Evangelicals Are the Most Beloved US Faith Group Among Evangelicals

And among the worst-rated by everybody else.

When asked about their views of the country’s biggest religious groups, most Americans don’t have strong feelings either way—except when it comes to evangelical Christians.

In a Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, 27 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of evangelicals, compared to 10 percent who have a negative view of mainline Protestants or 18 percent who have a negative view of Catholics.

About as many have a favorable approach to evangelicals—28 percent—but that’s mostly due to positive sentiment from American evangelicals themselves, about a quarter of the population.

The findings follow a trend from Pew. Six years ago, researchers reported that Americans were warming up to each major religious group in the US, from Mormons to Muslims, except for evangelicals.

Other surveys over the past year have pointed to American’s negative perceptions of certain evangelical denominations and traditions.

When asked about 35 specific “religious groups, organizations, and belief systems” in a 2022 YouGov poll, Americans gave the best ratings to Christianity and Protestantism, the biggest religious affiliations in the US.

YouGov respondents weren’t asked about evangelicalism as a category, but traditions with mainline denominations—Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and the Episcopal Church—were ranked favorable, while those that fall more squarely in evangelicalism—Pentecostalism and the Southern Baptist Convention—skewed negative. (The worst ratings, though, went to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, and Satanism.)

Additionally, just over half of Americans are turned off by Pentecostal churches, more than ...

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John Stott: ‘Evangelical Traditions Are Not Infallible’

The late theologian’s sermons are going digital, thanks to one of his family friends.

The public will soon have access to a digital collection of hundreds of John Stott’s recorded sermons and transcripts spanning five decades.

The influential theologian in the modern evangelical movement adhered to the principle of what he called (23:53) the “double obligation” of Bible expositors: “to open up the text of Scripture with faithfulness to the ancient word and sensitivity to the modern world.”

“John was very involved with what he called double listening—listening to Scripture and listening to the world. And [he taught] that when you preach, you need to have both,” Mark Hunt, an executor of Stott’s literary estate, told CT.

Hunt was the main coordinator of a small team tasked with the yearslong project of organizing Stott’s sermons. His main job was listening to and editing nearly 650 recordings made over the decades Stott served as a preaching pastor at All Souls Church in London and traveled the world speaking.

Stott was influential in Hunt’s life and career as a family friend turned mentor, inviting him to serve on the boards of his nonprofits and accompany him on global trips.

Faithlife, the company known for its Logos Bible study software, first approached the literary executors of John R. W. Stott about the sermon project in 2016. But it wasn’t until 2020 that Hunt began the process of refining the late evangelical leader’s audio recordings. That included cutting out coughs, long pauses, and paper rustling. He also increased the audio speed.

“John was very deliberate in his preaching, which was great, giving people a chance to reflect. But it didn’t make for the greatest audio listening experience,” Hunt explained.

He ...

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Speaking for Evangelicals at the UN, Gaetan Roy Seeks to Serve

The new representative starts each conversation with an unusual question.

Gaetan Roy goes to the United Nations building in Geneva with an unusual question: “How can I serve you?”

Roy is not a waiter or a salesperson but the new representative from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) to the UN. Ever since he first got involved in politics, this is the question he’s led with. Back in 2015, when he went to the German parliament to lobby on behalf of evangelical organizations, he couldn’t get the words of Mark 10:45 out of his mind: I have come to serve, not to be served.

So Roy asked the first politician he met on his first day, “How can I serve you?” He’s continued asking it ever since.

“I thought this was really simple, but I felt God was unrelenting in this regard,” Roy told CT. “If Jesus came to serve and not to be served, then I will do the same by asking diplomats and politicians we engage with how we can serve them.”

With this question, Roy has become one of the primary evangelical voices at the world’s largest intergovernmental organization, speaking on behalf of 600 million believers in more than 120 countries. He takes over from Michael Mutzner, who helped establish the WEA’s office at the UN in 2012, and joins Wissam al-Saliby, director of the WEA’s Geneva office. Al-Saliby focuses on public statements about human rights violations while Roy works behind the scenes, brokering deals and developing official proposals for the UN representatives to consider.

Whether he’s promoting peace in Nigeria or working with the Coalition for Minority Rights in India, Roy said he hopes service will lead the way as he represents evangelical concerns and advances the cause of religious freedom for all.

If Roy’s approach ...

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Why Does Creation Groan?

Scripture and science suggest that animal suffering fits into a divine artistic story.

My Labrador retriever Buffy had a big heart. Our veterinarian, Beth, told us that Buffy had the largest, slowest “athlete’s heart” of any dog she had seen in 20 years of practice.

Buffy inherited her athletic heart from her grandmother, a dog that won numerous national field trial championships. In field trials, dogs must be eager, fast, and acutely alert to hand signals. They must also be able to keep going at full speed when most dogs begin to flag. That was Buffy. I never trained her for field trials, but we did retrieving drills almost every day with a bright orange “dummy.” Unlike Blue, her sister from another litter, Buffy never showed even the slightest sign that she was ready to stop retrieving. She just kept going.

