The concerns raised are serious and, in important respects, legitimate. Yet the statement’s imprecise terminology and unexplained omissions weaken its effectiveness and risk obscuring the very issues it seeks to address.

There are also puzzling features of the document itself. The signatories are not listed and not all the Churches have published the statement on their official websites. This contrasts with a similar statement issued by the Patriarchs in 2006, which was signed, more carefully framed, and explicitly directed against extreme forms of Christian Zionism—those that undermine the possibility of a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That earlier statement at least suggested that not all Christian Zionisms were identical.

The core concerns of the 2026 statement are legitimate. The current Israeli government includes religious Zionist figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who claim that Gaza and the West Bank belong to Israel and who envision the departure of Palestinians from these territories. Were such views to prevail, the likely outcome would be the disappearance of Arab Christian communities from the occupied territories. (Christian populations within Israel proper remain relatively stable.) These religious Zionist ideologies tend to make little distinction between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. Their strand of Jewish religious Zionism, drawing on the theology of figures such as Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, is also explicitly hostile to Christian presence in Israel. 

These concerns are intensified by the influence of American Christian Zionists, especially in the United States. Their political reach is substantial, and the appointment of a Christian Zionist such as Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador heightens fears that Jewish religious Zionists and foreign Christian Zionists together exercise disproportionate influence over policy affecting local Christian communities.

Yet if this alignment is the central concern, the statement raises questions it does not address. Why does it single out Christian Zionism while remaining silent about political Islamist ideologies that also seriously threaten Christian life and institutions across the region? Further, it falsely presumes all Christian Zionists hold the same theological and political views.

Figures such as Ihab Shlayan, an Armenian Christian Israeli Zionist, long-serving IDF officer, and chairman of The Israeli Christian Voice, illustrate the complexity the statement overlooks. Or the Jewish Catholic Zionist Yarden Zelivansky, also an IDF member who established the Association of Hebrew Catholics in Israel. Shlayan is connected to Israeli and American political actors but has not been endorsed by Armenian Church authorities. He may be resented for appearing to speak on behalf of Christian communities. This could explain the statement’s vague reference to unnamed “local individuals,” but it also underscores the diversity concealed by the term “Christian Zionism.”

This leads to the central difficulty: The term “Christian Zionism” is used far too broadly. It presents a flattened and misleading picture of a diverse phenomenon. There are many Christian Zionists, myself included, who reject extremist political agendas and support a two-state solution (but are open to other models). They are deeply concerned about the survival of Palestinian Christian communities, whether threatened by Israeli policies or mainly by the rise of political Islam. There are Anglican Zionists, like Gerald McDermott, who, like me, reject evangelical dispensationalism and work within a post-supersessionist theology. To classify all Christian Zionisms as “damaging ideologies” is both poor theology and obscures the big issues. 

A second major omission is the statement’s silence regarding Jewish–Christian theological developments, particularly post-supersessionist teaching within Churches represented by the Patriarchs themselves. By saying nothing about the Jewish people or about the theological legitimacy of Jewish attachment to the land, the statement risks alienating Jews and Christians committed to post-supersessionist theology. It leaves unanswered a fundamental question: Is there any legitimate place for Israel at all, or is Zionism—Jewish or Christian—understood solely as a project of colonization and empire-building? This silence is especially striking given that the Latin Church formally recognizes the State of Israel and consistently supports a two-state solution grounded in natural law. 

The situation in the Holy Land is complex and fragile. The statement rightly identifies genuine dangers facing Christian communities. But by employing imprecise language, overlooking crucial distinctions, and leaving key theological and political questions unresolved, it misses an opportunity for genuine peacemaking and bridge-building. Instead, it risks generating unnecessary controversy—fireworks that distract rather than illuminate—at a moment when clarity, nuance, and careful dialogue are urgently needed.

The post The Problem with the Jerusalem Statement Against Christian Zionism appeared first on First Things.

My first time there, I was surprised to see that so many of the laity were college students. Instead of partying or studying late, they walk over from Catholic University of America’s campus to the priory for Compline. While the lay people will go home and return to their usual routines, the Dominicans will be back for Lauds at 7 a.m. to begin the day, a day where the bell will toll four more times for the Liturgy of the Hours. In between, brothers rush off to classes on the second floor, consecrating their minds to everything from Latin to metaphysics, as each one will have read Aquinas’s entire Summa Theologiae before they are ordained to the priesthood.

How do I know all this? President Dominic Legge appointed me as the McDonald Agape visiting scholar, a position reserved for Protestants. What has caught me off guard is the way the Dominicans expect me to be a participant rather than a mere observer. I am lecturing in class (on Protestant theologians, no less), joining Thomistic conferences with some of today’s most erudite intellectuals, leading soirees over topics of my choice, and participating in their spiritual retreats for university students. I am used to Protestants saying “ready, aim, fire” if there’s a Catholic in sight, but here I encounter Dominicans not the least bit defensive, confident that if they have truth, it will show itself.

I expected to see Dominicans devoting themselves to Lectio Divina—reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating the Scriptures. I did not expect to see Dominicans traveling the world at a neck-breaking pace for the Thomistic Institute, engaging universities with the truths of Thomism. My son caught on quick. “Why is there a dog in the statue of St. Dominic outside?” he asked. “Well, we are called the barking dogs because we bark the gospel everywhere we go,” said Fr. Dominic Langevin. Ready to engage the intellectual life wherever they find it, they see the whole world as their stage.

The experience has given me hope. In the past, ecumenism often meant debating distinctives that date back to at least the sixteenth century. This exercise has not generally been fruitful. Imagine two men arm-wrestling in a pub, each staring at his opponent. Suddenly, a storm erupts, and its wind brings the four walls crashing down. They are so caught up in themselves they don’t even realize the house has collapsed around them.

What should happen instead? The arm-wrestlers must lock arms, only this time to rebuild the walls. Their strength is far more effective together. The storm of secularism has hit Christianity, bringing down its walls. On this side of modernity, it’s time to link arms and rebuild, although neither side must compromise its distinctives to do so.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants have tried to unite around their theological distinctives, which usually results in them being watered down. What we need is a common architect around which we can unite, one who is especially equipped with the metaphysical tools that can help us rebuild the walls of Christianity: Thomas Aquinas. Sadly, while Dominicans have been applying the metaphysics of Thomism to the culture for centuries, most Protestants today are not. If the walls that have fallen are First Principles, then Protestants desperately need the metaphysical tools of Thomism.

In a world of skepticism, Thomism believes theology is a science, an organized body of knowledge dependent on the principle of non-contradiction. In an age of materialism, Thomism believes not only in matter, but form and therefore can give every person hope that their body is informed by their soul (hylemorphism). In a culture rampant with nominalism, Thomism says that universals are real, explaining all the otherwise meaningless particulars of our everyday experience. In an era swept up in naturalism, Thomism believes in causality, capable as it is to move from our sense experience to a First Cause by which all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28), thereby infusing our lives with purpose, or telos. In a day of expressive individualism, Thomism puts forward a real distinction between our essence and existence, one that reminds us we are dependent on a Creator who is simple. And, perhaps most importantly, in a world in constant motion, subject as it is to potency and act, Thomism asserts that our security resides in one who is pure act. As the unactualized actualizer, he can direct the fluctuating course of history to its fulfillment.

If real ecumenism is to have a future, it must oscillate around the perennial metaphysics of Aquinas. First, Protestants must learn from the Dominican rule of life. After my experience with them is over, I will be applying its basic principles by starting Anselm House, a school of philosophy and theology through Trinity Anglican Seminary where its fellows consecrate themselves to contemplation for the formation of virtue, as well as participation in the liturgy at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church. What’s distinctive about Anselm House? It is classical, retrieving the ecumenical creeds. It is Thomistic, committed to Aquinas’s First Principles and his way of doing philosophy and theology. And it is Anglican, allegiant to the reformed catholicity of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer. If Stewart Clem is right that the twentieth century “was the golden age of Anglican Thomism,” then the story of Anglican Thomism in the twenty-first century has yet to be written. In a small way, Anselm House will turn the page to that next chapter.

Second, talking across battle lines is not enough; real partnerships must begin. I am linking arms with Tory Baucum, director of the Center for Family Life at Benedictine College, and Msgr. Stuart Swetland, president of Donnelly College. Together we will launch Aquinas KC, a school for Thomistic catechesis, whose genesis began when Archbishop Naumann tasked Tory Baucum to find a creative way to do Thomistic catechesis. When Tory met me, a Thomistic Protestant, that original idea took on flesh. Our first project is a conference at Donnelly in Kansas City, where Catholic and Protestant scholars will gather around Aquinas as their “common doctor” to answer objections to Christianity in the culture. Then, we will launch Thomistic Fellowship Circles modeled after Jacques Maritain. Christians from various traditions will embark on a five-year tour, beginning with Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, then his homilies and hymns, and eventually his philosophy and theology, all for the sake of sharing Thomistic wisdom with the world.

Many Protestants will keep arm-wrestling, even if the walls have collapsed. It’s time to start building.

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Our flight from reality has other and earlier ­sources, however. As Henry Vander Goot details in Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought, a great deal of modern theology has turned its back on God’s creative work. Theologians concede the task of analyzing reality to modern science, purporting to focus on the greater truth of salvation in Christ. The effect, Vander Goot argues, is acquiescence in a practical atheism beneath the veneer of a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Vander Goot’s nemesis is Karl Barth. Vander Goot argues that the great Swiss theologian overdetermined his thought in reaction to National Socialism. By Barth’s reckoning, German Christians were susceptible to blood and soil ideology, because they had already been seduced by “natural theology.” The notion of a created nomos paves the way for the perversion of a Volksnomos. Barth’s solution was to absorb creation into salvation history. From the very beginning, God was “saving” reality from the dark void of “nothingness.” In Vander Goot’s reading of Barth, redemption in Christ becomes the be-all and end-all of Christian revelation. In practical terms, this “Christomonism” means that theology does not contend with secular academic culture’s statements about everything else, ceding the terrain. Again, a practical atheism reigns.

As Vander Goot recognizes, there were deeper forces at work in twentieth-century theology than the crisis of National Socialism. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant claimed to solve the difficulties in Enlightenment theories of knowledge, which swung uneasily between dogmatic rationalism and despairing skepticism. Kant shifted the quest for certainty away from our perception of things, urging us to place our trust in the ways in which we analyze and synthesize our mental images of things. Put differently, according to Kant, we don’t know things “objectively.” To use his terminology, we can’t know the “thing-in-itself.” Rather, we know things rationally, which is to say in accord with reason’s a priori patterns, which impute cause and effect and other relations.

 Kant developed an elaborate technical vocabulary to describe these forms of understanding, but we need not be detained by the details. More important is the overall effect. After Kant, philosophical emphasis fell on how we think rather than on what the world is like. Very quickly, philosophers questioned Kant’s presumption that reason’s pre-set patterns are universal. Having articulated the project of modern idealism (the mind frames reality), Kant opened the way for the many modern reflections on how our thinking is shaped by historical, social, and psychological factors. 

Karl Barth’s theology had tremendous influence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He ­defended the “realism” of God’s revelation in Christ, which was an exciting break from liberal theology. But he did so without challenging Kant’s anti-realism, his strictures against knowledge of things-in-themselves. This accommodation of modernity was as much a source of Barth’s influence as his theological bravado.

Vander Goot offers an especially astute assessment of Jürgen Moltmann, who followed in Barth’s footsteps. Vander Goot wryly notes that “the future” is the topic of Moltmann’s book, The Future of Creation—not creation as we experience it here and now. In this conception of Christianity, the power of reality rests in the future, the coming realization of Christ’s lordship over all things. Theology is thus excused from the task of describing (and defending) the order and distinction of things established “in the beginning” by God’s creative Word. Again, the upshot may be lots of theological talk about Christ, but everything else falls under the authority of science. Practical atheism.

Vander Goot does not wish to gin up a revival of Aristotelian metaphysics. He endorses an aspect of Kant’s skepticism about knowledge of things-in-themselves, noting that we lack firm bases on which to determine which metaphysical schemes are correct and which are misguided. But we are not unmanned. Following ­Calvin (and the Dutch Reformed tradition), Vander Goot holds that Scripture provides Christians with a divinely authorized construction of reality, as it were, one that avoids metaphysical conundrums and vindicates things as they appear.

The inspired text authorizes us to trust our common-­sense perceptions. The matter-of-fact tenor of the creation account in Genesis licenses us to reason about the nature of things without worrying about philosophical foundations. Moreover, the first chapter of Genesis does not encourage speculative efforts to get underneath or above what we experience. Vander Goot quotes Calvin to good effect: “It must be remembered that Moses does not speak with philosophical acuteness on occult mysteries, but related those things which are everywhere observed, even by the uncultivated, and which are in common use.” Moses was the first ­common-sense realist.

St. John Paul II often spoke of the anthropological crisis of modernity, our confusion about what it means to be human. He regularly cited a passage from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which teaches that we discover the truth of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. I don’t think Vander Goot would disagree. But he recognizes that modernity has fomented a metaphysical crisis, a despairing sense that we cannot know the stable, enduring place in which we live out our lives. Modern science offers little consolation, because most presume that its tacit metaphysics is a mute materialism, epitomized by Richard Dawkins’s metaphor of a blind watchmaker.

Vander Goot warns against too much talk of the ­doctrine of creation. By his reckoning, Scripture authorizes us simply to talk about things, all things, as Christians formed by the self-same Scripture. He ­recommends what the Church Fathers called Christian philosophy, by which they did not mean an academic discipline, but the wisdom that arises when the eyes of faith are trained on all things—and report what they perceive.

I would add liturgical worship to Scripture as the divinely authorized means by which our perceptions of reality are trained and sharpened. And I’m inclined to defend the precision found in the Catholic tradition of natural law, which Vander Goot criticizes. But we should take to heart the larger point of Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought. Vander Goot often returns to an epigram: “Life is religion.” God asks us to live in accord with his creative will, here and now. This vocation will not get us to heaven. But it is religious nonetheless, because it cleaves to the order and purpose God has ordained “in the beginning.” That God has ­done more, that he offers us fellowship, despite our sin and defilement, is another matter, more important, to be sure, but distinct. And this offer does not efface or supersede the way things are. As St. Thomas teaches, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.

The post Recovering a Christian World appeared first on First Things.

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Franklin’s idea included: 

Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. 

Jefferson’s draft was nearly identical to Franklin’s, but suggested for the reverse side “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” The two Founders didn’t get their way in the final product, whose religious language includes both the nod to Providence and the Latin phrase annuit cœptis, “He has favored our undertakings.” 

