Why would God act so powerfully in one nation’s history? John Piper turns to Exodus 14 to show that God’s saving acts reveal his glory to the whole world.

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ABSTRACT: Whether the United States of America has ever been a Christian nation may continue to be debated. The undisputed truth is that Christianity has played a significant role in the 250-year history of America. Its influence is present from the beginning, even though the most prominent Founders did not have robust Christian faith. After the Founding, the Second Great Awakening brought America to a high point of evangelical faith in the decades before the Civil War. Though several denominations have experienced drastic declines in the century and a half since then, recent data suggests that the phenomenon of the “nones” is overblown. Christianity in America is changing, but it is not dying.

As the United States of America observes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question of the nation’s Christian roots seems more controversial than ever. Secularists tell us that biblical faith had virtually nothing to do with the Founding, while many today on the Christian right insist that the Founders were born-again believers who created America as a “Christian nation.”

Whatever role Christianity played at the nation’s birth, we have entered a post-Christian era in modern America. The reigning powers in American academia, business, entertainment, and law are typically hostile toward Christians and biblical morality. Freedom of self-expression has become the ultimate determiner of social justice. Traditional morality and even biological reality are often reviled as tools of oppressors. Our brave new world has made many Christians eager to recapture the nation’s spiritual origins.

In the following essay, I sketch the story of Christianity in America from the Founding to the present day, demonstrating that the church’s flourishing in America has depended not on a connection to the government but on the strength of its sovereign God.

Faith Among the Founders

America in 1776 doesn’t easily yield the image of uncomplicated biblical devotion that some Christians expect to find. To be sure, biblical concepts influenced America’s founding principles. To cite just one example, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” makes no sense unless you assume (as the Founders did) that there is a created order perceptible via revelation, reason, or both. Thus, our equality and rights derive from our relationship to the Creator God. The Declaration’s view of humanity, then, is broadly based on Genesis 1 and 2.

However, saying that the founding ideals reflect a biblical worldview is not the same as saying that the Founders were orthodox, practicing Christians. Some of them surely were believers. Virginia’s Patrick Henry and Massachusetts’s Samuel Adams were outspoken Christians who insisted that America needed Christian morality and biblical beliefs to thrive as a republic. But when you look at the most prominent Founders, there are no obvious instances of personally devout and theologically sound Christians.

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are perhaps the easiest Founders to diagnose theologically. Franklin called himself a Deist in his Autobiography, and through the end of his life he professed doubt regarding essential Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible.¹ Jefferson was even more skeptical than Franklin for much of his life. Though he became convinced that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher in history, Jefferson still did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.² He famously prepared a Gospel compilation containing only Jesus’s parables and ethical teachings, with most of the miracles literally cut out with scissors.

John Adams was more supportive of a public role for Christianity than Jefferson was. Adams even backed the continuation of Massachusetts’s official church after the adoption of the US Constitution, believing that Christianity deserved state support because it was the primary wellspring of people’s virtue. But like Jefferson, Adams was a Unitarian, denying the doctrine of the Trinity.³

Other Founders, including George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, were guarded about their own beliefs, making them more difficult to label. Washington, like Adams, held a high view of Christianity’s social importance. But during his long career Washington said almost nothing about his personal convictions, and he clearly decided to never write the names “Jesus” or “Christ” or utter them in public. He held to this standard of silence about Jesus in all but a couple of instances.⁴ Washington also did not take communion for most of his life.⁵ Some reports suggest that he did partake prior to the American Revolution, but after 1776 he either did not attend church on communion Sundays or left the service before communion was served.

Madison certainly had a strong background in traditional Christian theology, both from his upbringing in the Anglican Church and from his studies under the Presbyterian pastor John Witherspoon at Princeton College. But after college, Madison also became largely silent about his own beliefs. Aside from his attending an Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, as president, scholars have little evidence with which to assess Madison’s own convictions.⁶

Finally, Alexander Hamilton was no one’s idea of a sanctified Christian, but he was more deeply rooted in orthodox Christian belief than either Franklin or Jefferson.⁷ And the dying Hamilton did request to take communion after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.⁸

Free to Proclaim and Practice

Given the mixed personal record of the American Founders, what accounts for our nation’s impressive history of Christian devotion? The most important factor was the Lord’s providence working through thousands of churches to spread the gospel. A second essential factor in America’s robust religious history was the unusual freedom that churches and Christians enjoyed due to religious liberty.

In other words, America’s Christian strength was not dependent on the government somehow being “Christian.” We have seen the dismal results in countries such as England that have maintained an official state church.⁹ Political compromise and theological corruption are the inevitable products of church-state collaboration. America’s religious vitality was based on God’s power moving through zealous churches operating in a free environment. American history is a case study of the benefits of a “free church” ministering in a “free state,” a situation that the Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention describes as the “Christian ideal.”

