplify the virtue of liberality, as in broadmindedness or generosity of spirit. More typically, in the United States, liberalism refers to left-wing political views, though “classical” liberalism references a relatively gentle variant of libertarianism.

In his new book, Liberalism and its Discontents, however, eminent political scientist Francis Fukuyama sets out to defend liberalism in what may be its deepest sense: the focus on freedom as the highest political good that unites the mainstream American left and right.

Both major political parties, and most American Christians, have embraced this liberal perspective. Republicans tend to seek so-called “negative liberty,” ensuring that the state leaves individuals alone, while Democrats tend to seek “positive liberty,” or state empowerment of the individual. Republicans emphasize economic freedom, while Democrats emphasize sexual freedom. Fukuyama’s treatment reveals, however, why the liberalism at the heart of both approaches is deeply at odds with the Christian political tradition.

Fielding criticisms

Fukuyama opens with a pair of definitions that seem innocuous enough. He calls liberalism a doctrine advocating legal limitations on government and institutional protections for individual rights. In his view, all variants of liberalism 1) favor the individual over the collective, 2) recognize humans as morally equal, 3) emphasize human unity over cultural diversity, and 4) are optimistic about the improvability of the social world.

Chapter 1 lays out three overarching arguments ...

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The Forgotten Christian Cause: Preserving Democracy

This election season, love your neighbor by supporting voter results, a free press, and a peaceful transfer of power.

The midterms election season is not the easiest time to feel good about American democracy.

We’re inundated with negative campaign ads that often distort the records of opposing candidates and portray them in the worst possible light. Each side warns that the election of the other party means disaster for the United States on an apocalyptic scale.

Can Christians really defend a democracy like this? Yes. We can and we should. And there’s no better time to do it than now.

Democracy is currently facing an unprecedented crisis, both in the United States and around the world. According to V-Dem Institute, the world’s leading research group for tracking democratic progress, there are only 34 liberal democracies in the world, the fewest since the mid-1990s. And only 13 percent of the world’s population lives in one of those countries—down from 18 percent 10 years ago. (V-Dem ranks the United States No. 29 in the list of liberal democracies, and its score is rapidly falling.)

Democracy allows for journalistic independence, free and fair elections, and peaceful transfer of power, but those attributes are fragile and easily lost. It’s currently much more common for a democratic country to become autocratic than for an autocratic country to become a democracy.

Some countries that lose their democratic status fully autocratize and become military dictatorships. But V-Dem’s recently released 2022 report suggests that the much more potent threat to democracy is not dictatorship but rather what the institute calls “electoral autocracy.”

Under that system, elections continue to be held, but the government rigs the political process by controlling the media, harassing critical journalists, ...

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Jeffrey Dahmer and Killing Our True Crime Obsession

When serial killer stories rank among the country’s top shows, we’re guilty of fueling a dark trend.

There are thousands of things to watch on Netflix—but right now, two of the top ten shows on the platform are about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a drama series produced by Ryan Murphy, broke Netflix records in its opening week last month, according to the Los Angeles Times, and remains the platform’s most popular English language series. Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, a docuseries, debuted a week ago. Both portray one of the most gruesome serial killers in American history.

The popularity of these series is no surprise given the growth of true crime as an entertainment genre—everything from podcasts to narrative journalism to television series and films entrance audiences with storytelling, suspense, and a collective longing for justice.

But the popularity of these programs, especially those that reiterate the horrifying acts of serial killers, reveals a rotten reality about our society. Seeing Monster at the top of Netflix’s trending list should prick our consciences and drive us to consider how such shows affect us and the real-life people whose stories are flattened for our screens. The dark rise of serial killer true crime has moral weight for those who aim to reflect a God of light and life.

Monster dramatizes the horrific crimes of a man who brutally slaughtered and in some cases cannibalized 17 young men, many of whom were Black and gay, in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Families of victims have spoken out against the show, confronting Netflix for not consulting them and challenging viewers to consider the real people still impacted by Dahmer’s despicable crimes. TV critics have needled the show’s failure to handle ...

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Australian Football Executive Forced to Resign, Prompting Debate about Religious Liberty

Andrew Thorburn’s affiliation with an evangelical Anglican church was “a clear conflict of interest,” according to the club’s president

He lasted 30 hours.

Andrew Thorburn, a former banker, was appointed chief executive of Essendon Football Club on September 27. A little more than a day later, he was forced to resign from the prominent “footy” club because of his connection to a conservative Melbourne church.

