David Goodwin. Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education (Broadside Books, 2026). 

In 1996, as a new immigrant to America, I started my study of Latin at a North Carolina public school. Fifteen years later, as an adult with a PhD in Classics, I came to Christ, and my academic study of the ancient languages played an instrumental role in that conversion. Reading the Gospels in Greek moved me in ways for which I do not quite have words—this was reading that truly touched the soul. 

I have spent the years since then homeschooling my children, and the study of Latin and Greek has been an important part of the program I have adopted. But also, we have generally followed the precepts of what many now refer to as classical Christian education. The term is admittedly nebulous and overused—sort of like every grocery store of late jumping on board with the protein craze to cram protein into the most unlikely things—protein bread, protein cookies, protein pasta, or protein iced coffee. So it is that every private school now claims to be “classical,” simply because that is the buzz word for good education, and if you’re a good parent, obviously you want the best education you can get for your children, right? But what actually is classical Christian education, at its core? And what makes it so good?

These are questions that David Goodwin has thought much about of late, and his new book, Forging the American Mind provides answers, moving from the elementary grades through the end of high school. Goodwin’s own education, he admits, was spotty: “I was about thirty years old before I heard of classical education, and forty before I started my own trek to get one. The payoff is great. I went to state college and got all the way through without even reading a real classic work. I believe anyone can get a classical education if they want one.”

The book is heavy on the prescriptive—for each grouping of grades, Goodwin offers the essential learning outcomes and ideas that classical Christian education would offer for that age, including an essential reading list. In grades K-1, for instance, the key is “cultivating order and memory.” Kids learn how to behave in a particular setting, and they memorize vast quantities of information, because their young brains are naturally wired for this kind of learning. For example, my two older sons were enrolled in Classical Conversations, a classical Christian co-op, for many years. For each child, the early grades were a time of memorizing an astonishing amount of history facts, math facts, and much more. My oldest son skipped a grade in elementary school, because his memorization of math made multiplication and division “click” right away, so we ran out of one grade’s material in the middle of the year and figured we’d go on to another one. The same child later did have to repeat eighth grade, reminding us that children’s learning progression is not steadily linear, but there are developmental leaps and bounds involved.

For grades 2-4, Goodwin emphasizes “introducing history as God’s story” as well as perfecting literacy skills. Then in grades 5-6, students are beginning dialectic training while continuing to cultivate the imagination through the reading of good books. “We should read our children the stories that motivate them to love what God loves and hate what God hates,” he reflects. “This is as true of chemistry as it is of history. It’s as true of math as it’s true of the Bible. Everything has a story, and so everything must be told in a way that leads our kids to love what Christ loves, so they will desire what He desires, so they will live like He lived. Without stories, facts are meaningless.” This is a beautiful and holistic vision, harkening back to the integration of all fields of learning in the Medieval university under the reign of theology, the chief of all disciplines. 

While the early grades are the “grammar” stage of education—the building of key foundations—grades 7-12 are where serious learning can happen precisely because students have the building blocks in mind and can retrieve all of these facts they’ve been memorizing all along to put together a more sophisticated picture of the world. It really is fascinating to watch, for instance, a child who has read a novel set during a particular period make connections to the period in question and go on to discuss and analyze the text more deeply. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia, my eleven-year-old can talk about Britain during WWII, and C.S. Lewis’s public evangelism on the radio. His understanding of the historical place and time when Lewis wrote enhances his understanding of the novels, as does his knowledge of Lewis’s broader apologetic writing.

At all stages, Goodwin emphasizes surrounding students with things that are good, true, and beautiful—especially in the literature that they consume. Classical Christian education is rooted in the virtues, he reflects early in the book—“the look and feel of school” has to be built on the cardinal virtues, the faith virtues (also known as the heavenly virtues). These overlap with the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the code of chivalry could also be useful to discuss with young children. Such foundation of the virtues and discipline is the essential sine-qua-non for learning is what sets the attitude towards learning in classical Christian school apart from public schools, whose students may never hear mention of the virtues, for instance. And that’s a pity. As writers from antiquity to a fairly recent period of modernity openly recognized, virtuous citizens are better for any state than ones who are not. Prioritizing an education in the virtues, therefore, is a political exercise of supreme importance for the wellbeing of any state. Classical Christian education today certainly aims to recover this mission—thus the emphasis in the book’s title on “the American Mind.” This education, in other words, is a key civilizational enterprise for our country’s future.

In making these arguments, Goodwin’s book is not innovative or earth-shattering. Rather, it is a thoughtful, straightforward, and readily usable reference tool for a parent who is new to classical Christian education and is looking for a clear philosophical explanation of what to do with students, when to do it (level-wise), and (most important) why. 

And yet, I opened the book with a feeling of unease. Yes, this is a book on classical Christian education—what it is, and why it is good for America. I found myself nodding along a lot as I read. But why does this book boast a foreword from Pete Hegseth, a man whose own life both before and after his entering the political sphere exemplifies none of the virtues that we hope our children will acquire from classical Christian education? Are there no better role models to invoke in this important task? 

Indeed, the present book is a sequel to Goodwin’s earlier collaboration with Hegseth—The Battle for the American Mind, which thoroughly criticized the present state of American public education. That criticism was well deserved, yet any talk of discipline and virtues and wisdom from Hegseth, a man utterly lacking in all of these areas, rings hollow and disingenuous. I understand that publishing is a business, and publishers need to sell books. But I also find it alarming that this seems to be the way to sell classical Christian education in America right now—by connecting it to individuals like Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, whose public witness is less than savory. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

America does need classical Christian education, but I hope that those who choose this educational method for their children do not overlook the importance of truly following the virtues that this education promises to instill in us no less than in our children. 

In R. J. Snell’s Acedia and Its Discontents, he compares the difference between living in the world of pre-modernism and the world of postmodernity.

The pre-modern person lived in an enchanted world where meaning was thought to reside in things themselves—the world was full, sometimes frighteningly full, of meaning. A bone fragment from a saint retained the sanctity and curative power of the saint…for things possessed their own meanings and powers and humans lived alongside those meanings rather than creating them…Things are quite different for the contemporary Western person occupying a disenchanted world where things mean only what we assign them.

…If one was irritated at the order of the cosmos in 1066, one was irritated, in a very real sense, at the ordering chosen by God; postmodern irritation is directed at nothing, just a coldly impersonal set of forces.

Much has been said about a cultural “vibe shift” away from cynical pessimism, about leaving the postmodern mood behind for something more aspirational. Metamodernism, what allegedly comes after postmodernism, is not a wholesale rejection of the irony and skepticism of postmodernism, but a decision to not make your home there, to dare to believe that there is something of meaning, beauty, and truth out there. Backrooms, A24’s latest box office gamble on a 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-director has paid off big time, mostly by rejecting this “vibe-shift.” The movie’s message is deeply postmodern.

The Loop of Trauma

The plot of the movie centers around two main characters set in the early 90s: a despairing middle-aged alcoholic, Clark, and his therapist, Mary. Both bring a long train of trauma with them. Clark’s dreams were set aside to help his wife pursue law school. Instead of becoming an architect, he runs a failing cheap furniture store to make ends meet.

But his drinking has pushed his wife away and so we meet Clark cocooned in despair and resentment, pursuing therapy but obviously not making much progress. He is trapped, Mary reminds him, in a “loop of trauma.” Bad things happened to him which lead him to spiral inward, rehashing the injustices of his past rather than forgiving and moving on.

Mary, his therapist, reminds Clark he must escape this loop. Yet, she seems to be caught in her own. She pensively hides behind a mask, as if the real Mary is a thousand miles away. Her mind ruminates on her childhood when her mentally ill mother kept her trapped in her home.

At one point, we see Mary as a child furtively attempting to crack open a papered-over window, only to have her mother rush at her in a maddened fury. Her home is a cacophony of debris littered hither and thither. The door is barricaded with a pile of furniture. Why, the mother asks, why would you do that Mary? We can’t go outside, it isn’t safe. Mary, not unlike Clark, is trapped. Even as an adult, her mind constantly is tugged backwards, stuck in the loop of her childhood trauma. Her book is aptly titled: Now You Can Open the Window Within.

Parsons is tapping into the existential dilemma that defines his generation. The stories of pre-modernity revolved around man at war with dragons, monsters, or gods. The stories of modernity wrestled with man at war with ideas, the state, the market. The stories of postmodernity spiral inward: man is at war with himself, at war with meaning–that is to say, at war with realizing that there is no meaning beyond the agony of self-discovery, self-expression, and therapeutic self-salvation.

Deconstruction

In the basement of Clark’s furniture store, he finds a mysterious portal to an alternate dimension that is somehow both infinite yet parasitically dependent on the real world. These sprawling labyrinths of rooms seem to be copied on snippets of our world, but done with an amateur’s hand, “Like you were describing a dog to someone who had never seen one,” Clark explains, “and then asked them to draw it.”

The rooms appear to be man made, feel familiar, but are “off” enough that one feels unsettled just staring at them. Doorways are too small, off-center, or in the floor. Angles run incongruously. Sloped floors lead inexplicably nowhere. Piles of furniture, or signs emerge halfway out of a wall. It is like someone digested our world and then puked a simulacrum of it back out. Or, perhaps more apropos for us (and what I think Parsons intends to evoke), it is like you asked AI to generate an infinite corridor of rooms similar to our own and it hallucinated a number of misshapen, inhuman elements.

The chaotic amalgamation of signs, rooms, doors, and other detritus push you into an uncanny valley. It is similar enough to reality that the dissimilarity and crookedness of it all feels unbearable. Who made these rooms? What is going on here? It evokes a similar but more disturbing sense of Alice stepping through the looking glass into a reality that seems to be upside down, void of meaning.

There is no particular reason why this hallway leads to that empty, windowless, beach-themed wallpaper room because in this world there is no reason for anything at all. Signs are gibberish, houses emerge halfway through walls, and stairways extend over vast chasms. In our world, for signs or houses or stairways to exist someone must build them. And therefore, must be built on purpose. But here? No one builds and therefore there is no purpose. It simply emerges and what emerges is meaningless.

A recurring scene in the film is Mary’s childhood home being deconstructed. The liminality of the backrooms has a similar deconstructionist motif. At one point, one character while fleeing for his life inexplicably finds an illuminated Christmas tree in one of the rooms. What is it doing here? A Christmas tree is a culturally rich symbol loaded with meaning: the story of Christmas, family, joy, festivity, traditions, etc. This is what French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a cultural “text.”

But take that “text” out of the context it is normally set in, and what does it mean here in this bizarre, liminal space? Does this sign still bear its meaning? The character who finds the tree in the film does not see it and read “Christmas” from it. He is baffled and terrified: What is this doing here? What does this mean? The terrifying rejoinder that lurks just beneath the surface for the entirety of the film is: Nothing, none of this means anything, everything is facade. Derrida famously wrote: “There is nothing outside of the text.” That is, it may seem like there is a reality, meaning, that exists in of itself behind our cultural texts, the way the idea of “Christmas” exists apart from a Christmas tree. But Derrida argues that reality does not give us our texts, but it is the other way around.

And herein is the genius of Parson’s attempt at an existential horror movie. The greatest fear that lurks behind all fears for human beings living on the other side of modernity is not the presence of monsters or ghouls or serial killers. It is the fear that behind all the edifice and custom of our life, there is a great void of meaninglessness. I do not know if Parsons intended to evoke 20th century deconstructionism through his film, but the interaction with this symbolism demonstrates that this postmodern critique of reality is something that still has cache with the social imaginary of Westerners today.

But, Parsons doesn’t totally believe that “nothing matters.” Like a good postmodern, Parsons fixates on the “realest” thing he knows: our feelings.

Bad Therapy

Eventually, both Clark and Mary–who are psychologically attempting to stop the loop of trauma–are pulled into these “backrooms.” The rooms seem to generate based on poor copies of memories from who is there. Clark and Mary, both of which bear monstrous pain within, quickly find monstrous creatures lurking around the corner. Earlier in the film, Mary performs a method of role play therapy with Clark, having them act out the night that Clark’s wife left him. She is trying to delve deep into his repressed feelings with the hope that venting them will provide relief from Clark’s anger and resentment.

But down here, she has in some sense literally descended into Clark’s psyche and found that the expression of feelings doesn’t always bring health, but can summon something sinister. Earlier, Clark claims he wants to “escape the loop of trauma.” But down here, in the deepest recesses of Clark’s mind, we find something different. Mary has sincerely tried to help Clark, but in the backrooms she does not find a good but misunderstood man, but (at root) a deeply selfish, cruel, and sinful one. And here, Parsons seems to land a legitimate shot at the worst iterations of therapy culture today. We cannot blame all of our problems on the trauma inflicted upon us. Unless we are willing to take responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the past, we will be trapped in the loop.

The Monster Within

The question of Backrooms is “What does the great human drama of man finding himself look like in a meaningless world?” The kaleidoscope of debris and architecture-on-LSD is an uncomfortable assault on the familiar customs of purpose and meaning. But the real horror emanates from the one load-bearing beam that postmodernism has for meaning: what if the truest thing about you is not that you are misunderstood or traumatized; what if, deep down, you are responsible for the hurt and pain? In a world that has flushed metaphysics down the toilet, the only “real” thing we have is our experience, our feelings. And if we fail to find salvation within, if we “open the window” and find not light, but darkness, then nothing remains. Our only hope is snuffed out.

As a Christian, I find movies and stories that expose the price of postmodernism to be both deeply unsettling and when done well, (as Backrooms is) deeply satisfying. It is similar to reading Friedrich Nietzsche or early French existentialists. Here we have someone who is willing to pay the full fare of a materialist worldview with total honesty, even if the cost is agonizing to the mind. It is a bracing slap of reality against the cheery atheism of those who celebrate God’s death without realizing the price of unchaining the earth from the sun.

There is a kind of internal slingshot experience I have as I watched the film. I am pulled into the despair and meaningless of the story, only to be shot back into my own worldview suffused with a metaphysics that extends far beyond my inner world of feelings or cultural world of signs and texts. God exists, has ribboned this world with meaning, and has prepared a salvation for me that is thicker and more durable than any thin soup therapy-culture is eager for me to drink. My hope isn’t that the further down the rabbit hole of my psyche I descend, the more I am able to find inner peace. My hope is in a Savior who dies to redeem monsters and sinners, and transform them into beloved, forgiven saints. Perhaps the more honest people are about the cost of a life without God, the more eagerly they will seek after the Truth.

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Robert Hasler's remarks. We published Derek Rishmawy's yesterday.

The subject of tonight’s event is addressing the question of what the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) can and might do about the challenge of generational turnover. Of course, that challenge includes the passing of the torch from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials as well as reaching new generations of men and women with the Gospel. 

Where I want to start, however, is by reminding us that ours is not the only institution facing down the uncertainty of generational turnover. All throughout America, institutions of every sort are bracing themselves for the fallout.

With that in mind, I want to frame my talk by asserting what I believe are twin realities.

First, that the PCA is already grappling with the challenges of generational turnover and that it is no small contributor to the restlessness we feel as a church right now.

The second is that we have no more idea of what will happen when the Boomers, by force of nature, finally pass on the torch of ecclesial governorship than what will happen when they no longer wield the same influence in politics, markets, and the culture. If what we feel now is any indicator, all we might be able to say with certainty is that the future has never felt so uncertain. 

As I prepared my remarks, the greatest temptation was to try and offer some all-encompassing diagnostic that would explain these generational fault lines and illuminate the future for us. I’ve tried, instead, to internalize the lesson I learned from my old seminary professor, Dr. Jack Collins: I am not a prophet and I’d be crazy for wanting to be.

But that won’t stop me from making some educated guesses about what the future landscape of ministry might look like, and I think that starts by accounting for two key trends in the broader culture. 

First of all, we know that the U.S. fertility rate is well below replacement level. People in America have not – and are not – having as many children as previous generations. That a declining population will have to be counteracted either by massive reforms in the economy or through higher levels of immigration in a country already fraught with populist sentiment raises questions and concerns that go far beyond technical solutions; they inspire existential questions of national identity.

This is not so different from what we face in the PCA. In staring down the challenge of losing a large percentage of our membership roles as our fathers and mothers in the faith ramp back their involvement and eventually pass on to glory, we face immediate questions of resourcing and leadership which in turn inspire the kind of existential wrestling that leads to questions like, “What kind of PCA do we want to be?”

Secondly, there’s also the matter of the so-called “vibe shift” — or what some people call Gen Z’s seemingly higher appreciation for religion broadly and Christianity in particular. While I think the vibe shift is real, it remains a far cry from the kind of national “revival” we heard so much about in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There’s also the question of whether the vibe shift has a Roman or Eastern flavor to it. 

I suspect a lot of you here, like myself, have anecdotal evidence that something is going on. The data gives the story a slightly different shape. My best read of it is the precipitous climb of the “nones” has reached its zenith, for now at least; Gen Z is probably attending church at higher frequencies than previous generations; and that church is far more likely to be nondenominational than anything else.

As I’ve thought about these trends in my own ministry context, I’ve come to subdivide the challenge of generation turnover into three distinct but interrelated challenges – challenges I think we’ll have to face in our individual ministries and as a denomination. 

Those three challenges are a resource challenge, a leadership challenge, and an evangelism and discipleship challenge, and they’ll be a roadmap of sorts for the rest of my talk.

