by | Sep 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
A group of evangelical broadcasters who hosted Donald Trump at their national conference earlier this year are suing the Internal Revenue Service over the so-called Johnson Amendment, a tax law that bars nonprofits from supporting political candidates.
Lawyers for the National Religious Broadcasters, along with two Baptist churches and a conservative group called Intercessors for America, argue in their suit that the ban on engaging in politics restricts their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They further argue that the IRS ignores the politicking of some charities, while threatening to punish others.
In particular, lawyers for the groups claim that newspapers and other news outlets that have become nonprofits in recent years, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, endorse candidates. Why can’t churches or other Christian groups, they want to know, do the same?
“Plaintiffs believe that nonprofit newspapers have a clear constitutional right to make such endorsements or statements,” read the complaint filed Wednesday in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. “Plaintiffs simply contend that they should also have the same freedom of speech.”
The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that has long been the bane of conservative groups and, in particular, preachers seeking to become more involved in politics. The ban on taking sides in campaigns—including endorsements or campaign contributions—applies to nonprofits that fall under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code.
For years Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, organized “pulpit freedom” Sundays designed to have preachers violate IRS rules by endorsing candidates from the pulpit. As president, Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to give more leeway under IRS rules.
The current lawsuit pitches its argument toward similar religious freedom principles. “For too long, churches have been instructed to remain silent on pressing matters of conscience and conviction during election season or risk their 501(c)(3) status,” said NRB President Troy A. Miller in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
But the growing number of nonprofit newsrooms has added a new twist to the arguments over the Johnson Amendment that has to do with fairness. Those newsrooms, the complaint argues, should be required to abide by the same rules as other charities.
“Hundreds of newspapers are organized under § 501(c)(3), and yet many openly endorse political candidates,” lawyers for NRB and its co-plaintiff argued in their complaint. “Others make statements about political candidates that constitute forbidden statements under the IRS’ interpretation of the statutory prohibition against supporting or opposing candidates.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, with about 450 member organizations, including RNS, does not accept members that endorse candidates.
“Nonprofit news organizations do not endorse candidates and, under IRS guidelines, should not favor any candidate for public office in coverage or other action,” the INN’s guidelines for members state.
Karen Rundlet, the CEO and executive director of the INN, told RNS in an email that grants made to nonprofits often bar those funds from being used for political activity.
The complaint points specifically to the Inquirer’s candidate endorsements, as well as articles critical of candidates in other nonprofit publications from 2012 to the present, claiming all violated IRS rules with impunity.
While nonprofit newspapers such as the Salt Lake Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times no longer make political endorsements, the Inquirer does, in part because it has a different ownership structure.
“The Philadelphia Inquirer is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, but the newspaper remains a for-profit public-benefit corporation,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, told RNS in an email. “As a for-profit entity, The Philadelphia Inquirer is permitted to publish political endorsements, as it has for decades. It does so following thoughtful research on candidate policy positions, qualifications, integrity, and track record.”
In their complaint, lawyers for the NRB and its fellow plaintiffs said that, despite the Inquirer’s structure, dollars from a nonprofit are funding political endorsements.
A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The NRB did not respond to a series of questions from RNS about the lawsuit.
Darryll K. Jones, a professor of law at Florida A&M University who blogs about nonprofit law, agrees that the IRS is allowing the Lenfest Institute to “have its cake and eat it too,” he said by email.
“Other exempt charities can farm out their political speech to subsidiary organizations without diminishing their tax-exempt efforts,” he said. “Churches cannot do so because farming out political activity necessarily diminishes or even precludes the accomplishment of the church’s tax-exempt and (oh, by the way) constitutionally protected effort.”
If the IRS refused to bite on ADF’s pulpit actions, said Jones, it is because the IRS likely knows the Johnson Amendment would not hold up on constitutional grounds. On their part, many nonprofits appreciate the rule, Jones said, because the restriction keeps them out of politics.
“They can say, look, we’re not going to be involved in that. We’re not going to be involved in politics. We are out here to do our charitable deeds, and we don’t want to be on one side or the other,” Jones said.
Jones believes courts are likely to dismiss most of the NRB’s claims, especially its due process and equal protection assertions, which he said obscure the main point of their lawsuit.
