This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

Share

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

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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.

Share

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.

Share

See Also:

Recent Analysis:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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.

Share

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.

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.

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.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

See Also:

Recent Analysis:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

Share

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.

Follow Rod's New YouTube Channel!

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.

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.

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.

Share

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.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.”

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.

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.

Share

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.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

Share

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.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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.

Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024.

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.

Share

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.

Join Rod's 275,000+ Followers on X!

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.

Share

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.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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

by The Baptist Report
April 19, 2026

War is hell. But more importantly, the impact of war results in deaths of those who do not profess Christ as Lord, condemning their souls to eternal torment in hell.

As the United States and Israel carry out significant and potentially regime-changing military action and political pressure intensifies in Iran, speculation grows about the future of the Islamic Republic. Christian leaders and regional analysts are increasingly asking a consequential question: What would the fall of the Iranian regime mean for the spread of Christianity across the Middle East?

Across multiple sources — from the Denison Forum’s Faith & Clarity podcast to reports from osvnews.com and other sources — a theme emerges: Iran may be on the brink of the most significant spiritual shift in the region in centuries.

A Nation Under Pressure – and Spiritually Awakening

For more than four decades, Iran’s clerical regime has enforced strict religious controls, criminalizing conversion and driving Christian worship underground. Christians face severe persecution, including arrests and harsh penalties for practicing their faith.

Yet paradoxically, this pressure has fueled unprecedented spiritual openness. Hormoz Shariat — often called “the Billy Graham of Iran” — told the Denison Forum that despite persecution, “many Iranians are turning to Jesus through underground churches, dreams, and personal encounters with Christ.”

According to Persecution.org, Iran now has the fastest‑growing evangelical population in the world, a trend that predates the current conflict but has accelerated as disillusionment with the regime deepens. Estimates suggest there are more than a million Iranian converts to Christianity despite the country’s severe persecution. The growth is largely attributed to house church movements and personal connections among believers.

If the Regime Falls: A New Religious Landscape?

Analysts agree that a post‑regime Iran would likely experience a dramatic shift in religious freedom and spiritual exploration. Here’s how:

1. Could Freedom of Worship Expand Rapidly?

Under the current system, even attending a house church can result in years‑long prison sentences. One Iranian mother, Narges, received 17 years simply for participating in a home gathering.

A new government — especially one not rooted in Islamist ideology — could dismantle these restrictions. As one observer puts it, “A new government could lead to greater religious tolerance, allowing Christians to worship freely and openly.”

Share

2. Underground Churches to Public Communities

Iran’s house‑church movement is vast, decentralized, and resilient. Shariat’s ministry alone has documented more than 100,000 conversions through satellite broadcasts. He notes that believers exist “in every city and town,” ready to form public congregations once it becomes safe.

Shariat predicts that within months of regime collapse, “we will be able to plant tens, maybe hundreds of churches.”

3. Disillusionment with Islam Fuels a Search for Alternatives

Multiple sources highlight a profound spiritual shift: millions of Iranians are rejecting the regime’s version of Islam. A survey cited by the Denison Forum found that 84% of respondents expressed negative views of Islam, while 92% held positive views of Jesus and Christianity.

This cultural moment — rare in the Islamic world — creates fertile ground for Christian growth.

Regional Ripple Effects

Iran is not an isolated nation. Its religious, political, and cultural influence extends across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf. A post‑Islamist Iran could:

• Reduce pressure on Christian minorities in proxy‑controlled regions

• Shift regional narratives about Islam and religious identity

• Inspire reform movements in neighboring countries

• Open new pathways for Christian media and missions throughout the Middle East

As a Denison Forum commentator noted, “Perhaps God is stirring in a fresh way… to bring spiritual awakening, religious freedom, and a whole sense of flourishing to Iran and the surrounding region.”

Challenges Ahead

A regime collapse would not automatically usher in a Christian renaissance. Several realities need to be taken into consideration:

• Secularism may surge first, as Iranians seek distance from all organized religion.

• Political instability could delay open worship.

• Decades of surveillance and distrust will take time to heal.

Still, Christian leaders inside Iran remain hopeful. An observer summarized, “The fall of the Iranian regime could create a more favorable environment for Christianity to flourish.”

A Historic Opportunity

If Iran’s regime falls, the Middle East may witness something unprecedented: the first modern Islamic nation to experience a large‑scale turning toward Christianity.

Shariat puts it bluntly: “History is in the making… Iran will be the first nation that rejects Islam and comes to Christ.”

Whether that vision becomes reality remains to be seen. But the spiritual groundwork laid quietly through decades of underground faithfulness suggests that the fall of the Iranian regime could mark a watershed moment for Christianity in the region.

Watch “Iran, War, and the Surprising Growth of Christianity” on YouTube:

— This article first appeared at The Baptist Report, which you should follow.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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 PowerPoint to use for your own purposes).