The Resource Problem

The first challenge that the generation turnover poses for our denomination is a resource challenge. Now, there’s a very conventional and perfectly legitimate way to think about the resource problem, and that’s to focus on finances and manpower and addressing possible shortages in both. But let me offer another way to think about the resource problem. 

Like I said before, I don’t think we can really predict how extensive the disruption caused by generational turnover will be. Interrelated contractions in the economy and in population pose civilizational challenges that extend far beyond the doors of our churches and the pocketbooks of our members. 

So, let’s just suppose it’s way more disruptive than anything we can imagine. At the expense of sounding overdramatic, what if the level of freedom, prosperity, and stability we enjoy today isn’t permanent or inevitable? After all, “there is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. 

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe in the face of an even larger, more existential, social, and political conflagration than anything we’ve experienced in our recent history our civil authorities will learn from their past errors and lead with prudence over ideology, Americans of all stripes will link arms, and everyone will overcome their individual passions and prejudices for the sake of the common good. 

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if instead we see things that will make us pine for the good ole’ days of 2020?

Let me put it this way: We can’t limit ourselves to thinking about the resource challenge as only a drop in giving or volunteers without taking too many ancillary social and political conditions for granted. History hasn’t stopped. We must recognize that the benefits and privileges churches have historically enjoyed under an older political consensus could radically change under a new one. What would you do, for example, if you and your elders and deacons woke up and suddenly had no access to your church bank accounts because you transgressed the new cultural orthodoxy by preaching biblical truth? How would you keep diaconate resources flowing to those who needed them? Is your church resilient enough to keep ministry going when your lease at the school or your agreement with the campus administrators is torn up, or your tax-exempt status revoked? How would accounting for that kind of contingency change, not just your budget, but your whole philosophy of ministry resources?

I’m not trying to be a doomer. I’m simply trying to convey that there are resource challenges and there are resource challenges; and we have to be ready for both, even if preparing for the latter feels a bit unsavory. “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” our Lord says. 

Ask yourself: What is your church doing right now to be resilient enough to weather a significant resource challenge caused by generational turnover, even if we don’t feel its full effects for 25 or 50 years from now?

The Leadership Challenge

The second challenge that comes with generational turnover is a leadership challenge. Again, I believe this is something we’re already experiencing and it goes far beyond the sort of friction caused by different groups in the PCA vying for leadership roles in churches, presbyteries, and permanent committees. 

I’m talking about the challenge of facing new paradigms of pastoral leadership that are emerging with this generational handoff. Often, evangelicals adopt and defend these paradigms on the basis that they are corrections from the perceived errors of older generations and so meet the demands of Zoomers. 

The most popular fad right now is an evolution in what I’ve heard described as a kind of “guru” model of pastoral leadership. It’s a newer version of the evangelical leadership style supercharged by a new technological landscape where pastors are not so much expected to offer a regular foretaste of heavenly life through the ministry of Word and Sacrament as they are supposed to participate as one more voice among a host of evangelical leaders who provide unimpeachable solutions for emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational, and (unfortunately, we’ve all heard the Mark Driscoll clips) sexual wholeness.

For better or worse, many in younger generations believe legacy evangelical institutions and leaders proved themselves anemic throughout the controversies of the last ten years. Some are gravitating towards “guru” pastors who will tell them with “Thus saith the Lord” certainty not just what the Scriptures say about the magistrate’s divinely ordered office, but also things like who you should vote for (or, at least, who not to vote for); not just that it is the parents' duty to train up their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but also exactly what kind of school you should send your kid to; not just what godly womanhood looks like, but that you have a responsibility to undo the nineteenth amendment.

How did we get here? As we all know, it’s not that the subject of politics, education, or gender are totally beyond the scope of ordinary ministry. But I think because evangelicalism already suffers from poorly distinguishing the church from other kinds of institutions, and as those other kinds of institutions that would normally address those subjects have suffered or betrayed their own core mission, it’s the church that’s been put in this position of picking up the slack. 

Today, younger generations, for better or worse, expect their pastor to have answers to these questions and more, and plenty of less responsible men have taken advantage of the market demand to peddle their own personal or political agendas. 

Now, what I find personally striking about this new development in pastoral leadership is that it’s actually quite old. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that on this point modern evangelicalism has “horseshoe’d” so hard that it’s become a kind of uniquely American form of Roman Catholicism – a simple, but not ordinary form of Christianity where adherents participate in a strange “new way to do church” all the while “guru” leaders who wield bishop-like power issue non-negotiable edicts telling you how to think and what to do about the most pressing matters.

As pastors and elders in the PCA, we have the unique challenge of pointing people to a different, uniquely Protestant way of pastoral leadership and about the Christian faith – leading people toward a form of Christianity that is ordinary, but not simple. 

It is ordinary because our “way of doing church” continues to center the priorities we find in the early church of Acts 2: word, prayer, and sacrament within the embodied, covenant community of God’s people. But it is also not simple, because we believe Christians are called to something quite amazing, something extraordinary even, something I think we might take for granted sometimes: disciplined lives of ongoing maturity into the image of our Savior.

We, as pastors and elders, have to lead people to understand that there is no shortcut to the good life nor any way to offshore the working out of their sanctification. 

And that will require confident, bold preaching concerning the things the Scriptures principally teach. We have to be bolder about God, bolder about man, bolder about sin, bolder about the Gospel, bolder about worship, and bolder about the duties required of man. But also bolder to lead men and women to work out for themselves those things Scripture leaves to individual conscience. 

That’s our calling. And it is not one which we can afford to be ambivalent about. Our flocks, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and ministered to through a life of embodied participation in the local church, still have to do the hard work themselves – to pattern their thoughts after God’s thoughts, to grow in wisdom, and act for the good of others and for the glory of God in all the unique circumstances of their lives. 

The Evangelism and Discipleship Challenge

Finally, I want to end with the evangelism and discipleship challenge. Here, I want to try and offer one reading on what’s going on with public sentiment among younger generations towards religion broadly and Christianity in particular. 

I think it’s fair to say that most of our evangelism and discipleship resources of the last few decades have been oriented towards a “spiritual-not-religious” audience of upwardly-mobile, young professionals who were stakeholders in a globalized, small-l liberal, world order. These were de-churched, individually-minded people who, despite their hangups with organized religion, largely wished to retain its moral and ethical framework even if it took the work of a good apologist to show them that.

It was Tim Keller who so excellently exposed their hypocrisy in The Reason for God: You can choose to personally value things like justice and toleration and reject the worldview upon which they’re built, Keller preached, but there’s no integrity in that.   

I think our challenge will be adapting the resources we’ve inherited to reach a completely new generation with completely different ideological assumptions about the world and their place in it. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were primarily fascinated with Christianity as a means of preserving what they liked about the current world order, I want to suggest to you that our future might be one of “religious-not-spiritual” men and women (and men in particular) fascinated with Christianity because of its potential to fix what they perceive are modern liberalism’s failures.

Just a couple months ago, The New York Times reported more and more people are finding themselves attracted to the idea of concrete, religious rituals to combat their sense of loneliness and detachment. Ross Douthat, in his new book, suggests the folks who at first embraced a choose-your-own-adventure spiritualism, mixing and matching spiritual practices from a diverse array of religious traditions, are exhausted and might be ready to accept the idea that the way to truth and wholeness means submitting your individual identity to a single, coherent religious tradition and community that’s bigger than yourself.

This is what I’m encountering in my ministry context, especially in the Army. And more and more, I’m noticing a subtle but important distinction in the way seekers and skeptics are framing their questions. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were drawn by the prospect of achieving personal moral integrity; the “religious-not-spiritual” are far more interested in Christianity’s prospects for civilizational integrity and renewal. 

And it manifests itself in two different ways. Elite-aligned individuals are inclined to Roman Catholicism, its aesthetics, and the lure of something that, at least from what they’re told, is much older, more stable, and therefore more capable of resisting modernity and postmodernity than anything Protestantism can offer. 

At the same time, there is the more populist form embodied in the aspirational message of Charlie Kirk who included going to church alongside getting married and having kids as essential responsibilities for anyone serious about making America great again. Many of these folks are naturally inclined to the low-church, nondenominational expressions of Protestantism.

And the question that I’m wrestling with is simply this: How come they’re not coming to us?

Two quick thoughts and then I’ll wrap up. 

If I could be so bold, I think elite expressions of evangelicalism (and the PCA, insofar as we swim in those waters) tend to treat the stereotypical Zoomer who walks through the doors of a church for what I’ve called “civilizational” motivations with far more cynicism than they deserve. I heard Glen Scrivener talk about this recently on a podcast and I think it’s brilliant because he perfectly encapsulated what I’ve come across.

None of us, I suspect, would ever be as suspicious of the person — the addict or the criminal — whose life is crumbling around them and walks through the doors of the church because he or she believes Christianity can “fix” them. Yet, we seem to keep at arm’s length the person who expresses the exact same sentiment only about Christianity having the moral infrastructure to “fix” their society. My sense is that too many in our tribe automatically assume such a sentiment must come from a dangerous place of triumphalism when oftentimes it reflects a poignant discovery about secularism’s empty promises and the humble acceptance of man’s powerlessness in the face of such overwhelming brokenness. 

But here’s the second thought: With the willingness to receive these folks comes the responsibility of straightforward and long-suffering discipleship. 

We must be willing to extend far more grace even with the conviction to say, as I think Keller would, that you can choose to commit yourself to the defense and preservation of the West’s fundamentally Christian ethos, and not embrace the plain teaching of Scripture, or be personally humbled by an encounter with the living God, but there’s no integrity in that. 

Conclusion

Just yesterday I preached from Psalm 11 to our small church plant in Abilene, and it struck me afterwards how much the passage speaks to this challenge in particular.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” This is the question posed to David — one that expresses the sense of hopelessness in the face of physical, emotional, moral, spiritual, and, yes, civilizational uncertainty. It’s not that dissimilar to the question Gen Z is asking.

How does David respond? He starts by orienting his heart to God’s heavenly throne. He finds refuge in God and in the memory of God’s righteous judgement on the wicked. God has not been blind to injustice and wickedness in the past. Surely, he is not blind to it in our world today.

Importantly, Psalm 11 doesn’t besmirch utilitarian motivations for seeking refuge in God. It just won’t let you stop there. Listen to the last verse: “For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds, the upright shall see his face.”

Psalm 11 directs us past the important desire for earthly safety and justice and peace and order and to that which all things are properly ordered — to the ultimate telos of human life itself: the beatific vision, to see our God and Maker face to face, without a veil, and to enjoy him forever. 

If we preach that. If we confess that. If we lead people to that, regardless of whatever generational turnover may bring us, I have no doubt the PCA of the future will be as strong as ever.

In my growing up years I was blessed to travel often. Regular beach vacations; various youth group camps and even a missions trip taken with other young teenagers; a school trip to Greece and Italy; trips to England, Austria, the Bahamas, and other bucket-list spots before I was eighteen.

I learned many good things from these trips. But I learned certain mental habits, too: I learned to anticipate the excitement that colored my life as a trip approached. I learned to think about seasons and years as pathways to some more riveting place than my local suburbia. I learned to expect a certain pinch of homebound despondency.

Meanwhile, in all the years of my youthful travels, I attended a rigorous Christian school and participated in various extracurriculars and club sports such that “normal life” was a bustling one. All that I participated in was due to the generosity and hard work of my parents. But without anyone’s conscious intention or alarm, I, together with my peers, was treading as a teenager the waters of upper middle class American culture: the pursuit of excellence, the Protestant work ethic, constant busyness. A busyness whose best respite was vacation.     

The time between Memorial Day and Labor Day is, for many, the time of vacations. As spring approaches its close, vacation becomes a primary topic for small talk. “Do you have any travel plans for the summer?” the dental hygienist asks, as does the acquaintance one chats with after church. 

Around this time, too, refrains resound about the unshakeable busyness of the season and the great need for a break. Or one will hear church leaders promote various spiritual summer getaways—whether youth group camps or marriage conferences or women’s retreats—with similar language: let’s all depart to [some peaceful place by the beach or mountains], and there we can have fellowship and spiritual growth!

How we talk about our lives and desires is telling. Our speech about vacations and retreats reveals that Americans both in and outside of the church have accepted a particular mindset about work, life, and time. The mindset could perhaps be summed up this way: we are (and ought to be) busy all the time, and as such, we need a getaway from our ordinary lives in order to refresh ourselves and connect with others, particularly family members and close friends, or even to connect fruitfully with God. 

The problem with this mindset is not that it rests on false claims. Our busyness hardly needs to be proven: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the average American married-couple family, both parents work. Meanwhile, most American children attend school for about eight hours a day and give their evenings and weekends to sports and activities. It’s not surprising, then, that many American families don’t have (or make) time enough to eat dinner together. 

Still, the “getaway” mindset represents a departure, though a covert one, from the Christian understanding of rest and time. As such, Christians would do well to be wary of it, even while  appreciating opportunities to vacation. 

Our consumerist culture would have us believe that true rest requires spending money to abscond several times a year from our given places and vocations and revel in some other good (whether a legitimate good, like the beauty of the seaside, or not). Rest is, in this framework, to be pursued and purchased, not to be accepted as a gift. Rest and peace are always out there, away from the banality of the ordinary, not woven into it. Rest is perpetually incompatible with our callings and the consequent rhythms of our weeks and months—and our callings and routines are themselves perpetually burdensome, in part because rest is not a regular part of them. 

What we need for rest, however, is not a weekend at an isolated mountain Airbnb or at a conference away from our children, listening to the most engaging Christian speakers, though these things can have their places as blessings from God. What we need, rather, is the divine rhythm of the Sabbath. 

The getaway mindset echoes the concept of the Sabbath in its recognition of the human frame: we are limited; we require respite from our work. But the echo is only a faint one. The getaway mindset, unlike the Sabbath, flows from the pressures of a consumeristic and workaholic culture more so than from Scripture or tradition, and it proposes no limits on or order of acceptable restful activity and no clearly defined purpose for it. 

The Sabbath, meanwhile, springs from God’s Word: after exemplifying and instituting a day of rest at creation, God ordered the life of Israel around the worship and rest of the Sabbath, and he included the injunction to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” among the moral laws of the Ten Commandments. Ever since the apostles began to worship and fellowship on the first day of the week in honor of Jesus’ resurrection, the church has in some fashion understood and taught that the “Lord’s Day” was to be a holy day of worship, fellowship, and rest distinct from the Jewish observance of Saturday. Different traditions deal with the specifics of the day differently, but a thread runs through historic Protestant and Catholic teaching: God still orders the time of his people such that one day in seven—now Sunday—is set apart for his purposes. 

Many modern Christians have no concept of the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath. Or they apply the fourth commandment individually, maintaining that they can choose a day for personal rest or that they can celebrate it on Saturday apart from the gathered people of God. Others insist that because “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” we ought not burden ourselves or others with the concept of a moral injunction to cease. 

If only we took that language seriously instead of using it to support our favored conclusions. The Sabbath was made for man, which means that it is a gift. And, as Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees show, it is a gift which God designed to bring life. Gifts cannot be recast into whatever we would like them to be. Gifts are defined by their giver, even though recipients may enjoy them in different ways.    

As a gift, the Sabbath asks of us reception, not ignorance. It does not require purchase either, unlike the vacation. In fact, many in Christian history would maintain that it requires us to not spend money—to be entirely free from the world of commerce and consumption for the sake of worship. 

The gift of the Sabbath is, in some ways, a paradoxical one. The Sabbath principle requires the devoted action of man, yet that action is one that looks like inaction to the world: the actions of ceasing and of worshipping seem entirely useless. It enjoins us to rest yet prescribes how we ought to rest: “not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly,” but by delighting in the Lord, as Isaiah 58 teaches.

The Sabbath is a routine, one day in seven, yet it is an invitation into things that are decidedly not routine but sacred: the sacraments, the preached Word, the fellowship of believers, and other things which fall into the category of what the Westminster Catechism calls “holy resting.” 

Where the getaway is an occasional, temporary departure from ordinary life altogether, the Sabbath, as an ordinary departure from otherwise ordinary commitments, orders our lives in a sacred rhythm. 

Theologian Alastair Roberts discusses this aspect of the Old Covenant Sabbath as follows: 

The daily cycle of work and rest, the weekly cycle of six days of labor followed by the Sabbath, the annual cycle of feasts, and the larger cycle of sabbatical years both punctuated and variegated Israel’s time. Time was meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends, and differentiated in its character. Through such an articulation of time, Israel was granted the possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind. Time was “redeemed”... In such a manner, work could be bounded, differentiated from rest and leisure, flowing from a higher source and being ordered toward a higher end. Bitter toil and cruel bondage could become good work and sacred service…

Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of otherwise unrelenting toil and a purpose: an orientation of work to something greater that upholds its goodness.

By placing the Lord’s rest at the heart of Israel, the entire realm of man’s times and labors was reordered.

Though the calendar of the New Covenant church is appropriately different from that of the Old Covenant, our time is still “meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends.” To us, too, God graciously extends the “possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind.” Here the possible becomes actual not if we are wealthy enough to afford a beach house or if we are “spiritual” enough to take a silent retreat but if we are humble enough to submit ourselves to God and accept, through Christ, his gifts.  