But, he said, “Once you get through all the unnecessary weeds, the complaint makes a legally irresistible argument, the logic of which can’t possibly be avoided.”
He added that politicking by nonprofits would likely have negative outcomes. “Everybody’s going to do it, and then there’ll be sort of a race to the bottom,” he said.
A 2019 survey from Pew Research found that Americans would prefer to keep religion and politics separate. Nearly two-thirds (63%) want houses of worship to stay out of politics, while three-quarters (76%) say churches and other congregations should not endorse candidates.
The NRB hosted Donald Trump at its annual convention in Nashville this past February, where the former president promised to return Christians to power if elected for a second term. Before Trump spoke, Miller told those in the audience that the group was hosting a presidential forum and that the speakers did not represent the official views of the NRB.
The former president appealed to religious broadcasters to join his side.
“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told a gathering of National Religious Broadcasters at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center.
The post Evangelical Broadcasters Sue Over IRS Ban on Political Endorsements appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 4, 2024 | Uncategorized
How do Christians live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control?
In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book titled Uncommon Ground. Our project convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect—as the subtitle said—on how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference. Since then, however, I’ve rephrased the question for my own work. We should be faithful, yes, but also neighborly. And our world is not just host to real difference of belief; it’s also a world we don’t control.
I owe this subtle but important reframing to my friendship and work with Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America. The most important interfaith organization in the country, Interfaith America does not advance a soupy multiculturalism that pretends that all roads lead to heaven or that our differences don’t matter. It takes religious particularity seriously, identifies conflicts and tensions created by that particularity, and works to find common ground across religious differences.
I met Eboo nearly a decade ago. On that first meeting, we talked about the challenges of having young kids, busy travel schedules, and public writing commitments, as well as the importance of interfaith cooperation. Since then, we’ve spoken, taught, written, and built together.
As a Muslim, Eboo does not believe in the saving work of Jesus Christ—and that difference between us is no small thing. We have other differences too: Eboo tells more stories than I do. I drink alcohol, and he doesn’t. His language is usually more colorful than mine. We are friends in spite of our differences.
What does this kind of friendship have to do with Christian engagement in the world? Almost everything.
My question of how Christians can live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control is the interfaith question. It asks how we can be fellow citizens, coworkers, and friends with people who do not share our belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This question has become increasingly important in a cultural context where Christians are too often seen as self-interested and unconcerned for our neighbors of other faiths and no faith, in our politics and in our personal lives.
There’s nothing relativistic or wishy-washy about the interfaith question posed this way—nothing to suggest we should water down our beliefs or pretend they don’t matter. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas often says that few statements are more incoherent than “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that is just my personal opinion.” The gospel is either true for the entire created order or a lie that has captured the hearts and minds of fools (1 Cor. 15:12-19).
The universal truth of the gospel compels me to want all to come to know it, Eboo included. But I’m also convinced that the gospel is best advanced through persuasion, not coercion or control. Eboo knows I want him to become a Christian. He also knows I believe his conversion doesn’t depend on me—and that our friendship doesn’t depend on his conversion.
Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith, and the Spirt is the one who convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. As a Christian, my calling is not to force people into our faith but to live faithfully as their good neighbor. It is to bear witness to God’s story unfolding in creation.
That can include partnering graciously with those who do not see things as we do. In my work as a law and religion scholar, I have often advocated for greater liberty for others to live according to their own faith commitments, even though this increases their opportunities to advance beliefs and practices I find false and misguided.
For his part, Eboo wants to help Christians be better Christians. He doesn’t believe Jesus is Lord, but he does—just as Jesus promised—recognize Christians when we are behaving like Jesus’ disciples (John 13:34–35). He believes that when American Christians love God, love our neighbors, and demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit, all Americans benefit.
I have my own interests in this partnership. I want to destigmatize interfaith among evangelicals leery of the word by demonstrating that Christians can hold our convictions firmly and partner generously with non-Christians across many domains: friendship, advocacy, religious freedom, charitable services, education, and more. And I want to help show the interfaith community that evangelicals—especially younger ones—are eager for these partnerships.
One of my initiatives with Eboo, which this essay serves to announce, is called Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy. For the past two years, we’ve cultivated friendship and trust among a group of people whose voices collectively offer a counternarrative to the assumptions of the Christian and post-Christian right and an increasingly dechurched and unchurched left. We believe Christians can be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens with those who don’t share our faith—and that we can do so within the fullness of our Christian identity.