However, now there is a strong current on the internet to portray Jewish people dishonestly, reject the promises made to ethnic Israel, and claim Christians who think God’s covenant with Abraham still applies to modern Jews are somehow heretical. There are even voices now questioning Jesus’s Jewish identity. This corrupts our hermeneutics, questions God’s promises, undermines Christ’s human nature, and cuts us off from our own church history.

This is why I have decided to teach on God’s sovereign election of ethnic Israel as a chosen nation, distinct from other nations, and the instrument by which God reveals “His glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises” (Rom. 9:4).

Most of the attacks on this doctrine stem from a political angle that opposes industrial, military, or diplomatic support for the modern nation-state of Israel or sees Jewish people as uniquely evil. I believe there are some legitimate concerns about the extent to which we have financially invested in other places while we have massive debt here at home. There is also little doubt that secular Jewish people have contributed in high percentages to liberal causes. But we should not allow political outlooks to determine our theology.

If you go online today, you will see a lot of poorly argued diatribes against dispensationalism, Protestantism, or Zionism, sometimes conflating them, that seem to assume the belief in a future ingathering for Israel or the restoration of a future Davidic kingdom are somehow novel developments that have brainwashed decent, ordinary, conservative leaning Christians into a lie intended to benefit modern Jewish people. You will also see regular re-articulations of the exclusivity of Christ for salvation or the fact that Christians are following the true Jewish religion, as if these are relevant points or are being denied by those who also believe God has a future plan for ethnic Israel.

In reality, the hope that God holds a special place for ethnic Israel and will finish restoring them in some capacity is traceable to the origins of our faith, derives from clear biblical teaching, and has been the conviction of many of the church’s greatest theologians from the past regardless of disagreements over the timing and nature of this restoration.

This is a relevant conversation for us for two reasons. First, in Romans 9-11 Paul argues that gentiles can have faith in God’s promises to them because God also keeps His promises to ethnic Israel. If God will not fail in the unique promises He made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He will not fail in the promises gentile believers are included in.

Second, we need to have a theological category for what the modern state of Israel does or does not represent theologically because there are all kinds of claims, ranging from the notion that Jews are God’s permanent enemies post-70AD, all the way to the idea that the modern nation state of Israel represents the beginning of the restoration prophesied by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. This second question has a political dimension today, and I do have my own strictly political thoughts about this, but for our purposes we will only focus on theology.

There are three simple points I want to make. First, the Bible consistently speaks about a future completed restoration of ethnic Israel. Second, spiritual fathers throughout church history believed this promise. Third, the command to bless Israel is still in effect.

The Restoration of Israel

The complete fulfillment of God’s promises to ethnic Israel features, at the least, an “ingathering” in which Israel experiences universal salvation, and, at the most, a “restoration” in which the land promised to Abraham is possessed during the Messiah’s earthly reign.

God’s promise to Abraham is first found in Genesis 12:1-3, where God promises Abram a land, nation, and blessing:

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

God reminds Abraham of His promise nine more times throughout the book of Genesis and specifies that the land promise will ultimately expand to the region between the River of Egypt (Wadi) and Euphrates River (Genesis 15:18), that it will include many nations and kings (Genesis 17:5-6), that circumcision will be the sign of the covenant (Genesis 17:11), that Abraham’s seed will rule over their enemies (Genesis 22:17), and that the covenant will be established with Isaac and not Ishmael (Genesis 17:18-21).

In Genesis 15, God ratifies the covenant and makes it unconditional by passing between a turtle dove and a pigeon, along with a cow, goat, and ram cut in half while Abram was in a deep sleep. This meant that, unlike the Mosaic covenant, which made blessings contingent upon obedience, the Abrahamic covenant’s fulfillment was only conditioned upon God’s promise to Abraham.

Islamic Interpretation

Because Islamic interpretations are becoming more popular, even in right-leaning political circles, I should note that Muslims hold to a different version of events. In Surah Al-Baqarah 2:124, the Koran says:

And [mention, O Muhammad], when Abraham was tried by his Lord with commands and he fulfilled them. [Allah] said, “Indeed, I will make you a leader for the people.” [Abraham] said, “And of my descendants?” [Allah] said, “My covenant does not include the wrongdoers.”

In this section (124-130), which addresses Israel’s claims to religious legitimacy over Islam, the Koran teaches that both of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, built the first Mosque, the Kabba in Mecca, and that from Abraham and Ishmael would come a “Muslim nation.”

Whereas in the Bible, God changes Abram’s name after Ishmael’s birth and in anticipation of Isaac’s birth and the fulfillment of the covenant through him, Muslims do not believe this happened and focus more on the significance of Ishmael.

Share

On this view, there is no land promise for Israel or future salvation through a Messiah by which all people would be blessed.