It goes without saying that some vocations such as those of firefighters or emergency medical personnel regularly require Sundays to be taken up with, in the words of the Westminster, “works of necessity and mercy.” But most of us can in fact submit our Sundays to this divine order if only we have the courage to welcome certain limits. If we were to allow our lives to be ordered by the Lord’s Day, we would not feel the overwhelming need for a break from them. A life that is centered around and satisfied in the transcendent worship and festivity of the Sabbath cannot be subsumed by the busyness our culture presses on us. Neither can it be overcome with the desire to flee from one’s given place. 

In his famous work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, philosopher Josef Pieper contrasts the world of total work with that of religious festivals like the weekly Sabbath. He writes: 

It is in the nature of religious festival to make a space of abundance and wealth, even in the midst of external poverty in material things... Thus in the very midstream of worship, and only from there, comes a supply that cannot be consumed by the world of work, a space of uncountable giving, untouched by the ever-turning wheel of buying and selling, an overflow released from all purpose, and an authentic wealth: it is festival-time. And it is only within such festival–time that the reality of leisure can unfold and be fully realized. 

Perhaps this year, as summer wends on with its various gifts, we should not so yearn for our getaways and inwardly mourn when they are past but instead seek after that “space of uncountable giving… and an authentic wealth” that flows from the worship and rest of the Lord’s Day.

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Derek Rishmawy's remarks. We will publish those of Robert Hasler tomorrow.

To begin, I want to set the stage to frame up the “advice” I am going to give.

Boomer Apocalypse

First, we need to begin by acknowledging the demographic challenges facing the PCA, which we might refer to as “the boomer apocalypse.” (This term originated with the Australian pastor and podcaster Mark Sayers.)

Essentially, in about 15-20 years or so, when the Boomer generation is set to recede from the scene, we are going to see a massive demographic shift that will impact (a) raw numbers, (b) culture and institutional knowledge, forms, and leadership, and (c) pure dollars coming into fund the ministry of the church. 

The shape of the PCA is set to change radically no matter what we do.

Obsolescence and De-Churching

Connected to this, I want to add a related phenomena: the massive dechurching of America and the obsolescence of American religion. I won’t rehash this at length, but most of you have heard the stats from Ryan Burge, Michael Graham, and Jim Davis, or heard a podcast about Christian Smith’s work on the obsolescence of religion. In the last 25 years, 40 million people stopped going to church—and actually, Graham and Burge’s new book argues that it’s closer to 60 million. Beyond that, traditional religion has continually lost market share, not to atheism, but general non-traditional spiritualism, or nothing in particular. While the Boomers were actually key to this movement, their loss from the scene can only seem to accelerate and amplify that dynamic across the landscape.

Never-Churched? 

Third, while we all know about the de-churched, we must recognize that an increasingly large segment of youngsters that campus ministers are meeting are the “never churched.”

Anecdotally, at UC Irvine if I run into a student who is not currently attending a church and doesn't identify themselves as religious explicitly, I am less likely to find somebody who is formerly religious than in past years. This means they’re not Christian and they don’t typically have religious baggage. But it also means they have no context for Christian doctrine, truth, or practice.

Vibe Shift and Quiet Revival? 

Finally, some of you have heard about the Vibe Shift and the alleged “Quiet Revival.” I’ll say that, briefly, the Vibe Shift is very real, but the Quiet Revival basically has no data for it. On the ground, things have shifted politically, and I think even created an openness to spiritual conversations broadly among the younger generation and, yes especially among young men. That said, statistically speaking, there is no data telling us that we should be banking on any kind of quiet revival to come save us.

I mention these realities, not because they change our call as ministers of the gospel to reach and shepherd the coming generations—the call is the same. Nevertheless, we answer the call under the conditions of history and to my mind it does two things: the boomer apocalypse and dechurching of America lends urgency to the task and perhaps gives shape to some of how we go about it. 

Thankfully, the PCA is not doing bad comparatively. We are one of the only denominations to see any growth in the last few years and anywhere from 25-30 percent of our denomination is under 30. I attribute that last fact largely to two things. First, thank God my church has lots and lots of babies. Second, to the work of RUF. 

Admittedly, I am biased, but given that RUF reaches about 20,000 students across 160 or so campuses right now, it’s not crazy to think that starting RUF was one of the most forward-thinking things our founding fathers did when starting the PCA 50 years ago. When it comes to reaching the next generation, I am sure Andrew Rein would want me to say: Keep partnering with RUF, keep funding it, keep encouraging it, and keep making your churches welcome to RUF students. And I am saying that.

But I'll say more than that. On the practical side I want to make three suggestions that I will categorize in two boxes. RUF’s tagline is “reaching students for Christ and equipping them to serve the church,” and so those will be my boxes: Reaching Students and Equipping Them to Serve the Church. 

Then, I will end with one meta-comment on how this relates to some of our vibe-related denominational tensions. 

Reaching 

Preaching has to be Exegetical, Catechetical, and Apologetic. 

This is another way of saying that when it comes to reaching Gen Z, both in college and post-college, much of the post-Christian, un-churched, religiously pluralistic, spiritual-not-religious landscape needs to be consciously borne in mind in our preaching. 

To break that down, preaching needs to be exegetical–a clear exposition of the text we have in front of us, because what else are we doing when giving people God's Word? One of the most important things I've learned over the years in working with college students is that while there is absolutely a place for understanding and humility and giving space for differing views as people come into your ministry, sheer confidence in the Word of God and an unflappable drive to apply it and expound it directly and unashamedly is essential for actually reaching them. And you just need to believe that. You need to believe that Gen Z is not the unique species of human upon whom the Spirit of God cannot work.

Here’s the thing, Gen Z is burned out on cynicism. Some have heard about the metamodern moment—that after cynical postmodernity, we have a longing for a post-ironic turn to belief, to earnest faith, to the embrace of identities more solid than deconstruction alone can offer.

As Paul Anleiter has noted, Creed made a comeback, Top Gun: Maverick and even the recent Superman moved past grimdark cynicism. Why? Everybody is being constantly bombarded by this take, and that YouTube video and that TED talk and that influencer TikTok and it is tiring to be constantly being sold and then seeing through grift after grift. And the most important thing you can do for an 18 to 30 year old is to declare to them clearly and directly what God's Word has said for thousands of years, unchanged because that's where the Spirit works. The Spirit and the Word are not a gimmick.

Second, preaching needs to be catechetical. Younger folks—both Christian and non-Christian—increasingly have no prior Christian architecture of belief metaphysically, ethically, or narratively. Reaching them requires a lot of Paul’s Acts 17 mindset of being willing to clearly teach in a way that is aimed at regularly instructing outsiders and beginners in the faith from the text at the same time. It means coming to the text not with advanced dogmatics questions or advanced biblical theology questions at the forefront, but often Nicene Creed and Apostles’ Creed and basic Ten Commandments questions as part of how you frame your preaching and teaching. In other words, the Confessions and Catechisms are evangelism tools, not roadblocks!

Third, it actually just does need to be apologetic. Not in a scared, embarrassed, fearful way or even in a needlessly offensive and aggressive way. But you should be attuned to showing how God’s Word and the Good News of Jesus can answer the defeaters, objections, and assumptions of the pagan hearts of our Christians and our non-Christians. This is Charles Taylor, right? Everybody is “cross pressured”, meaning your Christians have pagan objections, and your pagans have some Christian longings and so speaking to one audience is speaking to both. And this isn’t selling out the text because these texts were written to a people in missional contexts! This is Acts 17 stuff.

This year, I walked through the Apostles’ Creed, the 10 Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. I used the Confessions at key points, answered questions, gave out books, pointed to good podcasts and did not shy away from having a Protestantism book club that was one of the most successful things we did. It feels basic to say this, but if we are going to be aggressively reaching and evangelizing the next generation, our regular Sunday preaching and small groups needs to be consciously and consistently pitched at them in that way. 

As a side note, all of this applies in similar measure to younger ages like high school and junior high. The best way to reach the next generation is to produce them, baptize them, and keep them.

Hospitality

The second point here is also a very basic one. Hospitality needs to be core to your church or local ministry’s philosophy of outreach. One of the most important things I do as a campus minister is buy kids Chick-fil-a and Chipotle and get them into random families’ homes at church. 

Obviously, the church is a hospitable place and in liquid modernity, we should do this for everyone. 

But this is especially the case for Gen Z, whom Jonathan Haidt calls “The Anxious Generation.” They are most on their phones, most online, most unchurched,  and the absolute loneliest and disconnected generation in America. They are struggling with severe mental health issues, anxiety, struggling with agency, and hopelessness. They also have lower social skills across the board, they are failing to launch, and by several measures are just behind. So while they are safer (ie. less drinking, more exercise, less sex), they are less social, less able to date, and make connections. They are also more divided politically by gender (young men leaning to the right and young women leaning strongly to the left), and more suspicious of each other.

But this is part of why providing regular avenues of embodied engagement, in homes, at church, over coffee, over service projects, or other ways is not just being an event coordinator, but doing real outreach.

We are Presbyterians so one of the easiest ways is actually to go all out Sabbath-maxxing. Our church doesn't own its own building, so we can't do an evening service but there are frequently small groups that meet at those times. And the family from church that opens its home on Sunday afternoon that has over my interns and staff and several of my students has been a core avenue of welcome to this deeply disconnected generation.

Incarnational ministry was a buzzword about 10 years ago, and I have criticisms of it theologically. But the basic point about breaking bread and sharing community together on a Sunday afternoon where you get a student to log off,  and maybe touch some grass, or providing avenues for families with kids to do so is going to be so important and so countercultural in the coming decade or more. The churches that have elders, deacons, and families who are aggressive about inviting them into their lives and into their homes along with the preaching and the programming and the worship are going to be the ones that are doing the work here. 

Equipping

When it comes to “equipping” the next generation to serve the church, on campus I try to focus at least on having a decent ministry team with plenty of places to hand off responsibility to students, such as small groups, Bible studies, and event planning. But I don't really want to talk about that, beyond saying that our churches got the Boomers involved a couple of generations ago by risking and allowing them to make choices and handle important things in the church. We'll need to do the same in our ministries. 

Risk and Pastoral Pipeline.

This willingness to risk is not unrelated to the point I want to focus on, which is mainly the need to build up the pastoral recruitment and training pipeline. Over the last few years there's been a lot of discourse around the upcoming problem of empty pulpits, drop-offs in church plants, and declining enrollment at seminaries. The OPC just said they had 40 pulpits open—which is a lot for the OPC.

Now, some of this is due to basic demographic realities: there are just fewer members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Beyond that, though, there is a general layer of anxiety and fear and an unwillingness to risk among young men that goes hand in hand with some of the broader cultural trends that we have already named.  

Again, I’ll say that one of the best pastoral pipelines we have in our youth in the PCA is just RUF. Just two years ago we sent four students to seminary to enter Presbyterian ministry and I don't think I'm remarkable as a CM. The RUF internship generally has something like 80 interns, half male, most of whom are thinking of seminary. Proportionally, that’s not bad.

But that said, I don’t think it should be the only, or even the main pipeline. I think the men in this room (Gen X pastors, millennial pastors, and even the Gen Z pastors) in our local churches need regularly keep their head on a swivel within your congregations for young men to disciple who you specifically think have talents, capacities, and the shapeable character of a future minister. Which is to say, we need to up our game at embodying the external call of God upon men for the ministry. 

To that end, I think as a cohort we must ditch the mindset that tells young men that if there's anything else they can do and be happy besides being a pastor, to go do it. I don’t believe that’s proper to our understanding of internal and external calling. Even if this is somebody who could plausibly go out into the field and do something else, if we see in young men the qualities, capacities, and gifts for the pastorate, we ought not be scared to say something to that effect. 

I have a firm grasp of the Reformed doctrine of vocation. It is right and good to teach our young men to glorify God in their callings in business, politics, law, the arts, construction, and so forth. These are not lesser jobs. All the same, there are young, capable, thoughtful men who the contemporary world is telling to focus on grinding, earning cash, securing their lives, while at the same time pouring fear into their heart about cancellation and misunderstandings, and cultural opposition. These men are being driven away from ministry. Yet some of these are young men upon whom God has placed a call. They need to hear from us that entering into pastoral ministry is one of the greatest jobs a man can have. 

Alongside that, we probably need to actually provide these young men what my friend Chris Colquitt has called a “pastoral theology of strength” or agency. I'm a millennial and we grew up on the brokenness and authenticity beat that set us up to hear the beautiful news of justification by faith beyond our works. What a lot of our students need is beyond a strong theology of justification, however, is a correspondingly strong theology of sanctification where the empowering Holy Spirit in union with Christ actually equips you to move beyond the sort of learned helplessness that is endemic to this generation.

And what they need is actually the voice, the belief, and the authoritative insight of godly older men who see something in them and call them into the field, and then are willing to dedicate the requisite time, energy and risk to allow them to succeed.  In other words, we need to be Fathers and Brothers. 

And this itself is risky, messy work that will possibly reshape and reform a young man's future. What’s more, it is risk to us. Some of us fear sinking time, energy, and focus into a “hunch” that might not pay off and maybe distracts from other important tasks within the church. Handing over responsibilities to an untested, unknown leader can go beautifully or terribly. All of this requires risk on our end. 

Relatedly, it will also mean risking a bit financially on internships, fellowships, two-year pastoral apprenticeships, and so on. This is especially the case at the larger churches who may be choosing how to allocate some funds.

But this is crucial if we are going to disciple and reach the next generation. The reality is the people who are most likely to reach the next generation are those that we call and equip among that coming generation. But this needs to be a priority for us because it is a priority in the New Testament. 

Remember, when Jesus was preaching and ministering, what did he do? As an RUF buddy of mine pointed out, he spent three years walking around with the equivalent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s corpus, nearly 1/6 of his written material is directed to guiding the young pastors Timothy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.

Meta-Reflection on the Ecclesial Vibes

And with that, I want to make one, last, final meta-comment having to do with some of the broader ecclesiastical challenges we’ve had in the PCA having to do with culture: “Beware the temptation to ride the Vibe.”

Be cautious about trying to leverage cultural vibes too much in our intramural debates about confessional identity and reaching the next generation. 

A couple of examples by way of memes I have seen: 

Crossing the Tiber or Bosphorus. 

Right now, in our rootless, liquid modernity, with the threat of creeping Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox apologetics coming for our young folks, there is a temptation to think “what these rootless, identity-less kids need is thicker, confessional, Presbymaxxing, not softening ‘missionalism.’” It’s basically confessionalism as pragmatism to reach the kids.

Reaching Based Young Men. 

Or again, post-vibe shift, as my friend James Wood has pointed out, there are a bunch of reality respecters, especially young men who are turned off by the excesses of critical gender and racial theories, who are interested in the sanity of a Christian moral view and not being unfairly demonized for being a white guy. What we need, then, some have thought, are bold churches that push back on wokeness, get more explicitly political, explicitly right-wing, etc., which then also get bundled with a certain vibe and ethos so as to not lose our based young men. 

What do we make of this? 

Elevation Still Sells. 

Well, to the first point about Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, anecdotally and at the meme level, the conversion train might be a real thing. But the data just isn’t there to substantiate it in any kind of real or large-scale way. 

The only group consistently winning or growing are the non-denom charismatics, who are eating the Orthodox and Catholic numbers for lunch. So while you should definitely bone up on your Protestant apologetics, my gut currently tells me this is mostly about keeping your future pastoral pipeline strong by keeping your nerdy readers on the team.

On the West Coast, though, I’ll just say I don't have many Presbyterian students showing up at my ministry. I only have non-denom kids, non-Christians, and random Catholics. They know I am a Presbyterian because I teach Presbyterian things and baptize them into Presbyterian churches. But when they show up, they are not Presbyterian.

You know who is the hardest group to get to show up to our liturgical PCA church? It isn’t the non-Christians or the Catholics. It’s the majority of non-denominational Evangelical kids who are used to the big rock concert worship services and just do not get liturgy and have no concept of confessions.  

Reformed Catholicity or Presbyterian Marines 

Now, I want those students to join PCA churches. I want them to be Reformed. 

One way of inviting people into the PCA, and into our confessional heritage and Reformed worship is to draw them into a broad, reformed catholicity (to use a hot buzzword). An alternative approach comes off as a call to join the elite Presbyterian Marines (the Few, the Saved, the Chosen). In this case, you either get with the program or get out. 

I'm going to suggest a certain amount of flexibility of spirit, and even some practice, for the sake of on-ramping the non-denominational kids is likely going to be necessary in these times if we are going to continue to reach out and grow.

Reaching Young Men 

Next, speaking as a guy whose ministry for the last seven years has been anywhere between 60-80% male in a given year and who really cares about reaching young men: Yes, challenge them. Yes, be direct. Yes, push back on much of the ideology out there that is contrary to God’s Word and has beat these young men up before they’ve even gotten out the door. Pour in the time. Mentor, pursue. Speak to their needs. 

But if you are one of those who think that some over the last 10 years have made the mistake of feminizing and emotionalizing churches to keep the young women happy, or tried far too hard to equate the Larger Catechism to a more center-left, even progressive political order, it stands to reason that running the same operation of coddling unbiblical or ungodly attitudes or winds of social doctrine in the opposite direction for the sake of catching the current vibe could also conceivably go wrong, right? I think the last few weeks and months have shown us a few ways that project could go wrong, right? 

Let me put it this way. One of the young men I baptized this year was someone I met lifting weights, took through a book on masculinity, and have offered a distinctly male form of mentorship to. And yet, another was a young woman who found it refreshing that when she showed up at church on Sunday, it wasn’t about right-wing politics all the time. 