This is the first of a series of essays at CT which will explore what that means between now and Election Day. Each essayist believes that the reality of an interfaith America provides anopportunity for Christians to engage our neighbors with confidence and compassion. It is an opportunity to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:1–2, NASB).
As I wrote in Uncommon Ground, “Many of our differences matter a great deal, and to suggest otherwise is ultimately a form of relativism.” The Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy essay series will not minimize our differences. “But we can still choose to be gracious across those differences. When we demonize the other side, we miss important insights that can only be learned through charitably understanding a different perspective. We lose the possibility of finding common ground,” which in turn means losing chances to advance common interests and bridge relational distances.
My friendship with Eboo is one example of how we can find common ground with others despite real differences in our understanding of the common good. My hope is that in the years to come, this kind of friendship will become commonplace among my fellow Christians. And my prayer is that the essays that follow in this series will encourage and equip evangelicals in our diverse democracy as they ask what it means to be a good and faithful neighbor.
John Inazu is a law professor at Washington University. His most recent book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024). He serves on the board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and Interfaith America.
Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.
The post How to Find Common Ground When You Disagree About the Common Good appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
On a recent Sunday morning, Gateway Church, one of the largest nondenominational megachurches in the United States, sprang to life.
Golf carts ferried people from distant parking spaces to the front door. The airport-terminal-sized campus in Southlake, just outside of Dallas, filled with people.
They purchased coffees from the café in the lobby, and children played in the two-story indoor playground. In the service, cameras on booms dipped to grab shots over the crowd as the worship band led the congregation in Gateway Worship’s top single, “Who Else.”
They sang out, “Who else is worthy? Who else is worthy? There is no one, only You, Jesus.”
The words that are universally true for Christians may seem especially true in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, as the area is called, which has seen a string of at least eight pastors step down from megachurches in the past few months over moral failings, mostly sexual in nature. The leaders oversee at least 50,000 in-person churchgoers.
In June, Gateway’s founder and senior pastor, Robert Morris, resigned following a report of his repeatedly molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s. Other Gateway leaders have also left in the aftermath, including Morris’s son James Morris, who was planning to succeed his father as leader of the megachurch.
The week of this particular worship service, there was more fallout: Gateway asked another one of its executive pastors, Kemtal Glasgow, to resign after an undisclosed “moral failing” that the church said was not related to Morris’s alleged abuse.
The eight departed pastors include prominent names like Morris and popular preacher and Bible study author Tony Evans, and in three other cases, pastors were arrested for sexual crimes. The size of the churches magnifies the damage to local congregants, North Texas churchgoers told CT, and the series of failings hangs over everyday conversations about church.
Attendees were hesitant to go on the record, but several told CT how they felt hurt, angry, and unsure whether to stay at their churches. Meanwhile, remaining pastors, some of whom CT interviewed, were angry and shocked themselves. They sought to counsel distraught congregants, fill the leadership voids, navigate communicating developments in investigations, and figure out how to restore trust between churchgoers and church leaders.
Megachurches often describe themselves as a “refuge” from bad church experiences, according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research director Scott Thumma, who has researched megachurches for decades. The founder of the Vineyard movement, John Wimber, described his church as “a second-marriage church” of “refugees from various religious systems.”
On this Sunday morning in late August, Gateway acknowledged that the thousands of worshipers might be upset, triggered, and questioning whether to leave the church or even their faith.
In early August, Gateway entered 40 days of prayer and fasting, including praying for anyone “wounded by any form of abuse … that God would bring his comfort.” Author and pastor Max Lucado has taken over as the interim pastor of Gateway, although he remains a preaching pastor at his longtime church in San Antonio, Oak Hills Church. On Sunday at Gateway, he prayed for the congregation processing abuse from its leadership.
“Do not allow the evil one to lead anyone away,” he prayed. “Protect that precious heart that is already fragile … protect these young people … protect those souls who have been triggered, whose memories have been stirred. May they hear you say, ‘I am with you, I am with you to the end of the age.’”
“I beg your blessing on the metroplex,” he added, praying against the “principalities and powers” that have “darkened the clouds over this region.”
The list of local churches with leaders failing over the summer is long.