Abraham to Moses

As the book of Genesis unfolds, we find the Abrahamic covenant is further narrowed from Isaac to Jacob (Genesis 28:13-15). Jacob deceives Isaac, receives the blessing from him, and then flees his brother Esau by going to Paddan-aram (Syria) from Beersheba (southern Israel). On his way, he stops at Luz (12 miles north of Jerusalem) and has a dream where God reveals Himself and applies to him the land, nation, and blessing He promised Abraham.

He tells Jacob: “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Jacob renames the place Bethel and returns to it in Genesis 35. At that point, God appeared to Jacob again, renamed him Israel, and promised to give the land to Abraham to his descendants, who constitute the twelve tribes of Israel.

Of course, a famine struck the land, and Israel’s sons moved to Egypt to buy grain, where they were enslaved for 400 years, as God said they would be in Genesis 15:13. But Exodus 2:24 states that “God heard their groaning; and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God brings them out of Egypt, and throughout Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, the land promise is reiterated multiple times and applied to the nation of Israel.

Joshua and Solomon’s Partial Fulfillment

God also reveals an additional scenario that must take place before the complete fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. In Leviticus 26:40-45, before the spies even enter the land of Canaan, God tells Moses that He will eventually punish the nation of Israel for their disobedience by exiling them to the land of their enemies, where they will subsequently repent of their sin and return to enjoy the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant. Moses wrote:

40 ‘If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me— 41 I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies, or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity, 42 then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land. 43 For the land will be abandoned by them, and will make up for its sabbaths while it is made desolate without them. They, meanwhile, will be making amends for their iniquity, because they rejected My ordinances and their soul abhorred My statutes. 44 Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I so abhor them as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God. 45 But I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am the Lord.’

This passage is important because it reveals that neither the conquest of Canaan under Joshua nor the expansion of the kingdom under Solomon can be the final fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. Joshua 21:45 describes Israel possessing all the land, even though they never reached the borders of the Euphrates. Yet it states: “Not one of the good promises which the LORD had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass.” Similarly, under Solomon’s reign, while the full extent of the borders promised to Abraham were never reached, Israel did exact tribute from the nations that lived within that area. 2 Chronicles 9:26 says “[Solomon] was the ruler over all the kings from the Euphrates River even to the land of the Philistines, and as far as the border of Egypt.”

Some theologians understandably think these events mark the final fulfillment of the land promise to Abraham. There are some problems with this view, though. First, God promised Abraham (Genesis 15:18), Moses (Deuteronomy 11:24), and Joshua (Joshua 1:4) possession, not just control, of the land from the River of Egypt (Wadi) to the Euphrates. Second, the historical scenario of rebellion, captivity, repentance, and return had not taken place yet. Third, the Abrahamic covenant is described in Genesis 13:15 as an everlasting covenant, using the same term (“olam”) that Genesis 9:16 used to describe the Noahic covenant. Fourth, the Abrahamic covenant is a singular promise to institute a land, nation, and blessing together, not separately.

Furthermore, God tells Joshua in Joshua 13:1 that “very much of the land remains to be possessed.” John Calvin commented on the seeming discrepancy between Joshua 21:43, where “the Lord gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it,” and Joshua 13:1, where the whole land is not under Israelite possession. Calvin said:

In order to remove this appearance of contradiction, it is necessary to distinguish between the certain, clear, and steadfast faithfulness of God in keeping His promises, and the effeminacy and sluggishness of the people, in consequence of which the benefit of the divine goodness in a manner slipped through their hands. Wherefore . . . although they did not rout them all so as to make their possession clear, yet the truth of God came visibly forth, and was realized, inasmuch as they might have obtained what was remaining without any difficulty, had they been pleased to avail themselves of the victories offered to them. (Commentary on Joshua)

In other words, his explanation is that God promised and enabled Israel to possess all the land, but they only occupied a portion of it. Their achievement was a fulfillment, and they were authorized to completely fulfill the promise, but it was not a final fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant due to their own weakness.

Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, Israel never fully realized the complete fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. In 931 BC, the kingdom was divided between the ten northern tribes and the Judeans and Benjamites in the south. Assyria captured the northern kingdom in 722 BC, and Babylon captured Judah in 586 BC and carried many of the Jews to Babylon. Then, around 538 BC, Ezra and Nehemiah returned with some of the Judean exiles, rebuilt the temple and the walls around Jerusalem, but they were also eventually conquered by Rome in 63 BC and were under Roman occupation until the time Christ came.

Jewish Expectations

At this point, it is important to understand what was going through the minds of the Jews when Jesus arrived on the scene. Some additional expectations developed during this period. Not only were the Jews looking for liberation from Rome and the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham that they would occupy the promised land, but they also expected the Messiah to usher in this kingdom, which is why they shouted Hosanna (“save us”) during Jesus’ triumphal entry in Matthew 21:9.

Join Rod's 275,000+ Followers on X!

In 2 Samuel 7:12-16, God had reiterated His promise to provide a permanent land for Israel and peace from her enemies. But He also revealed that David’s dynasty would be established forever.