That the most secular of our Founders, Jefferson and Franklin, insisted on this Christian language is just one example of many that demonstrates how very unsecular the American project really is. Yes, indeed, the men who launched the unique American experiment were allergic to a state church at the national level, having been scarred by the long history of church-state entanglement and the so-called religious wars in Europe. Yet having grown up in a thick Protestant milieu, they wouldn’t recognize the secularism that is often preached in their name. 

Consider James Madison, the father of the Constitution, who wrote that “conscience is the most sacred of all property” and who drafted and championed the Bill of Rights (influenced as he was by early Baptists such as Isaac Backus and John Leland). Yet Madison was not shy about appealing to God for his blessing on the new nation. In the midst of the War of 1812, he issued a proclamation calling for a day of prayer. He urged a turning to “that Almighty Power in whose hand are the welfare and the destiny of nations.” Madison urged citizens to pray 

that He would look down with compassion on our infirmities; that He would pardon our manifold transgressions and awaken and strengthen in all the wholesome purposes of repentance and amendment; that in this season of trial and calamity He would preside in a particular manner over our public councils and inspire all citizens with a love of their country and with those fraternal affections and that mutual confidence which have so happy a tendency to make us safe at home and respected abroad.

 Jefferson, who had perhaps the dimmest view of religion and the most expansive view of liberty, nevertheless in his first inaugural address acknowledged “an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people.” 

To be sure, they resisted the idea of an established state church at the national level and, increasingly, through debate and revision, established churches in the states. They were influenced by preachers such as John Leland who declared, “state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity, and reduces it to a level with state policy.” Though primarily Protestant, this understanding grew to include Jewish citizens, as witnessed in George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island. What emerged was both the acknowledgment of a generic theism in most state constitutions and the resistance to a religious test in the national Constitution. 

In assessing the Constitution, celebrated jurist and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story sums up the tension between the necessity of religion, and arguably Christianity, for the success of the republic and yet the resistance to state-enforced belief. In his popular Commentaries on the Constitution, he writes at one point, “The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion . . . never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community.” Yet in another section he commends the Bill of Rights and writes that “the rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the just reach of any human power. They are given by God, and cannot be encroached upon by human authority.” Later he decries the way in which the power to regulate conscience by the state was wielded throughout history as a tool of persecution and tyranny. 

Today this tension is at the heart of our national debates. Unlike the men of the Founding era, scarred as they were by the religious wars of the old world, we find ourselves scarred by the fruits of modernity and the false promises of secularism. Twentieth-century jurisprudence moved from Madison’s “line of separation” between church and state to the “high and impregnable” wall of separation of Everson v. Board of Education (1947), misinterpreted from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. This created decades of jurisprudence that weaponized the establishment clause in open hostility to religion. Thankfully, in the last few decades, a more originalist court has peeled back the “Lemon test” that made courts allergic to any incidental contact between government and religion. Recent cases such as Kennedy, Hobby Lobby, Trinity Lutheran, and Fulton forbid the state from punishing religious organizations for the crime of being religious. 

Still our debates rage. Secularism’s so-called neutral public square has been filled by all sorts of perverse ideologies, weakening the social contract. We’ve forgotten the warnings by the Founders of a society without virtue and bereft of the thick Christianity that makes liberty possible. John Adams’s words haunt us: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

The answer is not a rejection of the constitutional order that has endured for 250 years. Those who shaped this nation rightly recoiled at a state with the power to trample conscience. “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” echoed in Baptist and Presbyterian confessions, is still a good warning to governments who seek to compel belief. Jesus’s rendering only some rights to Caesar still stands. Caesar can barely run a functioning post office or pass a healthy budget. We shouldn’t think the state—as opposed to the God from whom our rights originate—is equipped to separate sheep from goats and wheat from tares. History shows us that a state with this power only ever damages some segment of Christ’s church. Conversion at the end of the sword is not true conversion. What’s more, the most vocal of those who call for this kind of arrangement don’t engender confidence that they can be trusted with this power. There’s a large gap between edge-lording meme-makers and a so-called Christian prince. In a fallen world, I’ll take my chances with the American experiment. 

Still, those of us who proudly champion religious liberty and who resist such theocratic projects should be more vocal about the thick Christian culture that is required to uphold this experiment. For instance, it was in vogue, at the start of the twenty-first century and during the rise of progressive social movements, for well-meaning Christians to celebrate the death of cultural Christianity. In this framework, secularism would help make the distinctions clear between genuine believers and the posers. I think this is naive, because what fills the void left by the loss of this consensus is worse. To be sure, cultural Christianity isn’t salvific. The church must still say, as Jesus said to the very religious Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” 

Andrew Walker, a Southern Baptist theologian, writes: 

To lament the decline of cultural Christianity is to lament not simply the loss of a Christian consensus, but the loss of the social capital born of common grace that secular society was borrowing from. Is it any surprise that a growing secularity is coinciding with the hollowing out of American civil society? . . . As society sheds its Christian foundations, there will be a serious detriment to human flourishing. We should mourn this as Christians. We don’t want just the salvation of our neighbors but the good of society, too.

The Founders understood the necessity of a thick layer of virtue and Christian faith underneath this framework of liberty. So we should root for this and, rather than dream in vain for a Christian prince or naively think liberty can survive secularism, work and pray for the growth of the church and the spiritual renewal of the nation. As William Penn, who eloquently defended religious liberty, wrote, “Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”

The post A Baptist Cheer For Cultural Christianity appeared first on First Things.

John Fisher, the renowned Bishop of Rochester, is known to history chiefly for having been put to death by King ­Henry VIII in 1535 for the “treason” of denying that Henry was “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.” In his own lifetime, however, Fisher had achieved European fame as one of the most influential early opponents of Martin Luther—a role into which he had been led by the example of none other than his king. Thomas P. Scheck has put English-speaking readers in his debt with this translation of two key sections of the most significant book Fisher published, his Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio (Confutation of Luther’s Assertion).

This text, which first appeared in January 1523, aimed to refute Luther’s defense of his 41 theological statements that Pope Leo X had condemned in the 1520 bull Exsurge Domine. The Confutation was a fairly comprehensive attack on Luther’s system, even though the condemned articles did not include either of ­Luther’s two fundamental doctrinal principles—justification by faith alone and the dogmatic authority of Scripture alone. Fisher addressed this lack by prefacing his work with a couple of essays identifying and engaging with those two principles.

The analysis of Lutheranism as a system founded on the two basic doctrines of “faith alone” and “Scripture alone” is still a commonplace of textbooks, and Fisher was one of the first to present it. He originally offered this analysis in a sermon to the citizens of London at St. Paul’s Cathedral on May 12, 1521, when the papal condemnation of Luther was promulgated in England and when it was announced that the king himself had written a book against Luther. Henry’s decision put the kingdom of England at the forefront of the Catholic response to Luther for almost a decade. The “U-turn” that was to set the king against the papacy by the early 1530s would have been unimaginable at that moment.

Scheck’s translation offers English renderings of the first of ­Fisher’s prefatory essays, the one on the principle of “scripture alone,” together with the longest of his responses to Luther’s individual articles—Article 36, on free will. Fisher’s Confutation was widely read in its time, running to about 20 editions by 1600, many of them published in the 1520s, and it left its mark on the Catholic response to what would come to be called “the Reformation.” It was often cited or invoked at the Council of Trent in the middle of the century, its reputation enhanced by its author’s status as one of the first Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation. Article 36 was especially important. Free will was, famously, the issue over which the great Christian humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, began to sever his ties with the Reformation, despite his initial sympathy with the concerns and goals of the reformers who came to be known as Protestants. Erasmus’s Diatribe on Free Will (1524) showed that he could not accompany them on their new path. Notwithstanding its title, the Diatribe was a measured and polite engagement with Luther’s teaching (the word diatribe, directly imported from the Greek, only acquired the pejorative sense of “rant” centuries later). As Scheck emphasizes in his substantial introduction to this volume, it has long been acknowledged that Erasmus was heavily indebted to Fisher’s treatment of this topic, and it may well have been Fisher’s work that alerted him to the crucial role free will played in ­Luther’s theological system.

Erasmus entered the lists against Luther because he was put under considerable pressure to do so, not least by English friends and patrons who were very important to him. For the most part, the things he wrote were things he freely chose to write, in pursuit of his own intellectual goals and aspirations. Publishing books, together, perhaps, with writing letters, was what defined him as a person. He was a man of letters. By contrast, Fisher wrote against Luther because it was his duty to do so. Everything Fisher published (as well as most of the things he wrote that remained unprinted) was the fulfillment of some very definite duty. Thus his Sermons on the Seven Penitential Psalms (1508) were preached and published at the behest of Lady ­Margaret Beaufort (mother of Henry VII), whom he served as what we would call a spiritual director. His funeral sermon for Henry VII and his memorial sermon for Lady Margaret were evidently court commissions. And his sermon at the burning of Luther’s books in 1521 was presumably delivered at the command of Henry VIII or Cardinal Wolsey, or both, since they had planned the entire occasion. Fisher made clear that his Confutation of Luther’s Assertion, like all his efforts in polemical theology, was written in pursuance of his duty as a bishop to defend the souls entrusted to his care from the snares of heresy. If Erasmus’s identity was essentially authorial, Fisher’s was above all pastoral.

Fisher took great pains, for example, to urge repentance on the ­unknown miscreant who had scrawled some graffiti on a papal bull (the source for this episode says it was an indulgence) that had been posted on the door of Great St. Mary’s, the university church in Cambridge. He addressed the university assembly on three separate occasions in his capacity as its chancellor, but the culprit kept quiet. He was much later identified as a Frenchman, Pierre de Valence, who went on to spend some years in the service of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and to commit himself wholeheartedly to the Reformation. 

The progress of Lutheran and other heretical doctrines at Fisher’s beloved alma mater caused him increasing grief over the next ten years. In February 1526 he preached another sermon at Paul’s Cross, this time at the first public recantation of the newfangled dissidents in England. Most of those disavowing heretical beliefs on that occasion were German merchants from the “Steelyard” (the Hanseatic trading station in London), whom Thomas More had found in possession of Lutheran books during a spot search. But with them was Dr. Robert Barnes, who had preached a sermon modeled on one of ­Luther’s at the little church of St. Edward’s, just off the market square in Cambridge, on Christmas Eve 1525. This airing of Lutheran ideas by a member of the Cambridge Divinity Faculty must have seemed to Fisher an almost personal betrayal. Publishing his sermon soon afterward, he explained: “My duty is after my poor power to resist these heretics, the which cease not to subvert the church of Christ.”

He went on to invite anyone ­unpersuaded by the arguments of his sermon to come to him confidentially so that they could thrash matters out for as long as it took for the doubter to “make me a Lutheran” or for Fisher to “induce him to be a Catholic.” There is no reason to think anyone ever took up that offer, with its naive confidence in the power of debate to resolve disagreements. 

Barnes himself appeared several times before a panel of bishops (including Fisher), but although he abjured at St. Paul’s, he certainly wasn’t won over. Within a few years he had fled the country to join ­Luther at Wittenberg, and many years later he would die a martyr’s death at Smithfield on account of his outspoken Lutheranism, though in political terms his execution was collateral damage from the fall of Thomas Cromwell in 1540.

Fisher’s arguments against ­Luther were often pithy and at times irrefragable, as in his version of one of the most obvious rebuttals of the exclusion of “works” from the process of justification, presented in his 1526 sermon. Taking up one of Luther’s favorite proof texts for this theory, Jesus’s assurance that “your faith has saved you” (Luke 7:50), Fisher wrote:

Our Saviour saith, not only Fides, but Fides tua. Thy faith (a truth it is) is the gift of God. But it is not made my faith, nor thy faith, nor his faith, as I said before, but by our assent. . . . But our assent is plainly our work. Wherefore at the least one work of ours joineth with faith to our justifying.

Logic, however, usually loses out when passions are engaged, and Kołakowski’s Law of the Infinite Cornucopia reminds us that there is an endless supply of arguments that can be deployed against this elegant rebuttal. But they do not leave it any the worse for wear, and so they only confirm that scriptural interpretation can never be the plain and simple thing that Luther said.

Fisher himself was perhaps too close to the action to decipher the full significance of what was ­unfolding around him. Thomas More saw a little further into it and into the future, warning his son-in-law William Roper even in the 1520s, when England’s Catholicism seemed so secure under royal patronage, that there might come a time—it came far sooner than he imagined—when Catholics would be happy to let the heretics “have their churches quietly to themselves” as long as “they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.” The essence of what Luther was about was the quest for a personal certainty of salvation (“­assurance,” as it came to be termed by its exponents). And for him, reasonably enough, the intrinsic sinfulness of human nature meant that salvation could not be certain if it depended to any degree on human operation or cooperation. In the words of another of his favorite biblical tags, omnis homo mendax (“all men are liars,” Ps. 116:11). Only God was true. So faith had to justify “alone,” as God’s pure gift, without any operation or even cooperation on the part of the believer. And Scripture had to instruct “alone,” as a totally transparent text, without any interpretation by any human agent or intermediary—whether the believer himself, a priest, or the church as a whole.

To a scholar such as ­Fisher, who had imbibed at Cambridge the theological traditions of the via antiqua—the “old way” of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus—Luther’s cavalier dismissal of most of the sacraments, together with his via moderna (“new way”) emphasis on the sheer will—one might almost say the sheer ­willfulness—of God, was always likely to be rebarbative. On the subject of scholastic theology, by the way, Scheck advances in this book, as he has done elsewhere, a case for seeing Fisher as a Scotist. It remains my own view that Fisher was more an eclectic than a disciple of any specific figure, but that nonetheless he had a particular predilection for Thomas Aquinas, whom he more than once acclaimed as “the flower of theologians.” Yet whatever might be thought of his precise theological affiliation, his theological center of gravity lay firmly within the “realism” of the High Middle Ages rather than the “nominalism” of the Later Middle Ages.

Luther’s doctrine of the transparent text, that alluring fancy, had a profound effect on English and even more on American (that is, U.S.) culture, formed and shaped as it was from the start by Protestantism. The American commitment, or rather fidelity, to the Constitution has not unreasonably been traced to that respect for the Bible that underpinned American culture until within living memory. The analogy, however, is more revealing than is often ­appreciated by those who draw it. The Constitution is, as texts go, coherent, and it was written with clarity in mind. Yet it cannot function alone. You cannot appeal simply to the Constitution. You have to appeal to that other SCOTUS, whose interpretative authority far exceeds any ever ascribed to Scotus. Without those nine supreme pontiffs, even this simplest and most transparent of texts is nothing more than a piece of paper. 

Luther’s specious notion of the self-interpreting or transparent text burst upon a world in which “the Bible” was being made much more real and accessible by the technological miracle of the printing press, in a potent coincidence that greatly enhanced its plausibility. But the limitless doctrinal fragmentation that was already evident by 1530 amply vindicated the observation of early Catholic polemicists such as ­Fisher and More that “Scripture alone” made every man his own pope. The Protestant world started by decrying this conclusion as a calumny but by 1700 often treated it as a dogma, under the label “private judgment.”