In June, Evans resigned from the megachurch he founded, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, after admitting to an undisclosed sin.
“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” he told Oak Cliff. Since his resignation, Evans has not shared further details of what happened.
Stonebriar Community Church, founded by Chuck Swindoll, fired one of its longtime associate pastors in July after an undisclosed “moral failure.”
Three other pastors of large churches were arrested. The senior pastor of North Dallas Community Bible Fellowship, Terren Dames, was arrested in May for soliciting a prostitute, and the church fired him. The founding pastor of Koinonia Christian Church, Ronnie Goines, was arrested for sexual assault in late July. Lakeside Baptist Church’s youth pastor, Luke Cunningham, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child after church leaders learned he had been accused of abuse at a previous church and reported him to police.
In late July, Josiah Anthony, lead pastor of the megachurch Cross Timbers Church, resigned for actions that were “inappropriate and hurtful” to church staff, elders of the megachurch said in a statement. They later added that they learned he had a pattern of inappropriate communication—sometimes sexual—with women in the church and on staff.
Executive pastor Byron Copeland took over as interim lead pastor at Cross Timbers but then, a few weeks later, he abruptly resigned. Copeland was a former pastor at Gateway, and a staffer there had previously accused him of pressuring her to drop her complaints of a hostile work environment under a different pastor.
It feels like an avalanche to Dallas churchgoers.
“It’s strangely localized and time-bound. I don’t know how to account for that,” said Rob Collingsworth at Criswell College in Dallas, who is plugged into Baptist church circles through his work with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The churches involved in these scandals are either nondenominational or part of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some locals have talked about the rapid spate of pastor removals as a spiritual attack, but Collingsworth said that could lead to the perception that victims reporting abuses are the source of the evil. He sees the cascade of events as a “righteous pulling back of the curtain. … [Would we] be better off with Robert Morris still in the pulpit?”
Still, Collingsworth knows that these pastoral failings could shake faith in the church as an institution. He and his wife have friends at Gateway who are considering finding a new church, but the friends don’t know where to go because they “don’t know who to trust.”
Because megachurches are such a feature of evangelicalism in Dallas, with their massive campuses visible when driving around many parts of the city, a crisis can affect a large segment of the Christian community. It’s like if Ford has a crisis in Detroit, “everybody is affected,” said Dustin Messer, the vicar of All Saints Dallas, an Anglican congregation downtown.
“We get folks coming from other churches who have been wounded,” he said. “Every week.”
For the fall, All Saints is planning a course for people who are coming to their church from church hurt.
“This is happening at a high tide of institutional distrust in American culture, anyway, and a low tide of measured social capital,” said Nathaniel Strenger, a psychologist in Dallas who has a theology degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. When people are detaching from churches because they don’t feel safe, he added, “you’ve got more and more isolated individuals.” Then those individuals turn to mental health professionals for emotional support instead of their churches, he said.
One local megachurch pastor who wished not to be named, to protect the privacy of people coming to his church, said his church had received “hurt people” from these other churches after the crises.
“They are a little more skeptical about me, the leadership at our church, than they were before,” he said. “And I don’t blame them a bit.”
The pastor also said he felt like everyone had some culpability for a church culture that embraces leaders who are focused on “fame instead of faithfulness. … It’s setting people up for failure.”
After the lead pastor of Cross Timbers resigned, Toby Slough, the founding pastor, came back to the church to preach. He thanked the people who had the “courage … grace and integrity” to bring their concerns to the elders about the pastor: “I know that wasn’t easy.”
Slough acknowledged that the congregation was probably feeling sadness, shock, and anger. He said he was sad too.
“I’m grateful the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, aren’t you?” he said. “My prayer is that we would let unchanging truth be our guiding light, even when it doesn’t feel that way.”
And he said he understood the tendency to want to find another place to go to church.
“That would be easier,” he said. “I’m just asking you to hang with us in the months ahead. … We’re not going to act like this didn’t happen and move on. We’re going to give everybody time to grieve.” He read from Lamentations 3: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.”
While the fallout for congregations is significant—not to mention those directly mistreated and abused—churchgoers said they often feel relationally distant from the big personalities leading their churches.
Jim Denison was the senior pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church, a Dallas megachurch of about 10,000, until he left in 2009. He referred to himself as a “face up on the screen” and compared it to being a mayor of a small town or a president of a university.