Psalm 89:3-4 says: “I have sworn to David My servant, I will establish your seed forever And build up your throne to all generations.” Jews during Christ’s time expected a descendant of David to deliver them and usher in the final fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus is identified as this promised Jewish Messiah, and this feature of His identity is intrinsic to His identity.

The first verse of the New Testament says: “The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1). The angel Gabriel tells Mary in Luke 1:32-33 that “the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end.” Mary then declares that God “has given help to Israel His servant, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his descendants forever” (Luke 1:54-55).

Zechariah also identifies Jesus as the Messiah and fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant (Luke 1:68-79). Nathanael tells Jesus in John 1:49, “You are the King of Israel.” Pilate even nails a sign on the cross that says: “JESUS THE NAZARENE, THE KING OF THE JEWS” in John 19:19-22. Paul says “[God] raised up David to be their king . . . From the descendants of this man, according to promise, God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus” (Acts 13:22-23) and that Jesus was “born of a descendant of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3).

If Jesus were not “the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah” (Revelation 5:5), He could not be the Messiah. The New Testament writers go to great lengths to demonstrate that Jesus fulfilled this role and his lineage is now emphasized in many of the historic creeds and confessions. However, the Jews also expected the Messiah to usher in a kingdom marked by certain features.

The coming kingdom would be a time of peace when “the law will go forth from Zion, And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem . . . never again will they learn war” and “the wolf will dwell with the lamb” (Isaiah 2:2-4; Isaiah 11:6). It would be marked by prosperity, where “the youth will die at the age of one hundred” (Isaiah 65:20) and where people will say, “This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden” (Ezekiel 36:35). It would also be a time of spiritual renewal, when God would “pour out [His] Spirit on all mankind” (Joel 2:28) and institute a new covenant by writing His law on Israel’s hearts so that they would know Him (Jeremiah 31:31-34). The Messiah would build a new temple (Zechariah 6:12-13), God’s presence would fill it (Ezekiel 43:5), and sacrifices would be made (Jeremiah 33:18). It would be a time of reunion, as Israel and Judah were brought back together from the nations where they had been scattered (Ezekiel 37:15-23). And God would rule over the entire world (Zechariah 14:9).

Religious Jews today are still looking for the coming Messiah, the defeat of their enemies, the restoration of the temple, and the Davidic kingdom. I saw a recent video of IDF soldiers singing, “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.”

The Messiah and The New Covenant

The problem modern religious Jews have is the same problem many of their forebears 2,000 years ago had during Christ’s first coming. Just as Leviticus 26:40-45 said there would be a period of rebellion and exile before a restoration and final realization of the Abrahamic covenant, so there also needed to be a final atoning sacrifice for sin, Israel’s general rejection of the Messiah, and the extension of the gospel message to the gentiles in the institution of the church as the manifestation of God’s spiritual kingdom.

For example, Isaiah 53 foretold a suffering servant who would be “despised and forsaken,” “pierced through for our transgressions,” and “crushed for our iniquities,” and yet would not open his mouth. Psalm 22 described the same figure whose hands and feet are pierced, whose garments are divided by casting lots, and who cries, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Daniel 9:26 predicted, with remarkable precision, the exact year the Messiah would be cut off, 69 prophetic weeks, or 173,880 days from Artaxerxes’ decree in 445 BC, which is AD 33.

Yet in John 12:34, the crowd say: “We have heard out of the Law that the Christ is to remain forever; and how can You say, ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’?” They did not understand what the prophets taught about Jesus. The disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:21 likewise said: “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel.” They assumed Jesus must not have been the promised Messiah because Israel was still under Roman occupation.

But, one day, during the restoration, they will. Zechariah 12:10 states:

“And I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him, like the bitter weeping over a first-born.”

This promise is echoed by Paul in Romans 11 when he states: “All Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26) because “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).

This brings us to the present question. Christians have been wondering since Acts 1:6: “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” and Jesus answers, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority” (Acts 1:7). Jesus talked about the “kingdom of God” for His entire ministry as a spiritual reality “in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21) that one enters upon being “born again” (John 3:3-5). He could have corrected their Old Testament assumptions and said the kingdom was never tied to a physical nation, but is a present spiritual reality. But He did not, because its full realization was still to come.

The New Covenant fulfilled an aspect of the Abrahamic Covenant, but it was not the final fulfillment. Under the New Covenant, Jesus is the “seed” by which “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Acts 3:25). Paul describes this as the “gospel itself” (Galatians 3:8). It was not a new concept though. Both 1 Chronicles 16 and Psalm 105 also describe the singular “seed of Israel” as distinct from the “Sons of Jacob, His chosen ones” and the salvation of the gentiles was prophesied by Moses (Deuteronomy 32:43), David (Psalm 67:2-4), and Isaiah (42:1–7). Jesus Himself told the Pharisees that “if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me” (John 5:46).