Founders such as Madison and Jefferson desired religious liberty for more “Enlightenment”-type reasons than evangelical Christians did. Jefferson thought religion was a private matter not subject to government oversight. Evangelicals, especially the Baptists, wanted religious freedom because the official state churches had often persecuted them as dissenters.¹⁰ But evangelicals and Enlightenment-influenced politicians reached the same conclusion about religious liberty: Christianity would thrive better when freed from government interference. This theory of religious freedom and vitality proved true in the American experience.¹¹

Not that religious freedom guaranteed Christian dynamism. Even by the 1730s, Christian commitment in colonial America had faltered to the point that the First Great Awakening was necessary to revitalize the slumbering churches. Casual Christian observers might assume that America was the most distinctively religious at the Founding, and that the nation has become increasingly secular ever since. But it is more accurate to see America’s Christian history as a series of cycles, with regular intervals of decline and revival continuing through present day. Thankfully, those cycles largely came after 1776, without much religious persecution against Christians. The imprisonment of dissenting evangelical preachers largely ended with the Revolution.¹²

Still, there was no golden age of church life in American history. Each era had its strengths and weaknesses. We understandably look back to the First Great Awakening as a high point for doctrinally rigorous preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. But even that era was tainted by these pastors’ complicity in the moral blight of slavery.

Second Great Awakening

In terms of evangelism, missions, and church planting, the greatest era in American Christian history was not the First but the Second Great Awakening. Many Reformed and evangelical believers look askance at the Second Great Awakening because of the theological novelties introduced by the popular Presbyterian preacher Charles Finney. In the late stages of the Second Awakening, Finney forged a human-centered system of revivalism. He declared that a revival was no miracle but merely an event that depended on a pastor’s efforts and the application of effective techniques.¹³ Calvinists also have mixed feelings about the dominant position that Arminian, free-will Methodists took in American Protestantism by the 1830s.

Despite such theological concerns, we shouldn’t forget the Second Awakening’s quieter but beneficial accomplishments. We may disagree with Methodists on issues such as free will and universal atonement, but the Methodist Church of the Second Great Awakening remained unambiguously evangelical. Methodist circuit riders such as Francis Asbury possessed a zeal for gospel preaching that few have ever matched. Between 1776 and 1861 (the beginning of the Civil War), Methodists went from a tiny sect in America to an evangelical behemoth. By the 1850s, the Methodists had helped to make America more evangelical and gospel-saturated than it had ever been before or has been since.

Running a close second to the Methodists in church planting were the Baptists, most of whom remained broadly Calvinist. Baptists saw particular successes in the backcountry South, which many observers (ironically) regarded as the least-churched part of America in 1776. Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled to remote villages and farms across the South and Midwest, leading to countless conversions and church plants, thus heralding the advent of the “Bible Belt.”

Baptists and Methodists also made the first major evangelistic inroads among African Americans during the Revolutionary era, highlighted by the conversion of the Baptist pastor and enslaved man David George. Around 1773, George became pastor of the first enduring African-American-led congregation, the Silver Bluff Church in South Carolina. After the Revolutionary War, George evacuated with the British to Nova Scotia in Canada, where he evangelized the Black Loyalist population. Eventually George and many of his Canadian congregation left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in West Africa, where George planted yet another Baptist church.¹⁴ George’s story illustrates the way that evangelicals were beginning to take the gospel across cultures and oceans.

Precedents such as David George’s church-planting efforts notwithstanding, the formal missionary movement in America began in 1810 with the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Inspired by William Carey’s British Baptist Missionary Society (1792), American churches joined the effort to send missionaries to the nations. Among the first missionaries appointed by the ABCFM were Adoniram and Ann Judson, who departed for India in 1812. The Judsons were Congregationalists, but as they sailed to south Asia, they reconsidered the issue of baptism and became convictional Baptists. This change ultimately led to the creation of the Baptists’ Triennial Convention, the first Baptist national organization in America. The Triennial Convention promoted global Baptist missions.¹⁵

In addition to evangelism, church planting, and missions, we could cite other facets of the vast complex of Christian growth that the Second Great Awakening entailed. Obviously it included revivals, highlighted by the Cane Ridge awakening in Kentucky in 1801. But even the revivals did not appear out of nowhere: The “camp meetings” were the product of local churches cooperating in special evangelistic events with round-the-clock gospel preaching.