The tragedy was that this early sixteenth-century moment, the moment of print, the moment of the “three languages” (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), the moment that briefly spoke through Erasmus and, among other effects, inspired John Fisher to diversify the curriculum at Cambridge by introducing both Hebrew and Greek, was poised to herald a new era in scriptural scholarship. As it happened, this new era was one of bitter confessional strife, thanks to Luther’s relentless and egotistical insistence on absolute assent to whatever he happened to decide was the plain meaning of Scripture. The Scottish humanist Florentius Volusenus later told the story of a conversation at Rochester, probably around 1530, in the course of which Fisher admitted to him that he wondered what divine providence meant by making some Lutherans such fruitful commentators on Scripture despite their being heretics. Even Fisher, it seems, was impressed by their scholarship. Even he felt the pull of Luther’s evangelical summons to unquestioning faith in Jesus’s promises, as Volusenus later emphasized in the same book (De Animi Tranquillitate Dialogus). Yet Luther’s evangelical rhetoric did not persuade Fisher, as it persuaded so many, to subscribe to his logical absurdities or theological foibles.

Luther’s theology, notoriously, is heavily based in the Latin tradition and the Vulgate text. For all his grappling with the Hebrew and the Greek, his theological vocabulary is the legacy of late scholasticism, and Erasmus took the measure of him pretty fairly in his Diatribe, identifying him as just one more needlessly dogmatic scholastic. Although the Christian humanist program of Erasmus did nothing so crude as to reduce the Bible to the level of a human text, it did seek deeper understanding of the Scriptures by treating them, in many respects, like any other human text. Luther’s approach was, at the theoretical level, exactly the opposite. It was to treat the Bible as entirely different from any other human text, because of his overwhelming need to deliver human salvation from anything that made it contingent on merely human causes. This emphatically anti-humanist approach explains why the phrase “Word of God” took off so strongly among Luther’s followers and, ultimately, among all Protestants as a name for the ­Bible. It was about emphasizing the difference. This is not to say that humanist critical approaches were eschewed by Protestant exegetes. Far from it. Many highly skilled humanist scholars were persuaded by the teachings of the Reformers, and they applied their skills to the teaching and understanding of the “new learning” that Luther had brought to light and to the understanding of the Scriptures. It was doubtless some of those efforts that so impressed John Fisher.

Thomas P. Scheck’s translation is careful and faithful, and his introduction full, informative, and illuminating, even if there are one or two fine points of interpretation on which I might beg to differ. There is one error, however, that cannot pass without correction, because it goes to the heart of the issue for which John Fisher was to give his life. Scheck rightly notes that, as J. J. Scarisbrick showed nearly forty years ago, Fisher actually entered into discussions with the Emperor Charles V’s ambassador to Henry’s court, Eustace Chapuys, about the possibility of imperial intervention to correct the English king as he became increasingly opposed to the pope. However, Scheck’s elaboration, that “this secretive endeavor was exposed, and Fisher was arrested,” has no basis in the historical record and must be rejected, together with the implication that Fisher’s intervention explains his execution, which took place more than a year after his arrest. Henry’s regime never heard so much as a whisper of Fisher’s discussions with Chapuys, and had they done so Fisher would have been for the chop in a month, not a year. Those who actually conspired against Henry got very short shrift. Fisher’s dealings with ­Chapuys would indubitably have been deemed treasonous had they come to light at the time. But they did not. To that extent, it seems, the bishop was as adept at secret communication as at most other things he turned his hand to. 

Fisher was arrested in April 1534 because he refused to take the Oath of Succession. More than a year later, he was executed because, in the words of the indictment,

on 7 May 1535, in the Tower of London in the County of Middlesex, [he] did, contrary to his due allegiance, falsely, maliciously and traitorously utter and pronounce the following English words, namely, “The king our sovereign lord is not supreme head in earth of the Church of England.”

It all took so long for two reasons. First, the regime had to enact new laws to criminalize Fisher’s position. The Act of Supremacy and the Treason Act were therefore passed during the winter of 1534–35. More importantly, though, the king wanted submission, not sacrifice. He wanted John Fisher, like Thomas More, to agree with him, or at least to acquiesce in his will. So they were given plenty of time to weigh an inevitable punishment against the mere words necessary to save their skins.

Henry would far rather have had their acquiescence than their blood; indeed, there were probably no men whose approval he craved so desperately. Thomas More had been his secretary and companion at court in happier times, with an international reputation as a scholar and Latinist thanks to his Utopia. As chancellor, he had zealously implemented ­Henry’s determined policy of censorship, propaganda, and repression against English heretics. Fisher had never been a courtier, and he was an austere, somewhat forbidding figure, of whom it was once said, “not only of his equals, but even of his superiors, he was both honoured and feared.” But in the heyday of the campaign against Luther in the early 1520s, he was in the highest favor with the king. On his way back from Canterbury to London in June 1522, Henry had called to see the bishop at Rochester and it was reported that “the king called on my lord as soon as he were come to his lodging, and he talked lovingly with my lord all the way between the palace and his chamber in the abbey.”

Henry’s piety was always ­oriented to the Book of Psalms, and at some point in the mid-1520s he commissioned from Fisher a full-scale devotional commentary on the Psalms. The commentary still survives, unfinished and fragmentary, in ­various working drafts, obviously set aside by the bishop when he was drawn into defending the validity of ­Henry’s first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, the task that made his former friend an enemy. That the two best known scholars in his kingdom would neither of them publicly endorse his divorce and his break with Rome was a rebuke the king could not bear. It remains the most revealing judgment on the events that started that very peculiar thing, the English Reformation.

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Radio City Music Hall boasts a grandeur that amplifies the awe of immersive projections, sparkling costumes, and first-rate performers. The Rockettes’ performances blend in with one another, creating a tight, unified ensemble of bodies in which no individual’s talent soars above the others. The chorus of other dancers and singers manages to do the same with balanced harmony and synchronized movement. The stage never feels too full, however, and the set design is shockingly minimal. When the Rockettes are dancing, there is little else vying for your attention. 

There are a few breakout acts, including an ice-skating duo, a young girl playing The Nutcracker’s Clara among other roles, and Santa Claus as the narrator. However, the show’s true high points and overall message convey a vision of unity in which the craft itself—rather than the individual performers—is the object of applause. The audience comes to recognize that the primary emphasis lies not on individual egos, but on the collective effort to advance the story they are constructing together.

The Rockettes’ show famously ends with a living nativity. No longer dressed as reindeers, toy soldiers, frost fairies, elves, rag dolls, or New Yorkers, the performers process across the stage en route to seeing the birth of baby Jesus. With camels, donkeys, and sheep in tow, everyone in the audience hears the Christmas story narrated. The performers, and much of the audience, sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” giving glory to the newborn king as the Holy Family is elevated and venerated by the performers on bended knee. It’s an arresting display of public Christianity. 

Many on social media have expressed annoyance at having to watch “the Jesus bit.” One TikToker even said: “I guess I just forget that Christmas is a religious holiday for some people.” Hardened hearts are bound to reject the resonance of such a scene. But there are some Christmas performances that warrant backlash.

The Bible Belt has its own renditions of the Christmas Spectacular that often provoke the ire of online commentators. Typically, the show, or at least the version with which I’m familiar, largely follows the same format as the Rockettes’: beginning with more secular Christmas imagery, song, and dance, and ending with a living nativity. These shows take place in megachurches that can seat thousands, and run for about a week. A description of the Christmas Spectacular in Houston, Texas, states that the show is meant to capture “the wonder and the true meaning of Christmas.”

“Wonder” indeed. Performers dressed as angels soar over the audience belting out “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” and one cannot help but wonder why the church has a flying rig in the first place. A live elephant stands at the edge of the stage during the living nativity, and I truly can’t imagine anyone is wondering at Jesus so much as wondering how they got a real elephant inside the church. Blinding laser light shows rip through the stage during “Winter Wonderland,” and again when Jesus is visited by the wise men. There is no thematic unity. 

Videos of these performances circulate online to the glee of those who live for anti-religious discourse, and the commenters don’t seem to understand that most of the performers are children. They are dancing and singing and being a part of something that feels big and technically impressive. They are being elevated by technical theater in a manner I understand very well from my years of community theater performances. But because so many elements compete simultaneously for the audience’s attention, all designed to “stand out,” the effect ultimately collapses into a kind of undifferentiated sensory overload. In attempting to evoke wonder, the people in charge of these shows have seemingly forgotten the simplicity of the manger and the raw power of the story they’re telling. 

Clearly, as the Rockettes have demonstrated, spectacle is not at odds with the religious. There are ways to platform the Christmas story, even amidst reindeer and Santa and elves, that allow the virtue and foundations of the Christian faith to resonate. Christians ought to remember that we are the keepers of the story and animating ethos that shape the spirit of Christmas in a way that secular culture cannot escape, whether it acknowledges it disdainfully or not. The best, most enduring Christmas stories—whether they are staged by the religiously unaffiliated or put on by the expressly evangelical—manage to bleed outside of the church’s walls during this season, and they are wonderfully spectacular all on their own.

Image by Bob Jagendorf, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Two domains are exceptions that prove the rule: politics and business. Many evangelicals have been successful in politics. Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia (and the rare evangelical who held a top position in high finance, as co-CEO of the Carlyle Group), is one; Jim Banks, the junior senator from Indiana, is another.

There are also many evangelical business leaders and entrepreneurs. But they tend to cluster in profitable but prosaic industries with limited cultural influence: restaurants (Chick-fil-A), retail (Hobby Lobby), distribution (Gordon Food Service), or oil and gas. Contrast Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, or Google, or BlackRock. Major media shape beliefs and cultural narratives; Google’s algorithms determine what we see online; BlackRock’s investing criteria prompt CEOs to take action. Few businesses with that kind of influence are run by evangelicals.

D. Michael Lindsay’s 2007 book on evangelical elites, Faith in the Halls of Power, largely confirms these observations. Though Lindsay’s tone is optimistic, his examples of evangelical elites are concentrated in politics and in businesses with little cultural leverage. And those evangelicals who are involved in culture-shaping institutions operate at the margins. For example, most of Lindsay’s evangelical academics are scholars of ­evangelicalism.

To be clear, there are some evangelical elites in the true sense of that word, such as Francis ­Collins (a geneticist), Ben Carson (a pediatric neurosurgeon), and even Justin Bieber (a musician). But evangelicals are underweighted in elite realms relative to their share of the population.

How can we explain this lack of representation in the halls of power? One reason is that evangelicals do not typically understand “elite” in these terms. Ask evangelicals who their elites are: the bulk of the names will be pastors, theologians, and other professional Christians. Pose the same question to Catholics and far more lay leaders will be on the list.

I asked R. R. Reno, and he noted that the last two editors in chief of the Wall Street Journal have been serious Catholics. Charles Taylor, arguably one of the three or four most influential living philosophers, is Catholic. Leonard Leo, the architect of Donald Trump’s remaking of the judiciary, is Catholic. And then there are the vice president and six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court.

This is also how the culture more broadly perceives things. Artificial intelligence is trained to operate as a cultural summarizer. A Grok AI query for the top fifteen evangelical elites in America returned a list that was 100 percent pastors and other professional Christians, whereas only 20 percent of the names from an identical query about Catholic elites were clergymen.

Evangelicals themselves have wondered why they punch below their numeric weight. Historian Mark Noll wrote of “the scandal of the evangelical mind,” noting the movement’s ­anti-intellectualism. Evangelicalism is strongly populist, and this ­orientation conduces to suspicion of institutions and elites.

Evangelical theology neglects creation and, ­unlike historic Protestantism, does not have a tradition of natural law. Emphasis falls on the saving of souls. Evangelical culture also tends to emphasize the role of women in family life, and this emphasis works against the emergence of female elites. Evangelicals are too often cocooned within their parallel institutions, such as Christian colleges, which direct them away from elite pathways and networks. They are deeply suspicious of power and its use. In a real sense, to become elite amounts to a betrayal of evangelical culture, if not of evangelical convictions.

History also plays a role. In a socioeconomically, ethnically, and racially stratified American Protestant landscape, evangelicals have long been socially subaltern. For a long time, evangelicals could become elite by moving into more socially prestigious mainline denominations. An old quip has it: The average American starts out as the son of a Baptist farmer, becomes a Methodist when he gets a white-collar job, and becomes a Presbyterian when he gets his first promotion. For generations, Protestantism contained a pathway for the ambitious evangelical to attain elite status while maintaining biblical faith.

The collapse of the mainline and the WASP establishment robbed Protestantism of its elite center. The old status escalator, to the extent that it still functions, now delivers rising evangelicals either to secularism or to Roman Catholicism, which retains an elite stratum, one that has grown more influential as the WASP elite has declined.

These developments are well known, and I do not wish to add still more to the analysis of evangelical underperformance. What is needed are answers to two key questions. First, does it matter whether there are evangelical elites? Second, if it does matter, how might an evangelical elite be ­reconstructed?

As to whether it matters: Evangelicals are roughly one-quarter of the American population. When a group so large fails to contribute its share of leaders, we should expect a leadership deficiency in society. Moreover, if we believe (as we should) that Christian formation adds an important dimension to leadership, then the deficiency is not just numerical but also substantive. Indeed, we see that today America is believed to be suffering from a crisis of leadership, and trust in institutions is in decline.

It’s notable that America’s leadership crisis emerged in the wake of the collapse of the old WASP class. That class had many well-known defects. Its caste-like behavior excluded Jews and Catholics. WASP elites cultivated a hauteur that undermined democratic culture. They often tolerated mediocrity in their own ranks, preferring men from “good families” above demonstrated competence. All true. However, the formerly subordinate groups that now dominate America’s elite positions have, for the most part, failed to replicate WASP virtues and competencies. The disastrous Biden administration, for example, was largely devoid of WASPs at its top levels, a fact noticed by secular publications like the Washington Post. (There is a story to tell about the rise of Jewish elites, especially in academia, and then their decline into secular assimilation, but that’s for another time.)

The United States remains culturally Protestant, even as it becomes more secular and diverse, and many of its institutions were created by Protestants on the basis of Protestant principles. This fact suggests that Protestant elites play a crucial role. They are well positioned to lead in ways that are suited to the character of the country. A diverse nation requires a diverse leadership class. We need talent from all quarters. But a national elite that includes few of those citizens who are historically the cultural roots of the nation cannot be healthy for the body politic. Perhaps our present political and cultural troubles stem in part from the failure of evangelicals to occupy elite positions. America needs Protestants to take on the leadership burdens of society, and in view of the dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism, they must come from evangelical ranks.

As to whether an evangelical elite can be ­created: The cultural conditions of evangelicalism augur against it. However, an elite by definition is numerically small, so there is no need to transform evangelicalism itself. We need only create a space within it from which elites can emerge.