The Church and the New Covenant

What the Jewish leaders failed to see at Christ’s time was what Paul calls the “mystery” (Ephesians 3:6), that believing gentiles would be added to the Jewish religion on the basis of faith without needing to become proselytes and keep Jewish ceremonial laws. Instead, the dividing wall of “commandments contained in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15) is broken down and there is no spiritual separation between believing Jews and gentiles. This fulfilled the promise God made to Abraham that through his seed all the earth would be blessed. Paul explains that it is through Christ that this promise is realized, writing that “in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (Galatians 3:14).

Share

Under the New Covenant, believers’ bodies become the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), which is also the sign of the New Covenant and symbolized by baptism (Ezekiel 36:27, 2 Corinthians 1:22, Matthew 28:19-20). The Passover meal gains new significance, symbolizing Christ’s atonement (1 Corinthians 5:7). Gentile believers are considered “Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:29) without becoming Jewish proselytes. Paul also says “a Jew who is one inwardly” is circumcised “of the heart, by the Spirit” (Romans 2:29) and that the “Israel of God” is composed of both Jews and gentiles (Gal 6:16).

Gentiles who believe are now spiritual Jews. But, Paul also reminds us that ethnic Jews are not rejected in this arrangement because a remnant of believing Jews still exists and so does the promise of restoration.

Paul says that a remnant of spiritual Israelites always existed within ethnic Israel. The idea of a spiritual remnant would not have been a new concept to Jewish people at that time. Both Isaiah (Isaiah 10:22-23) and Micah (Micah 7:14-20) talked about this and stories like Elijah and the 7,000 faithful Israelites illustrated it. The prophet Micah talked about how God “passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession” and would ultimately rule with a scepter, perform miracles, humble nations, and forgive Israel all their sins because of the “unchanging love to Abraham, Which [He] swore to [Israel’s] forefathers from the days of old.” (Micah 7:14-20).

These spiritual Jews, who were also ethnic Jews, retained their ethnic identity and heritage. Paul asks: “God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew” (Romans 11:1-2). Thus Paul continued Jewish practices like circumcision (Acts 16:2), taking vows (Acts 18:18), and participating in temple purification rites (Acts 21:26). But he insisted that such observances were not required for salvation. The ceremonial distinctions of the Mosaic law were completely fulfilled in Christ, such as animal sacrifices for forgiveness (Hebrews 10:1-18) or dietary restrictions (Acts 10:13) that barred gentiles from participating in the covenant community.

This means that spiritual Israel, which is composed of the remnant of ethnic Israel along with gentile believers in Christ, are partakers of salvation and members of the church. It also means that God has a special plan for ethnic Israel yet to be fully completed. In Romans 11:25 Paul spoke of ethnic Israel as under a “partial hardening . . . until the fullness of the Gentiles [conversions] has come in” after which point he says: “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

Jesus also predicted in the Olivet Discourse (Luke 21:24) that “Jerusalem will be trampled under food by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.” After the Triumphal Entry, during His famous “Woe to the Pharisees” teaching Jesus states that the “house” of Jerusalem will be left desolate and that the religious establishment in Jerusalem will no longer see him until they proclaimed: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 23:39).

Church History and Israel

The consensus in the early church was to take these promises in a literal fashion as referring to a future national spiritual restoration. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) believed God would gather “the people of the Jews” in Jerusalem where they would repent of their rejection of Christ. (First Apology [c. 155–157], ANF 1:180). Tertullian (c. 155–240) said God “will favour with His acceptance and blessing the circumcision also, even the race of Abraham, which by and by is to acknowledge Him” (Against Marcion [c. 207–208], ANF 3:448). For this reason he said Christians should “rejoice . . . at the restoration of Israel” because “the whole of our hope is intimately united with the remaining expectation of Israel” (Tertullian, On Modesty [c. 208–220], ANF 4:82).

Origen (c. 185–253) stated: “When the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and Israel comes to salvation at the end of time, then it will be the people which, although it existed long ago, will come at the last and complete the fullness of the Lord’s portion and inheritance” (Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans [c. 246], ACC: New Testament 6.291). Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386), John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Jerome (c. 347–420), and Augustine (354–430), among others, believed in a future mass conversion of Jews as promised.

Some early church fathers also expressed a belief in the restoration of the land promises to ethnic Israel or the creation of a third temple. Unlike the majority of church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202) applied the ingathering to all saved people, but he also believed that the Lord would construct the temple in Jerusalem where the antichrist would eventually sit. (Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies [c. 180], Book V.25). Victorinus of Pettau (c. 230–304 AD), who wrote the first full commentary on Revelation (c. 270), also believed there would be a third temple (Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse, ch. XIII.13).