Now, does this mean I didn’t preach about abortion for 20 minutes in my sermon on the 6^th commandment? No. I did so clearly and directly. But I did it on the assumption that I actually had more people than just those disaffected young men in my room. I still had the young, increasingly progressive women, who need the gospel just as much, who still have their own questions, whom I want to persuade about the goodness of God’s Word.

What I'm saying is that when it comes to reaching the next generation, being highly online, letting your ministry be governed by the contemporary algorithm and the quick shifts of vibes and moods, could, in the long term, be very counterproductive for faithful ministry to the coming generation. 

What the next generation needs is not our ability to catch a vibe, a wave, a revival, a trend, etc. Vibes shift and shift again. What they need is our continued commitment to ministering, yes, in culturally wise ways, but more fundamentally out of a bedrock of biblical conviction.

Does it matter how we arrive at outcomes? 

I’d argue that Christianity says yes. Much of the Bible is demonstrating and emphasizing that not only is God intent on creating a particular kind of people for himself, but that we actually cannot arrive at the end Scripture envisions for us apart from certain and specific means and processes. The processes and means through which God uses to create and transform a people for Himself is an intentionally painstakingly long and arduous one. It requires the slowness of history slowly unfolding through the seemingly mundane moments of birth and death of generations upon generations of one family, and which now extends to us who have been adopted into the family of God living faithfully day by day the time allotted to us on earth. God in grace and wisdom commits to us in the slowness of the process, for to create the type of people who will be able to partner with him to bring about the redemption of this world requires, quite frankly, time and struggle. 

This is opposite of what is often valued today in our society – efficiency, productivity, ease, and convenience. And while it is not necessary that we must always choose the difficult in order to be on the path of formation that uniquely creates the type of person God intends for us to become, I believe that given the abundance of options of convenience before us, it is especially crucial for us to be prudent and intentional with our choices because our choices form us. 

It is an understatement to say that AI has revolutionized our current time and culture. The opportunities and possibilities it opens up to people (just about anyone can create an app now), the convenience and ease it offers to us (we essentially have a digital assistant for our daily needs), the accessibility of information (research is revolutionized with how many papers can be digested and summarized for any topic of your choosing)... it may be our Prometheus’ fire. As with all new technologies, AI, whether directly or indirectly, is already forming us into a certain type of people. If we are not careful, we as individuals and the broader church will be swept up in its currents and develop habits, inclinations, and ideologies that will put us farther away from the path of formation God has intended for us. 

So how does AI usage impact our formation? There are many ways to consider. It can shape us in ways that devalue embodied persons and presence. It can shape us to value productivity and speed above all else, teaching us that the ultimate value of a person is in what they can produce, not who they are. But I’d like to focus on just one that I recently experienced: the eroding of our ability and desire to undertake and endure (or even appreciate) hard things, especially if doing so requires time.

Outcomes Without Effort

After five years of being a manager in a tech company, I recently went back to being an individual contributor. Having been out of the coding game for so long, I was nervous about my ability to relearn coding and meaningfully contribute, especially in the company’s high pace culture with an emphasis on productivity. But those around me assured me that with AI tools, coding had become much more accessible and the learning curve no longer so steep as when I had initially started out. And they were right.

The ease and convenience was exhilarating – with a few lines describing what I wanted to do, Claude was able to generate for me entire notebooks and production pipelines that would implement my idea and even test components of it for me. What would have taken me hours to ramp up and outline working code, now took me but a few minutes to set up and get nearly production ready code. The ease and the immensity of capabilities accessible to me through the AI tools made me feel that I myself were capable, and that I had the ability to implement anything that I wanted to. It was exciting and honestly, a lot of fun, but I also felt uneasy. Why? I couldn’t quite identify what led to the unease until I read this passage from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers: 

They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer.

Here was the articulation of my discomfort. I had all the exciting outcomes but did not need to do any of the hard work to get there. The more I did that, the more I knew my personhood would be formed by that experience. I was doing the equivalent of what Sayers says – memorizing how to play a song, but did not learn the fundamentals to know how to play all songs. I had all the excitement of the outcomes of learning (working code), but had experienced none of the difficulty and hard work that would have typically been required to get there. And so something felt amiss. One may argue that I am learning to use the AI tool – the optimization of prompts and such – but this is vastly different from learning to actually write code, which I had to do when I first joined the company. 

Under the latter type of learning, when working code was produced, it elicited within me a kind of satisfaction that was rooted in having undertaken, persevered, and succeeded at something difficult and new. In short, I was training and cultivating something in my personhood and character more permanent than the feelings or the outcomes – the ability and the habit of persevering through the struggle and challenges required to learn something. This ability – the ability to submit and endure the difficult for what will be gained through it, and the ability to do so even if it involves an uncomfortable slowness – is necessary in my formation into a person who can submit to and faithfully walk in the costly discipleship Christ calls me. Without it, we will not be able to root ourselves deeply into the grace, love, and truth that meets us in the inevitable challenges that we must choose to walk through with God, though there may be plenty of opportunities to find alternate, easier paths. And that is what true learning entails – that it forms us into the type of people God intends for us to be. 

So what do we do then in this tension of knowing that the process matters, but surrounded by the allure of tools that allow us to easily and with such convenience sidestep the challenges of such processes and yet still obtain the intended outcomes? What do we do as the ease of AI creates within us a drive for the immediate, and an undervaluing of learning processes, of doing hard things that take time, of sitting in situations that are awkward and uncomfortable because we have yet to learn fluency or competency? In short, what do we do to not inevitably become, (though we are likely already becoming) people who want all the ease, speed, and information without any of the work to get it? How do we lean into habits and situations that train and prepare us in what we need for discipleship to Jesus – a willingness to slow down our pace, endure difficulty, and wrestle with uncomfortableness – where the objective is not obtaining information, but growing in relationship with Jesus to be like Him?

I do not believe the answer is to avoid AI usage entirely, but what I am convicted and convinced of is that we are all called to have wisdom in determining when to use AI and when not to, and what counter-formational habits we must develop so that our formation is intentional, rather than accidental. For determining when to use AI and when not to, I have not found a better framework than the one put forth by Andy Crouch. 

As for counter-formational habits, I propose for consideration two habits that would form us in the ways that AI will not – to be people who can not only endure but be comfortable with the slowness, struggle, and hardship that is required of us in our life of discipleship to Jesus

Reading Long Fiction

First, we can read long fiction that has stood the test of time. Reading fiction does not increase our knowledge, rather the objective is for the forming and shaping of our souls. This is precisely why the reading of fiction is so counter-formational. We read not to be productive or increase intellect, but because of what it does to our souls. By reading long fiction, we become habituated with the time-consuming nature of formation, and the resilience and endurance needed to sit through the long build-up of good, soul-satisfying stories so that we may deeply enjoy the story’s culmination. This habit forms and challenges us to undertake and commit to time consuming endeavors for our good.

Write Without AI

Next: We should write without AI. Since the beginning of the year, all the documents I had produced for work had been done through freeflow, stream-of-consciousness style talking to AI (speech-to-text) and having it organize and structure my thoughts and proposals for me – practicality and efficiency at its best as I juggled back to back meetings all day with the needs of developing statistically rigorous methodologies to enable partner teams to do their work. 

But in undertaking this writing project, by purposefully not using AI, I have felt within myself the uncomfortable yet formational inconveniences and work of having to remember again how to write with clarity, structure, and logical coherence. At the same time, it has been deeply satisfying to re-train and re-exercise these writing muscles. It has forced me to slow down, to think of what is the right word to use, what is the right thought and idea to draw out, and it has done something wonderful for my soul and formation, something all together different and not replicable through AI usage. 

In essence, the nature of this writing project has blessed me, and while I hope this piece has inspired that longing within you, I am grateful nonetheless for what it has allowed me to rediscover – the beauty of leaning into the process of being fully human in creativity and distinctiveness in this slow, time consuming, and, at times, challenging journey of everyday formation into who God is making me into. 

Recently, I was invited to the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education to give a speech about my book on the Declaration of Independence, Finding the Founding: Meditations on the Theology of the Declaration of Independence (Front Porch Republic Books, 2026). This was my first trip to Philadelphia, and having arrived a day early, I made sure to visit Independence Park. The visit didn’t disappoint, but it did cause me to tear up my speech and write a new one.

An exhibit at the American Philosophical Society featured a series of memorial engravings documenting our country’s history of the Declaration. The evolving significance of the Declaration grew clear as these engravings changed with each generation. I was struck by a pattern: In all the earliest engravings in the 19^th century, each of the Declaration’s references to God (“Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” “divine Providence”) was enlarged and emphasized, along with many of our now-hallowed ideas. But as the years went on, only the ideas (equal, life, liberty, etc.) remained emboldened. Finally, a 2026 artist’s annotated, “re-interpretive” engraving placed at the end of the exhibit made a striking choice: It deletes each mention of God from the Declaration, and it adds a parenthetical question mark to every ideal.

I’m not alone in worrying about this trajectory. In 1798, John Adams warned, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In explaining the principles of the Declaration 154 years later, Dwight Eisenhower said, “our form of Government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” In 1973, Elton Trueblood wrote, “the Declaration makes sense in a theological context, but fails to make sense in any other.” They would have been neither surprised nor comforted by this exhibit in Philadelphia.

We are now experiencing a renaissance of American civic education, especially in our public universities. Last summer I found myself, as a theologian, now somewhat unwittingly part of this renaissance. I didn’t understand how I belonged to this endeavor. But I did think that in this 250^th anniversary year, the question of what it means to be American is alive again—thanks to debates over liberalism and postliberalism, globalization and its retrenchment.

In this year, I thought, the Declaration might have new answers to these deepest questions, if read in a certain way. So, I put pencil to paper, and over four months, I wrote a line-by-line meditative commentary of the Declaration, treating it as a theological document with its own voice—that is, as if the term “Nature’s God” mattered just as much to its integrity as the “Laws of Nature,” as if “divine Providence” was not accidental flourish, but the cornerstone which founds the declarations of this founding document and its people. If so, then the Declaration’s theology would hold a timely answer to who we are as “one people,” in this broken time.

Finding the Founding is the product of this meditation. It is a close reading of the Declaration—compacted into 126 pages and focused on the political theology that is crucial to the document. Within our renaissance of civic education, I offer this work as an invitation to a forum to meditate on the question of American faith.

What is that faith? For only a brief, apparently un-theological example, take that most beautiful and confusing clause of the Declaration: We hold these Truths to be self-evident. Now, as humanity before and since 1776 has shown, it’s hardly obvious that, say, all human beings are equal—if it were, so many wouldn’t have failed to see it. So “self-evident” can’t mean “obvious.” As many have argued, the definition of “self-evident” must be closer to something like a premise that cannot be proved but only assumed, like the claim that all triangles have three sides. But we don’t need to “hold” a geometric truth. Yet we do “hold these Truths,” the Declaration claims. Therefore, I found that the Declaration is, in fact, making a statement of mutual faith—not a claim to common sense or rational principle. We are basing our peoplehood on our holding of these Truths as our foundation. And the truths that follow are much deeper than mere propositions. The very words of the Declaration already demand something like a faith commitment, both in the founders who signed it and the “one people” the Declaration claims is America itself.

As we revive the conversation on civic education, I do not think we can repeat that aforementioned artist’s omission of God. Our ideals are worth holding without question marks, but only if we don’t erase the God of the Declaration. Therefore, we cannot ignore the fraught matter of American civic religion and theology, no matter how hard either side of the sacred and the secular may try. As Adams, Eisenhower, and Trueblood—as well as two of my personal favorites, Reinhold Niebuhr and Stewart Udall—all argued in their own ways, American self-government depends on a deeply religious sensibility. 

Many fear we have lost that pre-political disposition. Perhaps we cannot revive it. But we can regain the conversation to revive it. (I should not have to mention that others are already having that conversation, and in ways less than charitable.) I know how important the works by the Niebuhr brothers have been to my own sense of faith and civic responsibility. I am jealous of how freely and deeply they could write on faith and America, with a public audience ready to read their reflections. I hope this book may do for our time, if only in small part, what these earlier writers’ works did for theirs.

I hope you will read and converse with this book. Not for the book’s sake, but for the sake of what this book is about: our common deliberation on faith, solidarity, freedom, and belonging, face-to-face with the transcendent. If we can regain this, then whatever we will make together of “divine Providence,” I believe we will become closer to pledging each other “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Near the end of his essay on poetry and marriage Wendell Berry considers how free verse fits into his broader consideration of the relationship between fixed poetic forms and fixed forms of life, such as marriage.

To answer the question, he considered the work of American poet Walt Whitman, suggesting how Whitman's own style of free verse could be understood in a way that reconciled with Berry's insistence on the importance of forms which caused him to say, at one point, "the impeded stream is the one that sings."

Here is how Berry addressed the problem:

One analogue of free verse, I think, must be courtship, a way of accommodating our minds to something new, of finding out what it is that we are doing or about to do. The encounter between the English language and the subjects and objects of a new continent strange to it and to its poetic tradition seems to have required this of a succession of American poets from Whitman's time until now. Who can help feeling in the early Leaves of Grass a kind of falling in love? The lines must reach out impulsively, become capacious and tensile, to include in their full stance and particularity the images of American experience.

Later he continues,

If Whitman's work is the prime example of the freeing of verse, it is an example of something else too, for at its best Whitman's line, as we will see if we try to shorten or lengthen it, is a form. He set his line free only to make it into a kind of line that we recognize anywhere we see it—a new poer, a new music, added to poetry which can be learned and used. ... And such newness does not destroy the old set forms, but renews them in renewing our understanding of what a line of verse is, our sense of its properties of duration and coherence, beginning and end.

I hope that no one will consider accusing the author of these words of relativism. Berry can be attacked in any number of ways, but a relativist he is not. What he is, I think, is someone who is keenly attuned to place and context, such that he can recognize the times when an uncompromising rigor in the name of fixed forms can actually attack and undermine the goods that form was originally meant to encourage.

Good farmer that he is, I am sure Berry would consider the ways in which specific landscapes make specific demands on a farmer. "Good farming" is a recognizable thing, and yet what is "good farming" on one type of land is "bad farming" on another. The acknowledgement of this does not make one a relativist, but merely a person who pays attention to particularity. (And, of course, there are some practices that are 'bad farming' anywhere, no matter the local geography.)

I had just re-read that essay of Berry's when my family sat down to watch Up for a family movie night. I was surprised by the ways the film seemed to rhyme with Berry's insight regarding renewal and the need to distinguish between generalized goods and the particularized forms that those goods can take. It struck me while watching that the two main characters for much of the movie, the protagonist Mr Frederickson and the antagonist Charles Muntz, are faced with the same basic question: The life you thought you would have, the good you thought you would experience, has been taken from you. Now what?

One character tightens his grip on the old life and squeezes and squeezes until he loses life itself, literally disappearing from screen as he crashes into the world he tried to grasp. The other nearly does the same, but at the last is rescued from that fate.

What rescues him? The answer would please Berry: it is love. Frederickson has spent his life dreaming of going to Paradise Falls with his wife Ellie, only to have her die suddenly, just as he had purchased their plane tickets to go. The life he thought they would have is gone, and much of the movie is taken up with his attempt to avoid knowing that fact. And then, like Muntz, he hits a point where he has a choice to let go of that specific life while maintaining his grip on the good that life was meant to actualize. And, at first, like Muntz he can't let go. He begins to fall. He holds onto the house so tightly that he allows an innocent creature to be taken and abused by another. But then he learns again to see what he needs to do and to have the resolve to do it. How?

He opens the scrap book his wife had made as a child and discovers final pages he had never seen before in which Ellie's imagined adventures through life are transformed by love—visions of galavanting off to Paradise Falls are replaced by the ordinary treasures of a banal day lived with one's love. And as the book comes to a close, Frederickson reads a note left for him by Ellie: "Thanks for the adventure! Now go have another one!"

From that point on, Frederickson is a different character. He is able to let go of the house he and Ellie had loved. He lets go of the dream of Paradise Falls. And he goes to do the thing he needs to do, rescuing that innocent creature and repaying the faith of a young boy who had befriended him over the course of the movie. And so while Muntz falls to his death at Paradise Falls, Frederickson's old life falls from the sky as well, landing at Paradise Falls, but Frederickson himself returns to life (in Muntz's ship) and finds his new adventure. The good he seeks remains the same. The form changes due to circumstances outside his control.

There is a mirror here, I think, to the way Berry speaks of Whitman's verse. Berry believes that Whitman's verse does for America what, say, Chaucer had done for England. The difference in form, Berry says, is a necessary difference that honors the particularities of the place without losing its hold on the good that the poem is meant to name and commend.

I want to suggest, as I close, that there is a lesson here for us in other domains as well. Ross Douthat has written well of what has led to our "post-liberal" moment: It is the product of the complex intersection of cratering birth rates, mass migration, and technological disruption. In response to this moment, two dominant schools have emerged, both of which end up imitating Muntz, I think. There is a kind of civic libertarian who desperately wishes it could still be 1992. The Cold War was won. We lived in a unipolar world. History was at an end. Democratic, liberal capitalism would sweep the world, world without end, amen. And all of their proposals and goals in encountering this new moment seem to be "How can we turn back the clock to 1992? How can we take back the life we had and that we still want?"

That is not the world we have. And there is no way for that world to return, given the ascent of China, the lack of political will in America to police the globe (and the apparent ineptness of the American armed forces, at least if the Iran War is any measure), and the transformations coming now due to the factors Douthat named. The world the civic libertarians long for is never coming back.

