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by Jason Mills
July 26, 2026

There are ideas so absurd they once belonged safely in satire.

Imagine telling your grandfather — a man who hunted, farmed, and fed his family from the land — that one day a political movement would treat killing animals for food as moral barbarism. Explain that raising livestock, fishing in rivers, and harvesting game in season would be criminalized.

He would not debate you. He would laugh. And yet here we are.

Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28 (IP-28) moved in precisely this direction, redefining animal abuse in ways that would effectively criminalize hunting, fishing, slaughter for food, and ordinary animal husbandry. Beneath the policy language is a deeper claim: that man possesses no unique moral authority over animals. The petition nearly gained enough signatures to place it on the November ballot.

That is not reform. That is confusion, codified.

Many Christians instinctively recognize this as madness. But fewer understand why it is madness. The answer begins in Genesis. Not Genesis as mythology. Not Genesis as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Genesis, which describes our world — the world beneath our feet, the world after judgment, the world God preserved after the flood.

If we misunderstand Genesis, we will misunderstand reality itself.

Civilizations that reject God’s order do not become enlightened — they become inverted. And when that confusion hardens into law, societies eventually find themselves writing legislation against creation, reason, and the grain of reality itself.

The Foundation of Civilization

The story of civilization after judgment begins in an unexpected place: an altar. After the flood, when Noah steps off the ark, he does not build infrastructure, draft policy, or organize society. He first builds an altar, then he worships (Genesis 8:20–21). That is not a decorative detail. It is a civilizational order. Culture rises from worship. And every society has an altar. The only question is what — or who — is on it.

Modern Oregon is not neutral. Neutrality is a myth people tell themselves while switching gods. It has merely exchanged altars — like a river attempting to run uphill against the grain of creation. The worship of God has been replaced with the worship of self, desire, autonomy, and emotional sentimentality.

And once self becomes god, confusion is not a possibility — it is guaranteed.

Male and female become negotiable. Children become burdens. Marriage becomes optional. Truth becomes subjective. And eventually, even mankind and animals are forced into the same moral category.

When God is removed from the center, reality does not disappear. It collapses.

This is where movements like IP-28 come from. The issue is not ultimately animal welfare. The issue is worship. Worship determines how a civilization understands the created order.

Dominion: What God Actually Said

After the flood, God renews humanity’s original mission. The world had been judged, but mankind’s purpose had not been canceled. God actually reasserts it.

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1).

He also gives mankind a gift:

“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (Genesis 9:3).

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These verses are deeply inconvenient for those who reject created order. God does not apologize for meat. In fact, He authorizes it — explicitly, publicly, and covenantally. This is not a strange Old Testament exception tucked into ceremonial law. This command comes within the Noahic covenant — the covenant governing ordinary human civilization after the flood. In other words, it governs our world.

This means hunting is not barbarism. Fishing is not oppression. Ranching is not exploitation. Animal husbandry is not moral evil. A father teaching his son to hunt is not rebelling against creation order: he is participating in it. God gave animals into humanity’s hands, not for cruelty but for stewardship, nourishment, cultivation, and dominion.

The word “dominion” makes modern people nervous. Largely because we no longer know what it means. Biblical dominion is stewardship under authority. We steward as vice-regents under God (Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8:4–8). We cultivate fields, raise livestock, preserve habitats, restrain predators, harvest responsibly, and exercise wisdom in the use of created things.

Man does not own the world: God does. We govern it under God.

But governance is real. And hierarchy is unavoidable: God above man, man above animals.

Erase that structure, and you do not get compassion. You get chaos disguised as virtue. And that is exactly what is unfolding.

You may love your Labrador (indeed, you should), but your Labrador is not your covenant child. A deer is not your moral equal. A chicken is not your cousin. Animals matter because God made them. But human beings are uniquely sacred because God imprinted them with His image.

When a society begins confusing those categories, civilization does not become compassionate; it begins malfunctioning. Before long, we find ourselves governed by architects of managed absurdity: a moral vision that mourns chickens more than children, elevates sentiment above stewardship, and slowly teaches society to forget what humans, families, and creation are actually for.

The Great Inversion

Today’s moral inversion is breathtaking. Endangered owls are mourned while unborn babies are destroyed. The killing of livestock is vilified while physician-assisted suicide is celebrated. Pets are anthropomorphized while confused adolescents are sterilized in the name of compassion.

A civilization that cries harder over chickens than children has not become more loving. It has become morally lost.

Anti-Genesis activists routinely grant greater emotional urgency to animal suffering than to abortion. This contradiction is so glaring that it will blind anyone willing to look at it honestly. The same political coalitions horrified by fishing hooks also defend the dismemberment of unborn babies as “healthcare.” The same culture demanding legal protections for animals celebrates gender ideology that denies the created distinction between male and female (Genesis 1:27; c.f. Matthew 19:4).

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The Bible consistently maintains distinctions. So does natural law. So does ordinary human experience. And, until very recently, so did anyone with functioning eyeballs. From the opening pages of Genesis, reality is ordered through distinctions: Light from darkness, land from sea, male from female, mankind from animals, order from chaos. Creation flourishes precisely because categories remain intact. Chaos begins when categories collapse.

But reality is a stubborn thing. A society may reject God and His design, but it cannot escape it. Eventually, consequences arrive. Once civilization forgets God, it will eventually forget what humans are, what families are, what justice is, what food is, and what animals are for.

The problem with IP-28 is not merely that it would have devastated hunters, ranchers, farmers, and ordinary families (that’s bad enough). The deeper problem is what it reveals. It reveals a civilization increasingly alienated from God and reality itself.

Rebuilding

After judgment, Noah stepped into a broken world. The flood had ended, but sin had not. The ground still resisted his labor. Human hearts remained unchanged. And yet God still spoke with clarity: Build.

The order God gives is not optional — it is the architecture of any restored civilization (Genesis 8:20-9:7): Worship first, then ordered life, then family, then dominion, then justice.

That blueprint has not changed since the days of Noah.

The answer to civilizational confusion is not retreat. It is faithful obedience. Raise children who love truth. Teach them to worship Christ. Build households that do not bend to age. Plant churches that refuse to compromise. Build businesses that serve rather than exploit. Steward land. Raise livestock responsibly. Teach sons to hunt. Teach daughters wisdom. Support honest labor. Pursue justice that is not selective.

Live like reality is real. Because it is. Live under Christ’s authority in ordinary ways. Be faithful in a world that is forgetting what faithfulness even looks like. Christians must remember that the hard soil is still God’s field. Oregon is hard soil indeed — but it is still the King’s possession. Christ has not surrendered His world to decay, nor has He abandoned His people.

Our hope rests in the fact that the greater Noah has already come. Jesus Christ did not merely step into a storm — He stepped into judgment itself. Where Adam failed, Christ obeyed. Where Noah stumbled, Christ ruled perfectly. He exercised dominion without sin, authority without cruelty, and truth without compromise. And now He gathers His people for worship, then sends them back into the world as builders —faithful stewards of a restored creation under His lordship.

So worship Christ on Sunday. Then return to your homes, businesses, farms, schools, churches, and neighborhoods carrying His light into all the hard places.

The answer to confusion is not despair; it is presence — faithful, unflinching, Christian presence.

Hard soil is still God’s field. So plant truth anyway. Raise families anyway. Run for public office if needed. Hunt honestly. Farm gratefully. Worship without apology.

And refuse to forget this: Christ still rules the world that modern man is trying so hard to unmake.

— Jason Mills serves as a pastor at Foundation Bible Church in Boring, Oregon. This essay originally appeared at TruthScript, which you should follow.

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by Virgil Walker
July 19, 2026

A generation of men opened the Bible expecting a sword and found a self-help book with verses scattered through it. The mistake was not theirs. They were handed a Christ engineered for the therapeutic age, and they correctly noticed that He had nothing to say to them.

Open the Book. He has something to say.

God Reveals Himself as Father and King

From the first page, God speaks, and what He speaks comes into being. He forms what is formless and fills what is empty. He walks in the garden to call Adam to account, and He thunders from Sinai to give law to people who would have settled for less. When the time was full, He sent His Son to crush the serpent.

He is Father. He is Lord and King. Scripture never softens those titles, and the people who try are not editing the Bible. They are replacing it.

This is not stereotype mapped onto deity. It is revelation. God has chosen masculine terms to disclose Himself because those terms convey what is true of Him: strength under authority, faithfulness that holds across generations. Strip the masculine vocabulary, and you do not correct God. You manufacture a different one.

Adam’s First Sin Was Silence

Before God provided a mate, He commissioned a man. He told Adam to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Adam was given a garden to guard and a Word that defined the boundary between life and death.

Then the serpent spoke. And Adam stood there.

The first sin in human history was not aggression. It was abdication. The man God had ordained as priest and protector watched the lie unfold and said nothing. Every failure of biblical masculinity since has followed that pattern. The men who get it wrong in our churches and our homes almost always get it wrong on the silent side.

I should know. I’m not one to lean into silence. For the most part, I say what I mean and mean what I say. But there are times when, instead of the bold proclamation I’m known for, it’s easier to retreat from pushback. I’m guilty of it. When silence happens at work, no one faults you. When it happens at home, in your marriage, it always costs you.

I have learned that the hard way. Silence in a marriage causes separation and division. Clarity gets replaced with confusion. Direction gets replaced with drift. Most of it goes unnoticed because of the chaos of everyday life. But what you don’t address early becomes a mountain to unpack later. By God’s grace, my wife and I have done the unpacking. Most couples don’t get the chance, or don’t take it when they do.

The Faithful Men of Scripture Took Ground

The men God used in redemptive history were not bystanders. Noah built an ark while a watching world mocked him into the rain. Abraham left everything familiar on the strength of a promise he could not yet see fulfilled. Moses confronted a Pharaoh who claimed to be a god and came down from Sinai with the law on stone. David wrote psalms with a sword on his belt and the blood of Goliath behind him, and Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem with a trowel in one hand and a weapon in the other.

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None of them were perfect. They were faithful, and they feared God more than they feared the people watching them. That single ordering pulled them into action, the world called inconvenient, and heaven called obedience.

Jesus Died Because He Was Strong

Jesus did not die because He was weak. He died because He was strong enough to lay down His life on His own terms and take it up again on His own authority. The Christ who overturned tables in the temple and answered Pharisees with words sharp enough to get Him killed walked toward the cross when every human option said otherwise.

He is the Lamb. He is also the Lion of Judah. Modern preaching has spent two generations dwelling on the Lamb until the Lion went out of focus, and the result is a Christ who looks suspiciously like the therapist the culture was already shopping for. The real Christ does not fit in that office. He never has.

Scripture Commands Men to Be Men

“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13)

That sentence is a command, written into the canon and addressed to the church for as long as the church exists.

For thirty years the American pulpit has whispered safety to men. Scripture has been issuing the opposite order the entire time. The Bible does not call men to be loud or aggressive. It calls them to be faithful and present, to carry crosses and inherit kingdoms. The men who learn that distinction are the men who stay married, and their children grow up able to pray without being asked. Their churches hold when the culture pushes back.

The King Is Coming on a White Horse

When Jesus returns, He does not arrive holding hands and singing ballads.

“Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.” (Revelation 19:11)

His eyes burn like fire. A sword proceeds from His mouth, and His robe is dipped in blood. The story of Scripture closes with a King riding out for battle, not a counselor convening a support group.

Every man who reads the last page honestly has to reckon with the kind of King who is actually coming and the kind of man that King is forming His people to be.

What This Requires of You

The soft religion has worn out a generation of men, and the answer is not a louder voice on a podcast or a sharper fight on the internet. The answer is to open the Book and let it work on you before you swing it at anyone else.

Read the Word in the morning before you read the news. Pray for your wife and your children by name, and confess your sin to a man who can hold you accountable when you fail. If you don’t have that man, find him this week. Stop confusing online combat for actual courage, and show up in the room where you are actually needed before you tell anyone what you think about the rooms you are not in.

The world has plenty of opinions and very few men who keep their word and stay when the conversation gets hard. Your family does not need your hot takes. It needs your presence. Your church does not need another commentator. It needs men who can be called on.

The Bible is a war manual. The men who read it that way will be the men still standing when the King returns.

— This essay originally appeared at Virgil Walker’s Substack, which you should follow.

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by Michael Foster
July 12, 2026

The very first question in the Bible does not come from God, Adam, or Eve. It comes from the serpent.

“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1)

On the surface, it looks like a simple yes-or-no question. But it isn’t. It’s a deceptive, leading question, designed to reframe reality before Eve ever answers.

The serpent technically gets part of the facts right. God did forbid eating from a tree. But he frames the prohibition in the most distorted way possible, as if God were withholding everything rather than one thing. The question is deliberately negative. It casts God as withholding and suspect.

Eve responds:

“And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.”’” (Gen. 3:2–3)

Notice what happens. Eve does not answer with a simple yes or no. She clarifies, which is the correct instinct. But she also subtly alters God’s word. God never said, “neither shall you touch it.” That addition suggests that the serpent’s question has already begun to do its work.

The goal was never truth-seeking. It was to destabilize the authority of God’s word.

The serpent’s question pushes Eve away from objective revelation (“What did God actually say?”) toward subjective interpretation (“How does this feel? What seems reasonable?”). It invites her to evaluate God rather than submit to Him. The question was not neutral. It was a wedge.

Not all questions are innocent. Some are weapons.

We see this again and again in Scripture. The Pharisees question Jesus not to learn, but to trap Him. Their questions are often structured as false dilemmas, A or B, when the truth doesn’t belong to either option. If you accept their framing, they already have you. The dominoes are lined up.

That same tactic is everywhere today. People say, *“I’m just asking questions,” but the questions are doing heavy ideological work. If you don’t choose A or B, you’re accused of taking “the third way,” as if there are only three options. In reality, there may be ten, or a hundred. The dilemma itself is fake. The question is a steering mechanism.

By contrast, in Acts 17, the Bereans ask questions that are genuinely authoritative and submissive:

They examine Paul’s claims by the standard of Scripture.

Their questions are tethered to an external authority. They are not asking Scripture to justify itself to them; they are asking whether Paul’s teaching conforms to what God has already spoken. That’s the difference.

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In the case of the Bereans, it should also stand out that Paul is not offended by them going to the Scriptures. He doesn’t demand allegiance to himself. Paul understands that he is a man under authority. The allegiance is to God and to His revealed truth, not to Paul as a personality.

That’s where you see a subtle slide of hand in manipulative ministries and personality cults. Officially, they’ll say Scripture is the authority, but in practice the authority becomes the communicator of Scripture. The line between God’s revelation and the man delivering it gets blurred.

Sometimes it goes so far that faith is lodged in the personality rather than in the Word itself. Question the interpretation, and it’s treated as questioning the truth. That’s not how Paul operates, and it’s not how the Bereans think.

Paul welcomes scrutiny because the standard isn’t him. The Word is.

So one of the most important diagnostic questions you can ask about any question is this:

Is the question actually seeking an answer, or is it trying to smuggle in a conclusion?

If the answer is treated as “self-evident,” then the next question must be asked plainly:
Self-evident according to what authority?

When pressed, people often retreat to vagueness: “Do your own research.” We saw these with the QAnon hysteria. Or they hide behind posture: “I’m just asking questions.” This allows them to imply truths that are neither self-evident nor grounded in any objective standard, while avoiding accountability for the claim itself.

That’s the trick.

It’s not accidental that the last question in the Bible mirrors this reality in reverse. In Revelation 18:18, the sailors cry out at the fall of Babylon:

“What city was like the great city?”