The congregation didn’t have a close relationship with him, and he feels that, at some level, these senior pastors are replaceable.
And Dallas megachurches operate like large businesses, said Denison, who now leads the Denison Forum in Dallas. He sees church responses, which often include quick resignations and little explanation, as “fiduciary protection of the institution.”
“Dallas is only here because of banking during the frontier era and now oil,” he said. “It’s a very business-centric sort of context. As a result, everything is run in a business sense.”
That means these churches have resources and a sort of professionalism when it comes to dealing with a crisis. That could be used to cover up wrongdoing to protect the institution, but it also could be an asset, Denison said.
But when allegations are revealed in a slow drip, or multiple staff have moral failings, that creates a trust issue that “snowballs so fast,” he added.
When Denison was a megachurch pastor, his church discovered a staff member had embezzled a large sum of money, he said. Within a day, the church had a forensic accountant on the scene, a meeting with trustees and the finance committee, and a game plan. The church had a $14 million budget and a large staff, so it could handle the situation as a large business would.
“I was so grateful for the business sense that they brought, in terms of how to manage this crisis,” he said. “They realized far before I did that what we really would have would be a crisis of confidence. Can the church members trust us with their money?”
He said by “God’s grace” that attendance and giving didn’t drop as a result. But the church leadership also realized they couldn’t let it happen again.
“We had to bring in all new [financial] controls, and pray and ask God to keep us from having another failure in the same direction,” he said. “The mistake churches often make is they promise the same people will do it differently this time. … You have to bring in a different set of people who already bring their credibility into the room.”
But there’s a balance: Denison thinks that megachurches must do a better job of making sure a business culture doesn’t overwhelm a ministry culture, and that they have pastors who can keep the focus on the life of the church.
The bottom line is that the way a megachurch handles a crisis matters, and a congregation could respond with more unity after a crisis rather than with distrust.
Lakeside Baptist Church has about 1,400 in attendance on a Sunday, a little smaller than the 2,000 that researchers consider a megachurch. The news of abuse allegations against Lakeside’s youth pastor “blindsided” the church staff, said Malcolm Yarnell, a teaching pastor there and a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“It was, to say the least, the most difficult month or two of any of the church staff’s experience,” Yarnell said. The church is a member of MinistrySafe, an abuse prevention training program, but Yarnell said they are planning to beef up their policies. The church also stated that if the SBC had a working database for abuse offenders, “we would likely have never been exposed to Mr. Cunningham.”
The Sunday after alerting police about Cunningham, Lakeside gave a report to the congregation on what happened. A few days later, leaders met with youth and their parents.
They had pastors and professional counselors present to answer questions and talk through trauma, related to this incident or not. Yarnell said the response was positive, even though everyone was shocked.
It helped that Cunningham’s alleged crime happened at another church, and no one had reported abuse at Lakeside. But Yarnell said the church would be prepared to address that openly if it did come up.
“What hurts the congregation is when the church leadership doesn’t come forward and put everything on the table,” said Yarnell. “Healing begins with the truth. It cannot begin any other way than with the truth. … True pastors must protect the flock even at cost to their own lives.”
The post Deep in the Heart of Megachurch Country, Dallas Mourns a Summer of Pastor Scandals appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
I’ve been in the pro-life movement for 40 years. My wife founded the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center (ACPC) in 1984 and later chaired the national umbrella group for such centers, Care Net. I chaired the ACPC for a while and later chaired meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, DC.
We’ve also personally helped unmarried women unhappily surprised by pregnancy. One lived with us for nine months, during which time she gave birth. Another got married in our living room and also gave birth, although happily not in our living room. In 1988, 1992, 2021, and 2023, I produced four pro-life books on the history of abortion.
That personal history is why I don’t lightly say that much of the pro-life movement has lost its way. First Things recently opined, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a great victory for the pro-life cause.” No, it wasn’t: The number of abortions is apparently rising. Dobbs was a great opportunity for the pro-life movement to show our recognition that unwanted pregnancies are hard.
They are especially hard the small percentage of the time that rape or incest are involved, but they are hard all the time. A truly compassionate pro-life perspective shows that children need protection and their parents need support. But instead of emphasizing both, some politicians have talked so tough that it seemed pro-lifers might treat miscarriages as crime scenes.