Another response is that of the Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists, both of whom regard the failure of that regime as a welcome development and suggest that the whole thing was one big mistake and now that it has failed our path back to something sturdier is clear. The difficulty is the goals they envision—a monoethnic state led by a caesarist Christian prince who shepherds the life of the volk or an integrated state in which the government repents and submits to the pope—are entirely unworkable and impossible, and would require monstrous evils to achieve. (Consider how one prominent Christian nationalist was recently suggesting the forced deportation of 120 million people on Twitter.)

The question before us, I think, is not how we can magically coerce the world into being 1992 again or 1592, perhaps. Those worlds are gone and we can no more recreate them today than we could use the verse of Chaucer to provide the verse that would define American life. I am inclined to agree with Berry and think that we need new forms to answer the new challenges of our particular moment. To say this is not relativistic anymore than Berry's own thought is relativistic. We should seek to render to God what is due to God and to neighbor what is due to neighbor. We should seek to retain the structures and norms that have allowed us to have things like free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, a free press, and all the rest.

And yet we now, like Whitman, must find ways of preserving those goods under wildly different circumstances—circumstances in which given forms of membership and meaning have been badly weakened, when the unborn and the natural family are often attacked or, at best, forgotten, in which rampant injustice is increasingly regarded as tolerable as long it is one's enemies who are victimized by it, and in which technological innovation makes vice easier than ever before and virtue more remote. A Christian prince cannot fix these problems, nor can a free trade loving civic libertarian with a taste for foreign intervention. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the problems are unsolvable and we are entering a season of political and cultural winter. But if they are to be solved, then I think it will be in the way Berry describes, by identifying the 'new adventures' that allow us to find renewed forms which preserve the same goods.

Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250^th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation’s 250^th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week, Jake Meador proposed this answer to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.

***

We Need Both Patriotic Gratitude and Christian Humility 

Daniel Bennett

The Christian life is one of paradox. We believe we are made in God’s image while reckoning with the Fall, and we are called to be in the world but not of the world. The American story, too, is one of paradox. It is a story of liberty and opportunity for some, and oppression and exclusion for others. It is one of remarkable achievements and profound failures. 

As Americans approach a particularly auspicious Independence Day, I find myself thinking of these contradictions. It is a mistake to reflect on our country’s two-and-a-half centuries of history through an exclusively positive filter, ignoring our nation’s warts and scars. It is equally mistaken to dwell only on the negatives of our story while downplaying the positives.

Today’s political environment tempts us to simplistically choose sides, to reject nuance in favor of a black-and-white reading of our collective past and present. We are discouraged from recognizing that both praise and criticism can be true at the same time, lest we end up somehow ceding ground to our perceived enemies.

American Christians can model a better way of commemorating our country’s 250^th anniversary. Rather than defaulting to naïve optimism or cynical pessimism, we can celebrate the achievements of our nation while acknowledging the many ways it has yet to fully realize its promise. Doing so reflects both patriotic gratitude and Christian humility as we continue the unfinished work of forming "a more perfect union."

***

“Can You Help Me Get to America?”

Matthew Loftus

“Can you help me get to America?” As an American citizen living in a low-income country, it’s a question I get asked more often than I’d like. Occasionally someone tries to convince me that I ought to adopt their child and take them to the United States. I have absolutely no power to assist someone in getting a visa to my home country, so I don’t have much to say in response.

I try to disabuse people of notions that they’ve gathered from television or from their fellow citizens who have moved to the US and often project a more comfortable lifestyle than they are truly experiencing. I explain that a salary of $1000 USD per month, which is a top-quintile income here, is poverty wages in a country where rent and transportation eat up hundreds of dollars every month. I will occasionally add some tale of sexual or spiritual decadence in public schools to scare the parents ready to relinquish their child to me. I urge people to consider how they can flourish where they are and contribute to the good of their neighbors in their home country.

However, the inquiries and the hopes of people who want to come to the United States of America reveal some things that are worth being grateful for. Life is not fair for people born at the bottom of the income distribution, but anyone in the US who is willing to work at any job can earn enough to feed themselves and usually family members back home. Our government may engage in a variety of absurd overreaches, but an American citizen will never be abducted and tortured for saying anything bad about their rulers. Our health insurance system is overpriced and ridiculous, but if you suffer a medical emergency in the US, you will receive life-saving treatment up front and deal with the bill later. Millions of people around the world are willing to leave everyone they love and risk their lives in order to have any of these things Americans take for granted.

The United States of America have been blessed far beyond what any one nation deserves, and over the past 250 years much good has been done in the world with those blessings. I still shake my head at the decadence I encounter when I return home—why on earth anyone would want a 12-foot-tall skeleton in their front yard, I don’t know—but I know that the same abundance that allows people to buy dumb Halloween decorations also allows them to fund medical care and Gospel ministry all over the world.

I cannot help but be grateful for what I’ve received from my home country and what she has received from God. My hope and prayer is that as we celebrate 250 years of God’s goodness, more Americans cultivate that gratitude and ask themselves how God wants them to bless others with the abundance they’ve been given.

***

“Why Do You Love America?”

Katelyn Walls Shelton

“Why do you love America?” an acquaintance recently asked me, seemingly annoyed. The blunt nature of the question caught me off guard. We have bundled our four young children up in the January cold, hot chocolate in hand, to watch the Washington Monument light up in a projected display of our nation’s history. We’ve dragged them out late in pajamas to watch military flyovers on the National Mall, and we’ve gone to the White House Easter Egg Roll (three times). We have an American flag hanging outside our front door—it’s so big, in fact, that if it’s particularly windy, it sometimes slaps guests in the face as they enter our house. I have worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Executive Branch. My husband has worked for the House and the Senate and a former Vice President. We love America. It took me a second, but I responded: “Because it’s the greatest country in the history of the world. And it’s my home.” 

“But Jesus loves all people and all places,” he responded, “and in today’s political climate, America doesn’t really seem all that great.” His implication was that as a Christian, it was off-putting, perhaps even wrong, to be patriotic or feel a sense of pride in one’s place—especially when political leaders don’t always represent Christian ideals and values, or when some who claim the name of Christ abuse it in service of ignoble aims.

But it’s precisely because of the incarnation of Christ that I am free to love my nation and love it abundantly. Jesus lived in a particular time, in a particular place, amongst a particular people. He was and is fully human, even as He was and is fully God. And while He loved the whole world, He did so while on earth by loving and serving those right in front of him, in his place, amongst his people. That’s what we’re called to also. “And you will be my witnesses,” Jesus says in Acts 1:8 just before His ascension, “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” First at home and then worldwide. 

It’s easy, perhaps even tempting, to let the politics of the moment breed contempt or disdain for our country. But there’s so much to love, and we can love our country most exuberantly by working to make it more faithful, more just, and more worthy of its highest ideals.

Perhaps it’s providential that the World Cup has coincided with America’s semiquincentennial. Watching fans from around the world visit our homeland and delight in our people, our hospitality, our food, our music, our scenic byways and storied Main Streets, has fanned the flame of love for this country for many. Our love for our people and our place is not a denigration or rejection of the goodness of other peoples and other places—it is a recognition that God made this place and these people and set us among them. He calls them good, so we can (and should), too. 

There will always be a gap between our government as it is and our government as it shall be when the one upon whose shoulders government rests returns to rule every tribe, tongue, and nation forever. Until then, I thank God for 250 years of this free republic, and I pray blessings upon it for another 250 and more.

Katelyn Walls Shelton is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.

***

“Yet the Heavenly Father Sings Over His People”

Samuel James

The two most influential shapers of my life and thinking have been Scripture and raising children. And it has been remarkable to reflect how both of these have taught me about loving, delighting in, and being thankful for that which is imperfect. God’s covenant people are sinners, often spectacularly so. Children are ignorant, stubborn, selfish, and slow to learn. Yet the heavenly Father sings over his people, and I, in my own fallen way, sing over my two sons and daughter.

I think this can teach me something about my country. The United States is far from perfect. Yet I don’t delight or sing over its sins and flaws. I delight and sing over it because it is mine. For two hundred and fifty years, this country has been one of world history’s greatest ever monuments to transcendent truths about God, humanity, and civilization. America was not and is not a theocratic experiment, but it was and is a nation that assumes in its very constitution the reality of justice, the depravity of man, the necessity and limits of power, and the promise and peril of self-government.

Even more importantly, the US has been one of the world’s greatest places for the practice and exportation of Christianity. America’s legacy of religious liberty is almost singular in world history. And this is not a neutral or indifferent virtue. America is rich with gospel-preaching churches, faithful pastors, thoughtful writers, poets, singers, artists, and others who invite others into worship of the risen Christ, publicly, with no fear of legal oppression.

It is common in many places to barely speak of this nation without immediately pointing out all the ways in which it has failed to practice Christian justice and charity. Those failures are real. But they are not what I think of this year. Right now, I think of my family here in the meadowed, cavernous country of Kentucky, where we look forward to feasting and fellowship this July 4^th, worship and rest the following Sunday, and a government that is accountable to us all the year. Such blessings must not be taken for granted. They are not automatic. They are not accidental. They are divinely bestowed.

This 250^th American birthday, I am grateful. And I pray that I would, by God’s grace, love and care for imperfect things, just as my Savior loves and cares for me.

***

The Great Cradle of Liberty

John Shelton

America is the great cradle of liberty. Today, as much as at its founding 250 years ago, we have a Christian duty to honor America.

If the apostle Paul could command the first Christians to honor Rome under the reign of Nero—the mad emperor who lit Christians on fire for candlelight in his courtyard and fed them to wild beasts—how much easier should it be for American Christians, who live in a nation built on unalienable rights, to sing “God bless America, land that I love… my home sweet home”? We should be fiercely proud of our heritage on this national milestone.

Ours is not a heritage of blood, though patriot veins have nobly shed much of that in America’s defense. As President Lincoln eulogized in his first inaugural, “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Nor is it a heritage of soil, though America’s natural beauties, “from the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam,” are incredible and worthy of conservation. We are a practical people too, with deep roots in the earth and in our communities that make America exceptional.

No, our heritage 250 years on is one of the noblest ideas in the history of mankind, one tracing its lineage directly to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—namely, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Only a world reconfigured by the Christian gospel could articulate such a truth. Such a truth becomes inevitable, “self-evident” even, only in a world touched by Christianity.

Whether or not America lives up to our highest ideals on this or that policy matter today, we owe it and the Founding Fathers our honor all the same. Lincoln articulated it best:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

At 250, may America remain just that—a rebuke and stumbling block to the harbingers of tyranny and oppression, wherever they may reappear.

David J. Bobb and Tony Williams. Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America. Diversion Books, 2026. $34.00. 336 pp.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a wealthy slaveholder wrote one of the most enduring lines ever penned about human equality: the declaration that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator” with certain “unalienable rights,” including the right of liberty. 

After writing those lines, Thomas Jefferson returned to his plantation, where he continued to be waited upon by enslaved people for his entire life. Though he expressed great moral reservations about slavery, the only enslaved people he emancipated were members of the Hemings family that DNA tests suggest were his own biological children and other close relatives of Sally Hemings.

And if that’s true for Jefferson, the record of many of the other signers of the Declaration of Independence is not significantly better when it comes to slavery. Nearly three-quarters of the men who signed the Declaration also owned human beings as slaves. 

In view of this fact, some have argued that Jefferson and the Declaration’s signers did not really intend to include Black people (or women or other minorities) in the phrase “all men.” By “all men,” they really only meant “all white men”—or perhaps only white men of a particular social class—rather than all people created by God. And if that’s the case, maybe the Declaration was not so revolutionary after all. Maybe America’s real founding was based not on equality but on racism. Maybe the nation’s founding moment came not in 1776 but in 1619, with the beginning of African slavery in what would become the United States. 

In their new book, Divided Over the Declaration, David Bobb and Tony Williams push back against this counternarrative by arguing that the Declaration of Independence really did mean all people created by God when it declared that “all men” are “created equal.” 

Furthermore, Bobb and Williams show, in a historical narrative that stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present, the Declaration’s promise of equality has been a key guiding force in the campaign for African American civil rights. From the antebellum abolitionists to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond, advocates for equality have pointed to the Declaration’s phrase as an unfulfilled promise that the nation has an obligation to honor.

As evidence that Jefferson used the phrase “all men” to mean all people, including women and those who were enslaved, Bobb and Williams point to a phrase in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration that charged the British king with promoting the international slave trade. The king, Jefferson wrote in that draft, was “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.”  

That phrase was excised in the final version, due to concerns from some delegates that an indictment of the transatlantic slave trade might hit a little too close to home, but Bobb and Williams argue that it offers conclusive evidence that Jefferson understood “men” to include enslaved people. And since the people who were bought and sold in the international slave market included women, the phrase “MEN should be bought & sold” undoubtedly referred to women as well. And if that is the case, Jefferson’s opening declaration that “all men are created equal” refers to the rights of all people.

That is also the way that many African Americans and abolitionist-minded whites understood the phrase in the late eighteenth century. In Massachusetts, Quock Walker successfully sued for his freedom by citing a line from the Massachusetts constitution that closely paralleled the Declaration. (The line, written by John Adams in 1780, declared that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”) A Rhode Island emancipation law of 1784 included similar wording: “Whereas all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the holding of mankind in a state of slavery . . . is repugnant to this principle.” 

Because antislavery activists cited the Declaration’s promise of equality so frequently, pro-slavery advocates after the 1830s began publicly repudiating this part of the Declaration. John C. Calhoun said that the statement that “all men are created equal” was “inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.” In fact, it was the “most dangerous of all political error,” he said—and it had led Jefferson to advocate the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory (which later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), which Calhoun blamed for dividing the country between slave and non-slave states and producing “deep and dangerous agitation” that could destroy the nation.

After the Civil War, the Declaration’s statement of equality continued to influence advocates of democracy. In the debates over American imperialism in the late 1890s, those who opposed the American annexation of territory (such as the Philippines) to which the United States had no intention of granting the right of self-government appealed to the principles of the Declaration and argued that American imperialists were behaving as the British had done toward the American colonies in the 1770s. In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others routinely invoked the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

Many political progressives readily acknowledge this history as well, but the difference is that some progressives have argued that whatever promise of equality the Declaration might contain has come about in spite of, rather than because of, its author’s original intent. “Neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, declared. “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” 

If that’s the case, what matters is not the Declaration of Independence itself but rather what African Americans of later generations were able to use it to accomplish.

But that’s not Bobb and Williams’s view. If, as they assert, Jefferson really did intend to include all people in his declaration of universal rights—and if, as they also assert, Jefferson and his contemporaries really did understand the implications that this had for slavery and abolition—the Declaration of Independence is the foundation for American equality because of the genius of its author’s vision, and we would do well to study it.

Furthermore, Bobb and Williams assert, the Declaration’s promise works only if we accept its premise of unchanging, universal natural rights that are predicated on the idea of an unchanging human nature. Some of the early twentieth-century progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson, rejected the idea of an unchanging human nature because of their belief in a Darwinian model of human and societal evolution. As a result, they often rejected the idea of fixed natural rights as well.

Although progressives of our own era are vocal advocates of human rights, Bobb and Williams fear that they, too, have unmoored themselves from the unchanging principles of the Declaration—and as a result, they have no foundation within which they can ground their rights advocacy.

The solution, Bobb and Williams argue, is civics education that immerses students in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. Like Abraham Lincoln, Bobb and Williams view the Constitution as an outworking of the principles of the Declaration—or as “an apple of gold in a picture of silver,” as Lincoln phrased it. That means that the Constitution, like the Declaration, is an egalitarian document that deserves our full attention.

To those familiar with the civics model that is encouraged in programs such as the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University (with which I am affiliated), Bobb and Williams’s interpretation will come as no surprise. Indeed, the book’s acknowledgments list the names of many of my friends and colleagues, including two who teach at Ashland University and several others who participate in the Ashbrook Center’s Teaching American History program. After working in this environment for three years, I found the book’s analysis—and even the choice of sources that it drew on for its arguments—very familiar. 

But those who are not familiar with the evidence that Bobb and Williams cite should read this book. Those who underestimate Jefferson’s egalitarian vision or who think that a 250-year-old document written by dead white males is not relevant for the national struggle for African American equality should grapple with the compelling argument this book presents.

As Bobb and Williams readily acknowledge, Jefferson and the many signers of the Declaration who were slaveholders did not, to use the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “live out the full meaning of [their] creed.” But to a certain extent, they understood that when they declared that “all men are created equal,” they could never be fully comfortable with slavery again. They had set in motion an egalitarian revolution that is still ongoing.

If we want to continue that revolution for the next 250 years, Bobb and Williams argue, we must ground our vision of equality in an understanding of the Declaration of Independence. As the document that inspired both the abolitionist and the civil rights movement, its promise of equality lives on—but only for those who are willing to study it and take its message to heart.

Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250^th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation’s 250^th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week, Jake Meador proposed this answer to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.

***

Listening to John Adams

Miles Smith

"The Revolution ought to be more carefully studied than it is, and more carefully handed down to posterity." That was one of John Adams’ many valedictories about the American Revolution that he and others created in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. 

When the United States was born, there were still Holy Roman Emperors who claimed the mantle of Charlemagne. John Adams’s birthday was closer to the Fall of Constantinople than it is to 2026. On America’s 250^th birthday, the world is changing; the United States is changing—culturally, socially, and economically. 

Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment that “taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” How true that has been, especially for that tribe of people, nearly undefinable, but somehow still very real, called Evangelical Protestants. Fear—sensational or sober-minded, real or ridiculous—has driven us back to our roots. We search for something solid, something old and something unmovable. For that reason we look back longingly to the politics and religion of the past, to anything but the apparently sinking ship of the liberal order that has defined Western societies for eight long decades.

That the liberal order is flawed is, of course, an unremarkable observation. That liberalism is not “biblical” or somehow divinely sanctioned over and above other political philosophies might make us squirm a bit. But to claim that the liberal order is worth keeping, or that it is in some ways deeply Christian, and deeply American, is a far more contentious proposition among the generation we affectionately call Zoomers. Left and right, Christian and non-Christian, an entire generation sees the beliefs that held the United States together for a long human lifetime as trite or at worst a lie. Evangelical Protestants are much the same as the rest of society in their intransigence towards what once was. In as much as my tribe—Anglicans—can be called Evangelicals, we don’t have much in the way of good answers. Political theology is on everyone’s minds, but no one seems to be able to make it legitimately useful or serious on a national scale. Maybe the Baptists or Presbyterians will do better; the latter at least are trying. 

The American republic is 250 years old, but it seems like a random German tourist here for the World Cup appreciates the country more than some native-born Americans do. That word, “native,” carries more weight than it used to. So too does “heritage.” The bad news for native-born heritage Americans is that, try as we might, we cannot conjure a past where nativity and heritage supplied some sort of congenital morality necessary for the maintenance of a healthy republic. Rural so-called “heritage America” is poor, unchurched, and socially unwell. So it has been for much of our republic’s history. Nor can we invoke a Christian nation that we no longer measure up to; our forefathers were never as Christian as we want them to be. What we can do, however, is take John Adams’s advice and study the Revolution. 

***

Seeking the Divine Will

Eddie LaRow

On September 17, 1862, Union forces—87,000 men under the command of George McClellan—engaged with the Army of Northern Virginia, a much smaller 55,000-man army under Robert E. Lee, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in American history, with a staggering 22,000 casualties. Though a Union victory, the battle exacted a cost — felt not just by the men, but by Lincoln, who was 50 miles away in Washington, D.C. At this point, the divided nation had already experienced just south of 200,000 casualties, a staggering number for a conflict nearly 16 months old.

Lincoln had been waiting for the right moment to present the Emancipation Proclamation, which sat in draft form on his desk — waiting for a victory before presenting his charge that all men were not only created equal but were free.

As he sat at his desk, he jotted his reflections down on a piece of paper. This reflection was not meant for public consumption but was an internal wrestling with the conflict at hand. Lincoln wrote: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.” Lincoln was seeking to justify the staggering loss of life. How could so much bloodshed happen? What was the price of freedom—and was it worth it? He went on: “I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”

Now, approximately 163 years later, we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of this great nation. As I ponder what it means to be a Christian and an American, I can’t help but think back to the internal turmoil of Lincoln. For while we certainly do not have open armed conflict today, there is spiritual and invisible conflict. With each issue, we seek the Divine Will—and we, like Lincoln, often wonder what is right or wrong.

But I also can’t help but think of Joseph, who in the book of Genesis is dealt every manner of hardship and trial—being sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, and cast into prison, left to rot in the depths of despair. Anyone would think in that moment that God was not with them—and yet He was, very much so. For through the very hardship that Joseph experienced, God was fully at work. Joseph was ultimately elevated to the right hand of Pharaoh on account of God’s divine mercy, and through the very actions of his brothers and Potiphar’s wife, Joseph was restored by God. For what man intended for evil, God meant for good—that through one man, Joseph, and ultimately Jesus, many should be kept alive.

As Lincoln struggled internally with this conflict—a struggle that would have been forgotten to history if not for John Hay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries—he wrestled with the question that many of us wrestle with today.

This meditation on the Divine Will was, I believe, the kernel that became the Second Inaugural Address, in which Lincoln proclaimed: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes his aid against the other…the prayers of both could not be answered… the Almighty has His purposes.” In the closing paragraph he pronounced, with the eloquence of the greatest American poet: “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Today we stand—though quite divided underneath—united in the fact that we are Americans. As I reflect on America’s 250^th birthday, I can’t help but think of two blood payments. The first: the men who died on fields like Antietam—who died on American soil, by American weapons, in towns, streams, and mountains with American names. Though they did not live to see the result, the blood they shed was enough to purchase an imperfect Union. But I am also reminded of the blood spilled by Christ, who conquered the grave. For as Paul writes in Galatians 3, “Christ bought us with His blood.”

Two hundred and fifty years later, we may be prone to think back to the beginning—to the birth of a new nation. And while this is certainly cause to cheer, it is the blood paid at the moment of divide that may hold a better lesson for us today. For when we look back at the events of 1861–1865, we see the roots of many scars we still bear, and wounds that remain. Either we will abandon the cause and throw in the towel, or we, like Lincoln, will understand that though the pains are real, the cause is worth it. For together we are Americans; divided we are merely another power doomed to the shipwrecked seas of history. As a Christian, I am thankful that the Divine Will—the Sovereign Hand of God—is at work upholding and sustaining.

***

The Churches of Christ and the American Experiment

Daniel K. Williams

Both Christian faith and American citizenship have defined my entire life. 

I grew up attending church since the week I was born. I can trace my American genealogy back to seventeenth-century New England settlers and Revolutionary War veterans. But if, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt, I have been guilty at times of a lack of gratitude for the nation that has shaped me. Ironically, one source of that ingratitude has been Christianity – or rather, the particular American-born version of Christianity that has defined my family heritage. 

About five generations ago, in late nineteenth-century Tennessee, some of my ancestors joined the Churches of Christ, an American revival movement dedicated to restoring the New Testament church. The most prominent Tennessee preacher in that movement, David Lipscomb, was so other-worldly that he taught that Christians should not vote or serve in the military—a stance that continued to define some congregations in the Churches of Christ for decades. In the churches in which I grew up, most people accepted at least limited political participation, but many still maintained a strong other-worldliness and a healthy belief in the superiority of the kingdom of God to the American government. 

I’m thankful for the inoculation that tradition provided against Christian nationalism. In my writing, I have warned Christians against equating the gospel with American ideology.

But while my desire to avoid the dangers of American nationalism was well founded, perhaps in the process of criticizing those who wrapped God in the flag, I sometimes forgot to sufficiently acknowledge the particular American founding principles that coincide remarkably well with Christian theology.

As a Christian and an American, I’m struck by four unique aspects of the American experiment: the combination of religious freedom with church-state separation; the conviction (suggested in the Declaration of Independence) that humans have inherent dignity because they are created by God with God-given rights; the belief that a flawed human nature requires a separation of power to prevent any one person or group from becoming an autarch; and a belief in the rule of law created by self-government. Each of these principles is compatible with a Christian understanding of human nature and a healthy Christian suspicion of unchecked human power – which is largely why the American experiment, alone among world democracies, has endured for 250 years. 

I think that my other-worldly ancestors who joined a church tradition that eschewed American political participation in the name of the kingdom of God were actually deeply American after all, because as the Declaration of Independence reminds us, there’s nothing that is more American (or arguably, more biblical) than a suspicion of human political power and an acknowledgment of God’s rule over human potentates. I do not agree with all of David Lipscomb’s other-worldly views, but I applaud him (and some of my ancestors) for valuing the kingdom of God above all else—and I think that in the process, they arrived at a Christianity that was deeply American, even if they didn’t recognize it. 

The United States is not the kingdom of God, and it’s certainly not without sin, but it was founded on principles that are compatible with a Christian understanding of God and humanity. Under those principles, Christianity has flourished in a myriad of forms. For that, I am thankful.

***

From Russia, Without Love

Nadya Williams

History is why I’m here—and by “here” I mean living in America during this year of America’s 250^th birthday, which is definitely not something I had ever imagined would happen when I was a young child. 

I’m here, an American citizen of nearly two decades, because in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin led a revolution that overthrew the Czars and established a new country and government. These events happened just a few blocks from where I was born in 1981 and where I spent the first decade of my life. Today I am here and not there, because by the time I was in elementary school, the tottering edifice Lenin had propped with empty promises and a horrific system of state violence and repression of citizens’ liberty in every area of life could no longer hold. But also, I am here and not somewhere else in the world, because 141 years before Lenin’s revolution (and 205 years before my birth) another, more successful revolution took place—the American Revolution of 1776, which promised genuine liberty as the unalienable right of its citizens. 

To be an immigrant is to be aware of this kind of history on a personal level. By our very nature, humans crave roots to thrive and flourish. This means that most people do not move lightly across the world; one does not choose on a whim to uproot and start life over in another country—one that speaks a different tongue, has different cultural norms, and that (more often than not) looks down on beets as something unfit for human consumption. 

My love for America comes, first and foremost, from gratitude for the welcome my family and I received here. But also, this love over time has become more difficult to separate from my love for Christ, because through another complicated set of events, it was the move to America that made it possible for me, a secular Jew, to come to know Christ. In other words, through God’s infinite goodness and mercy, it was this geographical move that made the spiritual one possible. For both this place and this time, I remain profoundly grateful. For us while still clothed in our mortal coil, blessings and curses arrive through the times and places we’ve been given. God alone, after all, exists outside of time and space.

Winn Collier’s award-winning biography on Eugene Peterson (of blessed memory) begins with a story about Eugene’s son, Eric, entering his dad’s study to let him know that breakfast was ready: 

Eric turned the knob slowly, silently. He peered through the crack. . . A small woven rug lay on the tile floor before his dad’s desk. . . Eugene rested on his knees with a tallit—the tasseled Jewish prayer shawl—wrapped around his shoulders, a Hebrew Psalter splayed in front of him. He rocked gently, engrossed in the world of the Scriptures, surrendering to ancient prayers. Eric watched, hushed. He slowly closed the door and crept back upstairs. . . Only a boy, but he knew he’d witnessed something holy.

Eric did not merely witness his father’s private devotion, but a life whose deepest reality did not need to be publicized. For many churches, ministry now consists of exposure—podcast or perish—leaders feel obligated to maintain an online presence and publish their church’s conversion rate, baptism ratio, average weekly attendance, and annual earnings. After all, how are they to hear without Mailchimp?

This need to publicize runs counter to the broader emphasis on spiritual formation among many younger Christians today. Increasingly, Gen-Zers are logging off and greyscaling their phones in the name of silence, solitude, and Sabbath. And yet, even amid the renewed interest in spiritual disciplines, secrecy itself has remained, fittingly, hidden.

But perhaps an antidote to the growing pressures on churches, pastors, and laypeople does not lie in posting clips, publishing content, or podcasting (which is a verb now) about how to practice the presence of God, but rather in being invited to participate in what Eric witnessed: the Secret Place. 

A Biblical Introduction to the Secret “Place” 

Paul the Apostle’s background and education have remained somewhat of an enigma to biblical scholars and readers for two millennia. There are moments when Paul is kind enough to provide us with minor details: he’s from the tribe of Benjamin and was educated at the “feet” of the Rabbi Gamaliel. Beyond these tidbits, we remain unclear about the man from Tarsus. However, what is clear about Paul is that he was a rhetorical, philosophical, and religious genius. He could quote and debate the best of Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. Exegete the Torah like a Rabbi. And convince people—be they Jew or gentile—that the Messiah had come, died, rose, ascended, and was descending (again) soon. Paul was a master with his prose.

This is why it is all the more striking when Paul, in his dispute(s) with the Corinthians, states that when he visited them, he intentionally chose not to testify about God with impressive rhetoric or sage wisdom. Just the bare bones for the Corinthians. But why would Paul hide his first-class rhetoric or rich wisdom? “So that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor 2:5). In other words, Paul intentionally restrained himself and hid his impressive qualities so that the Corinthians would not give him the glory that was due to God.

In a similar vein, Jesus was a man full of secrets. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, whenever Jesus’s power is revealed or imparted to others, a strict rule follows: don’t mention it. During the Transfiguration in Matthew’s Gospel, after his full glory has been revealed, Jesus instructs his inner circle of disciples to “Tell no one” (Matt 17:9). Yet Jesus also wants his disciples to tell everyone.

This tension exists even within Jesus’s mountain sermon. He instructs the crowd, “let your light shine before others,” and just a few moments later commands them to “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people” (Matt 5:16, 6:1). There is an interesting dichotomy in Scripture, one’s faith is to be both public and private, publicized and yet personal. A follower is to hide the goods of the Kingdom and simultaneously give them out freely and publicly. So what gives? Are we to be secretive like Paul and Jesus, or perform show and tell for all the world to see? The answer to this question, at least in part, lies in Jesus’s words about secrecy.

When Jesus instructs his disciples to pray, he does so in a peculiar way, telling them to shut the door and pray in their “tameion.” Most translations render this Greek word as “room” or even “storeroom.” Traditionally, it has been understood to refer to a closet or any unlikely room for prayer. However, from what we know about rural Galilee, there were not many “extra” rooms in a peasant fisherman’s house for prayer. It’s akin to telling Manhattanites, “and when you pray, go into your fourth bedroom.” It is simply an unattainable place for his audience.

Scholar Carolyn Osiek has made the case that Jesus is rhetorically talking about a type of secret place that can be accessed anywhere. Osiek writes, “a secret chamber that is accessible anywhere by the one in whom it dwells.” That is, Jesus’s hyperbolic language is about secrecy, not privacy. Where you pray is not the issue; it is why you pray that matters. Anyone can pray in a closet for the wrong reasons, but it’s learning to cultivate a heart that desires to pray as if no one is watching. In other words, the Secret Place is less a space and more a way of living. If secrecy is rightly applied, one can let their light shine before others and pray in their “tameion” simultaneously. 

The Secret Place as the End of Self-Improvement

As a pastor, I am often in conversation with other men about their struggles with pornography. It’s a battle many men have faced, are facing, or are actively guarding against. Routinely, as I meet with other men, I hear the same sentiment when I ask them why they want to stop: “I hate how it makes me feel.” Most feel this is an acceptable answer. I almost always respond, “You’re not ready.” Not because shame is needed, but because self-disgust is too weak a foundation for holiness.

In this instance, the person’s primary motivator to stop doing something is how it makes them feel, not that it is an offense against God, His creation, and the life He has created them for. And this sentiment is not just a man’s problem. Sanctification has become the mechanism we use to satisfy our longing to be morally good.

The insatiable need to feel “whole” has infected the West’s moral drive. People no longer give as a means to imitate the generosity of their Creator, but because it offers them a “mental boost,” as the Harvard Business Review argues. Sacred rhythms such as the Sabbath, practiced by many Christians today, have become insular practices focused on one’s mental well-being and on becoming a “non-anxious presence.” As opposed to a practice as a means to an end, namely to be with God and His people. To be a disciple of the Secret Place involves turning this model upside down. Yes, secrecy invites you into a rhythm of avoiding others’ praise, but it is also an intentional practice of removing yourself as the motivator for the good you do in the world. 

Practices

My wife and I have moved eight times in nine years of marriage. It’s as horrible as it sounds. In the most recent move, I was trying to find a place for my degrees. I had purchased nice frames for them and spent a lot of time and money getting them, so I thought our bedroom was the best place to hang them. (Didn’t feel appropriate in the baby’s room.) After putting some nails in the drywall, my wife came in and, without skipping a beat, said, “Our room is not a shrine for your idols, take them down.” She wasn’t asking.

I turned my hammer around and plucked. The practice of secrecy is the painful process of removing the proverbial degrees from the walls. It is entering into a process of asking God to rewire what drives us. It’s a type of life where what we’ve done, where we’ve been, what we’ve purchased, the job we have, the money we make, and the place we live becomes the least interesting thing about us. So how do we practice this life? How do we take down our “degrees”? Recently, I invited our church to practice two simple acts of secrecy, and perhaps you’ll find them helpful. 

In conversations this week, try Jesus’s approach. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus answers questions by asking another question, telling a parable, or exposing the deeper desire beneath the question. Jesus often avoided making himself the topic of conversation and focused instead on the other person’s intentions or heart. And this is such a fun practice to try.

In conversations this week, take steps to avoid inserting your opinion, updates, or travel plans. Keep drilling down on the other person’s life. Ask a follow-up question. Then another one. And another one. If you try this just once, I promise you’ll be astounded by how much better you are at listening rather than merely hearing what they are saying. This practice is not just so that you appear to be a good friend, but you are testing out the practice of secrecy, trusting that your Father, who is in secret, knows you and hears you. Thus, you don’t feel the need to be the topic of conversation; you have the ear of the Creator of the universe. 

For the second practice, try answering these questions: 

1. What identity markers do you find the most pride in? 
2. What is the most interesting thing about yourself?
3. What do you spend most of your time thinking about? 
4. What good do you contribute to the place you live? 
5. What are your hobbies? 

To be clear, it’s okay to be proud of the accomplishments in your life. It’s just fine to think you are interesting; you are. But whatever your answers are to these questions, see how long you can go in a week or a month without mentioning them to others.

For example, I am a runner, and I love running. In New York, running has a particular subculture. We infest the streets, taking over sidewalks and bike lanes, doing our long runs on Saturday mornings, caking the streets with our sweat, hydration fuel, and slimy carbohydrate gels. We runners, tend to feel quite proud of our athletic abilities, so we talk about it a lot. I find it quite embarrassing when I think back how many times I’ve casually mentioned my weekly mileage or the race time I achieved to people who couldn’t care less. There is a desire in me to be applauded. It’s not enough to run because I enjoy it; I need others to enjoy it for me.