Churches also partnered in Bible societies to print and distribute the Scriptures in record numbers. Evangelicals engaged in the great social and political causes of the day, including the antislavery movement. Southern white evangelicals (many of them slaveowners) enlisted on the proslavery side, however, leading to the division of the Baptist and Methodist denominations in the 1840s. Poignantly, the 1845 Baptist breakup was not just about slavery in general but about whether slaveowners could legitimately serve as missionaries. Here, as so often in church history, we see people’s capacity to corrupt seasons of blessing with their own sinful and selfish agendas.

One way to define a “Christian nation” is a country with an unusually high percentage of Christian believers. By that metric, America was probably the most Christian during the mid-nineteenth century, after the Second Great Awakening. Church planting, evangelism, and revivals had brought unprecedented numbers of whites and blacks into gospel-preaching churches. (Native-American conversions lagged far behind, despite Baptists and other evangelicals making some advances among tribes such as the Cherokees.) But the specter of slavery loomed over the evangelical triumph of the mid-1800s. The denominational splits of the 1840s heralded the even more catastrophic national schism that precipitated the Civil War in 1861. The greatest moral question of the age would be decided by the clash of armies, not the reasoned deliberations of pastors and theologians.

Christianity During the Civil War and Beyond

If the mid-nineteenth century represented evangelicalism’s apex in America, what transpired over the next century and a half? How did the heavily evangelical nation of 1861 become the America of 2026, in which evangelicals now live in a culture that treats Christians with a combination of indifference and hostility? It is an extremely complex story, but the transformation started with the Civil War itself. The war undermined the moral authority of churches, who conspicuously failed to take a unified stance on slavery. The late-nineteenth century also saw a great wave of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who permanently diversified the religious landscape, undercutting Protestantism’s numerical dominance. That diversification broadened in the mid-1960s to include more immigrants from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious backgrounds.

Leading denominations in the late 1800s also began to face the theological and philosophical rot of Darwinism and higher biblical criticism, which brought basic issues such as humanity’s origins and the Bible’s authority into question. Tragically, many Protestant theologians and pastors were more interested in academic novelty and cultural prestige than biblical fidelity. Thus, once-evangelical denominations such as the Methodist Church began a long, painful slide into liberalism and cultural irrelevance. By the mid-twentieth century, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had overtaken the Methodists as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Even the SBC could not avoid the reefs of theological liberalism and higher criticism, however. Bitter controversies over liberal advocacy racked SBC seminaries for the century between the 1870s and 1970s. My own institution, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, saw one of its Old Testament professors (Ralph Elliott) publish the controversial book The Message of Genesis in 1961. Elliott presented Genesis largely as a symbolic and mythological account, not one describing actual historical events.¹⁶ The SBC’s conservative resurgence, beginning in 1979, corrected the recurring problem of liberal seminaries in a largely traditionalist denomination. By the 1990s, SBC seminaries had become uniformly conservative and inerrantist. Not coincidentally, in the twenty-first century SBC institutions play a dominant role in American seminary education, putting an indelible mark on the future of pastoral ministry and missions.¹⁷

The conservative turn made the SBC an outlier, however, among historic Protestant denominations. Mainline denominations such as the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) embraced progressive views on issues including higher criticism of the Bible, ordaining women as pastors, and affirming the LGBTQ+ agenda. The mainline largely followed broader American patterns of secular egalitarianism and expressive individualism. These denominations entered a devastating pattern of decline starting in the 1960s.

Some conservative denominations such as the SBC have also experienced slow decline in recent decades. But just when you start thinking that the American church is in a death spiral, signs of new life appear. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), for example, has seen recent major increases in professions of faith by children and adults, as well as slow membership growth.¹⁸ The growth of global Christianity has also had unexpected effects on American churches. Conservatives in the Anglican Church in North America, for example, have disaffiliated with the progressive Episcopal Church and aligned with traditionalist Anglican provinces in the global South. The United Methodist Church likewise saw many evangelical congregations break away to form the Global Methodist Church in 2022.

What Statistics (Don’t) Show

Pollsters of American religion have produced many breathless accounts of the “nones,” or the growing numbers of Americans who say they have no religion.¹⁹ However, as Byron Johnson and I show in our forthcoming book The Death of Religion? there are good reasons to suggest that the “nones” phenomenon is overblown.²⁰ To be sure, there are more Americans today who tell pollsters that they really don’t have any religion. A generation ago, many of these people would likely have said they were Christians, even if they never went to church. Switching from a nominal, non-practicing “Christian” to a non-practicing “none” is a change of self-identification but not necessarily a departure in religious practice or belief. From a Christian perspective, it is probably a welcome change, as nominal Christianity is not true Christianity anyway.