Many pro-lifers failed to understand the mourning on the other side: 50 years of reproductive rights down the tubes. Some women had come to believe that the only way they could prosper in our society was through unfettered access to abortion. It was hard for many to imagine how they could flourish without it.
Pro-lifers had an opportunity to help women imagine meaningful lives even with unexpected babies. Our side should have acknowledged that Dobbs was scary to many women. We could have built a movement to support more generous family policies. Instead, many pro-lifers went for force first.
With Dobbs liberating states to legislate as they saw fit, some pro-life advocates competed to see who could back the toughest laws. Some pro-lifers in Oklahoma and elsewhere wanted women who had abortions to be charged with murder. The result was a transformation of popular narrative from concern for the unborn and their mothers to a thirst for power and control.
Some politicians used harsh language and aimed their scorn at abortion-minded women. Specific hard cases cast pro-life activists as hard-hearted. A half-century of pro-life understanding—you can’t save babies unless you love their mothers—evaporated. I sympathize with the desire to win big, but I’m also a reporter willing to acknowledge uncomfortable technological and political realities.
Today’s technological reality is that two-thirds of abortions occur via abortion pills, often ingested at home rather than in abortion centers. Closing down those centers is more and more like shuttering pornography stores rendered irrelevant by streaming services. Stopping pills by law would require opening mail, frisking visitors, and going after senders based in states (like New York and Massachusetts) that offer them legal immunity. Convincing parents, one by one and two by two, not to kill their unborn babies, is more important than ever.
The political reality is of two kinds. The obvious problem is that the identification of pro-life belief with former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party remade in his image has been a public opinion disaster. Some can write off polls as irrelevant when lives are at stake, but Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
The problem of pledging allegiance to an unethical leader doubled in my state of Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton, impeached following allegations of corruption and bribery, is the best-known pro-life spokesman.He fought Kate Cox, then the 31-year-old mother of two who sought an undesired abortion in an exceptionally hard case. Chasing her out of Texas was only a pro-life win in the style of an ancient saying, “One more victory and we are undone.”
The second problem, more complex than individual nastiness, is the denial of the reality that although God does not judge by appearances, most Americans do. The closer unborn children are to birth—the more they look like born children—the more their protection has broad support. Most Americans support abortion early in pregnancy, but only 22 percent nationally support its legality during the third trimester.
Instead of thinking like Lincoln and building off where pro-life support is greatest, some pro-life leaders are campaigning against in vitro fertilization, which produces the very earliest unborn children. The tiny ones deserve protection, but that’s the hardest case to make in terms of public opinion, especially since many couples turn to IVF over their inability to have children otherwise.
The overarching mistake is a default position of compelling rather than convincing. We’ve seen the results of that before. In the early 1990s, after Operation Rescue physically kept women from entering abortion centers, the willingness to identify as “pro-life” cratered in public opinion polls, and the number of US abortions was at an all-time high: 1.6 million.
The meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington that I chaired during that period featured fierce debates and some rethinking. On one side were “all or nothing” advocates. On the other were “all or something” proponents, who supported legislation to protect as many unborn children as possible, given public opinion, but emphasized helping to change hearts.
Many groups came to embrace the all-or-something approach. With technological help through an increased use of ultrasound, with much prayer, with God’s mercy, the number of abortions fell during Bill Clinton’s second term, throughout George Bush’s two terms, and throughout Barack Obama’s two terms.
The number apparently increased during the Trump term. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has decreased in some states but has evidently increased overall, with abortion pills leading the way.
That brings us to the current dilemma many pro-life voters face. Donald Trump has now sidelined the pro-life convictions he opportunistically expressed. He returned to his earlier acceptance of abortion and told his Truth Social audience that he favors “reproductive rights.”
And the Democratic Party is no haven for jilted pro-lifers.
While Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in her acceptance speech moved to the center on many questions, she moved to the left on abortion. Much as Dobbs fueled a triumphalism on the pro-life side, seven straight victories on state referenda concerning abortion have excited abortion supporters—and more referenda are on the ballot two months from now. As The New York Times reported, Democrats have “recast Republicans as the party of control and theirs as the party of freedom.”