In a public statement, Thorburn summed the situation up briefly: “My personal Christian faith,” he said, “is not tolerated or permitted in the public square.”

The president of the Australian football club strongly disagreed with that characterization, saying in a statement that “this is not about vilifying anyone for their personal religious beliefs, but about a clear conflict of interest with an organisation whose views do not align at all with our values as a safe, inclusive, diverse and welcoming club.”

Thorburn is chair of the board at City on a Hill, an evangelical Anglican church that started in Melbourne in 2007. It currently has eight sites; five are in Melbourne. The founding pastor, Guy Mason, is affiliated with Acts 29. In 2013, Mason preached about homosexuality, calling same-sex sex a sin, and he has also spoken from the pulpit about abortion, at one point comparing the number of terminations of unwanted pregnancies to the Holocaust.

Online clips of the old sermons surfaced after Thorburn’s appointment, creating a scandal.

Thorburn’s short stint and dramatic resignation may be one of the most egregious examples of someone being forced out of a prominent position for their affiliation with conservative Christianity. His resignation is especially shocking because no one has accused him of saying or doing anything inappropriate. According to the Essendon board, Thorburn doesn’t even ...

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Herschel Walker and the Platform of Cheap Grace

Christians believe in mercy amidst moral failing. But how then should we vote?

A recent campaign ad for Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, is titled “Grace.”

Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is “a preacher who doesn’t tell the truth. He doesn’t even believe in redemption,” Walker says about his opponent in the clip. “I’m Herschel Walker, saved by grace, and I approve this message.”

The messaging, leaning on Christian language around forgiveness, is part of Walker’s campaign among Christian conservatives in Georgia. And it came two days after the former NFL and UGA football star dismissed a Daily Beast report that he urged a then-girlfriend to get an abortion after he impregnated her in 2009.

It’s a neat trick: I didn’t do it, Walker’s overall messaging says, but if I did it, you should forgive me if you believe in God’s redemption. You should give me grace.

He insists the receipt from the abortion clinic, the bank image of his signed personal check, and the signed “get well” card she presented as evidence “haven’t shown anything.” He brushes off the New York Times report in which the same woman alleged he pushed her to get a second abortion in 2011 and, after she refused, became a distant father, rarely present in the life of their now 10-year-old-son. He’s sworn to sue the Beast for defamation over its “flat-out lie.”

Maybe Walker is telling the truth, in which case I hope his suit succeeds (even though, full disclosure, I regularly write for The Daily Beast). To be falsely subjected to an accusation like this in the national press would be a great wrong.

But unlike some other years-old accusations of candidate wrongdoing to which the Walker allegations ...

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How Kanye West’s Breakdown Makes Sense of Our Social Crisis

Evangelicals are part of the shock culture ecosystem that exploits celebrities.

This past week, the artist formerly known as Kanye West—who now goes by “Ye”—was suspended from Twitter after an unhinged rant. He posted comments using antisemitic tropes about the “influence” of Jewish people, followed by an almost incomprehensible threat to go “death con 3” on Jewish people.

Twitter and Instagram, too, were right to take these comments seriously. We’ve seen how antisemitic threats of violence can incite terror—in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting and beyond. The lead-up to the suspension, though, followed a kind of publicity tour punctuated by deliberate controversy.

West appeared at an event with the contentious media figure Candace Owens wearing “White Lives Matter” T-shirts. During an interview with Tucker Carlson, he spooled out conspiracy theories to such a degree that he stopped to ask if he’d landed in Alex Jones territory yet. Then Vice posted additional video of him being even more explicitly antisemitic and even more open about bizarre conspiracy theories.

Instability from this artist is hardly surprising. Several years ago, I noted that I was worried for the rapper—not because of his mental health challenges but because of what American evangelicals often do to celebrities who profess faith. Too often we claim them as, at best, mascots for “our side” and, at worst, as trophies from the culture wars.

Over and over, the church has expected things from these figures that they do not have the maturity, wisdom, or even stability to handle.

The issue is in part that a celebrity is saying something insane (and highly offensive). But it’s equally problematic that we have an ...

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Africa’s Worst Famine in Decades Threatens Family Unity and Human Dignity

The plight of herding communities facing hunger echoes Old Testament examples.

“I am the father and mother of my children,” said Regina, sitting on the ground of the straw hut she built herself and weaving a basket.

The family’s possessions hang on the wall: a plastic blue bowl, a pair of small sandals, a green bottle cap. A toddler plays behind Regina’s back. A baby squirms in her lap. It is midafternoon in Nakorio village in northeastern Kenya, and nobody has eaten today.