But standard surveys of churches, such as the much-discussed US Religion Census, vastly undercount the actual number of American congregations, usually by at least 25 percent.²¹ Why the massive undercount? Demographers often miss relatively new churches and denominations because they are unknown to the surveyors, or the congregations don’t report membership statistics. These are the “others” missing in typical religion surveys, and they are a big cohort. In the religion media, the “others” might as well not exist, while the “nones” seem to be taking over the whole religious landscape.

The “others” are disproportionately evangelical and Pentecostal, they tend to be people of color, and their churches are often pastored by immigrants. Sometimes the “others” meet in a storefront or another church’s building; sometimes they represent megachurches with thousands of regular attenders.

The uncounted churches and congregants are especially strong in urban areas, including cities like Boston and New York, which have a missiological reputation of being secular and hard to reach with the gospel. The sociologist Tony Carnes, for example, studied one South Bronx neighborhood that reportedly had only 44 Christian congregations. Carnes discovered 156!²² This is an extreme instance, but it still reflects a vital matrix of often-unnoticed churches that represent the future of American religion.

Johnson and I conservatively estimate that there are about ten million Americans who regularly attend church but don’t appear in standard religion surveys. Reformed Christians would be uncomfortable with the theology of some of the “others,” especially those who embrace the deceptive promises of the prosperity gospel. The point, however, is that while Christianity in America is definitely changing, it is not dying. Even the relatively inhospitable environment of post-Christian culture isn’t able to kill it off. The church is a hardy plant, and it enjoys the care of a perfect, sovereign Gardener.

Evangelical Exceptionalism

So, where does all this leave us on America’s 250th anniversary? In God’s providential plan, America is just one nation among many. Many American saints will be represented in the great throng of worshipers from every tribe, tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9), but America doesn’t have an exceptional role in divine history; it is not the modern equivalent of biblical Israel.

What has made American Christianity exceptional, however, is religious liberty and the vitality of its evangelical churches. The American church has been unusually strong not because we were founded as a “Christian nation” but because the Founders believed the church would thrive best when it operated free from government meddling. The American government traditionally valued religion so much that it left churches to do what only churches should do: proclaim the gospel, preach the word, send out missionaries, and serve as embassies of God’s kingdom. Across the generations, the American church has produced legions of faithful pastors, missionaries, and laypeople to answer that call. May it continue to be so, as long as the American experiment endures.

It was a father’s nightmare — a nightmare that followed him into the daylight.

How many years was he made to watch this? How many years had he offered his prayers? How many years had his son battled this demon?

He felt what no father witnessing a suffering child can bear to feel: helpless.

How quickly did he set off with his son when the glorious stories first reached his ears? Even this Nazarene’s disciples possess power to exorcise demons? He tasted the heavenly dish he had gone so long without: hope.

He set off with his boy and caught Jesus’s disciples at the base of a high mountain. Jesus was not there, but any healing hands would do. The disciples began confidently. They spoke expectantly, rebuked earnestly, and ensured all onlookers that they’d done this before.

First attempt, nothing. Second attempt, nothing. Third attempt, nothing.

Failure.

Beads of sweat painted their brows. The crowd started to murmur. Scribes began to complain, then criticize. An argument broke out. The father and his son stood in the eye of the hurricane — alongside the demon.

That’s when they all saw him. The great crowd marveled and ran to greet him. A new contestant entered the arena, the disciples’ champion. What would happen next? Jesus would teach them (and us) an unforgettable lesson about faith.

Brought to the Master

“What are you arguing about with them?” Jesus asks when he arrives (Mark 9:16). Before anyone else can answer, the father can’t help but cry,

Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able. (Mark 9:17–18)

The Christ, having come from the heights of fellowship with his Father, Moses, and Elijah upon the Mount of Transfiguration, bemoans the sudden descent into doubt, uncertainty, and inability.

O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me. (Mark 9:19)

The crowd parts, and the boy is brought forth. Upon seeing Jesus, the spirit tightens his grip. The boy convulses, falls to the ground, and rolls about, foaming at the mouth.

“How long has this been happening to him?” the Lord asks.

The father packs years of horror into a few sentences: “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us” (Mark 9:21–22).

His son is on a suicidal path, harassed by a demon. The disciples (along with everyone else) could not dislodge it. The father pleads, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

‘If You Can’

Jesus is amazing. As everyone else’s eyes are focused on everything else in this scene, Jesus fixes the camera on an unseen problem.

Our lens focuses on the desperation of a father or lowers to the dismal convulsing of his son. Some may swing the camera around to glance at the befuddled disciples, while others would capture the scowling scribes or the rapt crowds. But as a desperate dad hovers above his shuddering son, Jesus focuses the camera fully on the father’s faith.