An elite must emerge organically as young people in evangelical churches entertain high aspirations. As a subset of individuals achieve elite status, they are likely to form networks and institutions with like-minded colleagues. It is this social framework at the highest levels of society, a framework that combines high status earned by recognition of excellence in secular vocations with forthright identification as evangelicals, that will create a proper milieu for Protestant elite development over the long term.

To craft networks and institutions as a method of manufacturing an elite would be a fool’s errand. But we can create conditions that will improve the likelihood of an elite’s organic emergence.

One way to begin is by cultivating flagship churches. Historically, most cities have had a few churches, often large and wealthy, attended by elites. Often called “tall-steeple” churches, they once were mainline Protestant. Today most of these congregations are theologically liberal and therefore useless as focal points for an evangelical elite.

There remain a few theologically traditional “tall-steeple” churches. Some are stubbornly orthodox mainline congregations, and others are more forthrightly evangelical. Examples include Redeemer and Central Presbyterian in New York City, Church of the Advent (Episcopal) in Boston, Capitol Hill Baptist in Washington, D.C., Highland Park Presbyterian in Dallas, Covenant Presbyterian in Nashville, and Epic Church in San Francisco. These churches play an important civic role. They provide Christian fellowship for elites and spiritual and moral formation for leaders at the local or national level. Churches with this ­status should embrace these functions and expand their civic footprints.

One element of the spiritual and moral formation these churches must provide is an expanded theology of vocation. Evangelicalism, especially under the influence of dispensational theology, has prioritized evangelization over the creation mandate. Vocation is valued, if at all, strictly for the purpose of generating money to fund evangelism. In its American evangelical expression, Protestantism, which rejected the Catholic idea of religious vocations, ironically ended up resacralizing them under terms like “evangelist.”

The sociologist Andrew Lynn studies the evangelical “faith and work” movement, which seeks a robust theology of vocation. In Saving the Protestant Ethic, he notes that the movement’s own practitioners “see their religious tradition as completely devoid of any theological frameworks that confer value on secular work.” Faith and work leaders have attempted to fill this lacuna, but they have been only partially successful. Their movement assigns a value to secular vocation, but it has a limited vision of what Christians should aspire to do in their vocations. The faith and work movement stresses conducting business ethically, doing high-­quality work, sharing the gospel in the marketplace, practicing love-your-neighbor relationships with colleagues, and taking a “redemptive” approach to business or entrepreneurship. These are all good things, but they can and should be done by all Christians at all levels of society. What’s needed is a theological mandate for leadership at the top of the key domains of society.

The only work depicted in the Bible prior to the Fall is Adam’s naming of the animals. This structuring and ordering activity imitates God’s initial creation: establishing day and night, the greater light and the lesser light, and so forth. Adam takes up this work. It is important to see that this structuring and ordering work is not just for this age, but for the age to come, with Christians to be reigning over the earth (Rev. 5:10) and judging angels (1 Cor. 6:3). Notably, Adam doesn’t ask God what to name the animals—it happens the other way around. God brings the animals to ­Adam to be named. God doesn’t want Adam to carry out his instructions mechanically; he wishes Adam to exercise dominion over the realm proper to his discernment and judgment.

The active, confident structuring and ordering of the world is what people in the top positions of society do. As Charles Coulombe wrote in ­Palladium magazine, “A true elite creates and re-creates its institutions, rather than merely staffing them.” At present, to the extent that evangelicalism has a theology of vocation, it does not encourage this kind of creative and re-creative leadership—or even give permission to seek the capacity to exercise it.

One exception is the dominionist theology associated with the New Apostolic Reformation and other such movements, particularly the “seven mountains” mandate, which encourages Christians to take over religion, the family, education, government, media, the arts, and business. It is a largely middle-class Pentecostal phenomenon, associated with populist leaders who sometimes style themselves “apostles.” These leaders sometimes obtain political positions, though often these positions are less consequential than their titles suggest. Trump’s faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, a prosperity-gospel preacher who does not personally claim the title apostle but is sometimes accorded it by others, is one example. Rather than serving as a theology of vocation for those who might become elites, the New Apostolic Reformation is more likely to discredit the pursuit of leadership positions among mainstream evangelicals. Dominionism is not the path forward.

The most widely cited book in mainstream evangelicalism that links faith and work is the late pastor Timothy Keller’s Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. This book marks a significant advance in vocational theology. It describes Adam’s naming of the animals, and discusses the work of structuring and ordering. Keller writes, for example, “Work not ­only cares for creation, but also directs and structures it.” He goes on to say, “That is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation.”

Unfortunately, structuring and ordering make up only a small portion of Keller’s book, and he offers no example of a person in a recognizably elite position engaging in structuring and ordering activity. Of the book’s many examples, none involves a positive portrayal of a person engaged in elite activity who uses the central power of his role to direct, shape, reorder, or restructure some element of society. Instead, Keller gives examples of elites behaving badly, or people abandoning high-powered positions in search of fulfillment or more ethical work.

Every Good Endeavor was an important step forward, but its approach must be extended. Evangelicalism needs a theology of vocation that comprehends the exercise of power—that validates and valorizes people who reform public policy, invent new technologies, become presidents of elite universities, acquire major media properties or foundations, organize research teams, or serve as Supreme Court justices. It is especially important that the pursuit of such achievements and positions be prized by Protestantism’s flagship churches.

Evangelicals need more than a better theology of vocation. They also need a patronage system. It is difficult to reach senior levels of society without patronage. The concept of patronage extends beyond hiring (although hiring is important). It comprehends mentorship, introductions, recommendations, public and private championing, admission to exclusive groups or institutions, and financial sponsorship.

Evangelicalism does not provide patronage construed in this way. Evangelicals overwhelmingly fund and support people who focus on Christian ministry. There are pathways to sponsorship for missionaries, church planters, and campus ministers, but not for people engaged in secular domains and activities. Moreover, being populist in orientation, evangelicalism is structured around charismatic leaders and their loyal followers. Evangelical leaders often resist providing patronage to people outside their “mafias,” people with whom they have weak ties and over whom they have limited control. Outsiders are often viewed with suspicion or as rivals.

With no patronage network, evangelicals often depend on support from non-evangelicals. One example is Brad Littlejohn, a Millennial evangelical ethicist and political theorist with a PhD in the political theology of the English Reformation from the University of Edinburgh. His jobs in Washington have come from an Orthodox Jew (Yoram ­Hazony of the Edmund Burke Foundation), a Catholic (Ryan Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center), and a secular Jew (Oren Cass of American Compass). The Davenant Institute, a think tank ­Littlejohn founded to revive the study of the works of the Reformers, failed to raise significant financial support from evangelical funders during the decade in which he ran it.

Whereas Catholicism enjoys a network of interlocking academic programs, activist organizations, and funders, there is no patronage or intellectual ecosystem for evangelicals within Washington’s conservative establishment. The fact that evangelicals often receive support from generous Catholics rather than from their own people is likely a factor in the tendency of rising evangelical elites to convert to Catholicism.

In his final white paper, “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church,” Tim Keller called for the creation of a patronage system as part of his “Christian mind project.” He proposed the creation of a think tank, the endowment of chairs at top universities, the creation of grants for young Christian scholars, and the establishment of a Christian equivalent to the Federalist Society. These initiatives are potentially useful. But a new attitude is also critical. Evangelicals must be willing to provide personal, institutional, and financial support to talented and ambitious people of good character who are outside of their own factions or tribes. Without a patronage system of this kind, it is unlikely that many evangelicals will reach senior levels of society outside of politics and business. Those with high ambitions may well convert to Catholicism on their way up.

An updated theology of vocation and a patronage system are important. But as I’ve noted, good planning and strategic investments cannot by themselves create an elite. Talent, aspiration, and grit are key, and they are qualities of individuals. Those who possess such qualities will become evangelical elites if they also possess heartfelt adherence to Christian orthodoxy. Whence might these individuals emerge?

In my estimation, what’s past is prologue. Tomorrow’s evangelical elites will most likely come from their historical origins, the high-status churches that have a long tradition of feeding their talented young people into elite institutions and professions. They are the Anglican and Presbyterian denominations, both of which have splinter groups, some long-standing, that adhere to orthodox doctrine. These forms of American Protestantism prize intellectual achievement and presume that their most accomplished members will shape the future of America.

Most evangelicals have little or no knowledge of mainline Protestantism. They simply assume that its churches and members are functionally apostate and politically very liberal. In fact, many mainline members, and indeed entire churches within the liberal denominations, are ­theologically traditional. Politically, mainline Protestants are purple, and denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA) are substantially Republican. To the extent that theologically traditional Protestant elites exist in America today, they are concentrated in mainline denominations or evangelical splinter forms such as the Presbyterian Church of America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and Continuing Anglican groups such as the Anglican Church in North America.

To achieve a critical mass of leaders, it will be important to break down the psychological and cultural barriers that separate lay mainline Protestants from evangelicals among a theologically traditional elite. Though aspiring evangelical elites need not switch to mainline churches, engaging lay elites in mainline congregations would be beneficial. The reverse is true as well. Orthodox mainline churches should understand their potential as hubs for nurturing faithful evangelical elites. An orthodox Episcopalian knows that the traditional WASP institutions long ago betrayed their Protestant heritage. Today’s Protestant elite should ­maintain an openness toward people from all Protestant backgrounds.

The new denominational and institutional landscape means that much depends upon individual discernment. There is no functioning “system” for elite production among Protestants with orthodox commitments. Therefore, Protestant laymen, especially evangelicals, who wish to reach elite status and generate a new class of Protestant elites will need to reorient themselves as individuals, and do so across several dimensions.

Obviously, ambition for high-level accomplishment is critical. It entails competence and credentials, the ability to navigate pathways to power and influence, and an awareness of our vocation to structure and order society. But other shifts are important as well.

Protestant elites need to be forthright about their Protestant identity, in the way many Catholics are. Catholic identity is central to the public personas of Vice President JD Vance, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, and Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen. One is hard pressed to identify a Protestant of similar status who leads with his religious identity.

The breaking down of barriers between mainline Protestant and evangelical laymen would help in this regard. Evangelical ardor can help mainline Protestants overcome their reticence. There are impressive, theologically traditional Protestant elites, most of them Episcopalian. But they rarely make their religion central to their public identity. Some have never publicly mentioned their faith at all. Existing Protestant elites have to stop putting their lamps under a bushel. Having public role models for younger aspirants to admire and imitate is critical.

In turn, mainline Protestants can fortify evangelicals. Mainline Protestants take for granted their roles in society. They have a long history of producing secular leaders in all fields. This social confidence can help evangelicals resist the temptation to “pass” as they rise in social status.

Cross-fertilization requires an openness to collaborating on the basis of a shared theological ­traditionalism—that is, agreement on such essentials of the faith as the Nicene Creed, the centrality of the gospel (salvation by faith alone), and the Christian moral framework. As lay Christians working in secular domains, Protestant elites should not treat women’s ordination, young-earth creationism, or other denominational particularities as boundary issues. This kind of cooperation was the key to WASP ascendancy, which did a great deal to perpetuate America’s distinctively Protestant character in the early and mid-twentieth century.

As they aspire to and attain elite status, evangelicals should accept Protestant fragmentation and stratification. They need not seek to please or be in active relationship with all of evangelicalism. Some movements and communities are ill suited to the pursuit of elite positions and national leadership. Some—such as fundamentalism, dispensationalism, the Anabaptist tradition, as well as those motivated by particular views of the end times—may even be hostile to these pursuits. There is no reason to criticize these movements. They can be powerful forces of evangelization and witnesses to Christian faithfulness. But evangelical elites should not be burdened by deference to those who have very different orientations and points of view.

At the same time, it is crucial that evangelical elites not countersignal against other evangelical groups or define themselves in opposition to them, just as Catholic elites don’t countersignal against low-status Catholics. One is hard pressed to find polemics against ordinary Catholics who vote Republican or denunciations of recent immigrant Catholics who vote Democrat. In American Catholicism, bare-knuckle battles are among Catholic elites: George Weigel took aim at Joe Biden; JD Vance tangled with the bishops. There is no “punching down.” By contrast, embarrassed by evangelicalism’s populist roots, many evangelicals in prominent positions are vociferous public critics of the evangelical masses who support Donald Trump. Aspiring evangelical elites can learn a better way from their Catholic counterparts.

Most importantly of all, evangelicals must become culturally confident. Talented people of all stripes are rightly encouraged to participate in elite culture and institutions. Evangelicalism should offer that encouragement while at the same time inculcating a degree of critical detachment from present-day elite culture, which has been secularized. But more than critical detachment, evangelicalism must encourage a positive elite vision, one that views Protestant Christianity as crucial to moral, cultural, and political renewal. Catholic elites are comfortable in elite milieux while believing that Catholicism and its social doctrine can inform a better and more humane public policy. Catholic elites seek to be agents of change within elite institutions. Again, a new generation of Protestant elites, confident in their identities, can learn from their Catholic brethren.

Evangelical cultural engagement has not accomplished the goal of shaping elite culture from within. To some extent, this failure is the result of a naive interpretation of sociologist James ­Davison Hunter’s teachings on cultural change. Hunter recognized that change occurs by means of networks of elites connected through institutions at the cultural center. But one’s mere presence in these domains does not make one an agent of change. Evangelicals have focused on getting a seat at the table, but they lack a vision for implementing big projects. This is why the evangelical presence in spaces such as the Ivy League makes so little impact. It certainly made no impression on JD Vance at Yale Law, as he mentions only Catholics and Mormons (and Peter Thiel) in his conversion narratives.

Contrast this approach with—for instance—that of Patrick Deneen, who was willing to declare forthrightly that liberalism had failed. His book became a subject of serious secular elite consideration, earning even a positive mention from President Obama. Protestants need to find a way to operate in this mode.

Finally, aspiring evangelical elites must adopt the mindset of being a minority in a pluralistic elite. America’s historic Protestant elite was a hegemonic majority. Today the old WASP establishment is long gone. Protestants are a minority in America, albeit still a plurality. They are a tiny minority among the American elite. The rising generation of evangelical elites must achieve a group consciousness, a sense of unique purpose as Christian leaders in a country very different from that overseen by the once all-powerful WASP elite. They must be comfortable operating in a pluralistic society. Attaining this combination requires two things: a thick skin and recognition of their unique and indispensable role in shaping America’s future.