Last year, Regina’s husband left for Lake Turkana. Other men have also abandoned their families—some desperate to save their herds of camels and other livestock; some ashamed of coming home to their starving children.

“I don’t even miss him because he doesn’t bring any food for me,” she said. “If he returned, I would chase him away.”

The Turkana, a semi-nomadic people in Kenya, share a plight with millions of East Africans, starving and displaced as a result of the worst drought in at least four decades. The ongoing threat of famine and food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa has become, to outsiders, a global suffering cliché.

But for Christians, the crisis in the dusty East African terrain should offer a jolt of recognition. Famine appears as a recurring character across the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a force that not only incites physical hardship but also brings degradation on their families, a pattern echoed in families like Regina’s.

“The stories of Genesis were not told to teach about famine,” said Yohannes Sahile, an Old Testament theologian at School of Theology at Africa International University, in Nairobi. “But we can find lessons about how to respond to famine even though such lessons were not the main objectives.” ...

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Nursing Homes Still Haven't Recovered from Pandemic Loneliness

Ministries double-down on efforts to build community in the wake of debilitating isolation.

Inside an Upper East Side nursing home on a September Sunday, Mimi Weinstein, who organizes and leads a weekly worship service there, bounced from resident to resident. She handed out bulletins and greeted people by name while shaking a tambourine. Two dozen residents showed up for the service, filling the activity room. Weinstein’s husband, Jerry, sat down at a baby grand piano, the top propped up with a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and started playing worship songs.

When a volunteer announced the first song of the service, one resident shouted at the top of his lungs, “Amen sister, Amen!”

This same neighborhood was bleak in 2020, with empty streets and mobile morgues outside of overwhelmed hospitals. In the US, over 200,000 long-term care residents and staff have died from COVID-19, according to a count from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In five states, they accounted for more than half of COVID-19 deaths up through 2021. But since the vaccine rollout, they make up a much smaller portion of COVID-19 deaths in the US.

All across the country, nursing home residents didn’t have visitors other than staff for months, and sometimes more than a year. In March 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services banned visitors from nursing home facilities, and administrators have dealt with regularly changing guidance on visitation since.

Cleopatra Mullings, 84, who resides at the Upper East Side Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New York, didn’t see her son Gene Mullings for a year.

“I think about it sometimes, but I try to push that thought back,” she said from her wheelchair, with her son sitting beside her on a Sunday in September. They were participating ...

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Wanted: More Christians to Dig in Israel

New tourism initiatives recruit vacationers to volunteer for archaeological excavations.

Biblical archaeology is back in full swing in Israel—after a two-year pandemic delay—and now the digs across the country are going to get a new boost from tourist-volunteers.

Israel’s Tourism Ministry has launched a new initiative aimed at getting Christian tourists involved in excavations. And a group affiliated with the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), the largest organization for professional American archaeologists working in Israel, is starting a 13-day tour with visits to 27 sites.

American archaeologists working in Israel welcome the new programs. Encouraging “archaeotourism” is good for archaeology—boosting the local economy, cultivating interested in the ongoing academic work, and supplying archaeologists with a steady flow of volunteers.

“We couldn’t get anything accomplished without them,” said Steve Ortiz, director of the Lanier Center for Archaeology at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. Ortiz co-led a 10-year excavation at Tel Gezer, and is now a codirector of the Tel Burna Archaeological Project.

Getting tourists involved in archaeology isn’t a new idea. Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin sought out and recruited volunteers for the excavation of the famous site of Masada in the 1960s. Ever since, a stream of people have paid their own way to the Holy Land to dig, haul, and sift dirt, spending part of a vacation contributing to the grunt work of scholarship and the chance to touch a little bit of biblical history.

Every year, until travel was halted for COVID-19, hundreds of tourists visited archaeological sites in Israel. Archaeotourism is also promoted in neighboring Jordan and Turkey.

Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, a religion professor ...

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Christian Aid Agencies Have a New Approach to Famine

Relief has changed in time for Africa’s worst food shortage in 80 years.

Agya Afari in Dodowa, Ghana, turns the corn and cassava dough in a pan perched on a coal pot as his middle child fans the coals. Nearby, his wife, Yaa Manu, grinds pepper, tomato, and onion to make a sauce for supper. The only form of protein, two boiled eggs, is traditionally reserved for the adults in the household.