The boy foams and shakes on the ground, the father stares pitifully upon his last hope — and Jesus responds by double-clicking on the wording of the plea. The father has let something slip. Read the petition again: “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” Did you catch the issue? Jesus does immediately.

He quotes the father back to him: “‘If you can’!” (Mark 9:23).

This father, in the heat and frenzy of the moment, makes what seems like a humble request. Yet Jesus discovers it leavened with uncertainty. He detects unbelief under civility. The father blends deference with doubt, sincerity with skepticism, entreaty with incredulity. There’s a hornet’s nest beneath the flower bed.

Jesus sees it, sticks his hand in, and crushes it. He will entertain zero if you can’s. He is able. Always able. Do you believe this?

Help My Unbelief!

I, at least, am hit with the shrapnel of Jesus’s correction.

Can God do all things? Of course. But real life does not allow me to answer in the abstract or check boxes on the theology test. Generally, I believe God can do all things. But how about specifically? How about in those seemingly impossible circumstances in my own life — or, harder still, in the lives of loved ones? Have I really escaped Jesus’s reproof?

Haven’t I often given up faith’s expectancy, its optimism, its childlikeness in those places that make me wince? Those prayers I’ve grown tired of praying. Those circumstances that seem changeless. Those friends or family members who I doubt will ever know the Lord or be healed. Those relationships that feel cursed with thorns no matter how hard I try.

Young hope grows old. This father has seen things, hard things. Early prayers expected the breakthrough just around the corner, but then they grew tired, more calloused, more realistic. “I know you are able, Lord!” becomes, “If you can do anything, help us.” I know I am bringing the impossible to you, Lord, so just do your best. If you could just manage some of the symptoms, I would be grateful.

Does the father have defective faith or faith worn down?

For years he watched the foaming mouth, looked down upon the stiff boy rolling about, endured horrible moments seeing his son jumping into fire or submerging underwater. For years. His is not total unbelief, as he soon confesses (Mark 9:24). Perhaps he was calibrating his expectations to accommodate years of disappointment. Perhaps he was merely managing disillusionment. Perhaps his faith had atrophied. Perhaps he saw the length of the road stretching before him and realized that he just couldn’t keep sprinting anymore.

“If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

How Faith Thinks

Jesus is amazing. He doesn’t just retweet the father; he adds his unforgettable commentary. “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23).

All things are possible for one who believes. In the Greek, it means: All things are possible for one who believes. Unbelief questions and then qualifies these words. It can’t seem to mean what it means. What about our experiences? What about unanswered prayer? What about my convulsing child of many years or the failed attempts by his disciples? What can Jesus mean?

He means, all things are possible for one who believes. Although not all things are guaranteed, nothing is outside of the realm of possibility for someone who believes in him and his Father — and faith thinks this way. Faith knows God is never deficient, never limited, and that any inability — wherever it is found — is never found on his side of the fence.

And this faith believes that God is not only powerful but predisposed to gladly give what we ask him in faith. All things are possible, and we can be optimistic about receiving them because ours is a God who loves to give generously. The conditional phrase — if you can — not only affronts God’s power; it ignores his good pleasure toward his people. But faith says, “He can always do it, and he is for me!”

All Things Possible

Oh, that we would repent of low thoughts of God as quickly as this father does: “Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:24).

The father goes from asking Jesus for help with his son to asking Jesus for help with himself. He follows Jesus in his redirection: from “Exorcise this demon from my son!” to “Exorcise these doubts from my heart!” He really believes; he’s come all this way and has some confidence that Jesus has cast out other demons. But he begs Christ to address the greatest issue in this scene: his lack of faith. The greatest obstacle to his son’s freedom is unbelief — not the epileptic symptoms or the demonic oppression or any lack in Christ’s power or willingness.

After the father’s repentance, Jesus meets the supernatural debilitation with supernatural deliverance, a perpetual harassment with perpetual healing: “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again” (Mark 9:25).

Have you begun to pray if you can prayers? Or have you simply stopped praying altogether? Has your heart determined that Christ can’t change this crisis? This relationship? This decades-long disaster? Doubt no more, dear saint: All things are possible for one who believes.

When we became Christians, what happened to us? By calling us from darkness to light, God gave us an everlasting reason to boast in Jesus Christ.

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Through working with dozens of newly married and engaged couples, my husband and I have noticed a new trend. It is well known that many young women choose to delay or forgo having children altogether — but often, this decision is driven not by a fear of lost autonomy but by a fear of pregnancy and birth, known as tokophobia.

Social media has made the idea of tokophobia popular through curated streams of short-form videos describing pregnancy and labor fears and complications. These clips show relatable women with real struggles, but they lack crucial context, often leading viewers to feel fear over their own situations without basis.