Sen. Mitt Romney is a good model of the combination of pluralism and deep conviction in an elite man of faith. Romney has a track record of accomplishment across multiple domains, having co-founded Bain Capital, been elected a governor and senator, and overseen the turnaround of the troubled Salt Lake City Olympics. In these roles he worked with many people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. A Mormon, he was subjected to taunts and attacks during his political campaigns, particularly his 2012 presidential run. Prominent evangelicals such as Robert ­Jeffress called the LDS Church a “cult.” Progressives attacked Mormonism’s social conservatism. But Romney took the high road, not deigning to respond to most attacks, not letting them distract him from his mission. Neither did he say or do anything that might suggest that he was distancing himself from his church or his convictions. Though a gulf separates the LDS Church from orthodox Nicene Christianity, there is much that evangelicals can learn from Romney.

Whether a Protestant elite—either evangelical or updated mainline—will emerge in America is uncertain. I hope it will happen, and I hope these reflections will make a contribution toward this goal. For America needs its evangelicals to lead the regeneration that our nation and our institutions so obviously require. America needs a faithful Protestant elite again.

The post The Problem with the Evangelical Elite appeared first on First Things.

♦ In his “Friday Update” newsletter, Mike Woodruff relates a wonderful reflection by the great biblical commentator Matthew Henry (1662–1714) after he was mugged: “Let me be thankful: first, because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took all I had, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.” 

♦ In early November, I visited Mike’s church in Lake Forest, Illinois, to participate in an evening event at the Lakelight Institute, a ministry of Christ Church that seeks to build up the body of Christ through biblically informed education. He sat me down for a wide-­ranging conversation about faith in the public square. I’ll let you know when the podcast version is available. 

♦ Germany legalized marijuana in April 2024. Summarizing a report in the European Conservative, ­Lauren Smith writes: “The data show that, between April 2024 and April 2025, hospital admissions for ­cannabis-related disorders like schizophrenia, severe anxiety, major depressive episodes, and addiction has risen 40%. . . . Cases of cannabis-induced psychosis have almost doubled.” Along with online sports betting, marijuana legalization is an instance of the grotesque misgovernance by leaders in the West. Instead of promoting the welfare of citizens, our elites accommodate our ­vices. More than that, they turn them into industries and revenue producers. Historians writing of this ­period will note that the policy response to catastrophically high levels of drug overdose deaths was to legalize marijuana. And the response to the inability of younger people to buy homes (the “affordability crisis”) was to legalize easily accessible and addictive gambling. 

♦ At the time of its founding in 1915, the American Association of University Professors issued a “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.” As William Inboden notes (see “Restoring the Academic Social Contract,” National Affairs, Fall 2025), the declaration “contained a prescient warning”: 

If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and unworthy, or to prevent freedom which it claims in the name of science from ­being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task [of policing professors] will be performed by others [outside of academia].

♦ I was recently at an event during which a panelist accused conservatives of harboring a “nihilistic” attitude toward higher education, seeking only to destroy the universities. His claim ignored the Trump administration’s October 2025 “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” One certainly may debate the ten points that make up the compact. But none are “nihilistic.” The administration undertakes to do what the 1915 Declaration suggests must be done when university faculty and administrators refuse to perform their duties: not to destroy higher education, but to save it. 

♦ Female hostility toward marriage is on the rise. Pew research shows that twelfth-grade girls are now less likely than boys to say they want to get married. In 1993, 83 percent of girls said they are likely to get married eventually. Seventy-six percent of boys gave the same response. Thirty years later in 2023, 61 percent of girls saw marriage as a desirable future, while boys had dipped only slightly to 74 percent. The polling results are striking. More than one-third of girls coming of age today do not have marriage in their plans for the future. 

♦ A friend serves on the board of a Christian classical school. He reports that, during the last decade, the school’s leadership formed a consensus about the need to help boys become men. A boxing program was implemented. Retreats were organized to talk to the high school boys about the responsibilities of men, especially those of a husband and father. When it comes to girls, however, no consensus has been possible. Even in a conservative Christian environment, a substantial number of parents believe that the most important goals for their daughters are independence and a career. 

♦ Tim Bass of Farmington, Missouri, would like to form a ROFTers group in his area. You can reach him at twc.bass@gmail.com.

The ROFTers group in Sacramento, California, seeks new members. To join, contact Kyle and Diane Smith: sacramentorofters@gmail.com.

The ROFTers group in Buffalo, New York, is also seeking new members. Contact Sandra Ham: sandra.ham3@gmail.com. 

♦ We’ve launched “The Fourth Watch,” a special newsletter devoted to matters Catholic and written by James Keating, a regular First Things contributor. You’ll want to subscribe by signing up at fourthwatchcatholic.com. We’re grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for funding this initiative. 

The post While We’re At It appeared first on First Things.

I graduated high school in 1999, having spent a decade immersed in the evangelical subculture. It was a period marked by an astounding amount of culture-making. Yes, a great deal of the music and art was kitschy or derivative. But the subculture was formative. For many of us who grew up in evangelical homes, it wasn’t a “subculture” at all. It was simply our culture, the songs and stories and images that populated our world.

There was a fruitful tension in those years. Some students felt the impulse to distinguish themselves from the world by consuming only Christian music. And yet, the Christian music of the time often seemed driven by a desire to show how Christians can be just as “cool” as the world. The paradox of what theologian Lesslie Newbigin called the “missionary encounter” lurked behind the debates of those years: The salt must not stay in the saltshaker, but its engagement with the world must be missionary, retaining its saltiness. 

Parental concern played a big role in creating demand for Christian versions of popular cultural idioms. The mists of nostalgia can obscure how far the envelope was pushed in the nineties when it came to vulgarity and sexuality in music and movies targeting young people. Tipper Gore, the wife of the Democratic Party’s vice president, led the charge for warning labels on albums with objectionable content. Pornography escaped the bounds of dirty magazines and became available on screens in every home with AOL dial-up. Raunch filled the big screen: Seven of the top twenty movies in 1999 were rated R, including lewd teen comedies and salacious blockbusters. American Beauty, a film about a middle-aged man who fantasizes about his daughter’s cheerleader friend, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The nihilism in rock music, the sensuality in pop, the promiscuity normalized in Friends, one of the decade’s biggest TV shows, the excesses of a hedonistic culture—Christian parents had good reason to look for “safe” alternatives for their children. Evangelical culture-makers stepped into the gap, providing music, media, books, and even outlets for activism.

Contemporary Christian Music played a central role in the evangelical subculture of my youth. CCM provided the soundtrack for my adolescent life. And I’m not alone.

Contemporary Christian music flowed from the Jesus People movement that flourished along the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At first a largely church-based phenomenon, with performances in small and medium-sized venues, by the 1980s, the industry saw songs and artists selling so successfully they broke into mainstream consciousness. Amy Grant epitomized crossover success. She had two #1 Billboard Hot 100 singles and multiple hits that dominated the adult contemporary charts. As CCM matured, it became an industry genre of its own.

2025 marks the thirtieth anniversary of two albums that transformed the landscape of Christian music. 1995 was the year the Christian rap and rock trio DC Talk released Jesus Freak. It was also the year Jars of Clay, an alternative rock band, released their self-titled debut album. Both albums produced multiple hit singles and became ever-present fixtures in youth groups across the country. 

DC Talk formed in 1987 at Liberty University: Toby McKeehan was the rapper, Michael Tait the soulful crooner, and Kevin Max contributed a quirky vibrato to the lyrics. Their 1992 rap and hip-hop album Free at Last blasted a counter-cultural narrative: Christian teaching is serious—and cool. “Luv is a Verb” sought to rescue the word “love” from meaning “sex.” “Socially Acceptable” lacerated American culture, warning against “justifying” sin and “synchronizing to society’s ways.” 

In 1995, DC Talk reinvented themselves with ­Jesus Freak, which blended rock and rap (“So Help Me God,” “Like It, Love It, Need It”), pop (“Between You and Me”), and even folk (“In the Light” and “What If I Stumble?”). The mix somehow gelled—an “in-your-face” combination of rock and rap, raging guitars and soaring harmonies hellbent on keeping young people from hell. The album’s title track was a deliberate throwback to the origins of CCM, the California revival in the 1970s, but “Jesus Freak” (clearly influenced by Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) had a compelling, power-chord driven enthusiasm impossible to ignore. Thousands of teenagers embraced this anthem, proudly proclaiming the freakiness of their faith in the eyes of the secular world. 

In contrast to DC Talk, Jars of Clay’s first album was more brooding—the lyrics more ambiguous, the music more acoustic, employing a wide range of instruments and strings in a folk-rock collection that explored grace and love, sin and sadness. There were songs you could jam to (“Flood,” which played over the credits of the film Hard Rain with Morgan Freeman), but the majority were simple, reflective expressions of faith (“Like a Child” and “Love Song for a Savior”). At the time, youth group kids typically identified with either DC Talk or Jars of Clay, each band’s style reflecting different teenage personalities. I was more of a Jars guy, enthralled by the musical arrangements, always mulling over the meaning of the lyrics, drawn to the introspection of songs like “Worlds Apart” as opposed to the guitar bluster of DC Talk, though plenty of young people enjoyed both bands (as did I).

The output of CCM in the late 1990s was astonishing. There was inspirational pop from groups like 4Him, Point of Grace, Avalon, and singers like Jaci Velasquez and Michael W. Smith. There was rock from Audio Adrenaline, the Newsboys, MxPx, the Supertones, and Switchfoot. Even in predominantly white churches, Christian teens knew Kirk Franklin’s “Stomp”, danced along to Out of Eden, or marveled at the vocal prowess of CeCe Winans. 

The arrival of the folk-rock band Caedmon’s Call signaled the rise of the gospel-centered movement soon to be called the “Young, Restless, and Reformed.” Caedmon’s Call extolled God’s grace, described human depravity, and emphasized God’s sovereign purpose in making all things new. I remember a discussion with a friend’s father who took issue with Caedmon’s Call’s “Shifting Sand,” claiming the lyrics were a false portrayal of the Christian life:

My faith is like shifting sand, 

Changed by every wave, 

My faith is like shifting sand, 

so I stand on grace. 

I defended the song, saying it’s the rock of grace that matters most, not the size or sincerity of our faith. Whoever was right in that argument, the fact that evangelicals were debating the lyrics of Christian pop songs is telling. Not all the culture-­making of the decade can be dismissed as theologically shallow.

CCM created a distinct and thick atmosphere. The whole industry served as an answer to the question Larry Norman posed in one of his most famous songs from the late 1960s, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” An Augustinian current ran through these attempts to “plunder the Egyptians” and repurpose musical forms from the world for eternal ­purposes. Before the industry shifted almost exclusively toward worship music, it manifested a Kuyperian mentality that mined all areas of life for signs of God’s glory and goodness. 

The catalog of singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman is a case in point. The man (we called him “SCC” or “S-C-squared” or just Steven Curtis) could sing about the grace of God or the hectic life of a parent or the struggles of knowing how best to love his wife. Chapman gave musical expression to the truths about God’s love and grace that I learned in my local church, shaping my young missionary heart through songs like “For the Sake of the Call” and “Whatever,” a favorite in the year before I moved overseas for mission work. 

When artists and bands achieved mainstream success—Sixpence None the Richer’s pop song “Kiss Me” hovered near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 the month I graduated from high school—we took it as a badge of honor. Such success underscored the perennial question faced by musicians: Am I a “Christian artist” called to create for the “Christian” niche, or am I an artist who happens to be Christian and therefore am free to write about anything through the lens of redemption, without regard to labels?

By the early 2000s, the Christian music scene was undergoing radical change. Napster and other online file-sharing platforms had transformed the music industry. Christian radio shifted toward songs that could be featured in Sunday morning worship. The “special music” before the sermon, once a mainstay in the evangelical “order of worship,” where someone, often a teenager, would sing a popular Christian song backed by a track, lost its appeal. Worship songs and anthems began to dominate.

Many of the criticisms of CCM today (theologically anemic, chasing secular trends, forgettably safe) were already being voiced in that era. Charlie Peacock’s 1999 book, At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, ­Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music, criticized the industry’s promotion of a “conformity” that “produces legalism, performance-based acceptability, and stunted, uninspired imaginations” and thus fails to offer artists “a sufficient theological or ideological foundation from which to create music, ministry, and industry.” Peacock’s call for artistic excellence was influenced by Francis and Edith Schaeffer, the apologists whose influential ministry at L’Abri in Switzerland took art ­seriously, especially its power to express goodness and truth. Years later, when I joined a writers’ group in Nashville that included Charlie’s wife, Andi, I saw that commitment to artistry—the desire to create something not merely popular but good, a gift of truth and beauty. But back in the nineties, most parents were just happy their kids were listening to music with lyrics that were, if not theologically substantive, at least not morally inappropriate. 

Radio dramas and family-oriented shows also emerged to shape evangelical households. Focus on the Family, led at the time by James Dobson, published manuals and books on marriage and family life, mixing secular psychology and biblical principles, all with an eye to strengthening the nuclear family in an age marked by moral indifference. There were magazines for young men and women (Breakaway and Brio). 

But Focus on the Family’s audio show Adventures in Odyssey had the biggest cultural impact. It debuted in 1987 on the radio and became a fixture in evangelical households by the mid-1990s, available through cassette tape collections. The series was set in the fictional town of Odyssey and centered on John Avery Whittaker, the owner of an ice-cream and discovery emporium called Whit’s End. 

It’s difficult to categorize Adventures in Odyssey. Some episodes were serialized drama and suspense. Others followed the story structure of a family sitcom. Still others used the invention of the “Imagination Station” to transport kids back in time to famous moments in history or into important Bible stories. It wasn’t just a show; it was a world, with memorable characters, running gags, and moral lessons—all designed to reinforce a broadly Christian, family-friendly, patriotic framework for life. The engaging scripts, the talent of the voice actors, and the amazing sound effects turned Adventures in Odyssey into the cultural wallpaper for evangelical homes. When I babysat my younger siblings, I’d pop in an Odyssey tape for my brother at bedtime as I turned off the bedside lamp. Countless families slid cassette after cassette into car stereos on long road trips, the episodes blending with the hum of tires on asphalt and sibling squabbles in the back seat.

Adventures in Odyssey drew its share of detractors. Some complained it prioritized moral lessons over clear gospel teaching, avoiding theological specifics beyond the basic evangelical consensus. Others criticized it for resolving difficult issues (an eating disorder, for example) in the time frame of a typical situation comedy and for prioritizing the homogenous social cohesion of a Midwestern Mayberry-type neighborhood at the expense of uncomfortable topics among white evangelicals, such as racial injustice or intergenerational ­poverty. Some of these critiques were valid, yet it’s hard to find a better example of influential ­cul­ture-­making in the evangelical world. Its fans are right to ­celebrate ­Adventures in Odyssey for standing head and shoulders above any audio drama coming out of the secular world, while critics are also right to chuckle at the fact that at the end of the twentieth century it was radio where evangelicals made their creative stand.