Jerome (c. 347–420) believed that “in the latter days” God would gather the called remnant from the people of Judah” to Jerusalem. (Jerome, The Prophet Joel, in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina [Turnhout, 1953-] 76, 198 [c. 400s]) Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) likewise thought that “the entire multitude of [the diaspora of] Israel will possess the region of the nations” as a “sign of blessing from God.” (Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Obadiah [c. 420s], PG 71:593)

For most of church history, despite periods of persecution, there was a general political tolerance of Jews that was not afforded to pagans. This is may largely be due to the fact that Augustine taught that the existence of Judaism served as a living testament to the truth of Christianity both because their Bible foretold Christ and their condition in the diaspora confirmed the Bible’s judgment upon them (James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews [2001], 218).

Join Rod's 275,000+ Followers on X!

After the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), hostility toward religious Jews began to increase, particularly from the Dominicans and Franciscans, who did not see modern Jews as compatible with European society. (Donald M. Lewis, A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century [2021], 33–36)

Restorationism

While Jewish conversions had always taken place, a movement to focus more attention on reaching Jews with the gospel increased during the Reformation. Martin Bucer (1491–1551) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605) emphasized the promises to ethnic Israel in Romans 11. The Geneva Bible (1560) reinforced this interpretation. Soon, major religious figures in England such as Thomas Brightman (1562–1607), Sir Henry Finch (1558–1625), William Gouge (1575–1653), and John Milton (1608–1674), and came to believe in the future restoration of Jews in the diaspora to the land of Canaan. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) convened the Whitehall Conference (1655), which readmitted Jews to England and positioned the nation as a divine instrument for Israel’s restoration.

Historian J. Van Den Berg said that “virtually all Dutch theologians of the seventeenth century [believed] ‘the whole of Israel’ indicated the fullness of the people of Israel ‘according to the flesh.’” Theologians in that tradition, such as Jacobus Koelman (1633-1695) also believed ethnic Jews would return to “their land” and “rebuild Jerusalem” (Eschatological Expectations, 145). Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) said that “the kingdom of the converted Jews who, returned to the Holy Land, would govern the world together with Christ” (151).

German Pietists such as Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) also took an active role in evangelizing Jews. The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (1809), founded by German-Jewish convert Joseph Frey, embodied this focus on Jewish conversion. In fact, one of the society’s missionaries, Alexander McCaul (1799–1863) believed he contributed to the emergence of Reform Judaism, which rejects the Talmud’s authority, by refuting certain teachings in the Talmud (McCaul, The Old Paths, 1880).

This focus on the prophetic significance of ethnic Jews and participation in Jewish evangelism led to “restorationism,” which expected a physical restoration of Jewish people to Palestine and was popular among Anglo-American theologians from the 18th century to the present. Church historian Ian Murray notes that “From the first quarter of the seventeenth century, belief in a future conversion of the Jews became commonplace among the English Puritans” (The Puritan Hope, 43).

John Newton (1725–1807), the author of Amazing Grace, believed that God was working through political circumstances to miraculously preserve the existence of Jewish people and bring about their salvation” (The Works of the Reverend John Newton, 668). Major figures like Increase Mather (1639–1723), John Gill (1697–1771), Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), J. C. Ryle (1816–1900), Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892), and Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) all taught that the Jewish people would one day return to the land of Canaan.

Jonathan Edwards said: “It is the more evident, that the Jews will return to their own land again, because they never have yet possessed one quarter of that land, which was so often promised them.” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Apocalyptic Writings, 134) Charles Spurgeon said: “There shall be a political restoration of the Jews to their own land and to their own nationality; and then, secondly . . . a spiritual restoration, a conversion in fact” (”The Restoration and Conversion of the Jews,” in Spurgeon’s Sermons Volume 10, 272). Martyn Lloyd-Jones stated:

To me 1967, the year that the Jews occupied all of Jerusalem, was very crucial. Luke 21:43 is one of the most significant prophetic verses: ‘Jerusalem,’ it reads, ‘shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ It seems to me that that took place in 1967—something crucially important that had not occurred in 2,000 years. Luke 21:43 is one fixed point. But I am equally impressed by Romans 11 which speaks of a great spiritual return among the Jews before the end time. (Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “From Buckingham to Westminster,” Christianity Today, February 8, 1980 (Vol. 24, No. 3)

It is important to recognize at this point that there is a popular teaching online that sees the ingathering or restoration of the Jews as taking place before the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. While Protestant theologians have disagreed as to whether the ingathering represented an ongoing process yet to be completed, as John Calvin believed, or a future national event, as Charles Hodge believed, or whether it constituted a Jewish return to the church, as R. L. Dabney believed, or a gathering as a separate nation, as J. C. Ryle believed, there are no clear Christian sources prior to the late twentieth century that explicitly teach this view. The idea that the ingathering took place before 70 A.D. appears to be a novel theological development.

There is also a popular idea today that Christian Zionism, or the belief that the Jewish people have a biblically mandated claim to their ancient homeland in the Middle East (Lewis, Christian Zionism, 3), is a heresy since it assumes the promises to Abraham are not all absorbed in the church. Yet many prominent theologians have held to a future restoration that includes the land promise, and it does not follow that, because those in Christ are one new spiritual man, God has revoked His promises to ethnic Israel. Such a conclusion would undermine Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11.