“This has become a way of life for us lately—banku and boiled eggs with ground pepper,” Afari laments in Twi. “Limited work in this current economy, increasing prices, and a pest invasion on our farm means my family and I have been struggling to make ends meet. One daily meal that satisfies everyone is impossible,” he adds.

This may seem like a timeless story of food insecurity. But Afari’s family is affected by the most widespread global hunger crisis on record. In the past couple of years, the need for food aid has more than doubled, with the World Food Program estimating that today 345 million people are close to starvation. World Vision estimates that one in five Africans suffered from hunger in 2020 and that over the past two years, the situation has only worsened.

In West Africa, 151 million people didn’t have enough food in August of 2022, according to the World Food Program. In East Africa (particularly the Horn of Africa), it estimated, 79 million people needed food. Without strategic help, their suffering will be deepened and prolonged.

But strategic help hasn’t always been the rule. In fact, Christian aid agencies have significantly changed the way they provide food assistance over recent decades to adjust to some difficult lessons.

During the well-publicized Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, relief consisted mainly of the direct delivery of food from donor ...

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Celebrity Funeral Becomes Thailand’s Largest Christian Outreach

Millions of fans in the Buddhist country heard the gospel at actress Tangmo’s memorial service

After Pimduan “Duan” Nagaviroj heard about the drowning death of 37-year-old Nida Patcharaveerapong in February, she joined millions of other Thais in watching the livestream of the funeral honoring the famous TV actress, better known as Tangmo.

Duan, who works as a consul of the Royal Thai Consulate General in Penang, Malaysia, was intrigued by the gospel message presented in the three-day memorial.

“I paid attention to everything said and was most impressed by the message that Christians do not fear death,” she said. “I learned that God loves everyone, and I decided that I wanted to know him.”

After the third night of the service, she messaged the church contact listed on the livestream to learn more about Christianity, and the church staff encouraged her to find a local church. She visited Wesley Methodist Church in Penang and joined the church’s online Alpha Course, an evangelism program. “After only a few lessons, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and I wanted to be baptized,” she said.

Pastors in Bangkok say Tangmo’s memorial service in March was the largest evangelistic outreach ever put on in Thailand, where 93 percent of the population is Buddhist and only about 1 percent Christian. While Tangmo was known for her appearances in Thai dramas and her tabloid-headline exploits, she also stood out as an outspoken Christian.

The livestream of the memorial brought in 12 million views, and Thai pastors say that afterward, they saw an increase in newcomers interested in learning more about Christianity.

“God opened a door through the death of a woman who loved God immensely,” said Thongchai Pradubchananurat, who pastors Bangkok’s Church of Joy and ...

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Faith on the OpenSea: Christians Launch NFT Fundraisers

The Bible-based video game company TruPlay and the charity Compassion International step into the crypto world.

With big green eyes, Maple the bunny dons a bright orange tiger costume. A character in the Christian video game world called RhymVerse, her loyal and courageous personality carries her through her heroic adventures. She and her friends must face dark forces in games like Maple and the Forest of Words.

Last month, designs of Maple and six other characters were sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by TruPlay, a Christian entertainment company that offers a variety of family-friendly mobile games.

NFTs like Maple are digital art pieces that can be bought and sold. When they are bought, the rights to that unique piece of art are transferred to the new owner, said TruPlay CEO and founder Brent Dusing.

In the case of the RhymVerse characters—which TruPlay says represent the first and biggest NFT release from a Christian tech company—the NFTs are a way for families to back their video game venture. Dusing said it’s “like a next-generation way to get the community involved in helping to build and support financially things they want to see.”

From South Africa to the Philippines, Christians purchased TruPlay’s first 6,650 Genesis NFTs within 10 minutes of their release, according to the company’s press release.

While TruPlay sold the NFTs for free, consumers then sold, bought, and traded them after that, with the company earning 10 percent of these transactions. The secondary sales of the NFTs yielded more than $200,000 in volume on OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace. In the first 24 hours of sales, the company placed in the Top 10 on OpenSea globally.

Dusing said he was amazed by the response and thanked God. To him, offering NFTs as a Christian company follows a long tradition ...

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Should Christians Own Guns for Self-Defense? A Global Snapshot

Leaders in nine nations explain how they think theologically and biblically about personal safety as mass shootings plague the world.

Last week, a former police officer killed 36 people, many of them very young children, at a daycare center in northeastern Thailand. The massacre, which was carried out through stabbing, vehicle ramming, and shooting, came several weeks after a gunman shot and killed 17 people at a school in Central Russia. In, July, terrorists launched a gun and bomb attack at church in southwest Nigeria on a Sunday, killing an estimated 70 worshipers.