So the final hard reality is that American pro-lifers do not have a party. But we can still remind both parties of what the Democrats’ 1968 presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, said: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
For Democrats, that will require a reminder of what could have been. Until the Roe decision in 1973, leading Democrats included unborn children within Humphrey’s moral test. When my friend Nellie Gray started in 1974 what began the annual March for Life in Washington, she knocked on the doors of Ted Kennedy and others and initially expected to receive support. They demurred, but at first did so with words like those that became the title of the best book on abortion by a pro-choice writer, Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow.
Democrats did not always link abortion with virtue and opportunity. They could return to the Clinton mantra of the 1990s: Instead of seeing abortion as victory, they could defend its legality but work to make it “rare.” If they want to be a “party of freedom,” they could strive to reduce the sense of “necessity.” Part of that means working with pro-life pregnancy resource centers, not harassing them.
For Republicans, many of whom still consider themselves pro-life, a recognition of “sorrow” leads to greater moral sympathy and economic creativity. They should advocate cultural and economic changes that make more women and men feel it possible to have and raise a baby well.
One of my favorite pro-life leaders in American history, Mary Gould Hood, graduated 150 years ago from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She moved to Minneapolis and became a founding doctor at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. She also practiced at the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children,the first hospital to be staffed by female physicians an all-woman board of 50 directors.
Hood and many other late-19th century pro-life doctors, including Elizabeth Blackwell, Rachel Brooks Gleason, Alice Bunker Stockham, Prudence Saur, Jennie Oreman, and Mary Melendy, labored for decades to do exactly what we need to do now: show how it’s possible to have and raise a baby well, whether the mother is married (a great positive) or not.
Hood eventually moved to Boston and joined the executive committees of New England Baptist Hospital and Vincent Memorial Hospital. She culminated her 40 years in pro-life work by publishing in 1914 For Girls and the Mothers of Girls: A Book for the Home and the School Concerning the Beginnings of Life.
“What experience can be more sacred, or more marvelous, than that of the mother who understands that a new human has begun within her,” she wrote. “Motherhood brings with it cares and responsibilities, but it also brings the greatest of earthly joys.”
That’s what today’s pro-life movement needs to convey, not by might but by light that can illuminate an inner and outer glow.
Marvin Olasky is a writer and columnist for the Discovery Institute and Religion Unplugged. He is also the co-author of The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.
The post Triumphalism After Dobbs Was a Mistake appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
I always assumed my sons would go to college. My husband and I were indelibly formed by our own college years of deep reading, endless discussion, and applying what we’d learned in the classroom to our faith and the world. University life helped us grow toward being “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), renewed for the service of God (Rom. 12:2). I expected my children would begin adulthood the same way.
But in his junior year of high school, our oldest son announced his plan to work in the trades. It caught me off guard, and my husband and I needed more than a few discussions to come around. My husband is the first member of his immediate family to have earned a college degree. After one generation, I thought, were we already going backward?
Our son didn’t see his decision that way. Being at home during the pandemic had meant seeing his parents working on their computers while he did school on his, and the experience made him rethink college.
The more we talked, it became clear that he was serious—and so were his plans. That year, he worked with a professional carpenter to build docks for his rowing team. The next summer, he started working for a local renovation company where, three years later, he’s a full-time carpenter himself. By the time our younger son made the same announcement as a high school sophomore, we rolled with it.
So I’ve become the mother of two members of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed the “toolbelt generation,” and I’ve come to see why this path makes sense for Gen Z. Lately, it’s seemed like all the news about college has been negative: The price tag is too high. Graduates leave with debt it’ll take decades to repay—and they might not even find a job in their field of study. Enrollment is declining. Many of the kids who are in school aren’t sure why. And many campuses have been hijacked by over-politicized rhetoric, if not outright violence.
In that context, it’s unsurprising that more and more high school graduates are deciding the university is not for them. But what about the spiritual needs of young people going into the trades? While skilled labor itself can be spiritually and morally formational, my sons want Christian discipleship that acknowledges the importance of their vocational path—and I believe churches need to meet the unique spiritual needs of this growing population in their congregations.
My younger son plans to do HVAC work for at least a year, but he may still go to college because he wants to go to seminary someday. We’ve started looking into schools that offer some sort of liberal arts education alongside training in the trades, and we’ve learned that Christian options are multiplying.