That’s not a real inquiry. It’s a rhetorical question of lament. The answer is obvious: none. The greatest city of man has fallen, and its uniqueness only becomes clear in its destruction. That question clears the stage for the city of God, which does not rise from human power and cannot be undone. It is the greatest city.

So Scripture begins with a deceptive question meant to undermine God’s goodness, and it ends with a lamenting question that exposes the fragility of man’s glory.

Questions matter.
Their framing matters.
Their authority matters.

And no one is ever “just asking questions.”

One question that will inevitably be asked about this article is, who is this about? And yes, people will say, “This is obviously about Candace Owens, right?” It does apply to her. She’s guilty of this. But she’s not the first, and she won’t be the last.

At the very beginning of East River Church, I was openly critical of QAnon and its false prophecies. We lost several families over it. Oh well.

That’s not what this is really about anyway. This is about learning to discern biblically. It’s about not having your life tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, every new trend, every charismatic personality who claims to see what others don’t.

We weathered Rob Bell. We weathered Brian McLaren. We will weather many others. The names change. The tactic doesn’t.

The point is not identifying the latest villain (or hero). The point is learning how to test spirits, recognize leading questions, and keep your allegiance anchored to the Word, not to whoever happens to sound confident this week.

Listen to whoever you want. Ask questions. But be cautious and biblical. Be an actual Berean.

— This essay originally appeared at This Is Foster, which I encourage you to follow.

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NOTE: Yesterday was America’s 250th birthday. On the 4th, I gave you “The Christian Worldview of ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, which I consider one of my most foundational essays. Take a few minutes to read that, and then today’s important piece regarding the moral legitimacy of the American Revolution itself. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
July 8, 2014

There is a recurring, albeit ill-informed, question in Christian circles regarding Romans 13 (which counsels dutiful subordination to legally established authorities) and the American Revolution: were the Founding Fathers in sin when they rebelled against King George? My beloved son (a Harvard, Yale and Mayo Clinic doctor who daily does heart and lung transplants but not a lot of historiography) recently asked me for some references he could read to help answer this question, as raised by some of his friends at church. This is my response.

Archer,

I am not in my library and thus a good position right now to refer you to works of scholarship, but I can briefly explain the position and why it is incorrect.

Your friends are reading Romans 13 and assuming from its admonition to obey the duly constituted authorities that any rebellion is necessarily wrong. This is incorrect, as follows.

1. Unlawful orders — even of duly constituted authority — may never lawfully be followed. E.g, in the case of the Sanhedrin’s ordering of the apostles to cease preaching Christ, their response was “We must obey God rather than men.” Likewise, should a leader command the murder of six million Jews, or a husband command the abortion of his child, those so ordered not only may not but must not obey. (Your mother reminds me to note the Egyptian midwives here also.)

2. God Himself shows us repeatedly the lawful overthrow of duly constituted governments, both by conquest and by internal processes. The most relevant of these is David’s displacement of Saul as King of Israel. This took place in two steps: first, the elders of Judah, Benjamin and Simeon seceded from the united kingdom and established David as King of an independent Kingdom of Judah. Later, after Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle by the Philistines, the elders of the northern tribes elected David as their King also.

This teaches us two things (well actually, two things relevant to this abbreviated discussion today): first, that in the system of government God personally designed, the legislative body (admittedly a bit less of a Congress and more of a Constitutional Convention, but elected and representative which is the principal point) had power to elect and to dismiss Kings; and second, that this power was in fact used lawfully, more than once (it comes up again after David’s death as well as Solomon’s) and with God’s express approval.

3. In Anglo-American law, a parliament may not tax or otherwise encumber (such as with military service) a jurisdiction which has no representation in that parliament. This, of course, was the principal point of the Revolution, and the principal constitutional debate within the United Kingdom at the time as well: the London Parliament asserted its (unlawful and unprecedented) right to legislate for all subjects of the Crown, whereas the Jacobites (supporters of the restoration of the Stuarts) became the defenders of the historic constitutional tenet that though the King ruled over all, parliaments must be local and representative in nature with jurisdiction only over that territory from which they had been elected. (The irony of the party espousing the divine right of kings taking this quasi-republican position is a discussion best left for another day.)

In any case, when the London Parliament began imposing taxes, levies, quartering of soldiers and other unlawful requirements upon thirteen English provinces each with its own parliament (the King being the chief executive of each one separately, the royal governor being his representative locally just as governors-general represent the Queen in Australia or Barbados today), this caused a constitutional crisis in the colonies.

England had largely neglected the colonies early on because of the Civil War and then the Commonwealth and Restoration, and barely more than two more decades passed before the Glorious Revolution. During this long period of preoccupation, the colonies had developed as though they were Scotland or Ireland, with their own institutions and their citizens possessed of the fullness of the rights of Englishmen. But when the French & Indian War (which to the English was the Seven Years War, the first truly global conflict) greatly stretched the Exchequer, the feeling in London was that the colonies should be expected to pay “their fair share.” And thus the long march to Revolution began.

It is important for you to re-read the Declaration of Independence, which after this discussion I suspect you will see through new eyes. You will find that, though it never references Romans 13, the entire document is a justification of independence, to people who knew Romans 13 well, in terms of the King having broken covenant with his subjects. And it is that last bit to which I’m seeking to draw your attention:

Anglo-American government is by covenant. Even in England, the King is not sovereign: Parliament is. And the colonists — law-abiding Englishmen, regardless of the province in which they happened to reside — were in covenant with a King who ceased keeping that covenant, and who allowed them to be rendered slaves rather than free men, that freedom being their lawfully acknowledged birthright.

This took on a rather different character after the Boston Tea Party, in consequence of which the London Parliament ordered the naval blockade of the Port of Boston and the cessation of all lawful commerce therein. This is to this very day in international law an act of war, and the colonists rightly understood it to be an act of war by the London Parliament against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They sought redress from their King — whose veto was absolute and in whom was vested supreme command of the Royal Navy — but he did nothing: quite the contrary, he took the position of the London Parliament and enforced it. And over time the offenses mounted, from the Boston Massacre to the passage of bills of attainder to the military occupation of American cities and dismissal of American parliaments.

In this environment, which broke into greater hostilities beginning in April of 1775, the colonial leaders sought what might be considered trans-Atlantic marriage counseling and reconciliation for an extensive period. But when the King refused to relent from the equivalent of wife-beating and adultery, they came to the conclusion not only that the covenant had been broken but that it ought to be broken.

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The Declaration of Independence was neither entered into lightly nor without abuses above and beyond those required for a lawful exit. To support the King was to reject right and support sin. The Revolution was no different in this regard than the refusal of Judah to accept Jeroboam as their King: it was the King who left his American subjects and provinces, not the other way around.

Your friends will at this point say something about Rome, and note that Paul was speaking to people under a far worse regime when under the Spirit’s inspiration he wrote Romans 13. They will be right, so far as that goes. But these are apples and oranges. Again, I will leave a proper discussion of Roman citizenship, and of Roman rule in Israel, for another day; but Scripture must interpret Scripture, and Romans 13 is only applicable to lawful commands no matter what position you take (see item 1 above).

As to America, each separate colony — like each of England, Scotland and Ireland — was in covenant with the King, a covenant which was shattered by that King, who began daily giving unlawful orders both to them and to others regarding them. The colonists were right to rebel, and were completely within their rights to rebel, not only by the precedent of Scripture but (crucially) by the terms of the constitution of the United Kingdom, of the principles of the Glorious Revolution, and of the English Bill of Rights.

Most likely, your friends will not have an adequate answer to that, nor can they have without becoming scholars in this area, something they will not wish to do. If they wish to discuss this, though, I will be happy to make some time to visit with them for your sake.

Love,
Dad

P.S. If your friends would like a more extensive answer, I suggest you should have them read Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex (the title of which means “the law is the king”, the exact opposite of the dominant political theory of his time, which was rex lex, or “the king is the law”). In reading this, they will start to understand our Founding Fathers, a large percentage of whom were committed and theologically astute Christians, far far better.

— This essay appeared as WORLD magazine's Saturday feature, August 2, 2014.

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by Seth Brickley
June 28, 2026

In my previous article, “When Repentance Becomes Costly,” I described a great problem in the American Evangelical Church. There is a need for pastoral repentance, but it has been absent in large measure. While the Lord has raised up many good shepherds, there is indeed an entire class that has disqualified themselves, because broadly they have participated in pastoral corruption.

One aspect of that corruption I did not mention previously is the cancer of pastoral pietism. But in this article, I will explain how many modern shepherds, especially in the U.S., eerily resemble the Pharisaic leadership of first-century Israel that opposed Christ.

A Great Neglect of People

The Pharisees were those who did not care about the everyday problems around them. In Matthew 23, where Jesus went scorched earth on the Pharisees, he told them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel” (Matthew 23:23-24).

What Jesus describes are a people who were concerned about less important things, but neglected to show concern about what the Lord values most. The Lord cares about the difference we are to make in the lives of others. Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). If we are to love the Lord with everything we have, how is this going to look in our lives? It will be shown by having a great love for people, especially Christ’s Church (Galatians 6:10).

But this was not the focus of ancient Pharisees nor the modern-day pastor-pietists among us. Their focus is on smaller matters. As they pursue the Lord in private devotion, they are not taking to heart that the study of Scripture is intended to produce a deep love for others.

As the apostle John wrote, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:16-18).

I heard one pastor friend explain that modern pastor-pietists treat theology as a hobby. They know Scripture well, they are capable preachers and teachers, they spend time in prayer, but when it comes to actually making a difference in the lives of others, something is missing. There is a coldness to them, showing a lack of love for the Lord. They are hearers of the Word, but not doers (James 1:22-25).

Yes, of course, we should be those who “meditate on the word day and night” (Psalm 1:2) and “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) as we have sweet communion with the Lord (Mark 1:35), but all of this should lead to action. If the action is missing, then love for the Lord is greatly lacking. As Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

It is a spiritual emphasis without action where the pharisaic pietists focus, but the people around them feel and experience little to no love.

Neglecting Earthly Affairs

Another mark of Christian pietists is that they see earthly things and affairs as inferior or second-class. But Scripture warns of the ungodliness of this path. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:1-5).

There is an ascetic nature to pietists, which Scripture condemns (Colossians 2:18-23). They see enjoying earthly things as second-class and sometimes even sinful, while Scripture states that the things of earth are to be enjoyed as long as it is done with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:5). To enjoy God’s gifts and then to thank him is to turn away from idolatry. God’s people can truly enjoy God as they take pleasure in his gifts. But to the pietist, spiritual practices such as reading a book, prayer, missions, and living with less are seen as far superior to enjoying God’s works in creation. This was seen in David Platt’s bestselling book Radical, where he essentially preached a sort of “poverty gospel.”

Furthermore, one well-known pastor has flashed his pietism in a multitude of ways. He has been on record saying that Christians should only own budget vehicles rather than nice ones, and it is better for Christians in urban churches to live in the city rather than the suburbs. There is also a story where he took his children to a baseball game, but took a book with him to read.

There is nothing wrong with driving a higher-quality vehicle and living in a nicer area that will bless one and his or her family. Certainly, it is better to leave the book at home and enjoy the ballgame with your children, but pietists see attention toward people, the enjoyment of a baseball game, or going fishing as inferior to reading the Bible or a Puritan work.

I was once at a conference where I ate lunch next to a pastor influenced by the pietistic culture who had never heard of the beautiful area where I live, only forty miles to his northeast. It occurred to me that this pastor spent most of his time studying and not enjoying God’s beautiful creation. Pietists miss that one of the ways we learn about God is through enjoying Him, especially in nature.

David praised the Lord for both his works in creation and his written Word (Psalm 19). We worship God through both without neglecting the other. To miss him in nature is to have a deficiency in one’s worship. Like the Pharisees, their religious practice has caused them to miss the enjoyment of life, and they’ve taught others to do the same. In so doing, they have placed burdens (Matthew 23:4) on people that Christ has not placed (Matthew 11:28-30).

Another way that pietists neglect the things of earth is by giving little to no care to matters in the public square. Their focus is almost solely on the spiritual. We have seen this in recent years with the neo-Reformed movement, which constantly reminded us to “just preach the gospel.” While they proclaimed this, they did not educate their churches on how to honor God in voting and public service, nor to stand against unrighteousness in their own communities.

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It is the responsibility of the pastor to address “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) and to call their people to be salt and light in a world where there is a tremendous amount of darkness (Matthew 5:13-16). The Lord desires for the church to be a prophetic voice in society, not hiding in their homes and within the four walls of their churches. Sadly, we have an entire culture of pastors who have left their churches largely in the dark on public-square matters, believing that addressing them is somehow inferior to “Just preach the gospel.”

But obedience to Christ demands a much fuller picture, in which the believer is faithful to him in the home, in the church, and as a mighty weapon for him in the public square. Scripture speaks of every issue concerning the life of faith (2 Peter 1:3), including every moral issue that Christians are presented with at the local, state, and national levels. The false spirituality of pietism has crippled the church from being the prophetic voice the Lord calls it to be in society. Like the Pharisees, they have neglected to instruct well-rounded faithful living that the masses desperately need to hear (Matthew 23:23).

Strong Commitment to Extra-Biblical Teaching

In addition to neglecting what they are supposed to be doing, pietists love to create their own morality by making their priorities more important than what the Lord really cares about. It is curious that when pietists have addressed public matters in recent years, they have mostly joined secular causes. When George Floyd died or when ICE was in the news, Evangelical pietists came out in full force, either on social media or marching with the protestors.

One professor friend of mine astutely explained to me that this is so because virtue signaling appeals to the pietist. In their pride, they love to flaunt their own self- righteousness before others (Matthew 6:1) when it is fashionable to do so.

When they address pressing moral issues, they consistently miss the mark biblically. The Pharisees, in their pride, were well known for creating their own righteousness. In the Gospels, Jesus said concerning them, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:8-9).

During the height of the Woke movement, pietistic pastors created their own morality by embracing the world’s own false righteousness. They indeed taught as doctrines, “the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9). But when it came to actually proclaiming God’s law in the public square as the Lord calls his shepherds to do (Matthew 14:4), they were nowhere to be found.

Public “Holy” Acts

As I alluded to above, all of these works have been done to be seen by others. Jesus warned concerning people such as this, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matthew 6:1-2).

Jesus also said in another place, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (Matthew 23:5). At the Southern Baptist Convention, only a few years ago, there was a mantra that continued to be uttered when Leftist values were on the table. That mantra was, “The world is watching.” They wanted their advocacy for Social Justice to be seen and applauded by the world, so they wouldn’t be known as “Bible-thumping fundamentalists.”

These attitudes revealed the hearts of false shepherds, as it is the fear of the Lord that qualifies one to be the Lord’s shepherd. To care what man thinks is a clear disqualification (Galatians 1:10). But pietistic leaders, like the Pharisees, love the praise of man.

Another area where pietism has sometimes been seen is in the practice of long, eloquent prayers. A professor friend of mine shared with me that at one church, it became apparent that the Sunday prayers had turned into a competition. They were under the leadership of a pastor who loved to pray long, impressive prayers before his congregation. There is an entire culture of prayer such as this across the Evangelical landscape. Pastors who have pushed Leftist values or acted cowardly, yet pray long, eloquent prayers, may wow their hearers, but they are not wowing the Lord.

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The apostle Peter warned concerning a husband whose prayers will not be heard because of mistreatment toward his wife (1 Peter 3:7). Phony prayers can be spotted based on one’s works. These prayers appear much more like a show than a humble and heartfelt prayer offered to the Lord. Whether they are doing truly righteous works or apparent righteous works (as we have seen done abundantly in recent years), their works have been done to receive the praise of man. In this way, they very much reflect the Pharisees of old.