The United States has experienced several high-profile mass shootings this year including a July 4 shooting outside of Chicago where seven people were killed, a grocery store in Buffalo where 10 people were killed, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas where a gunman killed 21 people.

In the US, white evangelicals are more likely than members of other faith groups or the average citizen to own a gun; 41 percent do, compared to 33 percent of white mainline Protestants, 32 percent of the unaffiliated, 29 percent of black Protestants, and 24 percent of Catholics. A majority of white evangelicals who own a handgun carry it with them (65%, versus 57% of all gun owners) because they view it as a safety precaution, according to these 2017 numbers from Pew Research Center.

Earlier this year, CT reached out to church leaders from nine different countries to learn more about gun ownership and their thoughts on this subject as Christians. Answers to the following questions are arranged from those who believe Christians can own guns for personal safety to those who believe it violates their faith.

Nigeria

Steve Dangana, chairman, Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria Plateau State Chapter

Nigerian citizens can own guns as long as the guns are licensed by the authorities.

Christians are called to be vanguards ...

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Narnia was C.S. Lewis’s Literary Petri Dish

It provided a controlled environment where he could develop, observe, and test his ideas about life and faith.

Though C. S. Lewis died many decades before the rise of the New Atheists, he taught and wrote in an academic world where naturalism, scientism, and secular humanism were ascendant and the Christian worldview was either dismissed or relegated to the personal, emotional realm. In the refined Oxbridge atmosphere in which Lewis lived and moved and had his being, most professors took for granted that miracles did not happen, that Jesus was just a good, moral teacher, and that evolution was a sufficient theory to explain everything we see around us and experience within us.

In response to this reigning materialist paradigm, one he had vehemently embraced throughout his teens and 20s, Lewis wrote three works of apologetics that have not lost any of their power. In Mere Christianity, he first argued for the existence of God on moral grounds and then clarified the essential teachings of the gospel, biblical morality, and Christian theology. In The Problem of Pain, he reconciled the ubiquity of pain and suffering in the world with the all-good and all-powerful God of the Scriptures. In Miracles, he argued that miracles do not break the laws of nature but are consistent with the God revealed in Christ and the Bible.

While vigorously but genially defending the Christian worldview, he also defended, in such academic works as The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image, the Christian Middle Ages from fashionable—but mostly false—charges of ignorance, superstition, and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, he countered the Freudians and Marxists by analyzing the theological and psychological dimensions of sin and temptation, and upholding, if slightly repackaging, traditional Christian ...

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Distinguishing Scripture from Hindu Mythology

Indian Christians grapple with heresies and cultural confusion.

American evangelicals are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and Scripture. This year’s State of Theology survey revealed the top five misconceptions that US evangelicals hold, as follows:

• Jesus isn’t the only way to God.
• Jesus was created by God.
• Jesus is not God.
• The Holy Spirit is not a personal being.
• Humans aren’t sinful by nature.

CT reached out to three Christian leaders from Bengaluru, Chennai, and New Delhi to learn what modern heresies are widespread in India and how believers can address them.

Jacob Cherian, dean of faculty at Southern Asia Bible College, Bengaluru, Karnataka

Unfortunately, Western evangelicals do not possess a monopoly on modern heresies, which I’ll loosely define as deviations from commonly held orthodox teachings. Popular and unhealthy theological trends quickly find welcoming minds in India.

While believing in the authority of Scripture, we often struggle to parse out what that entails and how Scripture could be appropriated in the nitty-gritties of Indian contexts. A pernicious problem of using random bits of Scripture (such as Christian healers quoting “By his stripes we are healed”) remains a pet weakness of far too many.

While we do see a plague of blatant and flashy prosperity teaching, many evangelicals and charismatics have succumbed to a soft-prosperity gospel, imagining that God owes the believer a long and comfortable trip through this world, apart from a wonderful future in heaven. This ill-prepares believers to courageously face illness, tragedy, and death.

Leaders must instead teach the church both the harsh vulnerability of life and the bold hope we have in Christ, even as we courageously engage in kingdom work.

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Self-Proclaimed Messiahs and Other Southeast Asian Heresies

Misconceptions about the Trinity and the exclusivity of Christ prevail.