If Adventures in Odyssey didn’t engage an evangelical family, other entertainment options were available. The age of the VCR and DVD player made it possible to bypass the cinema and broadcast TV, delivering faith-friendly options directly to consumers. McGee and Me! was a popular series about an adolescent boy, Nicholas, and his cartoon friend, McGee, who learn moral lessons or face ethical dilemmas together. Christian videos and cartoons (such as Bibleman) appealed to evangelical parents who wanted to offer their children something “safe” yet contemporary, an option better than reruns of family-friendly shows from the 1950s and 1960s. 

But it was VeggieTales that took the evangelical world by storm with success that spilled into the mainstream. Created by Phil Vischer, with early episodes featuring writing from Eric Metaxas, VeggieTales was launched in 1993. It featured memorable songs, zany storylines, funny characters, and a conclusion that sought to impart a Bible verse or moral lesson to the kids watching. I say kids, but as teens we loved them, too. Crowded into the sticky seats of a youth-group church van, stinking of sunscreen and sweat, we’d shout-sing VeggieTales songs over the rattle of windows that wouldn’t quite roll all the way up or down.

The enduring impact of VeggieTales was so profound that, recently, when President Trump reposted an AI-generated image of a monolithic gold statue of himself in the Gaza Strip, many ­middle-aged evangelicals instantly recalled the most creative of the early VeggieTales episodes. “Rack, Shack, and Benny” retold the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, with a magnificent chocolate Bunny as the monstrosity the vegetables are commanded to worship. The shared experiences within the evangelical subculture of the nineties were so strong that, thirty years later, a stray social media image caused Christian Gen Xers and millennials to start humming along to “The Bunny Song.” 

VeggieTales had its critics. The secular world resisted the intrusion of biblical morals into kids’ entertainment. Conservative Christians feared that the fantastical reinterpretations of Bible stories might lead kids to think of the Bible as just a bunch of fairy tales or a book of moral lessons, not all that different from what you’d find on PBS Kids. In 2008, Russell Moore pointed out the impossibility of telling the story of Jesus’s crucifixion: A splattered tomato wouldn’t fit the show’s style. A few evangelicals were scandalized when a baby carrot portrayed Jesus in a Christmas episode (which mercifully ended before Herod’s massacre). But these criticisms didn’t carry the day. Most Christian parents were just happy to see family-­friendly entertainment with creativity and production values as good as anything you could find in “the world.”

Historian David Bebbington’s well-known description of evangelicals identifies four traits: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. The last of these informed the evangelical ethos of the nineties in important ways. There was often a political current running through the culture-making of the time. Focus on the Family lobbied Congress; pastor and university president Jerry Falwell sent out videos peppered with Republican talking points (and, on occasion, conspiracy theories); Southern Baptists boycotted Disney because of the company’s leftist agenda; men gathered in Washington for Promise Keepers; and the sins of Bill ­Clinton made headlines. Fighting for the soul of the country was championed as a demonstration of faithfulness. Churches were asleep, and Christians apathetic. It was time to wake up! Carman, a CCM star, captured the urgency in his 1993 song “America Again”: 

If you wanna see kids live right

stop handing out condoms

and start handing out the Word of God in schools.

But not all the activism was political. Christian performers often paused their concerts to share opportunities for compassion ministry: feeding the hungry, building wells, or providing financial assistance to children in far-flung places of poverty. Teenagers went on mission trips—if not overseas, then to other states, where we did puppet shows, tutored kids, fixed roofs, or helped repair homes for families putting their lives back together after a natural disaster. 

The most culturally influential example of evangelical activism was a direct opposition to the sexual libertinism of the time. True Love Waits was a campaign initiated by Southern Baptists. It quickly outgrew its denominational origins and became a national phenomenon. All sorts of practices and cultural artifacts grew up around the pledges teenagers made to remain sexually abstinent until marriage—purity rings, a special ball to celebrate virginity. Christian singers wrote songs and gave testimony about saving sex for marriage: Jaci ­Velasquez, “I Promise”; ­Rebecca St. James, “Wait for Me.” The Jonas Brothers wore purity rings for a time, as did ­Miley Cyrus. Some rejected dating altogether, advocating for a culture of demur courtship. Joshua ­Harris’s best-selling I Kissed Dating Goodbye became the quintessential example of what would later be called “purity culture.” 

The larger society was influenced in some measure by the spread of purity culture. Between 1995 and 2002, sexual activity declined significantly among teenage girls and boys. The rate of teen pregnancies fell. The percentage of teenagers who had sexual intercourse dropped for both boys and girls, from 43 and 38 percent to 31 and 30 percent. And while some studies show that teens who pledged themselves to purity did not behave all that differently from teens who did not, it’s hard to deny a shift in cultural norms about teenage sexuality, even if True Love Waits can’t be considered the single cause for that shift.

Years later, many of us would re-evaluate the promises and pressures that purity culture placed on our generation. At times, virginity was ­equated with godliness in ways that exceeded biblical teaching. There were unequal expectations for young women as compared to young men, and the sloppy rhetoric of some youth pastors could imply a teenager’s worth was tied to keeping the pledge. A sexualized prosperity gospel took hold: If you wait for sex until marriage, you’ll be blessed with a great sex life and a better marriage later. One of the earliest sermon clips to go viral in the era of social media featured pastor Matt ­Chandler’s story of a church minister who, in making a case for sexual abstinence, passed a rose around the room, only at the end to hold up the bruised, battered flower with petals barely hanging on, and say, “Who would want this?” Chandler said everything in his soul cried out in response: Jesus wants the rose! That’s the point of the gospel! 

While the excesses of purity culture deserve pushback, a sober assessment of that era should still appreciate the aims of our parents and grandparents who encouraged us to cultivate a holy aspiration to present our bodies as living sacrifices.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye wasn’t the only book that made a mark in the nineties. Christian fiction was prominent. By the early 1990s, evangelical books and merchandise was a $3 billion business. In Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith (2021), journalist Daniel Silliman describes the evangelical bookstore as “a mechanism that forms a group as a group, bringing people into a conversation. . . . Imagination happens in a bookstore.” 

Christian bookstores stocked their shelves with colorful trinkets, toys, books, and alphabetized rows of cassettes and CDs. Evangelical moms and grandmas browsed the latest addition to Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series, historical fiction with heartfelt storytelling, gentle romance, and an emphasis on Christian values. Visitors stepping into a Christian bookstore were enveloped by instrumental praise music quietly playing overhead, creating an atmosphere that felt unmistakably safe and family-friendly.

But “safe” wasn’t the whole story. By the late 1980s, author Frank Peretti was writing novels that placed religious concepts within the horror genre. His books shied away from bad language and anything too gory, but there was plenty of cataclysm. His view of a world engulfed in spiritual warfare seized the imaginations of evangelicals across the country. This Present Darkness became a major success for the burgeoning publisher Crossway, selling more than two million copies in ten years. Once known primarily for publishing Francis Schaeffer’s work, Crossway’s editors sensed that Peretti’s novels fit well with the latter part of Schaeffer’s career—a heightened sense of the culture-war showdown, transposed into a charismatic key that aligned well with the growing Pentecostal and nondenominational movement of the time. Readers were invited into a world of the powers and principalities at war above and around us, with our prayers making all the difference. 

Peretti’s novels appeared during the Satanic panic of the late 1980s. Rumors spread throughout the country of ritualistic, occult activity underlying abuse, especially of children. Understandably, ten years later, many evangelical parents were ­initially wary of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the first of which appeared in 1997. Long before Rowling was a darling of evangelicals for standing ­courageously against transgender ideology, the world of witchcraft and wizardry she’d created made her suspect. As my friend Shane Morris once quipped, “A lost time traveler in the early twenty-­first ­century could just about pinpoint the year by asking who hates J. K. Rowling and for what.” By the time the final Harry Potter book arrived, many evangelicals had begun to recognize the Christian imagery in the series, and eventually Hogwarts found a place on the bookshelves in evangelical homes, next to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

But it wasn’t fantasy that captured the imagination of most evangelicals by the end of the nineties: It was eschatology. The first book in Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series appeared in 1995. Based on a quasi-dispensational view of the end times, Left Behind imagined a rapture of the Church at the start of a seven-year tribulation marked by the rise of the Antichrist and the race to Armageddon. The series was wildly successful, selling more than eighty million copies. Ironically, the Left Behind series that popularized the dispensational view of a pre-tribulation rapture was partly responsible for the rapid diminishment of this perspective as a respectable interpretation of the Bible’s prophetic literature in the evangelical academy. The new generation of pastors and seminary students opted for interpretations of the end times that had historical pedigrees. 

The rise of the internet marked a wholesale transformation of the evangelical subculture. By the time dial-up gave way to Wi-Fi in every home, the resistance to Harry Potter had largely melted away, the vibrant Christian music industry of my youth had blended into worship music, and the evangelical energy shifted from building a separate culture to figuring out how to survive in an increasingly hostile secular monoculture. The idea of a protected evangelical enclave was plausible in the nineties. It grew steadily less tenable as the new century marched on. The Great Dechurching began in the late 1990s and only recently has appeared to taper off, in part because there are fewer ­churchgoers around who might leave. Although evangelical churches fared better than Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants in holding on to their own, no one can overlook the steady stream of people drifting away from faith. Rather than plundering the Egyptians, evangelicals felt more like they were being led into Babylonian exile.

The evangelical subculture has had its share of headline-making scandals, with artists, authors, and pastors often disappointing fans and followers who once esteemed them. Josh Harris, the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, renounced his books and his faith. Two of the three DC Talk members are notable for public falls from grace—Kevin Max now claims to be an “exvangelical” who follows the Universal Christ, and Michael Tait has acknowledged a double life that involved abusing drugs and sexually assaulting young men over the course of two decades. Any assessment of the legacy of evangelical culture-making in the nineties must grapple with the glaring failures—sin, injustice, and compromise. But a full reckoning of the remarkable cultural outpouring that shaped me as a young Christian must also note the quiet victories. That world shaped a resilient faith among young believers in a secular age, and many of us have benefited greatly. 

Though we may roll our eyes at its kitsch, its copy-cat tendencies, its “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs, we need to remember how much of secular entertainment from those years is equally forgettable. Christians don’t have a corner on cringe. The evangelical pop culture of the 1990s was far from perfect, but it helped to remind my generation of the basics of life and faith. 

Picture the interlocking elements of how this subculture worked. A fifteen-year-old kid wakes up in the morning and reads a Bible passage in a student study Bible recommended by his favorite Christian band. On the way to school, Adventures in Odyssey is playing—an episode about responding with generosity to someone who insults you. He arrives at school early in the morning chill, where he joins a tight circle of believers around the cold metal flagpole, hands clasped and prayers whispered into misty air, a demonstration of his desire to be salt and light. During study hall, he finds time to read a few pages of the Christian fiction novel he bought at the bookstore the week before. After school, he heads home, listening to Christian radio on the way. The songs warn against sin, ­champion Christ’s redemption, and speak about standing out as a believer in the world. It’s Wednesday, so there’s church that evening, and CCM is pumping through the stereo system when he arrives for worship, friendship, and Bible teaching. These are his people, the ones who tell him he’s not alone, that others are seeking the Lord and living the great adventure of faith. After church, there’s a hangout for the youth group at a friend’s house. Teens cluster around the TV; a familiar circle of friends are laughing at VeggieTales as pizza grease stains paper plates. Others discuss their plans to attend a Christian concert next weekend. Before bed, he slides off his faded WWJD bracelet, tossing it onto his bedside table beside his battered Bible, whispering a prayer beneath posters of his favorite Christian bands taped to the bedroom wall. Another day over. A new one ready to begin.

This thick world of culture-making in the nineties forged our identities as young believers. Today, the evangelical world is splintered and fractured, and the monoculture has disintegrated not only for evangelicals but for Americans as a whole. Yet within evangelicalism, we can see flashes of various subcultures re-emerging: the popularity of conferences that draw thousands of young men, or women, or pastors; songs by Forrest Frank or Brandon Lake that become mainstays at youth camps and revival meetings; the rise of YouTube personalities and apologists; the resurgence of old and new hymns; the success of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga; books on spiritual formation that cross denominational lines. What’s often missing for young people in church is what’s missing for young people in the world—hospitable homes that make face-to-face interactions and spontaneous hangouts possible, places where the omnipresent smartphone isn’t a debilitating distraction.

Looking back to my adolescence, I feel profound gratitude—not merely nostalgia—for an evangelical subculture that earnestly sought to offer my generation a vision of faithfulness amidst cultural upheaval. I want the same for my kids and for future generations. The culture-makers of the nineties weren’t content to curse the darkness; they lit candles instead. I want to keep the candle burning.

Image by Ian Muttoo, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

The post We Were Jesus Freaks appeared first on First Things.

The litany addresses every facet of human need: prayers for forgiveness of and deliverance from all kinds of sins; from the depredations of evil men and rulers, heresy, and religious indifference; from civil injustice and violence; and from various natural disasters, the suffering of illness, unprepared death, and final judgment. It pleads for mercy for the weak and orphaned, prisoners and captives; for the protection of women, mothers, and children, and those who labor or work in dangerous settings. It asks for renewal of faith, conversion of heart, love for enemies. And in all this, the Great Litany proclaims the truth and grace of the Trinity and of the incarnate life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. 

The ambition of this upsurge of prayer is to evoke all of God: creating, ordering, judging, and redeeming human life—my own and my neighbor’s. Taken as an expression of faith, the Great Litany represents Anglicanism’s rich, communal, and detailed sense of Christian existence. If I were to use academic jargon here in hopes of conjuring a sense of objective observation, I would say that Anglicanism in its sixteenth-century origins had a “thick ecclesial imaginary,” a shared and complex way of making sense of the world within the Church.  

That thick ecclesial imaginary is mostly vanishing, not least because so few now recite the Great Litany. I observe this diminution with a certain sadness, though with little religious fear. I have never thought that membership numbers indicate anything about God’s promises. After all, at the end of time, “few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14). I dare to hope that God will save all he has created. But this hope is hardly certain, and indeed there is little evidence in the world that things are going that way. So, as I watch my own Anglican tradition seemingly falter, the observations I’d like to relate are mostly without theological evaluation. Still, we should be aware of the signs.

Western Anglicanism has developed an extraordinarily thin ecclesial imaginary, both in its stated ideal and in its practice. ­Anglicanism’s self-conception is a stunted creedal fundamentalism: Nothing but the creed counts in Christian belief. This seems a firm ideal, but it entails the conclusion that everything else is optional. Not surprisingly, this thin conception too easily slides toward a plain creedal indifference.  

Either way, Christian reality touches little of a person’s experienced world. With parents, children, male-female marriage, and the shape of human bodies all a matter of, at best, secondary religious interest for Western Anglicans, little else is left to snag us in our lives with God. A host of other activities rush in to swallow up the ever-unmet passions of human desire: sex, politics, money, cannabis, sports, TV, do-gooding. The lives of most ­Anglicans in the West are indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. The thin ideal dovetails with thin practice.  