Valuing Acceptability in the Pietist Club

Pietists love the honor that comes with being in a prestigious club. As Jesus said, “They love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others” (Matthew 23:6-7). In recent years, many have been exposed as institutionalists and company men. Their commitment to the truth has great limitations. Their primary commitment is to protecting their respective institution’s image and remaining in good standing within. On numerous occasions where compromise has been pointed out, instead of listening to the correction, the institutional leaders have treated those exposing the problem as the problem.

In this pietistic club, it is rare to see leaders go against the club at great risk of being shunned and losing the benefits that institutional credibility provides. There are two biblical examples of such men who went against the establishment to which they belonged: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus (Mark 15:43; John 19:39). After Jesus’ death, when it was unpopular to be associated with Jesus, they associated with him, showing their fear of God over man.

One such recent positive example is Willy Rice, who was just elected the SBC President in Orlando, Florida. The church needs many more Willy Rices who repent of past involvement in the club and truly bless the church by leading both humbly and righteously.

The Way Forward

The Lord calls all believers to pursue true piety (1 Peter 1:16), but there is a false piety that the modern American evangelical church is swimming in. I write this as someone who has lived in this toxic climate, but over the years, my eyes have been opened, and I desire to see many more pastors and Christians freed from the snare of faux-pietism.

Many Christians have blindly followed this poor leadership, not realizing they’re doing so. Pietism is a tool of the Devil to distract and paralyze Christians from doing what they ought to do. How can the church be the light of the world (Matthew 5:14) if they have been presented with a deeply faulty understanding of Christian faithfulness?

Followers of Christ are to be soldiers, not distracted by a false spirituality that makes Christians ineffective in a world that greatly needs the church to be triumphant. The Pharisaic system of the first century was a dark cloud over first-century Israel. With many similar features, modern-day Christian Pietism is a dark cloud over the American church in our day.

May more Christians wake to turn from false piety to true godly living.

— Seth Brickley is the lead pastor at Eureka Baptist Church in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. This article originally appeared at TruthScript.

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NOTE: I am republishing this important essay in honor of Father’s Day. Take time with it. You’ll be very glad you did. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
March 30, 2025

When Paul describes our salvation, he invokes the law — specifically, the Roman law concerning adoption. He does so deliberately, decisively, and repeatedly. His hearers understood what he was saying: they lived under that law. There can be no question regarding his intent.

And that has enormous implications for the Gospel, and for our status before God.

In Roman law, adoption was no soft sentiment. It was a public legal act that completely redefined who a person was: his rights, his duties, even his debts. Paul wasn’t waxing poetic when he said we’ve received “the Spirit of adoption”. He was invoking the most powerful legal metaphor available in the Greco-Roman world, a metaphor — and a reality — that explained not just what God has done, but who we become as a result.

He was also explaining what kind of Father God is.

What Roman Adoption Meant

In Roman civil law, adoption was only rarely the domain of parents seeking infants. It was primarily a tool of inheritance, as in the case of Julius Caesar’s adult adoption of his nephew Octavian. Adoption was usually a strategic legal transaction between intentional, consenting adults, used to secure heirs (political as much as financial), transfer wealth, and perpetuate family lines.

Roman adoption came with three enormous implications, enshrined in law:

1. Irrevocability: A natural son could be disowned. An adopted son could not. Adoption created a new legal status that could not be undone.

2. Erasure of past debts and obligations: Adoption wiped the slate clean. If the adoptee had debts, they vanished. His old family ties were legally dissolved. He became a new person in the eyes of the law.

3. Full rights of inheritance: The adopted child wasn’t “like” a son. He was a son, in every legal sense. He received the full status, name, and inheritance of his new family.

Paul’s Roman readers would not have missed the implications. To say that God has adopted us is to say that we are no longer legally bound to our old identity — our sin, our shame, our condemnation. It is all gone. Nullified. Buried. We have a new name, a new inheritance, and a new status that can never be revoked.

This is not just an aspect of the Gospel. It is the Gospel, expressed in legal form: God has made us His children — not figuratively, but legally, relationally, irrevocably.

When Jesus tells Nicodemus he “must be born again”,1 this is precisely what He means.

From Slaves to Sons

Paul’s recurring contrast between slavery and sonship only makes sense in this legal context. A slave in Roman society was property. A son was an heir. Paul tells us, “you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons”.2 This is not spiritual allegory. It is a courtroom declaration.

In Christ, we are no longer outsiders looking in. We are not merely sinners with a second chance. We are no longer children of the flesh, or of the devil. We are heirs, co-heirs with Christ3 the only begotten (or natural) Son,4 the firstborn of many (adopted) brothers.5

The force of Paul’s claim intensifies in Galatians: “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God”.6 That “if” is not figurative or speculative — it is legal. It is Paul’s shorthand for the full status of adoption under Roman law. He is saying: God didn’t just release you from bondage; He gave you the title deed to the house. You were not just freed — you were claimed.

Modern readers may find this idea of inheritance confusing: Is God going to die? No. But in an era of emperors and nobles such as Paul’s, an heir had a special place and status both before his father and the world, even while his father still lived. That is our status before God, or rather, the status of all who are redeemed.

Scottish law professor Francis Lyall drives this home.7 Roman adoption was not simply a change of relationship. It was a change of jurisdiction. A new father meant new law, new debts (none), new obligations (glory), and new destiny (inheritance).

The adoptee didn’t bring his baggage. He couldn’t. It had been erased as a matter of law. The magnitude of that — imagine having your mortgage completely cancelled — is why a Roman adoption had to be granted by a court. Likewise, our adoption is granted by the Judge of the whole world.

Debt Forgiven, Identity Rewritten

This is why the Gospel cannot be reduced to forgiveness alone. Forgiveness cancels punishment. Adoption confers identity. Forgiveness means you’re no longer guilty. Adoption means you now belong.

This is why Paul’s presentation of the Gospel is both legal and relational. Indeed “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.8 This is the doctrine of justification. But it’s not the final word. The Spirit Himself bears witness that we are children of God. And “if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ”.9

No condemnation, because your debts are gone. No distance, because you’ve been brought near. No uncertainty, because your inheritance is fixed. The law once testified against us. But now, through adoption, the law testifies for us. We have been legally transferred from the domain of darkness into the household of our new Father.

And in Roman law, as Lyall notes, such a legal transfer wasn’t private or provisional. It was public, binding, and irrevocable. This is the doctrine of the perseverence of the saints, what Baptists usually call the security of the believer. You cannot lose your adoption, assuming you were in fact adopted, because adoption is forever.

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Many fear losing their salvation. This is an impossibility. But many think they’re saved because they recited a prayer, or walked an aisle. Scripture, however, is quite clear: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.”10 Many who profess the Name do not truly believe. But for those who genuinely do, “He has given the right to become children of God”,11 and “no one may snatch us from His hand”.12

The Father’s Heart Behind the Law

All of this legal precision serves one relational end: sonship. Not servitude. Not probation. Not parole.

In Roman adoption, the adoptee didn’t earn his place. He was chosen. And in the case of God’s family, chosen not because of worthiness, but because of divine love. “In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ”.13 That’s the motivation. Love, not merit. Election, not works.

Such great love — of the Father for us, and of ourselves for the Father and for our Savior — will surely produce good works.14 How could it not? If I love someone I want to please them. But those works are not the basis of our salvation.15

And here the legal metaphor gives way to something even deeper. Paul tells us that the Spirit we have received cries out, “Abba! Father!” “Abba” is not formal: its best English equivalent is “Daddy”. This is not transactional. It’s relational. It’s not legalese. It’s the joyful cry of a child running to a daddy whom he knows is his.

Paul’s use of “Abba” is no sentimental flourish. It’s a theological earthquake. Jesus used that word in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now Paul says we say it also. The access that belonged to the Son by nature now belongs to us through our adoption.

This is what the Gospel is — not just pardon, not just escape, not even just rescue. It is that the Judge has found us “not guilty” by reason of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice, and has willingly and gladly become our Father.

And He will never disown His children.

The Healing Doctrine Our Age Has Forgotten

Our culture is drowning in fatherlessness: broken homes, fractured families, and absent dads. And the problem is not just one-way: there is a rising trend of children deserting their parents, orphans by choice not need, with 26% of Millennials deliberately estranged from their fathers.

It is no coincidence that so many people today struggle to understand the Gospel. The very framework God has given us — Fatherhood, sonship, adoption — has been shattered in our modern generational memory.

And yet, this is the very truth that speaks hope to our orphaned generation.

God is not merely a sovereign. He is not merely a lawgiver. He is not a cosmic CEO or distant deity. He is a Father. And not in name only, but in reality: He loves, provides, protects, disciplines, delights, and never lets go. He has bound Himself to us in the most permanent legal terms imaginable, and sealed it with the blood of His Son.

This is not metaphor. This is identity. This is the Gospel.

Not Just a Theological Detail — The Theological Core

The doctrine of adoption is not a minor chord in Paul’s symphony. It is the key in which the whole piece is written. It is how God accomplishes our salvation, and how He frames our new life.

It demands a response. The foundational reality of our status before God is that — inexplicably — He loved us so much He made us His children. Everything else flows from that.

Theologians and pastors often rightly focus on justification by faith. But justification answers the question of guilt: it’s just the entry point. Adoption answers the question of belonging. And without the latter, the former feels incomplete. God didn’t just save us from something. He saved us for something and to something. He made us a family.

This is why our theology must be driven not just by clarity, but by love. Not just by law, but by the Lawgiver who, through adoption, becomes Abba. The more we understand that, the more everything else falls into place. The law becomes instruction, not condemnation. Discipline becomes proof of love, not rejection. Obedience becomes joy, not obligation.

If you study your Earthly dad (let's call it "dadtrine" or "dadology") you certainly do so to some degree to stay out of trouble, and to some degree because it makes life easier. But mostly, you do it because you love him. And loving him, you want to please him.

That’s part and parcel of the doctrine of sanctification. And it’s beautiful.

The Gospel in Legal Form, the Gospel in a Father’s Voice

Roman adoption law gave Paul the tools to articulate the full glory of the Gospel. And it gives us a framework to understand who we are.

We are not just redeemed. We are not just forgiven. We are not just justified.

We are adopted. We have a Father. We have a new status. We have an eternal home.

The Judge has ruled. Our debts are gone. Our status is changed. And our Father opens His arms, not to strangers, but to daughters and sons.

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by Voddie Baucham
June 14, 2026

“Critical Sex Theory: How to Keep Marx and Freud Out of Your Bedroom” is a sermon preached by Pastor Voddie Baucham on September 11, 2021 at the Fight Laugh Feast conference. In it, Voddie argues that modern cultural views on sexuality are rooted in the destructive philosophies of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud:

• Marxism & Power: Secular views reduce human relationships to power dynamics, stripping sexuality of its holy, design-based purpose and replacing it with perpetual conflict.

• Freudian Influence: Secular frameworks hyper-sexualize human nature, making individual desires supreme and leading to moral relativism and degradation.

• Biblical Foundation: True fulfillment in marriage and sexuality comes from understanding and submitting to God’s original, distinct design for male and female.

We miss our friend Voddie. He was a good man, a powerful preacher, and a wonderful father and husband. We are all blessed for having known him.

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If you or your organization are facing a sex abuse or sexual harassment claim, or if you are yourself the victim, my friends at Chalmers Adams can help. Click here.

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by Rod D. Martin
June 9, 2026

Today is the first day of the Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando. It’s also the 43rd anniversary of Christ saving me.

So perhaps you’ll indulge me if I stray for just this one essay from our normal daily geopolitical analysis to talk about the most important thing in the world.

As you know, I am not one to “take someone’s word for it”. I have built an entire career on facts, logic, science, and reasonable inferences therefrom. Many of those inferences seemed counterintuitive at the time, but were correct, precisely because of the other three.

That’s exactly how I came to faith. Christ miraculously redeemed me, but in His kindness to meet each of us where we are, He presented my skeptical heart with the historical case for believing in Him. That was exactly what I needed to see, and it opened the door to the intimate, personal relationship with Him that’s available to all who place their trust in Him.

God is our Creator. He owns everything and everyone. We are rebels, subject to a traitor’s death. But God provided an escape, paying the price of our treason by entering history in the flesh and shedding His own sinless blood for all those who “confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God raised Him from the dead”. Nor does He make us mere servants: once set right judicially, He adopts us as His own sons and daughters, “co-heirs with Christ”.

That’s what Christianity is about.

Christianity is not about cathedrals, as grand as they are, or fellowship suppers, or singing songs. It is about a claim so bold, so outrageous, and so world-shattering that if it’s true, it changes everything.

That claim is this: that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish carpenter crucified under Pontius Pilate, physically rose from the dead three days later.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Not as a nice symbol of renewal or a poetic expression of hope. He walked out of a sealed tomb in the middle of Roman-occupied Judea, showed Himself to hundreds of eyewitnesses, and transformed history so radically that time itself was eventually divided by the date of His birth.

Believing that is a big ask. But let’s be honest: a God who could not do such a thing is no God at all. The miracle is that He would do it.

The resurrection is the very center of Christianity. And if it didn’t happen, the entire Christian faith collapses. As the Apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Christianity is not a philosophy of life. It is not a self-help system. It is not one religion among many. It is the declaration that God entered history in the person of Jesus Christ, and that He proved it by rising from the dead.

The Trilemma: Who Is This Man?

C.S. Lewis, the great Oxford professor and former atheist who wrote Mere Christianity, put it plainly. Jesus did not leave us the option of calling Him merely a “good moral teacher.” That line may sound respectable today, but it is not rational. Because Jesus didn’t just teach love and kindness. He claimed to be God.

“I and the Father are one,” He said (John 10:30). “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), deliberately using the sacred name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. When His disciple Thomas declared, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus didn’t correct him — He accepted the title.

This brings us to Lewis’s famous trilemma. If a man goes around claiming to be God, there are only three logical possibilities:

1. He is a liar — He knew He wasn’t God, but deliberately misled people, making Him evil and certainly not a great moral teacher.

2. He is a lunatic — He genuinely believed He was God, but was out of His mind, like a man who thinks he’s a poached egg.

3. He is Lord — He really is who He claimed to be.

But what you cannot say is that He was just a good teacher. “A man who was merely a man,” Lewis writes, “and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”

The Resurrection Is the Crux

Josh McDowell, who through Keith Whitworth led me to Christ, popularized Lewis’s trilemma in the phrase “Lord, liar, or lunatic?” and applied it directly to the resurrection. McDowell, also a former skeptic, began his investigation of Christianity intending to disprove it. Instead, he became one of its most prominent defenders.

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Why? Because the evidence for the resurrection, when honestly examined, is astonishing.

Here are just a few facts that demand explanation:

1. The Empty Tomb – Even the enemies of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty. The authorities spread the story that the disciples stole the body, which only makes sense if the tomb was in fact empty. But how could a group of terrified fishermen overpower professional Roman soldiers? And even if they could, they couldn’t assume success going in. Why would they be willing to die for a lie?

2. The Eyewitnesses – Jesus appeared physically, bodily, to many people after His death. Paul records in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, and even to more than 500 people at once, “most of whom are still alive.” This was written within 25 years of the event — far too soon for myth or legend to develop. Anyone could check the facts. And many did.