Alongside social media, a global pandemic and economic change have fostered anxiety and even panic in many women who fear losing control of their bodies and the potential dangers of childbirth. But while my own births have varied drastically in complications and recoveries, the reward of a new life has outweighed the pain and hardship. Not only that, but there is much statistical proof that children bring more happiness, stability, and purpose into women’s lives.

Sometimes, there are good medical reasons for why someone may choose not to bear children, following prayer and submission to the Lord’s will, but in general, healthy young women choosing to forgo children because of fear have little scriptural backing for their decision. Throughout Scripture, God does not call us to avoid potentially dangerous situations because of fear. Rather, he calls us to step into them with him (Isaiah 41:10; Philippians 4:6–7).

Pregnancy: Sanctified Through Struggle

Some women love pregnancy: They feel healthy, confident, and sentimental. Some women fight severe symptoms and feel miserable all nine months. The majority fall somewhere in between, experiencing nausea, fatigue, back pain, varicose veins, swelling, and poor sleep. This doesn’t sound like an encouraging argument for pregnancy. It’s hard. It’s painful. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Pregnancy is one of the most sanctifying experiences I’ve ever had. In the midst of pregnancy, I have fought to push away anxiety, recognized the idol I’ve made of my appearance, desperately clung to God to give me patience with my kids when I’ve felt exhausted, and confronted my sin when I’ve been unkind to my husband. I want to blame pregnancy, but the Bible reminds me that my heart is the source of my sin, not my circumstances.

Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (James 1:14–15)

The world tells pregnant women, “You deserve whatever you want because you’re growing a life,” or “It’s not your fault. It’s the hormones.” We give in to overindulgence because we have a craving and feel justified in unhealthy habits. We give in to impatience because we are in pain and feel righteous in our responses.

Yes, pregnancy is difficult. But if we want to grow and be more like Christ, this is an opportunity to ask for strength, wisdom, and all the fruits of the Holy Spirit. To refuse our fleshly inclinations, we actively practice our faith, seeking to honor Jesus with our hearts and follow him. We fight every step of the way to lay down our lives for a small image-bearer of God designed to uniquely reflect him and bring him glory.

Childbirth: Stepping into Sacrifice

At the end of the day, I can’t tell you that your pregnancy or birth will be flawless. I can’t tell you that I’m going to make it through my upcoming fifth birth or that my child will be healthy. But I can tell you there is great joy and hope in the faith that motherhood forces upon us.

Because we know God’s character, we can trust him without fear of what is to come (Proverbs 3:5) and believe that he holds all life in the palm of his hand (Job 12:10). We can trust that whatever happens in our story or our children’s story, he works all things for our good and his glory (Romans 8:28). Children are a blessing from the Lord (Psalm 127:3–5), and raising, forming, and teaching our children will shape the next generation likely far more than anything else we can do.

Carrying a baby through pregnancy to childbirth offers us a chance to reflect Christ to a broken world. Jesus selflessly gave his life in service — even to death — to rescue those who believe in him (Galatians 1:4). So also, childbirth is an opportunity to step willingly into sacrifice, laying down our lives to bring a new life into the world.

The Beauty Fear Tries to Hide

The husband of a dear friend recently sent this:

I thought I might be too queasy to watch [childbirth], but I couldn’t look away — and it’s easily the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever witnessed. She looked like a tiny cosmic creature: impossibly new, impossibly ours.

Not all men are as poetic, but his words encapsulate the truth of childbirth. While the unexpected can happen, the birth of new life is unquestionably beautiful. But more than that, the child is a blessing, a triumph — breathing life in defiance of Satan’s desires for death (Psalm 139:13–14).

A child renews: This new life brings a new opportunity for us as parents to be humbled, shaped, and made more like Christ. When we decide not to enter into parenthood because of fear, we deny ourselves a part in the beauty of a new creation. Each tiny miracle is formed by God’s hands but nurtured and brought into the world from a woman’s womb.

Choosing Faith over Fear

Women, there is so much we could fear. The world wants safety, clarity, certainty, and ease. But God doesn’t call us to any of those things (2 Timothy 1:7). While pregnancy and childbirth pose risks and sacrifices, they also bring joy and sanctification. We can look to God as the protector, provider, and pursuer of our bodies and souls no matter what happens. When all is well, we can rejoice in his grace for us. If all goes poorly, we can remember his promises to us. He loves us, he cares for us, and he has everything in his control, down to morning sickness, back pain, or an emergency C-section (Proverbs 19:21).