If the Abrahamic covenant still relates to ethnic Jews, which I believe Scripture teaches and church history supports, it is important for us, as mostly Gentile believers, to understand where our responsibilities lie.

Blessing and Cursing Israel

In Genesis 12:3, God tells Abraham: “And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse.”

This same language is repeated in Genesis 27:29 when Isaac blesses Jacob. He says: “May peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you; be master of your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be those who curse you, and blessed be those who bless you.” The blessing and cursing dynamic is thus applied on a national level and is specifically applied to Esau in the book of Obadiah, where the nation that came from Esau (Edom) is cursed for its treatment of the nation of Israel.

The Spirit of God also applies this promise to all of ethnic Israel in Numbers 24, when Balaam the sorcerer is commissioned by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the Israelites as they are entering the land of Canaan. Instead, God speaks through Balaam and blesses the nation of Israel, proclaiming that they will defeat their enemies, prosper, and possess a kingdom with a king higher than Agag the Amalekite, who was the most powerful king in the region.

The grammatical idea here is general and means God will favor those who favor Israel and punish those who maliciously harm Israel.

Knowing how this applies first requires understanding whether it is currently in effect, and if so, whether it refers to ethnic Israel, the church, or the modern nation state. There is little discussion of this before the Reformation. Irenaeus (c. 130–202 AD) believed this promise never applied to Jacob directly but instead the future millennial kingdom (Against Heresies, 5.33). Methodius (d. c. 311 AD) thought it applied directly to Christ (Oration on the Psalms, section V). Yet, it is difficult to make sense of the way this promise was applied to national Israel in Numbers 24:9 under these interpretations.

Evangelism and Restoration

It is important to remember that the early church was primarily composed of ethnic Jews under Roman occupation. They lived at a time when many of their fellow countrymen attempted to revolt against the Romans and were punished for it first in 70 AD and then in the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135/136 AD). The conditions for practically realizing a literal Davidic kingdom were not present, nor was there a feeling of blessing among Jews as they were oppressed and living as strangers in other regions.

As the church gradually spread and became more composed of gentiles the emphasis upon Jewish evangelism remained, but was not as fervent as it had been under Paul’s ministry. Jesus’ primary calling was to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). Paul said the gospel itself was “first to the Jew first” (Romans 1:16) as he labored and prayed for their salvation. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 AD) famously evangelized Jews in Dialogue with Trypho.

Share

But as the church grew and the Jews were not converting in large numbers, attitudes started to change. Figures like Origen (c. 185–254 AD) and John Chrysostom (c. 349–407 AD) expressed frustration. Martin Luther (1483-1546 AD) is the most famous example. Early on he encouraged Jewish evangelism (Second Lectures on the Psalms, 1513–1515) and wrote books like That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) in an attempt to convert them. But when they resisted and after he suffered personal loss from the death of his daughter Magdalena in 1542, he wrote On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). Yet, days before his death on February 18, 1546, he included a call to treat Jews “with Christian love and to pray for them, so that they might become converted and would receive the Lord” (Luther’s Works 51, 1).

As the Reformation spread, so did more literal interpretations of biblical texts along with an optimism that ethnic Jews would be restored to both their Messiah and their historic homeland. Interpretations that applied the blessing and cursing dynamic (or “protection clause”) to the way Christian countries treated ethnic Jews accompanied this optimism beginning around the 17th century.

Edward Nicholas (1593-1669), the Secretary of State to Charles I, believed England was under judgment for expelling the Jews in 1290 (Crome, Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850, 2). Puritan pamphlets that supported Oliver Cromwell’s readmission of Jews to England spread the news that England should take advantage of God’s promise to Abraham to bless friends and curse enemies by dealing favorably with ethnic Jews (Crome, 99). Puritans Hugh Broughton and John Harrison tied this blessing specifically to evangelism (Crome, 39-41).

Eventually, Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850), an influential Anglican rector influenced the British government toward a favorable view of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In his book The Restoration of the Jews to Their Own Land (1841), he argued that while the Jews did not have a valid claim to the Holy Land given their general unbelief, Christian nations should nonetheless help them return to the region in fulfillment of the prophecy that they would experience spiritual restoration in the process and that the Christian nations who helped them accomplish this would prosper. He stated: “Any aid . . . that we can nationally render to their peaceful return (without injustice to others) . . . [God] will bring down blessings on the country rendering such aid.” (The Restoration of the Jews to Their Own Land, xcv–xcvi)

There were varied reasons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that diaspora Jews were permitted to immigrate to Palestine including this application of the protection clause, sympathy toward persecuted Jews, and the desires to reduce local Jewish populations by sending them to Palestine. Under the Turks and then the British, Jews in Europe joined Jews who had remained in the land culminating in the modern state of Israel in 1948.