3. The Transformed Disciples – On the night of Jesus’ arrest, His disciples fled. Peter even denied Him three times. They were defeated, confused, and in hiding: they had incorrectly believed He had come to overthrow the Romans and establish a physical kingdom in Jerusalem; they struggled to imagine that instead the Romans would kill Him. Yet within weeks they were boldly proclaiming that Jesus had risen — and they were willing to suffer torture and death for that claim. Men may die for what they believe to be true, but no one dies for what he knows is false.

4. The Explosion of the Early Church – Christianity should never have survived the first century. It proclaimed a crucified Jew as the risen King of the world. It directly contradicted the mandatory claims of the Roman Emperors. It faced persecution, ridicule, and death. Yet it exploded in the first century, and within two centuries more it conquered the Roman Empire — not by the sword, but by testimony.

5. The Conversion of Skeptics – Saul of Tarsus (later the Apostle Paul) was a Pharisee, an enemy of the church who hunted down Christians. But he had a direct encounter with the risen Christ that transformed him overnight. Likewise, James, the brother of Jesus, was a skeptic during Jesus’ lifetime — yet he too became a leader in the early church and died for his faith. What would it take to convince you your own brother was God?

No Other Explanation Works

Many theories have been offered to explain away the resurrection. All of them fail.

• The Swoon Theory? Jesus didn’t really die, they say — He just fainted. But Roman soldiers were experts at execution, and the purpose of crucifixion was itself a torturous death from which no one was allowed to escape, much less recover. The soldiers even speared His side to confirm He was dead. And if somehow Jesus revived in the tomb, half-dead, bleeding, and crippled, He would not have inspired worship: He would have needed a doctor.

• Mass Hallucination? Hallucinations are personal. 500 people don’t hallucinate the same thing, at the same time, in multiple places, at least not without mass media manipulation. And hallucinations don’t eat breakfast with you on the beach, like Jesus did with His disciples (John 21).

• Stolen Body? By whom? Not the Romans — they wanted to crush the movement. Not the Jews — same reason. Not the disciples — they were terrified, and had nothing to gain but death. And again: why die for something you know you made up?

The best explanation for the empty tomb, the eyewitness accounts, and the explosion of Christianity is simple: Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Why It Matters

This is not a mere intellectual curiosity. It is the most important question you will ever face.

If Jesus rose from the dead, He is exactly who He said He is: the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth. And that means every one of His claims is true.

He said He came “to seek and to save the lost.” He said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” He promised, “Whoever believes in Me will not perish, but have everlasting life.”

The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on all of it. As Paul says in Romans 1:4, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead.”

If Jesus is Lord, then you must deal with Him. You cannot ignore Him. You cannot brush Him off as a wise man or moral teacher. He claimed your allegiance. He died for your sins. He rose again to offer you eternal life.

You Must Decide

The choice is yours.

You can say He was a liar, but liars don’t speak with the moral clarity of the Sermon on the Mount, or die forgiving their murderers.

You can say He was a lunatic, but lunatics don’t articulate logically-consistent brilliance, or found the greatest movement in human history.

Or you can say He is Lord — and fall at His feet in worship.

That is what your God demands of you: a verdict.

As Jesus asked His disciples, so He asks you: “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

What will you say?

Examine the evidence. Confront the reality. And respond to the risen Christ. He is not just a figure of history. He is the creator of it. He is alive. He is King. And He is calling you home.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” —Romans 10:9

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Further Reading:

• Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

• Evidence That Demands a Verdict — Josh McDowell

• The Case for Christ: Solving the Biggest Mystery of All Time - Lee Stroble

• Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels - J. Warner Wallace

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NOTE: This year’s Southern Baptist Convention begins today in Orlando. I am republishing this article to remind you what’s at stake. Voting doesn’t start till Tuesday morning, so it’s not too late to go. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
July 1, 2024

For many, the Southern Baptist Convention seems like a lost cause. From Critical Race Theory, to the leadership’s cavalier disregard for financial transparency, to sex abuse issues, to the heartbreakingly narrow defeat of the Law Amendment (61-39, with two-thirds required), many conservatives are at least considering leaving.

Don’t.

The SBC is worth fighting for. Maybe “God doesn’t need the Southern Baptist Convention,” as some always say. But you do. More than you realize.

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Southern Baptists make up 11 percent of America’s churches. But what you probably don’t realize is that the six SBC seminaries educate roughly 33 percent of America’s seminary students. 

We’re educating a lot more pastors than just our own. Losing our seminaries to the left would poison the pulpits of the planet. No, not just America’s churches, but the mission fields as well; countless lost souls across the world hear the name of Jesus, in many cases for the first time, but instead of receiving the Truth, they would get a woke false gospel.

Closer to home, if you’re a pastor and either retire or move elsewhere, odds are your church will pick one of the men trained by those seminaries to replace you. “Oh no, my church would never do that,” you might say. But in the real world, a pulpit committee made up of people who today may not even be members of your church will hire someone you probably don’t know. And maybe he’ll believe exactly as you do. But if he (or she, or “they”) was improperly trained, he could undo your entire ministry.

Examples of such are legion.

Now, those who believe we should give up claim that we can always build new seminaries. And maybe we can. But they don’t mention (or perhaps even realize) the following: when the PCUSA defrocked Gresham Machen almost a century ago, he left Princeton and founded Westminster Theological Seminary, which is certainly a fine institution. However today, ninety-five years later, Princeton still educates more seminarians than WTS.

Your SBC seminaries won’t go away if you abandon them. They’ll just replace you after you’re gone.

The logical retort, of course, is to ask why I am not suggesting we fight for Princeton? But there is indeed a reason, poorly understood by most Southern Baptists, but which is the philosophical and practical key to the whole argument. 

Princeton, like Harvard, Baylor, and countless other formerly faithful institutions, is governed by what the law calls a ‘self-perpetuating board’. That means its board members select their own successors. You and I aren’t getting into that club. God may well redeem Princeton someday. But we never will.

By contrast, the SBC’s institutions are what the law describes as ‘membership organizations’: their members elect their boards. And as it turns out, all these institutions have exactly one member, the same member: the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As a result, two things are true:

Those who show up at the Annual Meeting (‘messengers’) elect all the boards, and thus indirectly their professors and staff.

If conservatives don’t show up, they abdicate their stewardship duty and hand over these vital institutions to those who do.

“Those who do” tend to be people who have a dog in this fight. They’re often SBC or state convention employees, or people who’d like to be. Many are insiders or friends of insiders. They’re not prone to rocking the boat. And if there’s drift, that drift is always in the direction of the sin nature, because no one wants to take a hard honest look at their buddies, much less their bosses.

Just how bad is our stewardship? In an average year, just 7.2 percent of SBC churches are represented at the Annual Meeting. So it’s basically nonexistent. The club pretends to watch itself.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Any SBC church may send 12 messengers. No church, not even the giant ones like Prestonwood or The Summit, may send more. The formula favors small churches, which is a very good thing since 73 percent of all SBC churches have 100 members or less.

There’s absolutely no reason faithful Southern Baptists can’t steward their seminaries and thus protect their pulpits into the far future. All it will take is prayer, effort, and will. These things have been lacking for far too long. But we don’t have to continue in sloth. By God’s good grace, the Annual Meeting is annual.

For the sake of our grandchildren, let’s make the most of it.

— This essay originally appeared at ClearTruthMedia.com.

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NOTE: Every Sunday, we shift from our normal geopolitical analysis to something more theological, as is fitting for the Lord’s Day. Some of our newer readers may not realize that I have served over the years in countless SBC leadership roles, including as an officer of the SBC’s Executive Committee, and in part as a result, many of our readers are pastors and lay leaders in the SBC. So as the Annual Meeting approaches, on Sundays at least, we publish a handful of items vital to the life of America’s largest Protestant denomination. This is one of them. — RDM

by Tim Overton
May 31, 2026

The Southern Baptist Convention stands at an important crossroads. Controversy has grown in recent years regarding churches within the Convention that employ female pastors. While some of these churches continue to cooperate with the SBC, others have been removed from Convention fellowship. The inconsistency of the current approach erodes trust and creates confusion.

The proposed “Truth and Unity Amendment” seeks to clarify this issue by requiring churches that affirm female pastors to either repent and conform to biblical teaching or be disfellowshipped from the Convention. It does not force a requirement on any church. It merely limits participation in SBC governance to those who share our stated beliefs.

In a video announcement on May 18, Dr. Albert Mohler (president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) previewed that he plans to offer this “Truth & Unity Amendment” to the SBC Constitution in Orlando at our Annual Meeting. It would add an enumerated 6th item to Article III, Paragraph 1, defining composition (exactly where the Law Amendment was attempting to amend the SBC Constitution), and the text is as follows: “Does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation.”

This amendment is not about hostility toward women. Men and women are equally created in the image of God and possess equal dignity, value, and worth before the Lord. Christianity has historically elevated and honored women in ways many cultures never have.

However, Scripture also teaches that God created men and women with distinct responsibilities and complementary roles within the family and the church. The issue before the SBC is ultimately whether the Convention will uphold what it has historically believed the Bible teaches regarding the office of pastor.

There are at least three reasons why the Truth & Unity Amendment must pass. This article will present the reasons from the least compelling to the most important.

Third, passing the Truth & Unity Amendment would provide much-needed clarity and direction for denominational leadership. Over the last several years, confusion and inconsistency have emerged regarding how Convention leaders should respond to churches that openly employ female pastors. Some churches have been disfellowshipped, while others have not, even though similar practices were involved. This inconsistency creates uncertainty, controversy, and division.

The amendment would establish a clear standard for cooperation. It would eliminate ambiguity and ensure that Convention leadership applies the SBC’s beliefs consistently and fairly. More importantly, it would help protect the denomination from future theological drift. Historically, nearly every major denomination that moved into liberal theology first embraced feminism and rejected the biblical distinctions between men and women. Once a denomination abandons biblical teaching on male and female roles, broader doctrinal compromise inevitably follows.

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Complementarianism that never affects real-life church practice becomes functional egalitarianism. If churches claim to believe Scripture’s teaching on pastoral qualifications but ignore those teachings in practice, doctrinal statements become meaningless. The SBC must decide whether its convictions will remain theoretical or actually shape church life.

Second, the Truth & Unity Amendment should pass because the Baptist Faith & Message is crystal clear on this issue. The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 plainly states that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. This statement represents the agreed-upon doctrinal standard for cooperation within the Convention.

To allow churches to openly violate that standard while remaining in friendly cooperation — which means participation in governance and voting on funding — creates confusion and undermines trust. Cooperation among Southern Baptists depends upon honesty and doctrinal integrity. Churches give sacrificially through the Cooperative Program because they believe they are partnering with churches and entities that share common theological commitments. When Convention leaders fail to uphold the standards the SBC itself adopted, confidence erodes.

This matters greatly for missions and ministry. The Cooperative Program has enabled Southern Baptists to support missionaries, seminaries, disaster relief, church planting, and evangelism efforts in the U.S. and around the world. Trust is essential for this cooperative system to function effectively. If churches begin to believe doctrinal standards are selectively enforced, unity and giving will inevitably suffer. In short, compromise means less money for missions.

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The Baptist Faith & Message should not be treated as a symbolic document with no practical authority. It should be respected, upheld, and consistently applied for the sake of cooperation and integrity.

First and most importantly, the Truth & Unity Amendment must pass because it reflects the Bible’s own teaching. Scripture is the inerrant Word of God and the final authority for faith and practice. Southern Baptists have historically stood firmly upon biblical authority, and this issue is ultimately about whether the SBC will continue to submit to Scripture even when cultural pressures push in the opposite direction.

1 Timothy 2:12 states, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” Paul grounds this theological statement in the creation order by saying, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” The qualifications for pastors given later in Scripture refer to the pastor as the “husband of one wife.” Jesus Himself selected twelve male apostles. Throughout Scripture, the pastoral office is consistently presented as a male responsibility within the life of the church.

Again, this does not diminish the importance of women in ministry. Women serve vitally throughout the Kingdom of God in discipleship, missions, teaching other women and children, hospitality, mercy ministry, evangelism, and countless other forms of service. The church could not function faithfully without godly women. But Scripture distinguishes between valuable ministry service and the pastoral office itself.

At its core, the debate over the Truth & Unity Amendment is not really about politics, power, or public relations. It is about biblical authority. Do Southern Baptists truly believe the Bible means what it says? Or will cultural trends ultimately determine doctrine and practice?

The SBC has already fought major theological battles over biblical authority during the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s. Southern Baptists should not have to refight those same battles generation after generation. Instead, the SBC should move forward with doctrinal clarity and unity so that it can focus on evangelizing a lost culture that increasingly rejects even the most basic biblical truths about human value, marriage, and sexuality.

In a society that struggles to define what a woman even is, the SBC must remain anchored to Scripture. Passing the Truth & Unity Amendment would affirm that Southern Baptists still believe the Bible, still honor their statement of faith, and still desire to cooperate together in Truth for the sake of the Gospel.

— Tim Overton is the pastor of Kingston Avenue Baptist Church in Anderson, Indiana. He is also a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Home Education Association (SBCHEA.com), and director of the Indiana Prayer Caucus. This article first appeared at the Center for Baptist Leadership, which you should follow.

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by Michael Clary
May 24, 2026

Last year, I wrote a recap of the SBC’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Dallas, arguing that it was largely a “status quo” Convention.

Despite spirited debates on the Law Amendment and women pastors (and a third vote on a constitutional amendment), calls for increased financial transparency from SBC entities, and a major vote on the future of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), when we left Dallas, it looked like not much had changed. Hence, I settled on the description “status quo.”

In retrospect, I would now say that the multi-year, coordinated efforts to force change at the ERLC, one of the most liberal entities in the SBC, over the last decade turned out to be a big win for the Reformers. Just six weeks after a 43 percent vote in Dallas in favor of abolishing the entity outright, Brent Leatherwood resigned as President of the ERLC, marking the end of the Russell Moore-Brent Leatherwood era of escalating accommodation to liberal (and frankly unbiblical) political priorities being championed at the SBC’s policy outfit.

In that piece — which, based on the feedback I received, seemed to strike a chord with many in the SBC — I cataloged what I believe are the four main groups in the SBC and their respective interests: The Platform, the Loyalists, the Normies, and the Reformers.

At the end of the day, however, we’re all Southern Baptists, and we share core doctrinal commitments and ministry priorities. For this reason, these groups are dynamic. Moving from one group to another isn’t as dramatic as switching political parties. It can be as simple as being exposed to new information, seeing things a little differently, and acting accordingly.

The Four Groups of the SBC: A Refresher

So, who are these four constituencies, and how might things have changed in the last year?

The first group is the Platform. These are the guys on the stage who set the agenda and run the SBC’s bureaucracy. They are the most static of the four constituencies, because they hold official positions in the apparatus. And since there’s a limited number of these positions, they wield enormous influence.

The second group is the Loyalists. They support the platform from their entity-sponsored blogs and messengers from the floor. They are the “platform in waiting” — company men who hope to receive committee appointments or jobs in the bureaucracy. They are (largely) driven less by principle and more by the allure of institutional power. So they make strategic calculations to ingratiate themselves with those higher up the ladder.

For example, they will not support necessary reforms, such as the Law Amendment or financial transparency, if it would cost them career advancement opportunities. If you speak with them privately, they’ll say things like, “Brother, I’m totally with you 100 percent on this issue. But you must understand, I cannot go on record with this right now because Dr. So-and-so opposes it, and I need to stay on his good side. Trust me, once I’m chair of “fill-in-the-blank” committee, we can make some real progress on it.”

But once the platform signals it’s time to address the issue, they’ll suddenly voice their support. In other words, their courage is opportunistic. You can’t count on them to hold the line when the chips are down.