Some may object: Anglican liturgical life is traditionally quite thick! But rounds of prayer like the Daily Offices, Sunday catechesis and expository preaching, moral preparation for Communion, and private scriptural and meditative devotion have withered in parish practice and priestly example. Congregations are mostly interested in activities that, however ethically elevated they may be, do little to shape a life. That baptisms, confirmations, and marriages have plummeted in Western Anglicanism—in short, steady erosion of membership—is but the thin icing on a cake that has ceased to rise.

There are exceptions, and some quite notable. The split from the Episcopal Church in the United States that led to the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)—and parallel splits elsewhere in the West—promised a retrieval of some of the doctrinal and devotional thickness of the Anglican bequest. That has happened in places. But busyness is not itself a sign of thickness, particularly in our contemporary culture of desperate pastimes. The adoption by many Anglican churches of commercial evangelicalism—with its thin musical practice, digitized media, routinized politics, and morally superficial polemics and preaching—has hobbled the attempted renewal. Rather than recovering the thick ecclesial imaginary, the Church drifts along in the standard flow of America’s current cultural polarizations. 

The attenuation of the Anglican inheritance in supposedly “conservative” circles has been ongoing. The sober and rich commitments of more traditional Anglican evangelicalism—of the kind that made heroes like William Wilberforce and many of the now-forgotten early Church Missionary Society missionaries so perseverant and fruitful, true “confessors”—were rotted away by the infiltration of American pop evangelicalism into the British church in the 1980s.  

Alas, it has now contaminated whole swaths of African Anglicanism as well. To be sure, the African church remains the ballast of thick Anglicanism within the Anglican communion. There are—to maintain my sociological inflection—good reasons for that. The Prayer Book evangelicalism (and later the more catholic-oriented spirit) of the first Anglican missionaries in Africa encountered peoples well attuned to the fullness of something like the Great Litany’s faith. (The prayer remains in many of the Prayer Books in use in Africa). Birth, parents, family, siblings, toil, harvest, marriage, war, famine, storm, brigands, enemies, authorities, elders, children, illness, generations, death: All these human realities were ready to be captured by the prayers and divine concern of Scripture and the Church, bound up in the incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. One can speculate about the doctrinal head-knowledge of African Anglicans in the decades following their conversion to Christianity. But the phenomenon is plain to see: Their hearts were snared on a daily basis, touching the fullness of their existence. When the East African Revival took place in the 1920s and ’30s, it led to an indigenization of the penitential and cross-centered faith (very medieval from a European point of view) that lay at the heart of Anglican piety. The revival embraced communal realities, and so transformed local cultures that became integral Christian societies. Later, Pentecostal aspects of Christian piety, with their emotionally and expressive articulations, fused with Anglican worship and order. The combination proved to be one of the more vigorous thickenings of ecclesial life in the history of the church.  

But this achievement has been diluted by the spread of commercial evangelicalism, with its ready-made, slickly executed, externally produced, hollowed-out substance and devotion. The drive to engage “young people” caught up in the allurements of the internet (a way of escaping the dreariness of economic deprivation with images of a fantasized and moneyed Christian culture) is even stronger in places like Africa than in America, though the motives are similar. ­However, the drag of the real world remains powerful. Spotty wireless service, dysfunctional and incomplete electrical grids, and unreliable internet connections happily foil the reaching grasp of America’s commercial Christian tentacles. Reality also asserts its venerable limitations on human striving. African Anglicans continue to hit against the walls of social and human inadequacies—think of miserable healthcare services and constant insecurity. Thus they are forced still to reckon with the whole of their lives, and not just discrete and optional portions of it, as God’s own field of working and revealing. For this reason, African Anglicanism, for all its missteps, retains a vitality that far outstrips that of its ­Anglo-American ­elders.  

Catholicism is definitionally thick. Its seven sacraments—including marriage, penance, and the anointing of the sick or last rites—bind the believer to the whole range of human existence, from birth to death, much more than the Protestant limitation of sacramental life to the two “dominical” sacraments. For a long time, Anglicanism avoided the attenuating effect with a Prayer Book that followed the medieval sacramental practice in all but name. Moreover, Protestant scripturalism can have a thickening effect. Personal and extensive Bible reading—a tradition that after the Reformation turned Britain from among the least literate to the most literate of nations in Europe within a few decades—provides a daily discipline that encourages us to comprehend the breadth of human existence in Christian terms. But these thick practices, sacramental and scriptural, have been diminished, chipped away bit by bit as devotional practice becomes optional. (Do we really need it? There’s so much else to do, and we’re free to do it!) The thick ecclesial imaginary has melted into thinner and thinner puddles—­global ecclesial warming.

I tend to think that only a catastrophe of vast proportions will re-thicken Anglican and other ecclesial imaginaries. Something that pushes us back against the cliff walls of life, something that drives us to wake up from our narcosis of plenty so that we can see, again, that all is in God’s hands, to dispose, withhold, and judge as he sees fit. That was the urgent sense behind the Great ­Litany, and—here I move from the sociological to the ­theological—it is a sense we ought rightly to ­apprehend ­anew. For it is true. 

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By “celebrity pastors,” I did not mean those church leaders who happened to be well-known. I meant those who consciously leveraged their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it. These were not simply podcasters or bloggers or op-ed writers. They were key players in large parachurch organizations that sought to operate as denominations but without the typical accountability that denominations are, in theory at least, supposed to involve. At the height of Big Eva’s influence, I once asked a class of students who was the most influential pastor in their lives. Almost none mentioned his or her actual minister, defaulting instead to naming the headline acts at the big evangelical conferences. Q.E.D.

The era of Big Eva seems to have run its course. The conservative Protestant scene in the U.S. is no longer dominated by a few big-name celebrities or by a handful of large conferences. While those large conferences still exist and are often well-attended, they do not grip the popular evangelical imagination as they once did. They seem on the whole to have settled into the role that they should always have held: optional supplements to local church life for Christians who are committed to their own congregations but who enjoy connecting to others from elsewhere and hearing preachers from a variety of denominations. But the problems at the heart of Big Eva have not disappeared. They have migrated into new forums, particularly that of social media. 

The broader business dynamics in the U.S. are now sometimes referred to as creating the “gig economy,” a term that describes the shift from the traditional business model and institutions as sources of income to the more disparate and informal network of opportunities offered by new media. Ubers have squeezed licensed taxi drivers. Airbnb has opened up the world of short-term accommodation well beyond that once offered by professional hoteliers and the proprietors of guest houses. And so in the world of evangelicalism, Big Eva is being challenged by what we might call “Gig Eva.”

There are some obvious differences between the Big and the Gig. Even in the world of Big Eva, the headline acts were generally men and women who had first established their reputations through service of local churches or talented writing for established publishers. They had a certain authority that predated their rise to Big Eva influence. In Gig Eva, anyone with the time to spend living online can become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to any church. But there are also similarities, such as in the matter of accountability. Big Eva gurus were accountable only to each other. Their heirs in Gig Eva are accountable to nobody. To put it another way, both tend to marginalize the actual church by making their own platforms and declarations the source of all wisdom, but Gig Eva has only intensified the problem that led me to coin the term “Big Eva.”

There is a further similarity: Both are shaped by the economy of their chosen media. In the world of big venue conferences, headline names are critical to sell tickets. That led Big Eva at times to be undiscerning about who was welcome on stage. I remember asking one Big Eva boss if he thought a couple of his headline acts were men who offered godly models of what a pastor should be. He said “no,” then did nothing. Both men imploded in public scandal sometime later, and only then did they exit the conference stage. 

The economics of social media are different, and this is reflected in the culture of Gig Eva: Building a platform on X, for example, involves constant transgression of boundaries, hence the emergence of Gig Eva personalities whose trademark behavior ranges from attacking the leaders of Big Eva to rehabilitating Hitler. And Gig Eva also has the advantage of the frictionless nature of technologically mediated engagement. Big Eva silenced critics by ignoring them or making quiet phone calls to employers. Gig Eva launches full-frontal personal attacks but does so from the safety offered by tech platforms that have no place for that pesky prerequisite of personal competence. Indeed, X is proving to be the perfect platform for those aspiring to be the modern successors to Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw, who “was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”

No individual group or writer in Gig Eva will likely enjoy the breadth of influence experienced by their Big Eva forefathers. The diffuse nature of online discourse means that there will never be a focal point of the kind provided by the conference stage in the ten-thousand-seat convention hall. But Gig Eva may well reshape significant parts of the Christian culture because it is so attuned to the pieties of the dominant expressive individualism of our day. Its advocates validate their personal authenticity by their constant iconoclasm, their decrying of anything that stands in their way, and their priority of disembodied, cost-free online engagement over the more expensive demands of service—and accountability—to real people in real time, in church and in homes. Big Eva had its problems. Gig Eva is set only to intensify them.

The post Goodbye “Big Eva,” Hello “Gig Eva” appeared first on First Things.

The differences between Luther and Newman are immense, not least on the issue at the heart of De Servo Arbitrio: the clarity of Scripture. But their understanding of Christianity does share an important principle. Christianity is at its core a doctrinal faith, defined by dogmatic statements. Confronted with Erasmus’s reduction of the faith to vague practical pieties, a concern partially driven by the Dutchman’s desire to defuse doctrinal conflict, Luther asserted that any Christianity without assertions was no Christianity at all. And in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman argued that a basic point of continuity between his teenage Protestantism and his later Roman Catholicism was his conviction that Christianity was a dogmatic faith.

This has practical implications for those Protestants and Catholics who share this conviction: Christian doctrine stands prior to, and is formative of, all Christian practice, whether institutional or personal. Neither the church nor any individual who belongs to her is a free, autonomous individual. Rather, they are bound to a form of life. From preaching to pastoral care to behavior in the workplace or on social media, Christian truth determines Christian behavior. This is not to claim that Christians are automata who respond mechanistically to life’s challenges. But it is to say that Christians are to judge how to respond by looking to the prior shape of the faith.

Recent events illustrate how today’s church leadership is informed less by dogmatic conviction and more by managerial pragmatism. 

First, in responding to the controversy surrounding Cardinal Cupich, Bishop Paprocki, and Sen. Dick Durbin, Pope Leo made a statement that elided the difference between abortion and the death penalty. Christians disagree (and, for this Protestant, legitimately so) over the latter. But one would hope that all see a qualitative difference between a medical procedure that is exclusively aimed at the killing of an innocent and a legal procedure that is, at least in intention, for the purpose of the punishment of the guilty. For any Christian pastor to fail to see the difference is sad. For the pope, it is scandalous and, given his intelligence, raises the question of what is really behind such a statement—though the usual Catholic suspects saw it as confirmation that the liberal Protestant ethos of the Francis papacy would continue. 

Meanwhile, in Canterbury, the world saw the practical consummation of a process whose logic was established some thirty years ago. Once the ordination of women was allowed, it was inevitable that the archepiscopal office in the Church of England would be occupied by a woman. Her sex was therefore not a shock. Nor, sadly, was the fact that the appointee is somewhat liberal on both LGBTQ+ issues and on abortion. Only weeks earlier, a former archbishop of Canterbury, erstwhile conservative evangelical George Carey, made a speech in the House of Lords in favor of assisted suicide. Christian doctrine no longer informs how leaders in the Church of England ought to think, speak, and act.

What do Rome and Canterbury seem to share at this point? The answer is a view of church leadership as a matter of managerial control of institutions with eclectic constituencies. The new primate of the Church of England is being lauded not for her orthodoxy but for the unity she will bring by the marginalization of traditionalists, those pesky types who take seriously the idea that the gospel is not a function of the wider cultural predilections. And while Rome is committed to continuity, the gaffe by the pope is intriguing. It involves an elementary confusion, but it is consonant with his current pattern of behavior. For example, he treats the traditionalists to a positive gesture on the Latin Mass, but he also entertains Fr. James Martin at the Vatican and then allows him to control the subsequent story. Now he acts in a way that undermines a senior American bishop and confuses basic categories. 

True, it is early days in Leo’s papacy, and a charitable interpretation would be that he is learning the lay of the land before making any decisive moves. I have been sympathetic to such a reading; but this latest incident inclines me to think that maybe a desire to avoid necessary housecleaning and conflict, even to maintain the Francis trajectory in a less ostentatious manner, is the real motivation for the ambiguity of recent months. Indeed, perhaps “ambiguity” will soon be too charitable a word. When ambiguity always seems to benefit one side, it is not ambiguous for very long. And the appointment to Canterbury of yet another advocate of the day-before-yesterday’s cultural tastes would indicate the Church of England’s hard-earned reputation for cultural irrelevance and courageously baptizing anything other than orthodoxy is set to continue. 

Different as they were, Luther and Newman understood that Christianity stands or falls by its dogmatic commitments that pay no heed to the exigencies of the times or its institutional politics. There is no compromise or halfway house that reconciles the ways of the world with the ways of faith. Managing institutions such that all sides are somehow held together in a form of specious unity that ultimately favors heterodoxy in belief or practice contradicts the very essence of the faith. The choice is really very simple, and Christians the world over deserve leaders who model faithful, uncompromising commitment to Christian doctrine.

The post Lessons from Luther and Newman appeared first on First Things.

By choosing her, the Church of England has effectively distanced itself from the vast majority of Anglicans in the Global South, who have consistently upheld the traditional Christian teachings on marriage and ordination. Many had hoped for a path toward healing and reconciliation within the deeply fractured Anglican Communion. Instead, this decision appears to close that door and signals an affirmation of the unorthodox and unilateral direction taken by the Church of England and several other Western provinces.

The Church should not embrace every new trend or innovation that arises in the surrounding culture. While it is called to engage the world with love and understanding, it must also guard its spiritual identity and moral integrity. When the Church loses its distinctiveness, it risks blending into the world it is meant to transform. To remain faithful to its calling, the Church must discern carefully, accepting what aligns with the gospel and rejecting what contradicts it. Only by retaining this holy distinctiveness can the Church continue to be the salt that preserves and the light that guides a darkened world.

It is increasingly evident that the Church of England is following in the footsteps of the Episcopal Church in the United States—a path marked by progressive theological and ethical positions that are heretical and have widened divisions with the rest of the Anglican family.

The appointment also risks deepening the gap between the Church of England and its ecumenical partners, particularly the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, for whom questions of doctrine and tradition remain central to communion.

This does not diminish the reality that women have always played a vital role in the life and mission of the Church. From the biblical witness of faithful women such as Mary Magdalene and Priscilla, to the countless women who have sustained the Church through prayer, service, and motherhood (both biological and spiritual) over the centuries, their ministry is indispensable. Yet, at the same time, it is impossible to ignore two thousand years of unbroken Christian tradition regarding marriage (between a man and a woman) and Holy Orders (which are reserved for men). This unbroken tradition is matched by and rooted in the plain sense of Scripture in both Testaments.