In fact, as Nathaniel Marshall—a plumber by trade who writes on Substack at The Blue Scholar—has detailed, there’s a new wealth of Christian trades programs. Marshall maintains a list of high school and post–high school educational options, many of which come with the promise that by the time a student graduates, they will have learned how to think, paid back some or all of their minimal debt, and settled in a full-time job where they earn a living wage. Some of these schools are so new that they have their first cohort of students this coming fall or even next year.
That pairing of a liberal arts education in a Christian worldview with trades training or a heavy work-study program makes sense because, as Marshall argues, “blue collar work is not just the work of bodies: It is the work of whole persons.” It is, or at least can be, work “that recruits and forms my interior world,” “that orders the physical and social architecture around me,” “that has the potential to make me a better person by its dutiful practice,” and “that places me in God’s presence such that my work becomes prayer.”
One school on Marshall’s list particularly caught our attention for our younger son: the College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio. Its founder, Jacob Imam, believes that study of our faith and skilled labor are meant to be joined. “A deep love of study and work emerged from the heart of the Church; from the person of Jesus, the Word become carpenter,” he wrote this summer. “Our society cannot enjoy the goods of Christ without Christ himself.”
But what about our oldest, who’s still disinclined to pursue any higher education? My husband and I don’t want him to miss the spiritual formation that college offered us as young adults. We want him to “be transformed by the renewing of [his] mind,” and to “be able to test and approve what God’s … good, pleasing and perfect will” is (Rom. 12:2). Could this happen without college?
“The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake,” author Matthew B. Crawford said in a 2009 New York Times essay: “Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.”
To an extent, I’ve realized my question about spiritual formation outside of college is based in the same kind of mistake. I need to repent of being an education snob.
My oldest son is developing critical thinking in a community of like-minded people even though he’s not reading and discussing great literature or philosophy or history in the classroom. He’s renewing his mind while integrating his body in his work, and perhaps this is part of what it means to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). He isn’t discussing books with his coworkers, but they are having what Crawford calls “a sort of conversation in deed.”
As Marshall writes, such skilled labor “has the distinct capacity for integrating your entire being; its dutiful practice can (and will) train your morals, emotions, and intellect along with your senses and spirit; it makes you a dependable member of your family and wider community.”
A certain intelligence is born from paying close attention while doing work alongside others. Whether or not he can articulate it now, my son is learning to solve problems as he builds stairs, lays tile, and makes repairs both adeptly and efficiently. My son’s work community shows him the beauty of a neatly framed window. He learns the necessity of taking care—perhaps especially when he’s required to redo a task done wrong the first time. In many ways, his work helps him grow “in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).
Yet for all that, my concern about spiritual formation is not only educational snobbery, and Marshall’s vision of skilled work as a source of spiritual training may be an illusion if trades workers are left to figure it out alone, outside of Christian community. Unfortunately, churches full of people who assume—as I once did—that college is the default after high school may find it all too easy to overlook the toolbelt generation in favor of college-oriented ministry.
Growing from small tykes until they graduated high school, our sons received teaching and mentorship in our church’s children’s ministry program and youth group. But since he became a bona fide adult in the workforce, our oldest hasn’t had the same dedicated support. He found he didn’t fit into the church’s “college-aged” bucket because he wasn’t in school. Young adults who don’t go to college, who live on their own and support themselves, navigate the world and their faith very differently from their student peers.
Thankfully, our oldest stumbled into the community he needed in one of our church’s small groups made up of 25- to 30-somethings. Though he’s younger than the rest, they quickly pulled him in for the kind of discipleship and mentorship, even friendship, we’d been praying he’d find. Congregations with Zoomers entering the trades should intentionally pursue this model for discipling a cohort of young people who otherwise might drift out of a church that seems to have no place for them.
As Gen Z increasingly takes up the toolbelt over the textbook, the church must be ready for that shift. While there’s potential for healthy formation in our oldest son’s work community, our prayer is that he will remain connected to the body of Christ. He needs not just skills and knowledge but the knowledge that comes from the love of God (1 Cor. 8:1–2). He needs a distinctly Christian community to speak into his life and work. He needs the church.
Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basement on Substack.
The post Christian Formation for the ‘Toolbelt Generation’
appeared first on Christianity Today.