There’s a bit of a stolen valor dynamic at work here. For example, Mike Law took all the arrows fighting an uphill battle for the Law amendment a few years ago. He received little institutional support or vocal endorsement from high-profile leaders.

And yet, the issue is too urgent, too clearly biblical, and the opposition’s arguments too clearly compromised for the issue to go away. Everyone knows we have to settle the matter, one way or another. So now we’re seeing more chatter from the institutional leadership class about taking action.

Don’t get me wrong, I welcome this, and I’m glad to see it.

I’m simply pointing out a political dynamic that needs to be noticed: Grassroots reform efforts cannot be given credit for their victories, lest they become an even more powerful nuisance to the institutional class in the future. That’s how the apparatus works.

The third group is the Normies. “Normie” isn’t intended to be a negative term. It simply refers to ordinary pastors and church people who don’t closely follow SBC politics. As I wrote a year ago, “In an ideal world, the SBC is run so well that all of us are ‘Normies.’ The Normies don’t follow SBC politics or issues closely (and in many ways, who can blame them), so they attend the Convention and vote based on their perception of the room at any given moment. I suspect most of them are laymen and women in their churches who love the Lord and expect to discover whatever they need to know while at the Convention.”

The fourth and final group is the Reformers. I put myself in this group. They are concerned about the direction of the SBC and are trying to bring about needed change. In recent years, the primary issues animating the reformers are the need for clarity about women pastors, the need for greater financial transparency, and corruption in the ERLC.

There’s a fifth constituency we could add, the absentees. I didn’t include them last year because they weren’t there. They are the sleeping giant within the SBC that, if awakened, could help accomplish all the Reformers’ goals very quickly. But for whatever reason, they are the ones who don’t show up at the Convention, and their absence leaves the door open for the highly motivated and mobilized progressive minority in the Convention to have their way. The Platform’s coalition is relatively small but highly motivated and reliably present. Many of them get paid to be there.

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Two Further Observations About the Four Groups

There are two further observations that can be made about these constituencies.

First, the lines of demarcation are more about posture than doctrine. In the old days of American evangelicalism, the dividing lines were clear and specific — Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and so on all knew who we were and why we weren’t in one of the other groups. In the SBC, there were clear doctrinal dividing lines, such as between inerrantists and non-inerrantists in the Conservative Resurgence, or between Arminians and Calvinists.

These days, however, the old dividing lines have been blurring within and even across denominations. Some of this is driven by the ascendency of non-denominational churches, which downplay doctrinal distinctives to attract larger audiences.

I’ll save that analysis for another day, except to make this one observation: the single biggest dividing line in evangelicalism today is the courage to fight for our convictions.

Two Southern Baptist churches a mile apart may both eagerly subscribe to the Baptist Faith & Message, including a stated complementarian position on women pastors. So on the surface, they appear nearly identical. But there is actually a massive difference between them: One church will appease and accommodate feminism and similar DEI initiatives in order to appear winsome to the world and avoid conflict. The other church will boldly oppose such things, even risking a negative reputation in town for doing so.

Both churches hold the exact same doctrinal commitments, but only one will fight for them. This willingness to fight for their historic convictions is driving the “big sort” of evangelicalism, where pugilistic Presbyterians find themselves joining Baptist churches not because they’ve changed their views on baptism but because they’re looking for a church with a spine.

The churches that are unwilling to fight for the convictions they claim to hold often make pious excuses for doing so, such as a concern for mission (“the world is watching!”), or a concern about litigation (as Jeff Iorg warned last year, if the Law amendment passed), or a concern to protect the identity of missionaries serving in hostile countries if form 990-level financial transparency measures were adopted.

Second, constituencies can shift. Since the lines of SBC demarcation are not primarily soteriological as in the old days, people can shift constituencies without changing their doctrinal commitments. In other words, concerns about encroaching feminism and wokeness can lead people to beat their theological swords into denominational plowshares, working together for reform.

These changes can be observed in real time. For example, Willy Rice, who is not a “Five Point Calvinist,” has emerged as the champion for the Reformers, yet some of his most passionate and vocal supporters are Calvinists. Why is this? Because soteriology is no longer the Convention’s most pressing concern.

In my view, soteriological debates are peace-time luxuries when the Convention is otherwise healthy and solidly conservative. But those debates must take a backseat when existential problems are plaguing our Convention, threatening to pull the levers of bureaucracy to steer the largest Protestant denomination in the world towards liberalism, even though the majority of the Convention would oppose it if they saw what was happening.

Willy Rice is also interesting because he wasn’t always in the Reformers camp. I’d still consider Rice more of a normie: he’s a faithful pastor who loves Jesus, the word of God, and the church. All the books he’s published throughout his career are the sorts of things Normie pastors care about: walking faithfully with God, church leadership, and parenting. He’s not been an activist by any stretch. And yet, Rice has courageously voiced his growing concerns about the direction of the SBC, and, in so doing, has found himself a leader among the Reformers. Both Traditionalists and Calvinists in the SBC who see the need for reform look to Rice and think, “He’s our guy.”

Not because he represents everyone’s soteriological position, but because he’s got a spine. He’s a leader who isn’t afraid to fight for the soul of the SBC.

In this way, Rice represents what I hope to become a larger trend. As Normies learn about the games being played behind the scenes in the SBC, the more they realize they can no longer blindly trust the platform. They get “radicalized,” as the kids say, and they move from being a normie to being a reformer.

I previously mentioned the “absentees,” who are the SBC’s sleeping giant. Most of them are probably normies who are focused on their local ministries. Good for them. May the Lord prosper their faithful work. Most likely, many of them aren’t paying attention to the political drama of the SBC, and that’s why they don’t show up to the annual meeting. They’ve got sermons to write, Bible studies to lead, lost people to evangelize, weddings to perform, and pastoral counseling needs.

However, I know firsthand that there are other absentees who aren’t there for a different reason. Frankly, they do follow the political drama, and they’re both disgusted and discouraged. They’re disgusted by the compromise and corruption they’ve seen in the SBC, and it makes them angry. But they feel like there’s nothing they can do about it, since it costs a lot of time and money to attend the annual meeting, and they don’t have the power to make a dent at an annual meeting with over 10,000 messengers in attendance.

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If this is you — if you’re discouraged and feel powerless to make a change — you are not powerless. You’re just not in the room. People who stay home don’t get a vote. It’s as simple as that.

Four Ways You Can Fight for Reform

So, to accomplish the needed reforms in the SBC, what can you do? I suggest the following four action steps.

First, mobilize the absentees. Every empty seat in Orlando is a vote for the status quo. Their absence always benefits the platform. The SBC was originally set up to reward the effort it takes to show up. Orlando is a home-field advantage for the reformers. It’s a drivable distance for a significant portion of the SBC, and June is a reasonable time to travel. It’s a lower barrier to entry than even Nashville or Dallas. Every cooperating church receives two messengers. Send them. Only a fraction of the SBC’s potential messengers actually show up. If they were sufficiently informed and showed up, reform efforts could make real progress. Showing up is the #1 way to make a difference.

Second, retain the Reformers. Reform efforts are hard and take time. William Wilberforce worked for reform for 46 years, suffering years of legislative defeats over a twenty-year period before achieving his first victory. The SBC’s work has an eternal impact, and it is worthy of similar dedication and resolve. Further, reformers know too much to go back to business as usual. When they get tired or discouraged, they check out and disengage. Some become absentees and stop showing up. Some leave the Convention altogether.

Third, inform the Normies. The normies are the largest group in the SBC and thus form the single biggest power block. In many ways, they represent what we all want to be: churchmen who’d rather focus on the work of the ministry, not SBC politics. And in my opinion, most normies are pre-reformers who will join the fight once they see enough evidence of corruption.

When this happens, one of two outcomes is most likely. They will either (1) join the reformers and fight for change, or (2) they disengage and depart the Convention. I’ve seen this firsthand. People come to the Convention, witness the problems directly, and end up deciding the fight isn’t worth it. Churches that leave the Convention aren’t doing so because we’re too conservative. They’re leaving because they perceive us as becoming too liberal. Or, at least, they perceive we are unwilling to defend our conservative convictions.

The refusal to fight for our convictions is functional liberalism. This is different from the theological liberalism of the early twentieth century, which denied the virgin birth and the resurrection, but it has the same effect. Functional liberalism maintains orthodox confessions on paper while refusing to defend them in practice. The functional liberal believes the right things but won’t fight for them. Refusal to fight for our convictions is functionally the same as surrendering them. And the next generation inherits an SBC that says one thing and does another.

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Theological liberalism kills churches slowly through bad doctrine. Functional liberalism kills them just as surely through failed courage.

Convictionally conservative Baptists want to be in the SBC because we want to cooperate for the purpose of fulfilling the Great Commission. But if they perceive that our Convention doesn’t have the guts to stand by our convictions, they see little reason to stay in.

Fourth, get ready to do business. There are many motions and resolutions at the annual meeting, but only a handful have real consequences. Resolutions, for example, have no binding authority. They merely express the will of the Convention on a particular matter.

This year, three issues stand out that have real teeth: (1) clarity on women pastors, (2) financial transparency, and (3) the election of a new president. In my view, the Center for Baptist Leadership has its finger on the pulse of reform efforts in the SBC, and one can get up to speed by following their essays and podcasts. Regarding the election of a new president, this is the single most important vote we take as a Convention. This year, Willy Rice is the man who has the courage, clarity, and conviction to lead the SBC to a more hopeful and fruitful future.

Conclusion: All It Takes to Win Is to Show Up

Orlando is not Dallas. Dallas was a referendum on whether reform was possible. And look at the ERLC — it is.

Orlando is a referendum on whether Reformers will show up and Normies will be persuaded that it is time for a leader who is willing to admit we have some problems and then do what it takes to solve them.

In fact, I think our meeting in Orlando is shaping up to be very similar to the Nashville Convention in 2021. According to Baptist Press, Nashville’s “2021 SBC Annual Meeting was the largest since 1995.” Baptist Press suggests that “much of that had to do with the location and the involvement of first-time messengers to the convention.” While that’s undoubtedly true (I guess location does matter), we all know that the larger turnout was also issue-driven.

Nashville was the first SBC annual meeting since the disastrous and infamous “Resolution 9” that hoodwinked Baptists into affirming godless Critical Race Theory as a helpful “analytical tool.” It was also the first Convention post-COVID. Other massive political issues were roiling the SBC, driven by the narrative of an “abuse crisis” and Russell Moore’s underhanded political dealings.

Even more, there was an outspoken Reformer running for SBC president that year: Mike Stone.

The Platform pulled out all the stops to stop Stone from winning. Sadly, they prevailed, and Ed Litton defeated Stone by a total of 6,834 votes (52.04 percent) to Stone’s 6,278 (47.81 percent), a difference of just 556 votes. Flip just 300 votes and Stone would have won. The SBC would be radically different today.

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We don’t have to lose this time. Now, the Reformers know to expect the dirty tricks. Now, more Normies are aware that everything the Reformers have been warning about for five-plus years has proven true. The Reformers aren’t cranks; they’re prophets.

Whether it was Stone vs. Litton, or the recent votes on ratifying the Law Amendment, the difference is razor-thin. The direction of the SBC is being decided by a few hundred votes each year.

This means that the single most important thing you can do before June 9-10 is to plan to send messengers. Not because one messenger changes everything, but because ten thousand reasons to stay home have kept the sleeping giant asleep long enough. Your church has at least two slots. Fill them.

And this means that the single most important vote you will cast in Orlando is for our next SBC president. We are not electing a doctrinal statement — we already have the Baptist Faith & Message for that. We are electing a man with a spine. Willy Rice is that man.

He wasn’t always a Reformer. That’s precisely why he’s the man we need. He doesn’t have a reputation of a man who moves from one battle to the next because he’s addicted to fighting. No, he’s a churchman who understands the times and paid a price for changing his mind in public.

That credibility is worth more than a lifetime of safe positions.

Opponents of the Reformers (the Platform and the Loyalists) often trot out tired old lines, such as, “This is a distraction! Let’s move on from the conflicts and get back to soul winning!” My response is that our cooperation will be less effective at soul-winning if we lack clarity about who we are, how we are led, and how our money is spent. The real crisis in the SBC is the growing number of people who no longer feel confident that the SBC represents their convictions, and giving more money could actually be funding our own demise.

There’s one thing I’m absolutely convinced of: The most powerful and evangelistically effective version of the SBC is one that rediscovers its fighting spirit for the glory of God.

We don’t need to adjust our doctrines — the BF&M is an excellent summary of our shared convictions. We just need to be willing to fight for them, even if it means enduring temporary losses and the departures of those unwilling to do so. God is honored by courage and clarity. These are the very traits we see in the book of Acts, and this is how the SBC can get back on track.

See you in Orlando.

— Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. This essay originally appeared at the Center for Baptist Leadership.

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by Mark Tapscott
May 17, 2026

Early in my newsroom career, my mentor, an old-school journalist and son of an Arkansas Methodist circuit preacher, taught me the most basic and essential lesson of credible news reporting, editing and analysis: “Get It First, But First Get It Right.”

Sadly, that rule is mostly forgotten in the Establishment Mainstream Media (MSM) these days, replaced by the endless manufacture of Leftist narratives intended to shape public understanding of events, policies, institutions, movements, and people in the public eye.

This dominant narrative that underlies and thus frames the vast majority of what passes for journalism in the MSM’s news and analysis precincts can be summarized thusly: America was founded on and remains forever a product of an enduringly virulent brand of White Racism. The country is thus epitomized, according to the Marxian Critical Race Theory that dominates academia, by politically conservative Republicans and their theologically conservative evangelical allies, especially those associated with the country’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Toss in what’s left of the conservatives in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) and the many independent fundamentalist/pentecostal congregations, plus fanatical anti-abortion Right-to-Lifers, gun-toting Second Amendment defenders, homophobes, and anti-immigrant Trumpian MAGA populists, and you have the bigoted, reactionary, boiling stew of Americans described by Barack Obama in 2008 as the frustrated, angry legions who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” For Hillary Clinton in 2016, they are a “basket of deplorables.”

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Two more recent media events focused on the SBC and several of its most prominent public figures provide vivid illustrations of this reality. The first event is the May edition of Texas Monthly (TM) magazine with a news and politics feature entitled “He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations.”

The second event is the release of the cinema-documentary produced by CrossPolitic.com and entitled “How the SBC Got Played.” Using the Five-Phases strategy first explained by Professor Gary North in his Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, the cinematic-documentary describes how Woke activists and liberal academics within and without the SBC used the flood of abuse allegations referenced in the TM title, as well as a multitude of other similar allegations, to put the denomination’s future on an extremely dangerous footing.

Let’s look at the TM piece first. For those who don’t know, TM is an original voice on behalf of forever ending the Red dominance of the Lone Star State and converting it to an imitation of Deep Blue states like California and New York. Churches affiliated with the SBC have long been highly influential in Texas politics and culture, so it’s no surprise that those who seek to change the state fundamentally would put those congregations and their most prominent leaders in the crosshairs.

Paul Pressler is the primary subject of the TM headline, while almost equally prominent in the lengthy piece written by Robert Downen is Paige Patterson. To understand where Downen comes from, it is only necessary to read this from his TM biography: “Before joining TM in 2025, he covered politics and extremism for The Texas Tribune, where his work on the influence of far-right megadonors and white supremacists on the Texas GOP won or placed for numerous national investigative awards.”

In other words, Downen has made a career out of applying the White Racist Narrative and related indictments to conservative Republicans.