Orthodox Anglicans now have a historic opportunity to reform and redesign the Anglican Communion. Established in 1868 after the first Lambeth Conference a year earlier, the Communion’s colonial structure is outdated. The needed renewal should be built on a covenantal relationship among member provinces, united in their commitment to uphold traditional Anglican faith and practice. Such provinces must embrace the principle of interdependence—walking together in mutual accountability, not in hierarchy or domination. What affects all should be decided by all. If these decisions on marriage and ministry had been decided by all, Anglicans would never have departed from the orthodox tradition on marriage and ministry.

Therefore, leadership of this renewed Communion should arise from the people, through transparent and representative election, rather than inherited privilege. In this vision, the Global South Covenantal Structure, which we in the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) have developed, offers an inspiring and practical model for building a faithful, reformed, and truly global Anglican Communion. It is worth mentioning that fourteen Global South provinces have already adopted this new structure. 

The GSFA Covenantal Structure corrected the current dysfunctional Instruments of Communion that led to the fragmentation of the Anglican Communion. It is composed of the following three sections.

Section 1: “have a doctrinal basis for the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), where membership of the ecclesial grouping is not merely by geographical location but by way of agreement to clearly enunciated Fundamental Declarations in keeping with orthodox faith.”

Section 2: “to express the group’s common life by way of relational commitments to one another in discipleship, mission and ministry. These relational commitments will be actualised through specific Task Forces, which we envisage will work with other doctrinally orthodox global bodies, dioceses and parishes in the Anglican Communion.”

Section 3: “to establish conciliar structures for the Churches of GSFA so that particular Provinces/Dioceses in their respective Churches and together as the Church universal have a clearer process for addressing ‘Faith and Order’ issues, establishing the limits of diversity, holding each other accountable to a common dogmatic and liturgical tradition, and making decisions which carry force in the life of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA).” 

Doctrinal, relational, and conciliar agreement “makes the GSFA an effective and coherent ecclesial body with member Churches in full communion with each other. The goal is to be an ecclesial body that is faithful to God’s revealed word and effective in Gospel mission to the world.” 

The appointment of Sarah Mullally as head of the Church of England makes it clear that the time has arrived for different Anglican orthodox groups to join together. We need a new united Communion with such a strong Covenantal Structure.

The post Sarah Mullally and Reforming the Anglican Communion appeared first on First Things.

Not many people need to write an autobiography—especially not philosophy professors. Not many people who take the time to write an autobiography will do so in under 200 pages. But Peter Kreeft is unlike most people (and most philosophy professors).

For starters, there is his sheer output: more than one hundred books, covering everything from apologetics to surfing to Socrates to C. S. Lewis to the Catholic Catechism. Even more impressive is how he writes: pithy, humorous, opinionated, insightful, good-natured, and playful, yet serious and logical. Since Kreeft loves lists, permit me to list seven of my favorite lines from the book.

On the freewheeling way of being a kid in the 1940s: “Our play had more freedom, and our work and thought had more order.”

On young people today: “Teenagers are borderline human beings with their brains not in their heads but in their hormones or their smartphones; confused know-it-alls, dogmatically skeptical; spoiled brats who see their free gift of education as an imposed prison sentence. That is an exaggeration and a joke, of course, but if it weren’t at least 49 percent true, it wouldn’t be funny at all.”

On the frugality of the Dutch: “Dutch Calvinists make Scotchmen look like wasteful profligates. . . . How can you tell a Dutch house? By the paper plates on the clothesline.”

On the vacuity of modern praise choruses: “They make me feel excruciatingly embarrassed, as if I were watching a nudist colony of drunk Neanderthals loudly ‘sharing their feelings’ about their feelings. Yes, I know the people who sing them are sincere. They are terribly sincere. So is Ned Flanders.”

On what atheists do not see: “Religion is indeed a crutch, as the atheists argue. And until the atheist confesses that he is a cripple, he will not be in the market for a crutch.”

On the ubiquity of DEI in higher education: “Yes, I am a critic of the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ police, because I believe in all three of these things and they do not, any more than Robespierre and the ‘reign of terror’ in the French Revolution believed in ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ as they claimed they did.”

On why his autobiography says nothing about politics: “Today the majority of scholars, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and journalists see politics as more powerful, more practical, more realistic, more true, and more important than religion, while those who actually believe what their religion teaches (whether it’s Christianity or another religion) must see things in the opposite way: that our politics is only our human invention and fashion . . . Therefore, when religion lets itself be influenced by politics, it always gets corrupted, while when politics lets itself be influenced by religion, it gets sanctified.”

Like I said, the man knows how to write.

The course of Kreeft’s life is not hard to trace. Born in 1937 into a loving home in Paterson, New Jersey, Kreeft learned Christianity from his parents and from his pastor in the Reformed Church in America. In 1955, he traveled west to attend Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There he began his conversion—as the title indicates—from Calvinism to Catholicism. Almost the entire “autobiography” is the ­intellectual story of Kreeft’s conversion and an apologia for the Catholic faith. The rest of the story involves going to Yale, transferring to Fordham (where he completed his MA and PhD), marrying Maria, and then, in 1965, joining the faculty at Boston College, where he has lived and worked for sixty years. There is not much in this memoir about Kreeft’s personal life, especially as an adult—except for the general sense that—in the words of his biographical note—“He loves his five grandchildren, four children, one wife, one cat, and one God.”

As it happens, forty years after Kreeft was born and raised in the Reformed Church in America, so was I; and forty years after he left home to attend Calvin College, I left home to attend Calvin’s rival, Hope College—the RCA school in Holland, Michigan that Kreeft should have gone to! When Kreeft writes about the good and bad of tribal loyalty among the Dutch, the seriousness of Calvinist piety, and life in Grand Rapids, I know of what he speaks. Although we grew up two generations and seven hundred miles apart, we had many of the same cultural experiences: “Everyone I knew was Dutch, frugal, conservative, and Republican.”

But of course, our stories diverge in one absolutely fundamental way. My story has not been from Calvinist to Catholic but, one might say, from Calvinist to more Calvinist. As a Presbyterian pastor, I am not convinced by Kreeft’s apologetics for papal supremacy, or apostolic succession, or Marian devotion, or sacerdotalism, or Purgatory, or indulgences, or a Tridentine interpretation of justification, or a dozen other aspects of Catholicism, for which he argues with admirable brevity and lucidity. If a man is to be a Catholic, however, I hope he is the Peter Kreeft kind—full of good cheer and with a Protestant-like appreciation for the Bible, a personal relationship with Jesus, and the need for grace (even if we disagree on the nature of that grace).

Obviously, this is not the place to reengage the many areas where Catholics and Protestants continue to differ. But since most of the book is about Kreeft’s journey from Calvinist to Catholic, I think a few ­reflections are in order. Let me start with the ­area where he lands the best ­punches.

As is often the case when Protestants swim the Tiber, Kreeft’s initial attraction to the Catholic Church came by way of beauty and mystery. For Kreeft, this movement began with seeing St. Patrick’s Cathedral and reading St. John of the Cross. “My heart started moving down the road to Rome earlier than my head,” he writes. Kreeft found the poetry of the liturgy to be like fine wine, satisfying a deep thirst for joy and beauty. His aesthetic sensibilities resonated with architecture that was expansive and romantic rather than frugal and utilitarian. Whereas Calvinist churches were plain, humble, homely, and unpretentious, Catholic cathedrals felt elaborate, spectacular, and otherworldly. The eventual move to Catholicism was not a change from barrenness to pregnancy, he insists, but from appetizers to a main course. In Kreeft’s telling, Catholicism gave him the “more” he did not know he was missing.

One does not have to agree with all of the “more” to accept that Kreeft has identified a real weakness in many strains of Protestantism (and of evangelicalism in particular). I love the Puritans and their emphasis on the word over spectacle and their concern for the “beauty of holiness,” but more than a few low-church Protestants almost wear their utilitarian aesthetic as a badge of honor. Too many of us consider ill-prepared, poorly crafted spontaneous prayers the only way to be sure the Spirit is at work. Kreeft is right to remind us that personal prayers may be precious to God, but they are not public liturgy. As Protestants, we would do well to think more deeply about how formality, tradition, structure, and space are critical supports in our commitment to worshiping a God who is high and lifted up and whose glory is beyond tracing out.

If transcendence, beauty, and mystery are Kreeft’s most compelling points for me as a Protestant, what about some of his less convincing arguments? Let me mention three.

First, I wonder whether Kreeft has rejected a caricature of Calvinism instead of the real thing. For example, he makes much of the fact that in Catholic theology, grace perfects nature. This is said to be a major weakness of Protestant theology. But it does not have to be. The great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck anchored his whole Neo-Calvinist project in the conviction that grace restores nature. The same idea can be found in Francis Turretin and in many other Reformed systematicians.

Similarly, I am not convinced that Kreeft has dealt fairly with ­Calvin’s doctrine of free will. Kreeft believes strongly in God’s providential supervision over all things. He rejoices to know that God is the author of all our stories. He loves Romans 8:28 as a “castle keep” against doubt and despair. He stresses the importance of divine sovereignty. He also argues that Calvin was so “rationalistic” that he denied the other half of the great mystery: that we have free will even as God is sovereign. “If we are not free,” Kreeft argues, “then all morality and all justice is meaningless.” But this confuses several kinds of free will. Though Calvin denied that our wills, bound by sin, were free to choose salvation apart from God’s sovereign grace, he did not deny that we make real ­choices. Calvin preferred not to call this prerogative “free will,” but he ­granted that freedom from necessity “so inheres in man by nature that it cannot be possibly taken away.” In Reformed theology, God must unilaterally cause us to be born again, but he always works by renewing the will, not by abolishing it. As the Canons of Dort (one of the high statements of Reformed orthodoxy) put it, God “does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones,” nor does he “coerce a reluctant will by force.”

Second, I wonder whether Kreeft has dealt fairly with the diversity that existed in the Church even before the Reformation. He insists that not one of the supposed corruptions Protestants have found offensive and unbiblical—the primacy of the bishop of Rome, the Eucharist instead of the Bible as the center of worship, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, devotion to the saints and to Mary, her immaculate conception and sinlessness, her assumption into heaven, the doctrine of purgatory, and baptism as a saving act that works ex opere operato—“ever caused any protest or controversy or appeared as new” for 1,500 years. “If the Catholic Church today is full of so many heretical barnacles,” he asks, “why did no one in the world, no saint or sage or prophet, ever notice them and protest until Luther and Calvin?” Surely, the presence of the Waldensians, the Lollards, and the Hussites, not to mention the many conflicts between East and West, the many disagreements among the medieval schoolmen, and the many divergent views propounded by the Church Fathers and ecumenical councils undermine such a protest-­free version of Church history.

Three, I wonder whether my Catholic friends have considered what may be broken in Catholicism itself when most rank-and-file Catholics do not know the Bible and do not understand salvation by grace. This is not a criticism of Kreeft, so much as a different conclusion from the one he reaches. Kreeft presents an enjoyably evangelical version of Catholicism. And he does not describe his conversion as a rejection of Protestantism so much as a growing-up out of Protestantism into the adulthood of Catholicism. I suppose my question, then, is why it seems that so few Catholics grow into Kreeft’s version of Catholicism without the help of Protestantism.

Kreeft acknowledges that Protestants are superior to Catholics in three things: sermons, hymns, and familiarity with the Bible. Is it possible that the rejection of sola scriptura (the conviction that the Bible is the final and supreme authority on all matters of faith and practice) has meant, on a practical level, that Scripture is not deeply taught or emphasized in most Catholic congregations? If the word of God everywhere in the Bible forms the people of God, corrects the people of God, and tells the people of God who they are to be and what they are to do, then surely anything that leads the Church away from knowing, studying, and hearing that word is ­rightly regarded as suspect, even highly suspect.

In another moment of admirable candor, Kreeft acknowledges that when he has asked the Catholic students at Boston College why God should admit them into heaven, more than 90 percent begin with “I” statements like “I did my best” or “I am a kind person.” According to Kreeft, about half mention God’s mercy, and fewer than 10 percent mention Christ. Even if I were convinced that all the “more” of Catholicism was correct, I would have to wonder whether the benefits of the “more” had swallowed up the most important things that should come first. What does it profit a man to gain all the cathedrals of Europe if he forfeits his own soul?

At one point, Kreeft says he personally knows of at least twenty people who have converted from Calvinism to Catholicism, but not one who converted from Catholicism to Calvinism. All the data point in a different direction. Catholicism in America continues to decline, at a slightly faster rate than evangelical Protestantism. (My conservative Presbyterian denomination is one of the few that is growing.) In twenty-­three years as a pastor, I have seen literally hundreds of people come into the Calvinist fold from a Catholic background. Usually, the first thing they mention is that they never heard the gospel clearly in the Catholic Church and that they thought the essence of Christianity was about being a good person. Maybe they did not have ears to hear what was there in the Catholic liturgy or in the weekly homily. But it is at least worth considering why those who grow up with all the “more” of Catholicism often know little of the Bible and are routinely unaware that God saves sinners by grace through faith, and that this is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8–9).

Kreeft takes some big swipes at Calvinism throughout the book. This is no mealy-mouthed apologetics. And yet, even when I disagreed (strongly at times), it was impossible not to like the apologist. It is easy for people who believe strongly in their views to pursue their cause with scorn, with monomaniacal focus and self-importance. Kreeft has none of these attributes. Instead, he is always self-aware and self-­deprecating. He admits that he is better at reading and writing than at pastoring. He acknowledges that he hates small talk, which he has come to realize is a fault, not a virtue. He confesses that he is too often weak-willed, self-indulgent, and a whiney complainer. There is an important lesson here for polemical writers of all ages and on all topics. If you are determined to correct others, demonstrate that you are even more determined to correct yourself.

Wisdom doesn’t always come with age, but when the already wise get older, their wisdom is especially sanguine. I am still thinking about some of the pithy sayings at the end of the book—such as “I have learned to expect less of people.” And “I have learned the fragility of reason as well as the blindness of emotion.” And “I have learned the necessity of suffering and sorrow in order to know God and to become holy.” These are simple truths, but also profound. And there are many more like these.

I am thankful that Peter Kreeft has spent his career arguing for the reasonableness of Christianity. I am thankful that after all these years he still loves the first question-and-­answer from the ­Heidelberg ­Catechism. Most of all, I am thankful that he loves Jesus and wants others to love Jesus. I do not agree with the Roman Catholic faith. In fact, I think it represents a serious and dangerous departure in many places from the truths of Scripture. No doubt, Kreeft thinks my theological errors are serious as well. So if we ever meet, I suppose our conversation will take as its point of departure the saying that came to describe the relationship between him and his Calvinist father: “Hate the heresy but love the heretic.”

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