The day before Buffy died at the age of 16, she was lying half awake on the living room floor and needed to go outside. Out of habit, I picked up the dummy. I was surprised when she abruptly perked up, struggled to her feet, shook once, and looked up at me expectantly. I could not believe that Buffy still wanted to retrieve.

Outside on the front lawn, I tossed the dummy a short distance. Buffy ambled after it, picked it up, and brought it back. Her eyes and ears said, Throw it again! So I did. She brought the dummy back, but this time she dropped it and, with a heavy breath, lay down. Buffy finally stopped retrieving.

Despite Buffy’s suffering in her old age, she lived a long and full life compared to many dogs. From the time they are born, dogs face dangers that can cut their lives short. They must be vaccinated for rabies and are besieged by hordes of micropredators, such as ticks, fleas, biting flies, mosquitoes—and the horrifying heartworm.

When a mosquito takes ...

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Boarding School Alumni Push for a New Kind of Abuse Investigation

Uncovering decades of allegations out of the Christian Academy of Japan, investigators tried new tactics to facilitate repentance and healing.

Decades after dozens of missionary kids suffered physical and sexual abuse at the Christian Academy of Japan (CAJ), mission agency leaders associated with the Tokyo school fell prostrate on the ground to perform dogeza, Japan’s deepest form of apology.

The 13 leaders met with victims at a private retreat in Colorado last fall to hear their stories and offer a formal apology.

“On their knees, heads on their hands, sobbing,” recalled Janet Oates, a 1963 alum of the academy, which was founded in 1950 as a boarding school for missionary children. “Alumni were sobbing too … one moment of justice.”

The moment of repentance followed an unconventional abuse investigation process that involved CAJ alumni acting as consultants and advocates. Alumni like Oates pushed the school and its founding mission agencies to investigate historic abuse in the first place.

The results of the investigation were devastating—turning up 72 cases of alleged abuse from 1957 to 2001. But the recent response has brought a degree of healing for some victims and could demonstrate a new approach for other organizations facing historic abuse allegations.

A number of boarding schools for missionary children have faced records of abuse. Investigations have uncovered mistreatment and mismanagement at a New Tribes Mission school in Senegal, the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s school in Guinea, and Hillcrest School in Nigeria. Few of the 150 schools serving missionary children around the world still offer boarding.

Four years ago, CAJ alumni and survivors said they wanted accountability and an apology from the school and the six mission agencies that founded it.

At the retreat last fall where leaders apologized, “the ...

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Tim Keller Calls on God’s ‘Providential Oversight’ Amid Treatment for New Tumors

Three years into his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, the New York pastor will undergo immunotherapy again.

Tim Keller shared on Sunday that he will once again go through a “brutal” treatment for his pancreatic cancer and asked for prayers.

Last June, Keller participated in an inpatient immunotherapy trial at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, which he said had “shown great promise in potentially curing cancer.” The 72-year-old is returning to the Bethesda, Maryland, facility next month to do another variation of that immunotherapy on new tumors.

The tumors “are unfortunately in some fairly inconvenient places,” Keller said, “so the doctors encouraged us to go through the treatment again, this time targeting a different genetic marker of the cancer.”

“It was brutal last June, so we approach this with an awareness of how much prayer we need,” Keller wrote on Twitter. “Please pray for our trust and dependence on God, for his providential oversight of the medical preparations now in process, and for our desire to glorify God in whatever comes our way. Thank You.”

The longtime pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Keller was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in May 2020. He went through 14 rounds of chemotherapy, followed by a surgery to remove nodules the following year.

In June 2022, he first went through the month-long immunotherapy treatment at the National Cancer Institute. At the time, his son Michael Keller posted an update saying, “Things were scary for a bit but God was gracious, working through your prayers and the skill of the doctors, and now he is doing much better.”

Last July, Keller reported that the initial signs from the immunotherapy were encouraging. Eight months later, he said it ...

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What ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Showed Me About the Paradox of Achieving “Nothing”

Did Evelyn have anything to show for after a life in the laundromat? Did I as a homeschool mom?

Evelyn Wang feels like she has achieved nothing.

Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is the main character in award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once (spoilers ahead). In her current life, she experiences the tedium of running a laundromat business. As she visits other parallel universes in which she is a successful actress or a skilled teppanyaki chef, she begins to see her current life as the result of a series of bad decisions.

Evelyn soon comes to the devastating realization that she has not accomplished anything significant. Her marriage to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is on the rocks. Her relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is, well, hardly joyful. Overall, her life seems to be a complete failure.

Where I identify most with Evelyn's identity struggle is in her role as a parent.

My husband and I are from Taiwan. We met and married while studying in Germany. After graduation, I left my career to support my husband's work, moving from country to country and city to city.

When I became a mother, I received a call from God to become a home-schooling mother. I enjoyed living with my husband around the world and savored every moment I spent with my children in homeschool.

I am thankful for God's blessings in my family and marriage. But occasionally, in the quiet of the night, I have wondered what my life would have been like if I was not married and if I had not become a mother. There are times when I miss experiencing the passion for the political ideals I held as a student.

Yet, I stand by my choice to give up my career and homeschool my children. As Evelyn’s life reminds me, choosing to serve others by achieving “nothing” in a world that pursues upward mobility requires a deep love and a ...

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