by | Jan 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Even after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, evangelical activists see a bigger fight to change Americans’ minds on abortion.
Catholic activist Nellie Gray organized the first March for Life in 1974 to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. Fifty years later, even after the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, pro-life activists don’t feel like their work is done.
After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the organizers of the national march, which is considered the largest annual pro-life gathering in the world, “thought that it was possible last year that we’d have a little bit less of a crowd,” Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, told Christianity Today.
“And much to my delight, that was wrong. We had a really big crowd last year, a very energized crowd, and we anticipate nothing less this year.”
Days before the 2024 event, an arctic blast sweeping much of the US blanketed Washington, DC, closing area schools and delaying flights for the thousands of participants traveling to the capital. Friday’s forecast projects another dusting of snow.
But pro-life organizers don’t expect the inclement weather to deter turnout: They estimate the crowd could be 100,000 people. The crowd will draw from student campus activists, worshipers from evangelical and Catholic churches, staff from pro-life nonprofits, and volunteers from all over the country.
“We’re proud to be there every year en masse, you know, showing the nation that this generation rejects abortion and that we’re moving forward in our mission in this post-Roe world,” Kristan Hawkins, founder and president of Students for Life of America, told CT.
Hawkins anticipates more conversations this year about the pro-life movement’s goals moving forward, particularly …
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by | Jan 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Atlantic journalist’s portrait of a fractured movement chooses lament over axe-grinding.
Donald Trump might pose problems for established political norms, but he has been a godsend for book publishers. In the years encompassing Trump’s first campaign, election, inauguration, tumultuous term as president, second campaign, and unprecedented response to defeat in 2020, dozens of books have been written about the relationship between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump’s populist politics.
The latest of these is Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. A journalist for The Atlantic, Alberta combines memoir and research, drawing on his upbringing in and familiarity with the evangelical tradition to interrogate what historian Thomas Kidd describes as “a movement in crisis.”
This crisis is both political and personal. It is political in that white evangelicals have been the steadiest base of support for the least outwardly faithful president in half a century, at the alleged expense of their prior platitudes about morality and ethics being central to public service. But, as Alberta explains, it is also deeply personal, leading to rifts in families, communities, and congregations.
As the title hints, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is organized into three sections, each focusing on a different element of the evangelical movement and its evolution over the last decade in response to changing political tides. Alberta crisscrosses the country visiting churches and political rallies, interviewing pastors and activists, and trying to make sense of what he sees as too many evangelicals sacrificing a Christian approach to the political world at the altar of power. The result is a book that is well resourced and eminently readable, …
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by | Jan 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
As young people become more accepting of abortion, pro-life ministries encourage pastors to talk about sex and unplanned pregnancies.
When Eliora found out she was pregnant in 2021, she didn’t tell her church community as she felt ashamed about getting pregnant outside of marriage. Instead, she started researching abortion on the internet. When she told her partner, whom she was not in a committed relationship with, he gave her a list of abortion clinics in the area.
Eliora, 29, was also unsure about her church’s stance on abortion, as she had never heard the topic talked about from the pulpit or in small group. Two weeks later, she terminated the pregnancy, thinking it was the most logical choice. (CT agreed to use only her first name due to the sensitivity around abortion in Singapore.)
However, what she thought was a one-off decision soon plunged her into overwhelming guilt. “Deep down, I just had this sense that if it is a life, then I have killed something. It just felt wrong,” Eliora said. “I wish that my [church] community was a space [where] I felt safe to reach out for help.”
Stories like Eliora’s are not uncommon in Singapore, where abortion is a largely taboo topic in the church. At the same time, Singapore has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world due to the country’s former family planning policies in the ’70s. Abortion is legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and not restricted by age. Minors do not need to obtain parental consent to get an abortion.
While the number of abortions in Singapore has halved in the past decade—likely due to the increased use of contraceptives and the growing acceptance of single mothers—approval of abortion has increased in the younger generations, including among Christians. A third of Christians between the ages of 18 to 35 believe abortion …
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by | Jan 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Facile expectations hurt everyone in the process, including my new son.
A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, after putting my three kids to bed one night, I streamed a National Theatre production of Jane Eyre while squeezing in some exercise on our stationary bike. A chill crept through me as I found myself identifying not with Jane but with her vindictive aunt, who unwillingly becomes Jane’s adoptive mother.
I was horrified to share Mrs. Reed’s resentment toward Jane for being an outsider, an intruder, a bringer-of-problems. This was the same sentiment I found myself fighting daily toward our five-year-old adopted son, whom we’d welcomed into our family over a year prior. Watching my own feelings manifested on screen in Mrs. Reed—a villain—brought home to me how defective my moral compass had become.
As a child who always wanted to make the world a better place, I’d taken to heart the value that Christians, from the early church to modern American evangelicals, have placed on care for orphans. And the way adoption was portrayed in sermons and the Christian books I read was universally positive: Adoption was a metaphor for God grafting us into God’s family (Rom. 8:14–17, Eph. 1:5); adoption met a crucial need; adoption was a beautiful act of love. Being a gregarious evangelist or an on-my-knees prayer warrior might not be my strength, but welcoming a child I could do.
When I started dating my future husband, I had just returned from a summer volunteering with disabled children in a Chinese orphanage. Adoption was always part of how we envisioned we would build our family and extend God’s capacious love to kids in need.
After getting married and having two biological children, with my medical training finally complete and our lives relatively …
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by | Jan 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
Officially, the country protects religious liberties better than most in the region. On the ground, it’s more complicated.
Rodrigo is a Christian fisherman who lives with his wife in the department of Chocó, a jungle region near the border Colombia shares with Panama and one of the wettest regions on earth.
Due to its remoteness, the town does not have paved streets, and the presence of police and other Colombian authorities is scarce. Residents primarily travel the mighty Atrato, Baudó, and San Juan Rivers by motor boat, and Rodrigo supports his family by selling gas, as reported by Open Doors, which first told his story.
Despite the seeming necessity of his business, Rodrigo and his family are isolated. The majority indigenous community in the area where the family lives has rejected them because of their faith and have socially and economically excluded them due to their refusal to participate in the animistic rituals that are common among the natives. This isolation has also made Rodrigo vulnerable to the regionally dominant guerrilla and paramilitary groups, who periodically threaten to shut down his business if he doesn’t pay extortion fees—a crime present in the whole country but that affects Christian in a special way.
Rodrigo’s story encapsulates two of the biggest reasons Colombia has been the most dangerous country in South America in which to be a Christian over the last five years, according to Open Doors’ World Watch List (WWL). On this year’s list of the most difficult places to be a Christian, the country ranks No. 34 globally. So how did a nation with a long democratic tradition and a Catholic majority become one of the most precarious places for believers in the Western Hemisphere?
Much of Colombia’s notorious violence dates back to 1948, when the liberal presidential candidate …
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