American evangelicals are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and Scripture. This year’s State of Theology survey revealed the top five misconceptions that US evangelicals hold:

• Jesus isn’t the only way to God.
• Jesus was created by God.
• Jesus is not God.
• The Holy Spirit is not a personal being.
• Humans aren’t sinful by nature.

CT polled three Christian leaders in the Philippines, Singapore, and Cambodia to find out if these modern heresies are also widespread in their respective regions, how believers can address them, and what heresies may be more common in their contexts.

Timoteo D. Gener, president, FEBIAS College of Bible, Valenzuela, Metro Manila, Philippines

With Catholics making up 80 percent of the Philippines’ population and Protestants, including evangelicals, making up around 10 percent, these five heresies are not common among those who call themselves Christians, especially evangelicals who are part of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC).

There remains high regard for the authority of the Bible—as well as belief in the Trinity—among these Christ-followers. There are, however, indigenous non-Trinitarian heretical groups like Iglesia Ni Cristo (Church of Christ), Ang Dating Daan (The Old Path), and the more recent “Kingdom of Jesus Christ,” whose pastor-founder Apollo Quiboloy claims that he is the “Appointed Son of God.”

Many years ago, Benigno Beltran’s Christology of the Inarticulate (1987) revealed the prevalence of modalism, the belief that God is a single person who reveals himself in three forms, among folk Catholics. Countering modalism in faith and practice remains a continuing challenge for biblical Christians in the ...

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First Study of Chinese Churches in Britain Examines Boom and Possible Bust

Pastors and theologians respond to opportunities and challenges in new study on explosive growth from Hong Kong immigration.

For many Hong Kong immigrants to Britain, a church is their first point of connection.

Chinese pastors in the UK report their congregations have doubled or tripled in size. One church in Manchester has multiplied from less than 200 attendees to 1,200 due to the recent influx of immigrants from Hong Kong.

The impact of all these worshipers is shown in a new report on Chinese Christianity in Britain, the first systematic study of its kind. Led by Yinxuan Huang, a research fellow at London School of Theology (LST), its findings were released October 8 at a seminary symposium.

The study concluded that Chinese non-Christian immigrants are open to Christianity and ready to hear the gospel. But its data also suggests several obstacles to faith remain.

Though they are slowly becoming more outward-looking, Chinese churches have long been insular. And if Chinese Christians don’t mobilize fast enough, they risk missing a key evangelism window, as the study found British-born Chinese to be less receptive to the faith.

“The study is correct to say that children and youth ministries [in Chinese churches] are booming,” said Alexander Chow, a Chinese American lecturer in theology and World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.

“But what happens beyond that? That’s quite a critical question, not only for British-born Chinese but for the 1.5-generation Hong Kong migrant now.”

Church growth spurt

Billed as the “largest study of its kind in Europe,” the Bible and the Chinese Community in Britain (BCCB) research project is a joint initiative between LST and the British and Foreign Bible Society.

It seeks to develop an “expansive understanding” of the Chinese Christian community’s ...

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What Can Kids Draw from the Chess Cheating Controversy?

As chess champion Magnus Carlsen accuses an American grandmaster, coaches are trying to develop a virtuous love of the game in young players.

A couple of weeks ago, my pastor’s nine-year-old son, who plays chess for fun, asked me what I thought about “Hans.”

He was referring to Hans Niemann, the American 19-year-old chess grandmaster facing cheating allegations.

World chess champion Magnus Carlsen, one of the best players ever, abruptly withdrew last month from a big tournament after he lost to Niemann. Carlsen later put out a statement saying that he believed Niemann had cheated extensively in his career, and that he found their previous game together to be strange. In response Niemann admitted to cheating online when he was 12 years old and in one inconsequential game when he was 16 but has denied cheating in more serious tournaments.

No one can say how Niemann might have cheated. During online chess, players can sneak a look at a chess engine—a tool that shows the best possible moves. Cheating during in-person games is tougher to imagine: Perhaps a player is getting signals from a person in the room, sneaking a look at an engine during a trip to the bathroom, or wearing some kind of buzzer.

The money and status reached in the heights of chess don’t come close to professional sports like soccer or football—why risk your reputation? But the pressure to succeed, and sin while trying, is a human condition. Cheating in chess may be more tempting in a way, because a chess engine can turn anyone into one of the best players in the world. In baseball, a steroid taker or pitch stealer would still have to be really good at baseball.

After more global hubbub than chess has seen in decades, Chess.com (one of the main websites for online tournaments) put out a lengthy report showing that Niemann had likely cheated in more than 100 online games, ...

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