Pressler was a former Texas attorney, appellate judge, and conservative activist within the SBC who helped mastermind the “Conservative Resurgence” within the convention, beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing back and forth to this very day. Pressler died in 2024 at the age of 94.

Former Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) President Paige Patterson was a close friend and associate of Pressler. The latter was accused of sexually abusing young men and boys, while the former was accused of covering up sexual abuse of women at the seminary. Thanks in great part to an avalanche of reports bearing Downen’s byline and those of other like-minded journos and columnists, Pressler and Patterson became in the minds of many disgusting symbols of the rot at the heart of the SBC.

Here’s Downen’s summary portrait of Pressler:

“You might not know Paul Pressler’s name. But your life has been profoundly affected by the fruits of his labor. Though he may not be as familiar as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or other lions of the religious right, few have done more to shape our modern political and religious landscapes. Fueled by an unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy — the notion that Christian scripture is the perfect, literal word of God — Pressler in the eighties and nineties pushed the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second-largest faith group, into a civil war that drove moderates from its ranks.

“As the architect of the SBC’s so-called conservative resurgence, Pressler — or ‘the Judge,’ as many knew him — played a crucial role in the marriage of the Republican Party and the white evangelical voters who still sustain its power. For nearly four decades he served as a quiet GOP power broker, helping elevate generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill, and the White House.”

Note the sequential linking of the “lions of the religious right,” “unyielding belief in biblical inerrancy,’ and “moderates” driven out of the SBC, with “the marriage of the Republican Party and white evangelical voters who still sustain its power” and the “GOP power broker” who elevated “generations of conservative Christians to the Texas Legislature, Capitol Hill and the White House.”

Now add what Downen describes as “four decades’ worth of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations” creating Pressler the Sexual Predator Avatar and you have closed the powerful guilt-by-association lock at the heart of Downen’s narrative about “the effete young man with a high-pitched, nasal drawl” who became a momentous power-broker from the live oaks on the campus of Pressler’s beloved University of Texas at Austin all the way to Congress and the Oval Office.

And then there is Patterson, who joined with Pressler in a New Orleans French Quarter bar in 1967 where, according to Downen, “in the early-morning hours, over hot chocolate and powdered beignets, the two resolved to rescue the SBC from liberalism. They left without a formal plan, Pressler wrote in his memoir. But they spent the next decade quietly plotting.” And winning, over and over.

Once their victory within the SBC was won, Downen describes Patterson heading to Fort Worth where he took over the SWBTS:

“As their allies killed meaningful abuse-related reforms[within the SBC], the heroes of the conservative resurgence enjoyed the spoils of their conquest. Patterson was named president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, in 2003. He had ornate stained glass depictions of Pressler, himself, and other conservative-movement heroes installed in the school’s chapel.

“He banned female professors in the school of theology, citing his belief that women should not teach or have authority over men in spiritual life. And as enrollment plummeted, employees were laid off, and the school’s deficit reached $100 million, the seminary provided Patterson with a private chef and began building an on-campus facility that included a nearly six-thousand-square-foot apartment and library to serve as his residence for life.”

Given such luxurious predilections, it was probably inevitable that Patterson’s tenure on the Cow Town seminary campus would be marked by controversy. And then came allegations that Patterson approved violence against women and pressured several who claimed to have been raped to keep quiet about their ordeals.

And then there was Jen Lyell.

Downen explains:

“A former student from the SBC’s North Carolina seminary told The Washington Post that after she was raped in 2003, Patterson, who was then the school’s president, pressured her to forgive her assailant and not contact police. Trustees at the SBC’s Fort Worth seminary learned of a similar allegation from 2015, in which Patterson wrote in an email to campus security that he wanted to meet with a rape victim so that he could ‘break her down.’”

“Suddenly the #ChurchToo movement was national news, bolstered by thousands of evangelical women who signed an open letter condemning Patterson and demanding that the SBC confront its mistreatment of abuse survivors. Few knew who had penned much of the letter: Jen Lyell.”

In the weeks following, Patterson was ousted, then sued by Jane Roe, who accused him of gross negligence in his handling of her case in which she reported being raped on campus by a gun-carrying male who had stalked her. All of this and more broke as the SBC was convulsed amid a flood of allegations reported by Downen and others of sexual abuses of young men and women that were covered up by church leaders. And, ironically enough, a young man named J.D. Greear, who told Downen that Patterson was his “spiritual father,” became President of the SBC.

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Downen presents a massive case against Pressler and Patterson, all of it presented as cogs in the sequential linking that are locked in as the defining narrative of his analysis.

But here’s something Downen ignored completely: In a March 25, 2023, decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Sherman Division, Judge Sean D. Jordan ordered that “all of Plaintiff Jane Doe’s negligence and gross negligence claims against defendants Patterson and SWBTS are dismissed with prejudice.”

And there was also something Downen fails to mention regarding Pressler, despite his having examined, he claimed, thousands of pages from the man’s archives and conducted interviews with countless accusers. Downen notes one such interview, with a former Pressler judicial colleague, who told the FBI Pressler was guilty of homosexual acts:

“As a longtime Baylor regent and SBC moderate, [Jaclanel McFarland] was on the front lines of the battle against Pressler and knew him personally from her career as a judge in Harris County. Far more than whispers about Pressler’s sexuality, she told me, there were abundant suspicions about his relationships with boys and young men, including the personal assistants and mentees with whom he often shared hotel rooms.”

Not just “whispers,” but “abundant suspicions”? Having covered Congress for four decades, I cannot count how many ‘abundant suspicions” I have heard about generations of senators and representatives in both parties, but which I never reported because honest journalists report facts, not suspicions or whispers. And now perhaps you know why Downen never mentions the fact that Pressler was never charged with a single criminal sexual act.

Which brings us to the second recent media event here in focus, the release of the cinema-documentary “How the SBC Got Played.” Another journalism maxim I learned early on in my career was this: “Sometimes, what they don’t tell you is more important than what they do tell you.”

Downen’s failure to disclose that 2023 federal district court decision exonerating Patterson’s handling the Roe case is a key fact about the Pressler/Patterson saga in order to reach an informed judgment about those men, as well as the trustworthiness of Downen’s TM article.

But it is essential to understand how decisions and actions taken by key players on both sides of the sexual abuse issue in the SBC during and following the Pressler/Patterson saga reflected the underlying strategy employed by opponents of the conservative leadership of the denomination. That strategy is the five-phase operation dramatically exposed in the impressively documented “How the SBC Got Played” cinedoc, a “masterclass on institutional capture.”

“Most people think the abuse crisis in the SBC was straightforward; there were predators in the pulpit, a denomination that looked the other way, and survivors who finally got justice. But that’s not the story. That’s the story you’ve heard, but that’s not what happened,” as narrator David Shannon (aka “Chocolate Knox”) explains at the outset of the video.

There is far more factual detail and incisive analysis in the video than there is space here to cover in a reasonable reading time, so allow me to focus on two crucial facts: First, the five phases include these:

Phase One: Exploit the Moral Vulnerability — No person or institution is perfect, so there is always a moral weak spot that can be elevated and redefined as a sin so evil that every person even remotely linked to its presence or perpetuation must be removed.

For the SBC, there was a contextually prefacing evil and a present-defining evil; the former being the denomination’s Antebellum support of Southern slavery; while the latter was the sexual abuse scandal. Because it took the denomination so many postbellum decades to repent of the former, that delay became the sequential link to the latter.

Phase Two: Redefine the Threat — This is how the delay became the sequential link. Defending the procedural responses of the conservative SBC leadership to the cascading abuse allegations was cast as analogous to the long-delayed repentance of slavery support.

Those who uphold procedural and scriptural safeguards and requirements are thus recast as villains using their power and position to obstruct the saintly efforts of those defending the alleged victims of sexual abuse. The convenient and destructive result is that the Saints are presumed to be truthful, while their institutional opponents — the Villains — are assumed to be at fault and serving morally illegitimate purposes.

Phase Three: Force the Procedural Surrender — As the video so vividly demonstrates, the forced surrender came on Oct. 5, 2021, when the SBC Executive Committee voted 44-31 to cave to the demand of the Saints that the denomination waive attorney-client privilege and cooperate with an outside investigative entity without questioning any of its requests or actions.

In the debate on the committee, the waiver became the litmus test for demonstrating whether one was on the side of the Saints or of the defenders and protectors of the sexual predators in the pulpits and churches. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why won’t you waive attorney-client privilege to prove it?” was the defining argument.

The problem here is that attorney-client privilege is not a tool of coverup, it is rather a protector of fairness and equal justice in a legal proceeding seeking to determine the praise-and-blame determining facts of a controversy. Once the privilege is lost, the institution is all but defenseless against any and all charges.

Phase Four: Use the Surrendered Weapons — In this case, the outside investigation, which produced a 228-page Guidepost “report” termed by many in the MSM as “devastating” and a “bombshell” that left no doubt whatsoever that the SBC was shot-through with sexual predators who were protected by denominational leaders at all levels.

Phase Five: Inherit Everything — Having utterly discredited the conservative leadership of the SBC, those on the Executive Committee and in the “Woke” churches took over the denomination’s reins. End of story.

Actually, no, because, as the video demonstrates with awesome documentation, here’s what really happened:

The Guidepost Report was audited by Amy McDougal, a former Air Force attorney and certified compliance professional. McDougal’s conclusions were the genuinely devastating bombshells. The Guidepost investigation was not licensed by any state. Conducting such an investigation without a license is a crime in Tennessee, where the SBC was headquartered.

In the audit and other court documents, it turned out that the Guidepost “investigation” had investigated nothing. Rather, it accepted at face value the allegations of those claiming to be victims of sexual abuse at the hands of SBC-affiliated individuals and only sought “corroboration” from the attorneys for those claimants.

Chief among these was attorney Rachael Denhollander, who represented accuser Jennifer Lyell and played multiple behind-the-scenes roles in an effort to discredit the SBC’s conservative leadership. And multiple individuals who were either accused of committing sexual abuse or of possessing exculpatory or expository evidence were never interviewed by the Guidepost investigation.

Finally, a backgrounder prepared by the creators of the video focuses in on the crucial role of Denhollander, explaining that:

“Rachael Denhollander was simultaneously serving in four roles throughout the investigation. She was attorney for Jennifer Lyell, pursuing maximum settlement against the SBC. She was advisor to the Sexual Abuse Task Force overseeing the investigation. She operated the abuse hotline funneling survivor testimony into the investigation. And she edited the Guidepost report itself — in direct violation of Guidepost’s own engagement letter, which explicitly prohibited Task Force members from editing the report before publication.

“Any one of these roles would have required recusal under standard investigative ethics. The combination of all four constituted a comprehensive corruption of the investigative process. McDougal’s audit uncovered Denhollander’s edit requests from May 17, 2022, in which she described herself as the “driving force” behind the entire investigation:

“’This would absolutely not be happening if [Lyell’s case] had not happened. This has been the topic of conversation and the lynchpin for why we are here.’ She then specified what she wanted Guidepost to include. Guidepost’s recorded response: “I’m okay with this if you want to modify the language... I’ve always felt we didn’t add enough about the settlement.” The woman whose client stood to benefit financially from the report was editing the report about her own client. The lead investigator was taking direction from the lead plaintiff’s attorney.”

Hopefully, this column provides sufficient motivation for every reader to dig into the evidence presented herein and to watch the entirety of the “How the SBC Got Played” cinedoc. The sad reality is that for far too many Americans, what they were told about the SBC was anything but the whole story.

— Mark Tapscott is an award-winning senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand. He is also the founder and editor at HillFaith (which you should support), the former Executive Editor and Chief of Investigative Reporting at the Daily Caller and Executive Editor of the Washington Examiner. He served as a consulting editor on the Colorado Springs Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Other Than Honorable” and being elected to the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.

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by The Baptist Report
May 10, 2026

A new documentary by CrossPolitic examines the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) abuse crisis through a sharply different lens than the one that dominated national headlines in 2019. According to the filmmakers, the story the public heard—predators in pulpits, institutional indifference, and long‑awaited justice for survivors—misses the deeper procedural and political forces that reshaped the nation’s largest conservative Protestant denomination.

The film traces its origins to July 23, 2019, when Founders Ministries released a trailer for By What Standard. The trailer briefly included a blurred image of attorney and abuse survivor Rachel Denhollander. Within days, three board members resigned from Founders Ministries, a moment the documentary now frames as an early indicator of the cultural pressure surrounding the SBC’s unfolding crisis. As the narrator recalls, “They did not want to be associated with questioning that woman.”

Four years later, the documentary argues, court filings would reveal what it calls “massive conflicts of interest” surrounding the SBC’s internal investigation—an investigation that ultimately cost the denomination more than $13 million and contributed to the sale of its Nashville headquarters.

A Five‑Phase Playbook

The film’s central thesis draws from economist Gary North’s 1996 book Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, which outlined a five‑phase strategy for ideological capture within religious institutions. The documentary asserts that the SBC followed this pattern “step‑by‑step,” not through theological debate but through procedural leverage.

If you or your organization are facing a sex abuse or sexual harassment claim, or if you are yourself the victim, my friends at Chalmers Adams can help. Click here.

According to the documentary, the phases unfolded as follows:

• Phase One: Exploit a moral vulnerability.
  The filmmakers argue that years of public apologies over racism and social justice concerns conditioned the SBC to accept guilt on terms set by outside activists.

• Phase Two: Redefine the threat.
  Institutional self‑defense — particularly around legal protections such as attorney‑client privilege — was reframed as complicity in abuse. The documentary highlights a 2021 statement from Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler urging the SBC Executive Committee to waive privilege, warning that the denomination would “long remember” those who resisted, all while refusing to do so at his own institution.

• Phase Three: Force procedural surrender.
  Under intense pressure from pastors, denominational leaders, and survivor advocates, the SBC Executive Committee voted to waive attorney‑client privilege during an outside investigation. Twenty-four members resigned in protest, including longtime SBC attorney Jim Guenther, who wrote that he could not advise a client willing to abandon “this universally accepted principle of confidentiality.” At the same time, even the Biden Justice Department — which later cleared the SBC of wrongdoing — ordered U.S. Attorneys not to request waiver of attorney‑client privilege due to its manifest unfairness.

• Phase Four: Use the surrendered weapons.
  The documentary cites a 2025 compliance audit by attorney and former Air Force officer Amy McDougall, which concluded that the SBC’s chosen investigative firm, Guidepost Solutions, lacked required licensure and departed from standard investigative practices. McDougall’s report also documented extensive conflicts of interest, including Denhollander’s simultaneous roles as attorney for a key accuser, advisor to the task force, contributor to the abuse hotline, and editor of the final report.

• Phase Five: Inherit everything.
  With leadership turnover, depleted reserves, and ongoing litigation, the documentary argues that the SBC was left structurally weakened while the investigative process empowered a new ideological faction within the denomination.

A Crisis Reframed

The documentary revisits several high‑profile cases, including the allegations brought by former and now deceased SBC employee Jennifer Lyell. While Lyell described a 12‑year abusive relationship with seminary professor David Sills, the documentary notes that no criminal charges were filed and that Sills was never interviewed by Guidepost. The film argues that the case became a “pressure point” used to force institutional change.

The filmmakers also highlight the Department of Justice’s 31‑month investigation into the SBC, which concluded in 2025 with a single charge unrelated to abuse or cover‑up. The SBC spent more than $2 million responding to the inquiry.

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Broader Institutional Patterns

CrossPolitic situates the SBC’s turmoil within a wider historical pattern, comparing it to the theological and procedural shifts that reshaped Harvard, Yale, Princeton Seminary, and the Presbyterian Church (USA). The documentary suggests that the same dynamics — moral leverage, procedural restructuring, and leadership realignment — are now at work in other conservative denominations.