So the challenge for me is to see how long I can go without mentioning running, and, whenever someone brings it up, how quickly I can divert attention away from my hobbies to theirs. As cheesy as it might sound, God, who made me, sees my runs and understands my effort, and that should be enough for me. 

To Be Known You Must Hide

There is perhaps no better modern story of secrecy than Henri Nouwen’s. At the top of his field, Nouwen had spent over two decades teaching at elite universities, including Notre Dame and the divinity schools at Yale and Harvard. However, in 1986, Nouwen decided to quit the academy and move to L’Arche Daybreak in Canada, a community of people with intellectual disabilities. Nouwen abandoned a life of self-aggrandizement and the monotonous work of adding yet another line to his CV and decided to live with those who couldn’t care less about his accomplishments. In his thin but powerful book In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen reflects on Christian leadership in relation to all that God had taught him at Daybreak. He wrote the following:

The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with [intellectually disabled] people was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, the books could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction. . . I was suddenly faced with my naked self. . . These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self. . . and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.

Nouwen experienced the paradox of the Secret Place. No one at Daybreak possessed the ability to truly understand Nouwen as he wished to portray himself. The residents at Daybreak couldn’t have cared less about an Ivy League professor coming to live with them. And yet, in his inability to be known, he became stripped bare, able to be known in such a way he had never experienced before. This is the goodness of the Secret Place.

The spiritual discipline invites you into the ambiguity of choosing not to be known as you wish, and instead to be seen and loved as you are. It is bringing to light your scars, wounds, sins, and incompleteness, while hiding your successes. To live in the Secret Place is to live a life with God that is utterly exposed and frighteningly hidden. We hide ourselves, not because we are nothing, but because being seen, known, and loved by God is all that we desire and need.

Lost baby birds are not very important.

The world does not tend to wait for them, and doesn’t even pause as it might for other pieces of earthly life we must bear. A little fledgling, barely feathered and incapable of flight, that has fallen out of its nest and is stranded amongst the brick is not important.

What’s important is that dinner needs to be on the table for the kids in twenty minutes; what’s important is that relationship that’s on the rocks with no relief in sight; what’s important is that I need to get to work on time so that I can cover rent so that I can continue to be as self-sufficient as any grad student can be, but the train across the city is delayed; what’s important is that many people are dead because USAID was dismantled without a moment’s notice; what matters is that your church said nothing when it happened; what matters is that you’re headed to a new school tomorrow and the anxiety is eating your insides like acid and you’re terrified of eating lunch alone and your hair is stringy and you wish the dress fit better and looked more like you; what’s important is that you no longer recognize the country you thought you had grown up in; what’s important is that your father has had a stroke, and you don’t know if he will be able to speak again; what’s important is that you have always had to lift yourself up, and no one who has the power to help has never noticed enough to try; what matters is that you are alone, and you can’t imagine that life might ever change.

There is a baby bird sitting on my welcome mat when I come home from work. The bird is lucky, all things considered. The bar had hosted a graduation party that night, and rather than blinking blearily through a midnight haze after standing through eight hours of customers both kind and cantankerous and sweating profusely in a dish room full of billowing steam, the only tiring part of the night has been pouring an unholy number of diet cokes for the Class of 2026 and keeping my eye on the wine-drunk mother stealing the giant bowl of party chips.

All that to say, it’s been an easy shift and I’m home early, and so I manage to notice the small bundle of feathers quivering above the “we’re glad you’re here” printed on the mat. I set aside the box of chips I pilfered from the party leftovers that escaped the grasp of the PTA, and scoop him up after facing down some indignant flapping. It is, in fact, a myth that birds will abandon their baby if you do. My roommate is quite taken aback when I ring the doorbell with a bird in my hand—my keys are deep in my backpack, and I don’t want to drop the little fellow—and she is downright indignant herself when I bring him inside. He is very small, and I cannot find any sign of a nest.

My roommate is starting a brand new, hard-won job in the morning. She does not have time to decide what to do with a baby bird. I myself need to leave early in the morning to meet my father, someone I miss desperately, far outside the city for breakfast where he is visiting for a conference. My attempts at rescuing baby birds in the past have rarely gone well, though they have been numerous, and I am not optimistic.

But I do as my brief research stint bids and look amongst my landlord’s small plot of garden outside their beautiful townhouse and our hidden “english basement” below for a suitable place to give him the best chance at surviving the night and reuniting with mother bird in the morning. There is a planter with a small hosta plant elevated several feet off the ground, far above the rats of D.C. and the odd cat passing through. I tuck him in with some tissues, hiding him amongst the leaves, and look up at the silent canopy of the maple tree stretching far above me. It is silent, devoid of any parental bird noises, and very dark. My phone dings with a headline, something about our President’s slush fund to reward his political friends. I have to go inside—to follow up on the email I forgot to send, make sure the electricity bill is paid by midnight, have some dinner before bed, see if there is anything I can do to ease my roommate’s mounting anxiety about tomorrow. There are far too many important things to worry about.

My landlord’s garden is one of my favorite parts of living in our little Hobbit Hole. He has a great love of greenery, and the result is that I can spot the townhouse from all the way down the block and am greeted by a forest of planters, garden statues, and fragrant fauna when I make it home. The lush, verdant abundance of leaves springing out from bushes, the plentitude of potted ferns, the spider plants cascading down from an empty stone fountain, and a Japanese maple stretching lowly above it all almost makes up for the swarms of mosquitoes it inevitably summons in the late summer.

But today I am grateful, both because it has provided a temporary sanctuary for a lost baby bird, and because it reminds me of the understory—the life of a forest far below the canopy and just above the ground level that provides nourishment, shelter, and a nursery for the up-and-coming growth of the woodland. It also just so happens to be the name of the conference I spent three days attending just a couple of weeks ago. Both are rather extraordinary things to find in the heart of Washington, D.C.

Actually, they were rather insistent that the Understory was in fact not a conference, but a festival. The Understory Festival. It was not, as the name might suggest, a gathering of Park Rangers or enthusiastic environmentalists, though I suspect both could have been in attendance. It is actually a bit difficult to define, even after spending all weekend at its many events and listening to a plethora of welcome speeches, which reflects both the wide and varied nature of the kinds of people it attracted, and its own intentional uncertainty. I will use its creators’ own words to lieu of my own:

We find ourselves living in a time between times—when inherited frameworks are collapsing, trust in one another and in our institutions is eroding, and power, untethered from humility, too often turns predatory.…The Understory is not a conference but a people—a founding moment for a rising world of writers, artists, weavers, and civic builders to gather around a shared question: How might we rehumanize our common life and renew trust—between persons, and within the institutions that exist and those yet to be born?

I read between the lines—if you were grieving what society had lost in this last decade and beyond, if you were dismayed at the destruction that had been wrought in the last year and a half, and particularly if you were a Christian lamenting how this could have happened in an American Church you thought you understood, and if you were wondering where we could possibly go from here, this was the place for you. The existential weight of our times is an ache that I have struggled to learn to carry gracefully for years now, and so I could not sign up fast enough when registration opened in February. I was worn out in February. Come the last few days of May, I was entirely and utterly exhausted.

The year had been hard, though I don’t want to pretend that it was unique. If you are leaving a home that loves you, the first year out is hard for everybody. The first year spent across the country from childhood friends who remember what you wore in second grade is hard for everybody. Finding a real job, paying real rent, and buying real groceries on your own for the first time is hard for everybody. I was fortunate enough to not have to truly face most of those circumstances until I turned 24, but the fact remains that these turning points are hard for everybody, and they’re even more difficult when you have to learn how to do them all at the same time.

When I came to the Understory, I was coming off my first year of grad school and perhaps the hardest year of my life up to that point. I had discovered in the late July of 2025 that I needed to move from Chicago to Washington D.C. in less than a month for a program that I had applied to because it excited me, because I needed a doorway to D.C., and because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t find a job to cover student expenses that fit my interests—blame it on the market, blame it on slashed government programs, blame it on my insufficient resume—and turned to the service industry instead. I had never worked in hospitality in my life, and I must have submitted over thirty applications before I got an interview based on a manager’s whim and an overly enthusiastic cover letter. I was working nearly thirty hours a week at one point, coming home at all hours and wondering how in the world I was going to make it to my 8:30am class in the morning. Personal losses at home were made all the more devastating by distance.

The role that I had intended to take on in this city—of representing Christ in a community often filled with polarized assumptions, a demand to hate the left or right, and a blatant embrace of power over principle—gave me purpose, but it did not give me comfort. It did not give me peace. Obligation settled thickly across my shoulders every place I entered into and left no time or money or space for easy laughter, real rest, or trusted friendship. I was here, having the kinds of conversations I had come to D.C. for, taking the little steps towards making a difference, and yet all I could think about was that I hadn’t seen my hometown in almost five months. These turning points of life are indeed hard for everybody, and I have wished many times this year that knowing such a truth was enough to make it less hard for me.

When I leave early the next morning to meet my father, the first light is just peeking over the roofs across the street. The air is very cool and quiet, and so there is no missing it when the mother bird leaps out of the potted hosta plant with a furious flutter at my interruption. I exclaim quietly with joy, not wanting to scare her more than I already have, and peek in amongst the hosta leaves. The baby bird has made it through the night, nestled perfectly against the pot’s lip, and he has been found.

The creators and curators of the Understory were right in insisting that it was more of a festival than a conference, and choosing the Washington National Cathedral as the space to host it only added to the sense. Musical performances linked each welcome speech and long-winded lecture together, and jazz filled the air during the meet-and-greet reception. A brilliant show of lights and vibrant projections molded themselves both to the architecture they were cast upon and to the intangible artistry of a live string accompaniment.

We were seated—over a thousand of us—together in the nave where the light show made the columns holding up such a cavernous hall look like redwoods, rushing upwards and into the heavens filled with stone and stars. At one point, the artist brought a thunderstorm into the cathedral. A live artist intertwined his own style with a traditional Chinese calligraphy over the course of three days, his creation unfolding before us near the grand entrance. A bookstore sold its wares, tucked away in a corner of masterful masonry and stained glass.

The names of the public speakers, teachers, civic leaders, and artists were just as varied as their performances. Jon Guerra performed a few times, and though I had never heard him in person I have known his name for many years as I wrestled with American Christianity alongside the lyrics of “Citizens,” released in 2020. David Brooks spoke on rebuilding and elitism, always cognizant of how intellectuals and people in power have left the working class behind. A breakout session titled “Widening the Canon,” led by several Black classical school teachers, sought to honor the traditional literature that authors of all backgrounds admired and intertwined into their more modern works while creating space for masterpieces that were once shunned because of the color of their creators’ skin, trying to create a new kind of accessibility. Oskar Eustis, who was pivotal in bringing about the very first production of Hamilton, was seeking stories of grief both civic and personal and shared his own: he told us of how Lin-Manuel Miranda sent him the first draft of “It’s Quiet Uptown” just two days after Eustis’ sixteen-year-old son committed suicide. He and his wife sat in rehearsals day after day, grieving their lost child alongside an audience that wept for Hamilton’s. Dr. Anika Prather lamented the nature of stories left unfinished in the lives and transformations of MLK, Malcolm X, and Abraham Lincoln. Leaders of Minneapolis churches reflected on the lessons learned from ICE’s incursion on the city, and what it meant to stand with your neighbor when they need you the most. Francis Collins, whose name I recognized from the Human Genome Project, treated us to a poignant performance on guitar of “If Not Now, Tell Me When.”

I could go on, but I think the list paints enough of a picture and if I tried to fully describe all that took place this piece would be far longer than it already is. It was a meeting of art, politics, religion, identity, culture, and everything else that has divided us with particular vitriol in the past decade or so. It was a rousing call to community, a place of peace to be around people who were grieving the same sorts of things even if we didn’t all agree on how to fix them. It was sometimes a bit too undefined, similar sentiments repeated again and again in different speeches that blurred together into one. Sometimes there were too many trailing words strung together, aesthetically beautiful, perhaps, but beating around the bush so insistently that the real intended meaning was lost in all the circling. Many of us were not entirely certain what we were doing there at the start, but we were all beyond grateful to be invited.

What stood out most from those three days was this: Imagination will be what brings us beyond the world’s dividing lines and categorized solutions, imagination built on and guided by Christian Humanism and its philosophical sisters that can manage to find answers unconfined by the present moment’s definition of who is an enemy, and who is our savior. People of all walks of faith and of no faith at all were present and welcome. The Understory reveled in uncertainty, a jarring encounter in the environment of sharp lines and dictating labels that D.C. is known for. It took its time, and it did not hurry.

When I open my front door the next day, the birds are putting up a massive clamor. I am a bit concerned but mostly just confused, particularly because a great deal of their uproar seems targeted at me. A mother-looking bird is perched on a branch, eyeing me angrily. And then I look down: lo and behold, another baby bird is sitting as still as a stone a few feet in front of me. The clamor only grows when I pick him up as stealthily as I can and deposit him in the planter next to his brother. They instantly huddle together as if they had been waiting desperately to finally be reunited. I check through the garden pretty thoroughly after that, looking for any more lost fledglings. I find what I’m almost certain is their third sibling, dead on the stone of the alleyway around the corner just a few feet away from the little enclave outside my door where I found the other two. The same bird returns to the scene of my abducting, looking for her missing offspring with frantic desperation. I patiently wait for her to realize that he is no longer there, and that he has gone to their new home. After a few recurring bouts of amnesia, she seems to catch on and I watch her flutter back and forth with food in her beak for a good long while.

The halls of the National Cathedral feel hallowed and old, though not because of their actual age. Its construction took several decades, eighty-three years to be exact. 1907 to 1990 is quite a time to come into being, encompassing some of the greatest modern calamities in not just our nation, but those of the entire world. As I traversed the massive cathedral for various events, I was struck by the recurrence of Abraham Lincoln, his words carved into the wall and his likeness left in sculptured stone in postures of speaking, praying, and entreating. His face is kind, worn, and—I think—heavy with a deep sadness. Lincoln will always be my favorite president in spite of his flaws—and in some ways, because of them. There are many facets of his character that are worthy of study, but for now I will just reflect on this: though Lincoln did not support slavery even at the beginning of his time in office, he did not necessarily believe in equal rights as an innate part of what it means to be human. But what he did do was something we so rarely see these days—he changed his mind, and he realized that he was wrong when doing anything rather than admit fault would have been far easier for the war-weary President. Perhaps he would have lived longer if he had done otherwise.

Lincoln developed a close friendship with Frederick Douglass over the years, slowly opening his eyes to the great and furious injustice America had done to her own people. He presided over a calamity that we have watched, in many ways, end other countries and entire futures for generations to come. And when it was over, he imagined a different future for the now United States of America. He had the friends and fortitude to imagine something greater than what his modern day would have accepted as possible. And, as I was reminded this weekend by Dr. Prather, he is a tragedy.

Abraham Lincoln was in the process of becoming, weary as he was at the end, and he knew that America could be different than it had been. A pathetic, spiteful man with a bullet ended that dream, and we are in many ways still living with the consequences of that lost future. And yet, even with that loss there is still magnificent hope. Who could have imagined, in the darkest depths of the Civil War, that we would survive to see a new kind of society? Even with all its tragic imperfections, broken promises, and grief-stricken injustices, who could have imagined that we might still be here, striving away to bring about good in face of the evil of our day? There were many—Dr. Prather offered up MLK, Malcolm X, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few—and we cannot pretend that the darkness of their times was any less menacing than it is in ours. Therefore, let us go on.

Three days later, the baby birds have vanished. I stare dumbly at the empty planter, continuing to poke through the dirt just in case I had somehow missed them. There is no sign of a struggle, no sign of movement, no sign of the mother. They’re just gone. I feel stupid for having been so pleased with the results of my bird-rescuing only the day before. I feel foolish for feeling so sad that they are gone. I turn once more to my online sleuthing for some solace, but all I find is uncertainty. There are plenty of predators that can snatch fledglings without leaving so much as a feather behind. Mother birds sometimes move them away if they feel that the nesting location is unsafe. Perhaps they were further along in their development than I thought, and perhaps they had learned to fly. I will never really know. A pair of raucous bluejays wheel through the canopy overhead, and I glare up at the infamous nest-robbers. I shouldn’t feel so despondent. They were just baby birds.

One more story from this strange and wonderful festival, and then I will leave you in peace. The second night of the Understory, Sea Dog Theater presented an excerpt of their adaption of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, blending Frankl’s account of surviving the Holocaust with the anecdotes and reflections of the writer and actor Christopher J. Domig. The Austrian-American told his tale of moving back to Austria as an adult after being gone since childhood, returning to a place that used to be so familiar and so beloved, but now no longer felt like home. As he grapples with the ensuing isolation, his three-year-old son is suddenly afflicted by a mysterious illness, bleeding incessantly without cause and spending his young years in and out of specialists’ offices that provide no answers. He told this story of a parent’s helplessness and grief alongside Viktor Frankl’s account of when, as he huddled sick and starving amongst the other prisoners of the barracks, he was called upon to offer words of hope. The lights have gone out, and he begins to speak:

God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons—to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever….Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades…that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die.