We can look to Christ for guidance, or we can look to what the world says is best for us. If the Instagram algorithm of pregnancy-and-birth horror stories tempts you to fear, stop watching. I’ve been there. In those moments, my emotions take over, and I forget who God is and that he is in control. You and I can choose to “trust in the Lord with all [our] heart” and “not lean on [our] own understanding.” When we acknowledge him in all our ways, he promises to direct our paths (Proverbs 3:5–6).

So go forward — if the Lord enables you to bear children — with a joyful anticipation, a holy faith, and a countercultural calm in the midst of the unknown because you know the one who holds the world in his hand (Hebrews 1:3).

Before launching into his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes this local church as sanctified. What does that mean, for them and for us?

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For generations, evangelicals have been convinced that the works of Jonathan Edwards would remain indelibly in the American mind. In 1832, the young abolitionist Henry B. Stanton declared, “Edwards will live a thousand lives by means of his written works.”¹ The famous revivalist and reformer Lyman Beecher, noting the timeless quality of Edwards’s writings, called the Northampton theologian “the immortal Edwards.”²

Today, these assumptions have by no means proven false. In the past thirty years, the theology of Jonathan Edwards has — once again — enjoyed a renaissance. However, of all Edwards’s masterpieces, none has proven as long-lasting and as universally appealing as Religious Affections (1746), a text that one scholar has called “one of the most profound works of spiritual discernment in the history of the church.”³ Edwards’s most penetrating treatise has become his most enduring.

Religious Affections Revised

By the time Edwards passed in 1758, his most well-known work was The Life and Diary of David Brainard (1749), a biographical account of a missionary to the Delaware Indians of New Jersey. Going through thirty editions, it became one of the best-selling religious books in the nineteenth century. But Edwards had been inspired to write about Brainerd because the young missionary’s life provided a perfect case study of the religious affections. In fact, when it was first published, The Life of Brainerd was used as a companion volume to Religious Affections.⁴ Brainerd’s life modeled well Edwards’s idea that “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”⁵

After the “great bodily agitations” of the Cane Ridge Revival were unleashed in Kentucky in 1801, many evangelicals reached for Religious Affections to assess whether the event was indeed a work of the Spirit of God. “O that the less informed among the Americans,” warned one Kentuckian in 1802, “were in possession of President Edwards’s excellent volume on the Affections, and would most seriously read it.”⁶ Nevertheless, it was not until decades later, during the later phases of the Second Great Awakening, that Edwards’s most enduring theological work was regularly reprinted.⁷

Ironically, the version of Religious Affections that many Americans were reading was not the original Religious Affections. Newly established denominational and interdenominational presses often printed abridged versions that cut out Edwards’s Calvinism along with aesthetic concepts like “moral beauty,” “excellency,” and “sweetness” that were deemed too perplexing for a lay audience. Unfortunately, these omissions eviscerated many of the basic ideas of the treatise.⁸ John Wesley famously described Religious Affections as a “dangerous heap, wherein much wholesome food is mixed with much deadly poison” (by which the staunchly Arminian Wesley meant Calvinism).

Nevertheless, Wesley still published his own ultra-edited, bowdlerized version of Religious Affections. Amazingly, Wesley’s version was only a sixth of the original size, reducing Edwards’s twelve signs of godly affections to eight.⁹ So taken was Wesley with Religious Affections that one scholar has submitted that it was key to his thinking.¹⁰ Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury’s praise of the work was very similar to Wesley’s. Except for “the small vein of Calvinism which runs through it,” Asbury found it to be “a very good treatise, and worthy [of] the serious attention of young professors.”¹¹

Religious Affections Repurposed

Due to Edwards’s power to capture the inner workings of the soul and “the springs of men’s actions,” it was seemingly inevitable that Religious Affections would be co-opted by those whose theological beliefs did not remotely resemble those of its author. The most well-known revivalist of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney, credited Edwards’s Religious Affections as a primary source of inspiration for his “new measures.” Incredibly, the man who contended that revival was “not a miracle” appealed to the man who insisted “that God alone can bestow it.”¹²

In 1827, for example, Finney cited Religious Affections against his detractor, Asahel Nettleton, to justify his novel brand of revivalism (while Nettleton himself quoted Edwards back to Finney). Finney had first perused the monumental work in the home of a friend during his ministry in the “Burned-Over District” of western New York. However, as Finney biographer Keith J. Hardman insists, “If Charles Finney claimed to derive his arguments from Edwards’ Religious Affections, the question can be legitimately asked, Had Finney read beyond the first thirty pages?” Hardman then concludes, “Finney skimmed the book, took from it what he agreed with, cast the remainder aside — and then claimed to be following Edwards!”¹³

Finney’s misuse of Religious Affections was not the only such example of theological tone deafness. In 1835, Unitarian minister John Brazer described Edwards’s magnum opus in the Christian Examiner as “a book which is now in unquestioned repute, and which . . . has been referred to and quoted, reprinted and circulated by the predominant class of Christians in this country, with a deference only less than that which is paid to the Bible itself.”¹⁴ Astonishingly, one of the most hearty endorsements of Religious Affections came from the mouth of a heretic. Edwards’s work was consumed not just by those who opposed Calvinism but by those who opposed the doctrine of the Trinity!