A Media Project With a Mission

Produced by CrossPolitic, the documentary reflects the media organization’s stated mission to “put Jesus over politics” and build a new ecosystem of Christian media. The group describes its work as a response to what it sees as a progressive tilt in mainstream journalism and a need for “bold, joyful, biblically grounded” reporting.

Watch the CrossPolitic documentary below:

— This article originally appeared at The Baptist Report, to which you should subscribe.

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by Rod D. Martin and Ryan Helfenbein
May 3, 2026

What does God require of you in your economic relationships? Find out in today’s video.

The world hates Capitalism, because they hate God’s commandments (and they hate even having to read them). The world loves Socialism, because they love covetousness and idolatry.

This does not permit Capitalists to sin. But that’s the point. God doesn’t allow sin from anyone. Fraud and theft are impermissible to Capitalists, for both Biblical and secular reasons. But fraud and theft are features of Socialism, along with the repudiation of every other commandment.

In this episode, Ryan Helfenbein and I discuss why Capitalism matters, why it’s rooted in Scripture, and why it has created more prosperity for more people than any other system.

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by Rod D. Martin
April 26, 2026

The rumors of Christianity’s demise were not merely exaggerated. They may have been exactly backward.

A year ago, Pew Research Center released one of the largest surveys of American religion ever conducted, finding that after decades of decline, the Christian share of the country had stabilized. Christianity was no longer in freefall. The “Nones” — atheists, agnostics, and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” — had stopped their long march upward.

The secularization story every elite institution treated as inevitable had hit a wall.

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, 29 percent were religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent belonged to non-Christian religions. More importantly, Pew found that the Christian share had been relatively stable for five solid years, since around 2019.

Now the story has advanced.

Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025.

That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead.

For decades, it seemed America was following Europe’s path toward a post-Christian society: churches emptying, traditional belief systems collapsing, and no end in sight. The media, academia, and Democrat policymakers gleefully anticipated the day when Christianity would be an afterthought, a relic of an outdated era.

Meanwhile, a “Third Way” movement within the church, led by popular figures like Tim Keller and Russell Moore, sought to be “winsome” to people whose beliefs were not merely non-Christian but actively anti-Christian — sort of like begging a bully not to hurt you.

Every bit of that was wrong.

The Numbers Have Stabilized. There’s a Reason.

Last year’s Pew study surveyed over 35,000 American adults across all 50 states, making it one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. Its results were striking:

• 62 percent of American adults still identified as Christian, including 40 percent Protestants and 19 percent Catholics.

• The religiously unaffiliated — the “Nones”, or those identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” — held at 28 percent, virtually unchanged from multiple previous surveys.

• 7 percent of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism.

• The percentage of Christians remained stable over the five years from 2019-2024, marking the first time in decades that the decline had stalled.

Christianity experienced a severe decline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1990, roughly 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian. By 2007, Pew found that number had already dropped to 78 percent. By 2014 it was 71 percent. In the latest Pew Religious Landscape Study, it stood at just 62 percent. It is not insignificant that the steepest declines took place in the Obama years.

That sounds grim until you notice the trend line. The plunge has stopped.

Now the secular side of the ledger appears to be shrinking. The “Nones” have not merely hit a plateau. They appear to be retreating:

• 36.2 percent nonreligious in 2022.

• 35.6 percent in 2023.

• 34.1 percent in 2024.

• 31.8 percent in 2025.

Burge calls that decline statistically significant. He also notes that the General Social Survey points the same way, with the religiously unaffiliated falling to 25.2 percent. In other words, this is not just one odd data point. It is a pattern.

But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?

The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. The people who were leaving Christianity were not leaving because conservatives were “mean,” or because Christians “lacked winsomeness,” or because the church failed to wrap historic orthodoxy in the therapeutic language of NPR.

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They left because they were leftists. The belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.

Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left.

There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

And they don’t.

So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

Good.

The Left’s Exodus from Christianity

Why does Woke Socialism repel Christian belief? Because the left’s worldview is completely incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.

Progressivism champions moral relativism. Christianity demands objective moral law.

Progressivism deconstructs the family unit, asserts the right to murder children, and claims that all sorts of sins are “love.” Christianity actively opposes all these things.

Progressivism says objective truth is impossible, that “math is racist” and “2 + 2 = whatever the Party tells you.” Christianity asserts not merely objective truth but precisely one such truth.

Progressivism defines you by your skin color, sexual preferences, or other superficial or behavioral characteristics, asserting that there are oppressors and oppressed, and that the latter cannot sin and the former cannot repent. Christianity says we’re all one race, all descended from Adam, and that all who believe are adopted into one family whose Father is God. It also says that deviant behavior is not your “identity”: you are not a prisoner of your sins, you are not defined by them, and there is both escape and redemption in Christ.

Progressivism worships the state, because its adherents can control the state and “become like God.” Christianity acknowledges not just a higher but an absolute and sovereign Authority Whose laws are above any enacted by mere men, and cannot be changed by their whims.

But let’s put that another way. Have you ever met anyone who converted to orthodox Christianity and, as a result, suddenly started advocating for Drag Queen Story Hour, or abortion-on-demand, or the abolition of the nuclear family, or the deconstruction of the faith?

Of course not.

Typically, new converts leave progressivism behind and embrace the values and the issues generally considered “conservative” in our debased cultural moment. As Machen pointed out a century ago, Christianity and theological/political liberalism are completely different religions, even when they share the same terms. They cannot coexist in harmony, certainly not within a single person.

The Pew survey confirms what many of us have known for years — leftists are running from Christianity because their politics demand it.

Consider these statistics:

• 61 percent of self-identified liberals identified as Christian as recently as 2007; that’s now just 36 percent.

• More than half (52 percent) of liberals now identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 16 percent of conservatives.

• Among Democrats, Christian identification has fallen from 74 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2024. Without African Americans, it would be a small fraction of that.

• Republicans remain overwhelmingly Christian (82 percent), with only 14 percent identifying as religiously unaffiliated.

Christianity’s decline was never simply about intellectual skepticism or an embrace of “science over faith.” Lots of so-called “Christians” never truly were. Now that Democrats feel emboldened to seize control of society, the modern left has openly treated traditional religion as an obstacle to its ambitions, not as a positive or even a neutral institution.

From attempts to coerce churches into endorsing same-sex marriage and abortion to outright hostility toward public displays of Christian faith, the message has been clear: Christianity must conform to Woke ideology, or it must be dismantled.

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Hence, for most white Democrats, church affiliation is a lot of effort for no reward. If anything, it makes you suspect or outright unacceptable to your peers. And if you truly believe in transgenderism, abortion on demand, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (not to mention ESG, DEI, SEL, etc.), why would you waste a perfectly good Sunday morning in a church?

Unless you just really like singing in the choir, you have better things to do.

Bottom line, particularly for white liberals, it has become much more socially acceptable to make snarky comments deriding “Sky Daddy” than to continue to feign belief.

Conservative values act as an on-ramp to Christian belief, while Woke ideology functions as an off-ramp. Since 2007, the percentage of self-identified liberals who claim to be Christian has plummeted by nearly half. Among conservatives, that decline has been minimal, from 89 percent in 2007 to 82 percent today.

The Pew data dismantles the tired claim that Christianity has suffered due to its perceived entanglement with conservative politics. If anything, it proves the opposite.

Young conservative men helped drive the stabilization, and they may now be helping drive the reversal. They are embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology, secular despair, and the cultural war against masculinity itself.

And that portends a much greater societal and cultural upheaval to come.

Young Men Are Finding Faith

Now the newer data make that point even sharper.

Gallup’s newest data show a remarkable shift among young men ages 18–29. In 2024–25, 42 percent of young men said religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier. Young women, by contrast, remained roughly flat at about 30 percent. Gallup says young men now surpass young women on this measure by a statistically significant margin, a stunning reversal of the long-standing pattern in which young women were more religious than young men.

Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, those days are over.

This is a very, very big deal.

For generations, churches have been feminized. So has education. So has HR. So has corporate life. So has almost every “respectable” institution in America. Boys and young men have spent their entire lives being told that masculinity is toxic, ambition is suspect, leadership is oppression, and strength is dangerous unless it can be harnessed for the left’s political ends.

They were told to apologize for existing.

Christianity tells them something very different.

Christianity tells men they are sinners, yes. But it also tells them they are made in the image of God. It gives them a Father. It gives them a mission. It gives them discipline, hierarchy, purpose, sacrifice, courage, repentance, forgiveness, and ordered liberty. It tells them to become husbands, fathers, builders, protectors, providers, and leaders. It tells them that their strength is not a pathology. It is a stewardship.

No wonder they are listening.

The secular regime has produced loneliness, sterility, addiction, pornography, despair, broken families, cowardice, and an entire generation of young men who were told there was no higher purpose than self-expression and consumption. Then COVID came along and revealed the moral hollowness of the whole thing. The experts lied. The bureaucrats bullied. The schools closed. The churches too often complied. The media demanded fear. The state demanded obedience.

And millions of young people learned a lesson they will not soon forget: a life without God does not produce courage. It produces cowering compliance.

Those who obey a higher authority than government are harder to control. That was obvious during the pandemic. It remains obvious now.

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If you are a young conservative man in America today, odds are increasingly good that you also identify as religious, and probably Christian. Why? Because the war on Christian values, the war on masculinity, and the war on national identity have all been fought on the same battlefield. To be a conservative today is to reject the nihilism and moral relativism that Wokeness has imposed.

So suddenly, Christianity is a lot more attractive.

But not the “seeker sensitive” kind. Not the lukewarm, focus-grouped, skinny-jeans-and-fog-machine version. Not the “let’s apologize for everything the Bible teaches and hope the left likes us” version.

If you’re not getting the real thing, you have better things to do.

Not Just Identity, But Practice

There are other signs as well.

Barna’s 2025 State of the Church data show weekly Bible reading among American adults rising to 42 percent, up 12 points from a 15-year low in 2024. Among self-identified Christians, the number reaches 50 percent, the highest level in over a decade. Millennials rose to 50 percent, while Gen Z rose from 30 percent to 49 percent in a single year. And like the others, Barna also reports that younger men are now outpacing younger women in Scripture engagement.

This is all incredibly surprising, but it really shouldn’t surprise us. Materialism does not answer the questions human beings actually ask. It cannot tell a young man why he exists. It cannot tell him why he should marry, have children, tell the truth, master his appetites, or die for something greater than himself. Secularism promises liberation and delivers chaos leading to tyranny. It promises autonomy and delivers loneliness. It promises pleasure and delivers despair.

Christianity tells the truth about the world as it actually is.

That is why it endures.

The Future of Faith in America

Is Christianity in America experiencing a full-scale revival? It’s too soon to tell.

But what is clear is that the once-unstoppable march toward secularism has hit a wall. The easy deconversions are over. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. What remains are those whose beliefs run deep, who have weathered the cultural storm, and who are now finding strength in the very faith the elites told them was fading.

Ironically, the very people who’ve long decried “cultural Christianity” have gotten what they said they wanted, even while doing their level best to drag the Church to the left.

The battle for America’s soul is not over. Indeed, as the Book of Judges shows us, it is never over, not until Christ comes. But for the first time in a long time, Christianity is no longer retreating. And if history tells us anything, it’s that faith doesn’t just survive adversity — it thrives in it. What Aaron Renn calls “negative world” may be just the tonic the faith in America needs.

The church may have been battered, but it is far from broken. In fact, it may be on the brink of something extraordinary.

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NOTE: This incredibly encouraging piece from our friends at The Baptist Report deserves two additional statistics. According to the Iranian government’s own data, 54 percent of Iranians are now “non-religious”: whether that actually means only “non-Islamic” is unclear. But according to that same data, 50,000 of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have closed over the past decade.

The Ayatollah has long told Iranians that he and his government are Islam. It seems that the Iranian people have come to agree with him. And that presents some unprecedented opportunities. — RDM

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NOTE: This Deep Dive by my friend Jon Harris is pretty long, but it covers the topic extremely thoroughly. If reading on the desktop version, be sure to use the Table of Contents on the left-hand side to jump quickly to key sections. — RDM

by Jon Harris
April 12, 2026

I have never been that interested in discussing eschatology, but as of late, so much error has been spread on the internet about the Bible and the church’s teaching on the nation of Israel that I think I have a responsibility to offer some clear guidance from the Bible and church history on the issue.

We are fairly inoculated here against errors stemming from date setting, dual covenant theology, in which it is claimed that Jews can be saved apart from belief in Jesus, and uncritical political support for Israel as a religious tenet. (Here are links if you want a video presentation of this information or are a supporter and would like to download a …

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by Rod D. Martin
April 20, 2025

I am not one to “take someone’s word for it”. I have built an entire career on facts, logic, science, and reasonable inferences therefrom. Many of those inferences seemed counterintuitive at the time, but were correct, precisely because of the other three.

That’s exactly how I came to faith. Christ miraculously redeemed me, but in His kindness to meet each of us where we are, He presented my skeptical heart with the historical case for believing in Him. That was exactly what I needed to see, and it opened the door to the intimate, personal relationship with Him that’s available to all who place their trust in Him.

God is our Creator. He owns everything and everyone. We are rebels, subject to a traitor’s death. But God provided an escape, paying the price of our treason by entering history in the flesh and shedding His own sinless blood for all those who “confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God raised Him from the dead”. Nor does He make us mere servants: once set right judicially, He adopts us as His own sons and daughters, “co-heirs with Christ”.

That’s what Easter is about.

Easter is not about bunnies. It is not about eggs. It is not a celebration of springtime, nor is it a warmed-over pagan fertility rite in Christian clothing. It is about a claim so bold, so outrageous, and so world-shattering that if it’s true, it changes everything.

That claim is this: that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish carpenter crucified under Pontius Pilate, physically rose from the dead three days later.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Not as a nice symbol of renewal or a poetic expression of hope. He walked out of a sealed tomb in the middle of Roman-occupied Judea, showed Himself to hundreds of eyewitnesses, and transformed history so radically that time itself was eventually divided by the date of His birth.

Believing that is a big ask. But let’s be honest: a God who could not do such a thing is no God at all. The miracle is that He would do it.

The resurrection is the very center of Christianity. And if it didn’t happen, the entire Christian faith collapses. As the Apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Christianity is not a philosophy of life. It is not a self-help system. It is not one religion among many. It is the declaration that God entered history in the person of Jesus Christ, and that He proved it by rising from the dead.

The Trilemma: Who Is This Man?

C.S. Lewis, the great Oxford professor and former atheist who wrote Mere Christianity, put it plainly. Jesus did not leave us the option of calling Him merely a “good moral teacher.” That line may sound respectable today, but it is not rational. Because Jesus didn’t just teach love and kindness. He claimed to be God.

“I and the Father are one,” He said (John 10:30). “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), deliberately using the sacred name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. When His disciple Thomas declared, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus didn’t correct him — He accepted the title.

This brings us to Lewis’s famous trilemma. If a man goes around claiming to be God, there are only three logical possibilities:

1. He is a liar — He knew He wasn’t God, but deliberately misled people, making Him evil and certainly not a great moral teacher.

2. He is a lunatic — He genuinely believed He was God, but was out of His mind, like a man who thinks he’s a poached egg.