I am not learning how to die, and I would not venture to compare sufferings with anyone, much less a prisoner of genocide, but I do think this is a time in which people are tempted to give up hope. Democracy—which Winston Churchill once remarked was the worst form of government, except of course for all the other ones—seems to be stumbling all across the land. The U.S. is abandoning the ideals that, although it faltered in truly fulfilling them, it once strived for as a core part of what it meant to be an American: a revelry in attention, indecency, and betrayal have become the star-spangled currency of power.

War blossoms along borders in places once thought to be at peace, and age-old feuds have fallen once more into bloody disasters. The global humanitarian infrastructure has been dismantled just when the world seemed to need it the most. Technology is outpacing our ability to understand, much less control, its true implications. The online world has spawned a rage economy in which a few media companies, politicians, and so-called influencers profit from feeding a festering hatred that has real world consequences far beyond the comment section and election cycle. Society is happy to wield whatever weapon—cancel culture or a corrupted government without integrity—that best secures their interests above and before all others. We are angry, we are lonely, and many of us are grieving the kind of world we thought we would be stepping into as we reached adulthood.

And yet, we go on—we must. Viktor Frankl has a startling word for the temptation of hopelessness, for the pull to give up on a world that you wished was different. “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,” he writes. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

When the world is dark, will we add to the smog? When our leaders turn their back on integrity, will we follow in their footsteps? When someone looks down on each of us, will they find us suffering proudly and well? In my own wandering and rage and grief I had forgotten one of the most crucial lessons of growing up: though the world is outside of my control, how I live within that world is a choice that I make. My spirit is a choice. It cannot be decided by the doings—right or wrong—of others. Our goodwill, our resilience and charity and courage, cannot be true if it is only present when our world is comfortable.

As a young adult you are told to expect so much from these years, but what do these years expect from us in turn? Things are not as they should be, the lights are going out—therefore, let us go on. Let us make those small decisions that seem unimportant and treat them as if they really matter, because really, they do. How you choose to vote matters; how you respond to your infuriating coworker matters; how you treat your barista and bartender and waiter matters; how you preach on a stage matters; how you care for the neighbor who speaks a different language matters; how you clean and laugh and chat on the porch matters; how you speak to your mom and dad matters; how you wake up in the morning matters. It matters when you choose to look your friend in the eye to listen—really listen—rather than humming along and scrolling through on your phone, and it matters just as much when it’s your enemy. And such mattering should not paralyze but rather inspire us to live with renewed creativity, imagining how things might be different and loving what is good as well as we can. The Understory—both in the festival and forest—is created by a million smaller acts that build up the ecosystem we live in, acts that we all take part in whether we are aware of it or not. But it is us—humans, not trees—that have a choice in what kind of world our acts will help build. The possibility of failure is not permission to fail to act nobly or to give up on trying.

The lyrics of Dan Nichols’ cover of “If Not Now, Tell Me When,” settle over me as I sit on the steps under the great canopies of oak and maple stretching out far above. Bugs buzz past, the wind shuffles through the shrubs and bushes and empty hosta plant pots, squirrels and birds and rodents of all sizes squawk and scamper through their respective pieces of the urban understory. People walk past on the sidewalk, snippets of conversation and phone calls drift upwards, quick hellos and quiet nods permeate the few feet between us. Maybe the baby birds never made it out of the nest, or maybe they learned to fly. Even if I am left with the same uncertainty and the same sadness, I decide that if I find another one, I will try again. It is important, I think, to keep trying again.

“I see sorrow and trouble in this land, Although there will be struggles, we’ll make the change we can, If not now, tell me when?

I may never see the promised land, And yet we’ll take the journey and walk it hand in hand, If not now, tell me when?

So we’ll work it ‘til it’s done, every daughter every son, Every soul that ever longed for something better, something brighter—

It will take a change of heart for this to mend, But miracles do happen every shining now and then, If not now, tell me when?

If not now, tell me when? If not now, tell me when?

We may never see this moment, or place and time again, If not now, If not now,

Tell me when?”

Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250^th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation's 250^th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week, Jake Meador proposed this answer to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.

***

So Much Freedom

Vika Pechersky

Our arrival in the U.S. was in many ways banal and typical of countless immigrants before us—it was driven primarily by economic reasons; we sought opportunities our country no longer offered. Young newlyweds, my husband and I came with two suitcases and enough money for about a month until his first paycheck. 

I arrived with certain ideas about what America is. These were typical of immigrants. After all, to quote Bono, America is an idea. I imagined a country of giants—tall buildings glistening in the sun—of all kinds of shapes and breathtaking heights. In my childhood, I tried to imagine what it feels like to ride an elevator to the 100^th floor. Freedom and wonder are the best words to describe what I felt as I boarded the plane to come here.

As a Christian who learned about Jesus through missionaries and about American culture through Hollywood, I thought that everyone in the U.S. was basically a Christian. This is also common to many immigrants—an expectation that America is composed of Christians who diligently adhere to the faith of their fathers. Coming from Uzbekistan, one of the most hostile countries to Christianity, living in a Christian culture was a much-welcome reprieve. What I didn’t expect was to find a culture in outright rebellion against its Christian roots. 

Now, more than twenty years later, as a parent of teenagers, America today still feels to me like a defiant child, acting out in a fit of hormonal adolescence, standing up to its Christian parents to break away from their influence and assert its cultural independence. Is it just a stage? I surely hope so. Will it outgrow its defiance and realize that a tree with severed roots never truly regenerates? Or, better yet, perhaps America will come to realize that it can never truly sever its roots; that some things come together at conception and remain there, so ingrained, so steady, that no historical process can fully erase them. I hope that what truly lasts, despite the gruesome reality of historical erasure, is a simple Christian belief that God, who became man for us and for our salvation, remains the steady presence that gives us both guidance and meaning.

America offers so much freedom—sometimes more than we know what to do with. It is still the best place for opportunities to build one’s life with God-given talents. However, to be a Christian in America today is to exercise the emotional intelligence of a wise parent who understands that underneath rebellion lies a deeper longing for meaning and belonging that may not have forgotten its way home yet. 

***

America is Not a Church, and the Church is Not America

Daniel G. Hummel

Though disestablished, revivalist, evangelical Christianity predates 1776, I can’t help thinking about its legacy on the nation’s 250^th birthday. I am one of that tribe and have been my whole life—as were my parents and their parents.

I recently read an academic book that argued that evangelical missionaries exported their spiritual values of individual conversion, church volunteerism, the low church “priesthood of all believers” across the globe. By pursuing the religious aims of conversion, they ended up wielding remarkable political influence in postcolonial countries. Reflecting on my own childhood as a “missionary kid,” I found this an intuitive insight: Evangelical Christianity is deeply formed by both Christian and American values. Though I value many Christians and other faith traditions outside America, I can hardly imagine being a Christian without these values and their implications of individual conversion, congregational polity, lay leadership, and more.

A lack of imagination may be my failing. I might be too much an American and not enough a Christian. Still, I resonate with Tocqueville’s observation that Americans “combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” Most Americans do this, even those who aren’t evangelicals and those who claim immunity to it. At its best, this majority has understood liberty as both negative and positive (in Isaiah Berlin’s categories): freedom from external coercion and freedom to pursue one’s ultimate purpose in God. My tribe, like American culture generally, has majored in “freedom from” and left others to instill the capacity for “freedom to.” That was unrealistic, and we have paid for it: we are in a major “freedom to” deficit at our 250^th anniversary—both the United States and American Christians.

Having overemphasized “freedom from” and failed to articulate “freedom to,” we face a crisis of purpose in which the path forward looks political rather than what it should be: congregations seeking the good of the cities they inhabit. But I am also hopeful, as evangelicals should be. Paul urges the church in Rome, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The church in Rome—like those in Corinth and Thessalonica—faced a similar “freedom to” problem. A modern-day Paul could lift whole passages and apply them to the church in Los Angeles, Dallas, or Madison, WI in 2026. God was faithful then and he will be now.

America is not a church, and the Church is not America. This is all the better, as my evangelical commitments should lead me to conclude. But America has many churches on its 250^th anniversary, and those churches are called to seek the good of their cities, as past generations were. This political anniversary prompts in me a religious rather than political response—I hope it will prompt congregational responses of Biblically informed “freedom to.” American Christians—plenty of evangelicals among them—are already doing that, especially at the local level, modeling what a faithful witness of “freedom to” might look like for the next 250 years.

***

Was the Founding a Theological Event?

John Ehrett

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by arguments about whether America is a “Christian nation.” Virtually always, those debates are pegged to the Founding generation—as if the “Christian-ness” of the nation might inhere for all time in a set of founding documents or a solemn juridical covenant.

But the American Founding itself was rather more theologically ambivalent than any partisan might like. It was grounded in what James Davison Hunter has called the “hybrid-Enlightenment consensus”—a paradigm that blended basic Christian assumptions with emerging scientific pragmatism, and that was characterized by some discomfort with received institutional religiosity and by a high degree of openness to heterodox thinking. Final resolution of theological questions, in any “thick” sense, was deferred.

And so, it seems to me that arguments about whether America was founded as a “Christian nation” often miss the point. Instead, I’d argue that for its entire lifespan, ours is a country and society that has been working, however inconclusively, at becoming Christian, or at least reckoning at some level with the claims of the faith.

All throughout its history, the American nation has been periodically convulsed by society-wide moments of spiritual questing. Most famously, there were the First and Second Great Awakenings—massive-scale social upheavals defined by public attentiveness to, and longing for, spiritual realities beyond the horizon of the mundane. They produced some of the profoundest theology, and most controversial splinter groups, in national history. And—crucially—they were individualist, interiorizing, and highly emotive. They were summons not merely to participation in a common cultural project, but to personal conversion and transformation.

There was a Third—and then a Fourth—Great Awakening, too. The 1960s represented just such an episode, but a more fateful one: this time around, the old wineskins—that is to say, traditional institutions and culture—failed to hold the new wine. And, following Joshua Mitchell, I’d argue something similar characterized the social justice movement that blazed from roughly 2015 to 2023. 

Viewed in context, these episodes followed the same pattern as their forerunners: they were far-reaching, culturally transformative attempts to recapture something of transcendent truth against the backdrop of mundane existence. They insisted on interior redemption, not merely acquiescence. And both had a covertly Christian provenance: mystical encounter with God (in the former case) and the quest for eternal justice (in the latter) are both facets of the Christian tradition. But in the end, when torn from a robustly theological mooring, they became forces of disintegration.

Perhaps, in the end, the very theological ambivalence of the Founding is itself a touchstone of the religious vitality of American life. Here in our land, the perennial Christian summons to faithful presence—and personal faith—is urgent precisely because history permits no complacent assumption of a univocal religio-nationalist tradition. Whether American can be a Christian land, and what exactly that means, is a question to be asked and answered over and over again.

There is reason for humility, but also a certain tempestuous grace, in this. I, for one, am grateful for such a country where my ancestors—fleeing religious persecution in the Old World—could make their home. They did not arrive with great ambitions, but came as farmers and teachers and ministers seeking to worship, pray, and teach in their own way, and to weave their lives into the story of America’s ongoing reckoning with its God. May that story continue for centuries more to come.

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For the Love of America

Amy Mantravadi

Whenever July 4^th comes around, people talk about how much they love America. It is a love we express chiefly by setting off fireworks in the driveway and sending every neighborhood dog into a panic. But what do we mean when we say we love “America”? Do we mean this land that gives its bounty or these fresh waters fit to drink? Is “America” an idea of freedom, or goodness, or strength? Is it the factories that forge our steel, the labs that produce our medications, or the universities that train our students? Or is it the host of people who have made this land their home?

The one thing we seem sure of is that there are other Americans who do not love America quite as much we do. But again, what do we mean when we say we love America? Do we love these people, 340 million strong? The light and dark ones, the old and young, the rich and poor, the sensible and wayward? Do we love only those who love us, or do we love all our neighbors? And do we love the stranger, the alien who sojourns among us?

To love America means to love the whole: every person made in the image of God. It is to seek the common good, love your neighbor, pray for your enemy, hope all things, and repent of all wrongs. It is to look in gratitude upon the gifts of God—the fertile fields, the abundant waters, the human ingenuity, the peace our strength has bought us—while acknowledging the sins of man. It is to build homes and live in them: to tend to one’s business, raise one’s family, treasure one’s friends, and not despair in times of hardship.

For we are great when we seek the Giver of life, hope, freedom, and love. As we celebrate the nation’s sesquicentennial, let us remember who it is that allows us to prosper and shows mercy rather than judgment. The call of Scripture is not merely to pray that our land might be healed, but to humble ourselves and acknowledge the unique goodness of the Giver. For only in loving all her people will we begin to love America as God loves her: based not on her deserts, but the mercy only he can give. “America! America! God shed his grace on thee.”

America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.

There is a wildness to American Christianity that certainly comes with much pain. There is a vulnerability to hucksterism here, perhaps best summed up in the famous Bible salesman scene starring John Goodman in O Brother, Where Art Thou? American Christianity loves a good salesman and that is to our loss.

Yet the same indifference to custom and single-mindedness that makes us vulnerable to the Elmer Gantrys of the world also opens us up to something else: I cannot think of other western nations that so reliably produce such remarkable and unruly saints as we seem to grow quite predictably in America. Think of Dorothy Day or Francis Schaeffer or Rich Mullins or the Jesus People. If you reach back further, think of Sojourner Truth or Francis Asbury. Think, for that matter, of the outpouring that took place at the college bearing Asbury’s name only a few years ago.

There is an unruly and untamed spirit that runs through Christianity. You see it in figures like John the Baptist, wrapped in animal skins and eating bugs in the desert while preaching to the crowds or in the early monastics retreating to the deserts of Egypt. You can see it, I think, in a figure like Martin Luther. You might recall, for instance, that at the Leipzig Disputation the great Catholic debater Johann Eck informed the unruly Augustinian that he was effectively recapitulating the teachings of the condemned heretic Jan Hus, who the church had burned 100 years prior at the Council of Constance.

Luther asked for time to revisit Hus’s teachings before making a reply. He came back a couple days later and, to the astonishment of many, patiently explained that actually Hus was right and Rome was wrong. You can certainly see that same ungovernable streak in the modern missions movement, perhaps most of all in the famous story of William Carey defying the elders of his church who told him that if God wished to save the heathen he could do so without Mr. Carey’s help. What I am saying is that there is a kind of benevolent and faithful goblin mode quality to certain leaders in the historic church.

Yet while that disagreeable quality is present throughout the stories of the church, it is also true that Christendom has often struggled to reconcile itself with that quality: John Bunyan was thrown into prison in England. The only reason Luther wasn’t thrown into prison is that he happened to be blessed with a quite powerful local lord who protected him. But that, of course, did not stop Luther’s followers from frequently throwing other chaotic saints into prison. It crops up everywhere.

When the French Calvinists were becoming too influential and numerous, the French Catholics dealt with it by murdering them. And yet despite being subject to such monstrous behavior, my Reformed ancestors did not refrain from throwing fellow Christians into prison or, indeed, murdering them. (The only obvious example I can think of in which a Christendom country is able to accommodate these unruly saints is found in Russia, whose tradition of the holy fool has given them a way to understand such figures. Yet in Russia the tradition of the holy fool has at times lapsed into a quite jarring and, to my eyes, alarming disdain for creation and for creaturely health in the world. So I would not see the Russian example here as something to emulate, even if they are, in a fashion, better at incorporating chaotic saints into Christendom than some other nations have been.)

For the most part, America has not done as these other countries have. Our record is not perfect, of course, but it is preferable to that of most countries of European Christendom, I think. Indeed, it is immensely telling that perhaps my most favorite chaotic saints—my brothers and sisters in the Bruderhof–began their life together in Germany, yet were forced out of Germany, only to then be forced out of England, to which they had first fled. We did not receive them immediately in America, leaving them to endure and hope and suffer for a decade in the jungles of Paraguay. And yet eventually we received them. And while there are now Bruderhof communities all over the world and while it is certainly true that they do not need American-style religious liberty to thrive… well, in places that have our style of religious liberty they have done well. They have been welcome.

Certainly, there is much that is wrong in the American church today and much that is wrong with America herself. Even so: as we mark this Fourth of July I am thinking about my great-grandfathers who came to America 144 years ago and 116 years ago. Both had a certain wildness to them.

Carl, my Swedish Lutheran great-grandfather, was a tenant farmer, lay preacher, and lifelong depressive who attempted suicide many times, yet seemed to die (at age 83 and of natural causes) at peace with God and his fellow man. The last photos we have of him, at any rate, show a lightness in his eyes that is not detectable in the older photos, and the memories his grandchildren share of him strike quite a different note from what one imagines he was like in his earlier days. This man was welcome in America.

Constantine, my Greek Orthodox great-grandfather, meanwhile, worked in a Boston paper mill for many years with other Greek immigrants, was a cantor in the Orthodox church, and a veteran of WW1 who doted on his grandchildren and took his granddaughter, my mother, to professional wrestling matches at the old Pershing Auditorium in Lincoln when she was still an elementary-aged child. My mother tells the story of the time my great-grandfather shouted something at Mad Dog Vachon which he seemed to take offense at. So he spat at Constantine, which of course only made Constantine (and his granddaughter sitting next to him) more upset. Constantine, too, was welcome in America.

And so if there is something I am grateful for this week it is that I live in a country with space for men like them. Too true, we also have our frauds and our con men. But to live in a place that doesn’t squelch the radicalism of Christian discipleship and that is able to accommodate the unruly and the boisterous and the simply uncomfortable who show up in our churches needing to be loved… well, for that privilege I am grateful.