Still, the greatest testament to the wealth of moral theology contained in Religious Affections is its widespread reception among orthodox evangelicals in both the North and South during a time when Americans were finding less and less in common. In Georgia, Baptist Jesse Mercer published a lengthy excerpt of the treatise in the Christian Index.¹⁵ Calling Edwards “the ablest theologian of his time,” Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University and the leading ethicist of his generation, once asked his students at chapel, “Who of us have not examined his title to Heaven more carefully by the aid derived from the ‘Treatise on the Religious Affections’ of Edwards?”¹⁶ In 1852, an evangelical in the New Englander agreed that Religious Affections had become “the text-book of Christendom on experimental religion.”¹⁷ So much weight did Rev. S.C. Aiken in Utica, New York, ascribe to the masterpiece that he confessed that “next to the Bible, no book was read so much in my family” as Religious Affections.¹⁸ Even evangelicals in the Episcopal Church were influenced by the work, using it as a spiritual guidebook.¹⁹

Religious Affections Renewed

Traditionally, historians have recognized that interest in the writings and theology of Jonathan Edwards reached a nadir in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of scholarly ebb that eventually flowed with the work of Harvard professor Perry Miller in the late 1940s.²⁰ However, Edwards was not forgotten during this time. In 1882, renowned Bible scholar Calvin Stowe (husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe) confessed to a friend, “I am, and always have been in the main, a Calvinist of the Jonathan Edwards school.”²¹ When it seemed that the study of many of Edwards’s works was marginal at best, Religious Affections still exerted an influence upon the American mind.

Whereas in the nineteenth century the famous spiritual textbook inspired pastors, revivalists, and laypeople, at the turn of the twentieth century it garnered interest in more philosophical and academic circles. For example, in 1900, when Harvard philosopher William James made his argument for pragmatism — the belief that ideas must be evaluated by their results or outcomes rather than by truth — he appealed to Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections: “There is not one grace of the Spirit of God of the existence of which, in any [believer], Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.”²² Edwards was an unlikely source of inspiration for James, who rejected historic Christianity. Nevertheless, James respected Edwards’s reasoning ability and sometimes quoted him at length.²³

By the late 1930s, Yale theologian and ethicist Richard Niebuhr was writing about Jonathan Edwards’s notion of religious affections.²⁴ Acknowledging Edwards as an intellectual mentor, Niebuhr later drew from Religious Affections to defend the value of religious knowledge in relating to God.²⁵ However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, with the work of Presbyterian theologian John Gerstner and others, that “Edwards studies began to lift from the runway to the cruising altitude of 2003 levels of publication and interest,” a stretch of time that saw the publication of John Piper’s Desiring God (1986), a book deeply influenced by Edwards.²⁶

In the past twenty years, in large part because of Piper’s ministry, a movement of Calvinist evangelicals dubbed by Collin Hansen the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” has championed the works of the “immortal Edwards.” Recently, as the movement has faced theological, moral, and social challenges, Hansen himself has attempted to chart a “way forward” by consulting a long-trusted resource for holy living: Religious Affections.²⁷ It seems Edwards’s work has been passed down to another generation of American evangelicals as their favorite spiritual textbook.

Take Up and Read

One of the primary reasons Religious Affections has enjoyed such longevity in the American mind is that it seeks to answer a question with which many Americans are preoccupied: What is true religion? For as long as Christians have sought to make God their heart’s desire and to discern spiritual fruit in their own lives, Jonathan Edwards has offered a thorough blueprint of their own souls and a guide with which to understand the nature of biblical faith. The late Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul, for instance, modeled much of his 1992 book The Soul’s Quest for God after Religious Affections.²⁸ Edwards’s monumental work still offers a how-to manual in searching our own souls.

Therefore, for Christians today, Religious Affections is as relevant as the day it was written. While the language is not always of our own time, the subject remains the most important in the Christian life: living for God. Next to the scholarly edition by Yale University Press (edited by John E. Smith), Banner of Truth also offers a version faithful to the original. By diagnosing the exercises of the will and “the spring of men’s actions,” Edwards continues to aid believers in obeying the opening verse of the book: “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8 KJV).

What happens when believers meet together? Christians both give and receive grace from the God who gathers them in true fellowship.

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