3. He is Lord — He really is who He claimed to be.

But what you cannot say is that He was just a good teacher. “A man who was merely a man,” Lewis writes, “and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”

The Resurrection Is the Crux

Josh McDowell, who through Keith Whitworth led me to Christ, popularized Lewis’s trilemma in the phrase “Lord, liar, or lunatic?” and applied it directly to the resurrection. McDowell, also a former skeptic, began his investigation of Christianity intending to disprove it. Instead, he became one of its most prominent defenders.

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Why? Because the evidence for the resurrection, when honestly examined, is astonishing.

Here are just a few facts that demand explanation:

1. The Empty Tomb – Even the enemies of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty. The authorities spread the story that the disciples stole the body, which only makes sense if the tomb was in fact empty. But how could a group of terrified fishermen overpower professional Roman soldiers? And even if they could, they couldn’t assume success going in. Why would they be willing to die for a lie?

2. The Eyewitnesses – Jesus appeared physically, bodily, to many people after His death. Paul records in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, and even to more than 500 people at once, “most of whom are still alive.” This was written within 25 years of the event — far too soon for myth or legend to develop. Anyone could check the facts. And many did.

3. The Transformed Disciples – On the night of Jesus’ arrest, His disciples fled. Peter even denied Him three times. They were defeated, confused, and in hiding: they had incorrectly believed He had come to overthrow the Romans and establish a physical kingdom in Jerusalem; they struggled to imagine that instead the Romans would kill Him. Yet within weeks they were boldly proclaiming that Jesus had risen — and they were willing to suffer torture and death for that claim. Men may die for what they believe to be true, but no one dies for what he knows is false.

4. The Explosion of the Early Church – Christianity should never have survived the first century. It proclaimed a crucified Jew as the risen King of the world. It directly contradicted the mandatory claims of the Roman Emperors. It faced persecution, ridicule, and death. Yet it exploded in the first century, and within two centuries more it conquered the Roman Empire — not by the sword, but by testimony.

5. The Conversion of Skeptics – Saul of Tarsus (later the Apostle Paul) was a Pharisee, an enemy of the church who hunted down Christians. But he had a direct encounter with the risen Christ that transformed him overnight. Likewise, James, the brother of Jesus, was a skeptic during Jesus’ lifetime — yet he too became a leader in the early church and died for his faith. What would it take to convince you your own brother was God?

No Other Explanation Works

Many theories have been offered to explain away the resurrection. All of them fail.

• The Swoon Theory? Jesus didn’t really die, they say — He just fainted. But Roman soldiers were experts at execution, and the purpose of crucifixion was itself a torturous death from which no one was allowed to escape, much less recover. The soldiers even speared His side to confirm He was dead. And if somehow Jesus revived in the tomb, half-dead, bleeding, and crippled, He would not have inspired worship: He would have needed a doctor.

• Mass Hallucination? Hallucinations are personal. 500 people don’t hallucinate the same thing, at the same time, in multiple places, at least not without mass media manipulation. And hallucinations don’t eat breakfast with you on the beach, like Jesus did with His disciples (John 21).

• Stolen Body? By whom? Not the Romans — they wanted to crush the movement. Not the Jews — same reason. Not the disciples — they were terrified, and had nothing to gain but death. And again: why die for something you know you made up?

The best explanation for the empty tomb, the eyewitness accounts, and the explosion of Christianity is simple: Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Why It Matters

This is not a mere intellectual curiosity. It is the most important question you will ever face.

If Jesus rose from the dead, He is exactly who He said He is: the Son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth. And that means every one of His claims is true.

He said He came “to seek and to save the lost.” He said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” He promised, “Whoever believes in Me will not perish, but have everlasting life.”

The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on all of it. As Paul says in Romans 1:4, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead.”

If Jesus is Lord, then you must deal with Him. You cannot ignore Him. You cannot brush Him off as a wise man or moral teacher. He claimed your allegiance. He died for your sins. He rose again to offer you eternal life.

You Must Decide

The choice is yours.

You can say He was a liar, but liars don’t speak with the moral clarity of the Sermon on the Mount, or die forgiving their murderers.

You can say He was a lunatic, but lunatics don’t articulate logically-consistent brilliance, or found the greatest movement in human history.

Or you can say He is Lord — and fall at His feet in worship.

That is what Easter demands of you. Not a basket of candy. Not a sunrise service with pretty music. But a verdict.

As Jesus asked His disciples, so He asks you: “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

What will you say?

This Easter, don’t just enjoy the holiday. Examine the evidence. Confront the reality. And respond to the risen Christ. He is not just a figure of history. He is alive. He is King. And He is calling you home.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” —Romans 10:9

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

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Further Reading:

• Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

• Evidence That Demands a Verdict — Josh McDowell

• The Case for Christ: Solving the Biggest Mystery of All Time - Lee Stroble

• Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels - J. Warner Wallace

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by Mark Tapscott
April 4, 2026

Summer sweltered in Philadelphia in July 1776 when delegates to the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence drafted by the young Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, with sage advice and counsel of John Adams of Massachusetts.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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,” the Declaration said in words heavily influenced by the Christian faith practiced by most of the 56 signers and the vast majority of the people they represented in the 13 British colonies that thus became the United States.

The foundational document of the new nation informed the world that Americans believed God created human beings while equally blessing each of them with fundamental individual rights that no government could justly viol…

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NOTE: We are republishing this important essay Rod wrote for Good Friday last year.

by Rod D. Martin
April 18, 2025

Every year, as Christians around the world celebrate Easter, skeptics revive a familiar claim: that Easter is just a repackaged pagan festival. They point to spring fertility rites, to goddesses like Ishtar and Eostre, and to symbols like eggs and rabbits, declaring Christianity guilty of cultural plagiarism.

But these assertions, repeated so often they’ve become clichés, collapse under any serious historical scrutiny. The truth is simple: Easter isn’t pagan, and neither are its origins. Rather, it is the central celebration of the Christian faith, grounded in real events, rooted in Jewish (not pagan) practice.

Perhaps some of the people who claim otherwise are simply used to distrusting authority (a good thing). A few may feel “superior” by asserting “hidden knowledge” (which is not at all a good thing: it’s pride, or gnosticism, or both).

But the truth is, even if Easter had all manner of pagan trappings (it does not), it wouldn’t matter: Christ came to conquer and redeem all things. That’s the whole point of the Resurrection: our Lord even conquered death! And Scripture tells us that it is indeed that Resurrection which is our hope, and that if it is not true then “we are to be the most pitied among men.” (1 Corinthians 15:17-19)

One online commenter suggested today that “nowhere does Scripture command us to celebrate Easter”. But if we need to be commanded to celebrate the Resurrection of our Redeemer, do we really believe at all?

Christmas was not “originally the Saturnalia”. Easter is not just a fertility rite. But it wouldn’t matter. Every knee, and everything, shall bow to Jesus Christ our risen Lord. “He is making all things new”, which means that previously they were old.

Still, let’s examine the evidence.

The Central Claim: Pagan Parallels

The argument that Easter is pagan generally takes two forms. First, critics claim that early Christians simply borrowed from pre-Christian fertility rites to make their new religion “more palatable” to the masses. Second, they argue that since many ancient religions had myths about dying and rising gods — Osiris, Tammuz, Mithras, or Dionysus — Christianity is just one more retelling of an old myth.

Both claims are superficial, historically ignorant, and logically incoherent. They also deny the faith.

Let’s start with the obvious: correlation does not equal causation. Why would we be surprised that pagans had holidays? Lots of them? Some overlapping with Christian ones?

Perhaps even more to the point, why should we be surprised to find Satan defiling actual holy days with his filth and lies?

Why should we let him get away with it? The critics seem to think that Satan and his pagan minions came first, not the Creator God.

The existence of seasonal festivals in spring, a time of agricultural rebirth, is neither surprising nor threatening to the claims of Christianity. Human societies, particularly agrarian ones, have always celebrated seasons. That some of these celebrations took place near the Jewish Passover — the actual historical setting of Jesus’ death and Resurrection — is coincidence, not conspiracy.

It’s just nonsense.

The Christian claim is not that Jesus symbolically rose like crops in the spring. The Christian claim is that Jesus physically, historically, rose from the dead in a specific week, on a specific day, in a specific city, under a specific Roman governor. Christianity is not a seasonal myth — it is an historical faith rooted in eyewitness testimony.

The Passover

What skeptics ignore — or never knew — is that Easter is rooted in the Jewish Passover. All four Gospels locate the death and Resurrection of Jesus during the Passover week. Jesus is repeatedly called the “Lamb of God,” a reference to the Passover lamb whose blood the Israelites in Egypt had placed as a sign on their doorposts, demonstrating their faith so the Lord would pass them over as He poured out judgment on their oppressors.

The Last Supper itself was a Passover meal. Paul, writing within twenty years of Jesus’ death, explicitly connects Christ’s Resurrection with Passover, calling Him “our Passover lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7) and asserting that His Resurrection occurred “on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:4) — a reference to the Hebrew Bible, not Babylonian, Egyptian, or Norse myth.

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The earliest Christians, almost all of whom were Jewish, did not need pagan holidays to build their calendar. They already had one. And they tied the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection directly to Passover — its actual well-witnessed date — not to the vernal equinox or some fertility goddess. The very name of the celebration — Pascha — is the Greek and Latin word for Passover. To this day, most Christians around the world — Eastern Orthodox, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and many others — still call it Pascha or a local derivative (i.e., Pascua de Resurrección in Spanish, Pâques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Paşti in Romanian, Paskha in Russian).

The English word “Easter” is an historical outlier, not the norm.

So What About the Name “Easter”?

The etymological argument is one of the weakest — and most frequently cited — by critics. Many claim “Easter” comes from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, supposedly worshiped in springtime rites involving hares and fertility symbols.

The problem? This theory, popularized only very recently in the 19th-century by the monk Bede, rests on extremely thin evidence: a single passing reference in De Temporum Ratione, written around A.D. 725. No archaeological evidence, no liturgies, no myths, and no other textual sources mention this goddess at all, much less any celebrations tied to her.

But even if Bede was correct (and he wasn’t) that would prove only that English and German speakers used a local word for a Christian holiday. In German, Easter is Ostern. But again, in virtually every other major language the word used derives directly from “Passover”.

Christianity was not borrowing paganism. The English language, much later, was borrowing a Germanic word for spring.

It’s also worth noting that naming conventions prove nothing about the origin of the thing itself. The English days of the week are named for Norse gods: Thursday is “Thor’s day,” and Friday is “Frigg’s day.” But no one suggests Christianity is secretly worshiping Odin when we go to church on Sunday. Names change. Language evolves. Our God does not.

Dying and Rising Gods?

Another popular but equally flawed theory asserts that Christianity copied its central event — the Resurrection — from ancient myths about dying and rising gods. Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Dionysus in Greece — these figures are trotted out as supposed prototypes of Christ.

This is simply not something a Christian can believe. But it’s also not believable.

Each of these myths differ in substance, not just detail. Osiris dies and becomes king of the underworld, but he never returns to earthly life. Tammuz dies and returns cyclically, but there is no once-for-all Resurrection. Mithras doesn’t die at all in his myth. And Dionysus’ story involves dismemberment and rebirth in various tellings, none of which even vaguely resemble the Gospel narratives. And in any case, none of these myths make historical claims about a unique, bodily Resurrection in real space and time.

More importantly, the earliest Christian writings — especially Paul’s letters — show no trace of these myths. Paul was a rigorously monotheistic Jew and one of the leading theologians of his day even prior to his conversion. His letters are saturated with references to the Old Testament, not Greco-Roman mythology. His Christology is drawn from Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalms — not from Isis or Ishtar.

If Christianity had borrowed from paganism, you would expect syncretism in its earliest texts. You would expect rituals, stories, or symbols that mirrored pagan cults. Instead, you find Jewish categories — Messiah, sacrifice, covenant, Resurrection — applied to a Jewish man crucified under Roman authority and afterward witnessed alive by hundreds.

The early church didn’t copy pagan myths. It upended them.

The Ishtar Myth: A False Internet Meme

One of the most viral claims about Easter is that it derives from the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar (pronounced Eesh-tar), a deity of fertility, love, war, and sex. A popular meme circulates every year, usually around Holy Week, declaring:

Easter is actually the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex... Her symbols (like the egg and the bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols... After Constantine decided to Christianize the Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus.

This meme is almost pure fiction.

For starters, there is no linguistic connection between Ishtar and Easter. The names sound vaguely similar in English, but they come from entirely different language families. Ishtar is Akkadian, derived from the Sumerian Inanna. Easter, as already noted, comes from the Old English Ēastre (or possibly Ēostre), a name mentioned in passing by Bede to describe a local spring festival. There is no historical or etymological link between the two.

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Moreover, there is no evidence that Christians in the early centuries of the church ever associated Easter with Ishtar or with any rituals surrounding her. Nor are there any serious scholars who support this theory, whether Christian or otherwise.

The Ihstar “connection” is pure internet folklore, not academic history. Even secular scholars of ancient religion find this claim laughable. The meme conflates phonetic coincidence with historical causality — and ignores the deep Jewish foundation of Christian Resurrection theology.

So why do people believe it? Likely because it's catchy, subversive, and easy to share. But ease of repetition doesn’t make it true. Ishtar has no part in the origin of Easter, either in name or in meaning.

Eggs and Bunnies

Skeptics often point to Easter eggs and rabbits as “proof” of pagan influence. It’s true that eggs and rabbits have long been symbols of fertility in various cultures. But their use in Christian celebration developed much later — and they were not originally religious symbols at all.

Eggs were forbidden during Lent in the early Middle Ages, so when the fast ended, Christians feasted on them at Easter. Decorating eggs became a festive custom, not a theological statement. Similarly, the Easter bunny traces its origins to German folklore in the 1600s — not exactly a time known for its paganism — and did not become widely associated with Easter until the 19th century in America.

These customs are cultural, not creedal.

Cultural accretions around holidays are inevitable. That doesn’t mean the holiday is pagan. It means it’s popular. And in cultures shaped by Christian belief, that popularity grew around Christian truth.

The Historical Reality

Finally, and most importantly, the entire premise of the “Easter is pagan” argument ignores the historical claims of Christianity. The Gospels don’t tell us that Christ rose in the spring, like Persephone emerging from Hades. They tell us He rose on the third day, during a specific Passover, witnessed by real people who were willing to die for what they saw. This wasn’t a seasonal myth. It was a shocking, world-shattering event that transformed cowards into martyrs and a small Jewish sect into a global faith.

The early Christians didn’t celebrate the Resurrection because it fit the seasons. They celebrated it because they believed it had happened. And they marked that celebration not with rites to a forgotten goddess, but with hymns, baptisms, Scripture readings, and communion — the breaking of bread in remembrance of Christ’s body, and the cup in remembrance of His blood, He Who is our Passover (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Christianity conquered paganism not by imitation, but by contradiction. The early church grew because it refused to bow to the emperor, refused to offer incense to idols, and refused to reduce Jesus to just one more myth in the pantheon of dying gods. It proclaimed a risen Christ, victorious over sin and death, and it did so all too often at the cost of its own blood.

No, the Empty Tomb Is Not a Fertility Rite

Easter is not pagan. Its foundation is Jewish, its meaning is historical, and its message is uniquely Christian: that God has entered history, died in our place, and risen in triumph over the grave.

Attempts to tie Easter to pagan mythology fail not only historically, but theologically. They misunderstand the nature of the Christian claim and misrepresent the evidence that supports it.

If the Resurrection is true, no pagan myth can diminish it. And if it is false, then no pagan parallel can redeem it. But Christians don’t gather on Easter morning because of myths or metaphors. They gather because a tomb was empty — and still is.

That is not pagan. That is the Hope of the world.

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