What it Means

Prominent Protestant theologians like John Calvin and Matthew Henry interpreted the protection clause as applying to the church, since the children of Abraham by faith constitute the “Israel of God.” However, the New Testament writers do not apply this language to the church directly. Instead, the church is promised ultimate victory over hell (Matthew 16:18) but she endures persecution despite faithful conduct until Christ returns (2 Timothy 3:12, John 15:20; 1 Peter 4:12–13).

Throughout the Old Testament, pagan leaders such as Abimelech (Genesis 20:14-18), Pharaoh (Genesis 47:7-10), and Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1-5) explicitly receive blessing for their treatment of Israel, even in exile. From Cyrus’s decree allowing a return to Jerusalem (538/537 BC) to national repentance under Ezra (458/457 BC) is a period of about eighty years.

Without knowing exactly how God is working in current circumstances, but recognizing the possibility that He could be setting events in sequence that will culminate in a full restoration for ethnic Israel as well as the church’s final spiritual victory, here are some practical conclusions:

In both Genesis 12 and Numbers 24 the promise to bless and curse is applied to Abraham and then to Israel before settlement in Canaan. If this applies today, it would apply to the people of Israel broadly, most of whom are not living in the modern nation state.

At the very least, blessing Israel would include evangelism, since the way God blesses both Israel and Gentiles, who are grafted into Israel’s spiritual root, is through what Peter in Acts 3:25 calls “turning every one of you from your wickedness.” Prayer and evangelism are the main ways Christians can bless Israel today, because it is in connection to their Messiah that they will receive all available blessings.

The Larger Westminster Catechism encourages believers to “pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, and the fullness of the Gentiles brought in.” Many of our Protestant forebears emphasized this special ministry. Matthew Henry said “[Jews] should be brought to believe in Christ the true Messiah whom they crucified, and be incorporated in the Christian church, and become one sheep-fold with the Gentiles under Christ the great Shepherd” (A Commentary upon the Holy Bible, 80). Spurgeon believed that Christians “do not attach sufficient importance to the restoration of the Jews” (The Church of Christ, 1855) and said that “those who work among the seed of Israel . . . have the honor of having helped to gather together the ancient nation to which our Lord himself belonged” (The Whole-Heartedness of God in Blessing His People, 1888).

There is good reason to pray the way Paul did in Romans 10:1 that Jewish people would be saved with an eye toward the prophetic significance of Romans 11:25-27 where the fulness of the gentiles comes in and all Israel is saved. In 1649, John Owen preached to the House of Commons and mentioned the “millions of prayers” on behalf of “the bringing home of [God’s] ancient people to be one fold with the fulness of the Gentiles, raising up the tabernacle of David, and building it as in days of old” (The shaking and translating of heaven and earth).

There is nothing in Scripture requiring Christians or Christian-influenced countries to support the modern nation state of Israel politically in order to receive a blessing. It is unknown whether or not the state of Israel’s success is leading to a spiritual restoration.

However, it is impressive that the modern state of Israel exists in the first place and has been victorious against overwhelming odds numerous times in seemingly miraculous ways. It is natural for Christians to have an affinity for the country that protects biblical sites and shares a respect for a common historical and biblical heritage. It is also possibly strategic to maintain an alliance that offers stable benefits in regional dominance. But it is not known whether or not this will, like the eighty year process that brought about repentance during the return from the Babylonian captivity, also bring about repentance.

I have not mentioned any dispensational theologians yet, but I will mention two who did not believe the modern state of Israel qualified as the restoration because of their lack of repentance. Charles Ryrie, who compiled the popular Ryrie Study Bible, said that while the modern state of Israel could be leading to a future fulfillment of prophecy, the present situation was a “political and or racial and or religious phenomenon, not a spiritual one.” The popular Presbyterian pastor and radio host J. Vernon McGee also claimed that Israel had “never returned to the land” because they had not returned to God.

Though ultra orthodox Jews disagree with Christian theologians on many matters, they also share a similar critique of the modern state of Israel, which is why many of them refuse to serve in the IDF.

Americans’ primary concern should be the protection, preservation, and stewardship of their own country as ordained by God for all nations. Only if an alliance with Israel fits into this can it be thought of as prudent under a Christian framework, especially without a divine assurance that God has ordained the current government to lead to a restoration under the Abrahamic Covenant.

Join Rod's 275,000+ Followers on X!

What is clear and expressly forbidden under the protection clause, is hating Jewish people. In Deuteronomy 30:7 God says that He “will inflict all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted you.” In Romans 11:18-20, Paul says: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches [Jews]; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, ‘Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.’ Quite right, they were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear.” Paul goes on in verse 28 to say that even unbelieving Jews “are beloved [by God] for the sake of the fathers.” This is the only nation in the Bible treated this way.

In other words, hating, being arrogant toward, and persecuting Jews is forbidden in Scripture. Yet, currently on social media, even among self-proclaiming Christians, I cannot think of a group more rhetorically provoked, lied about, and subjected to unequal weights and measures than Jewish people. There are obviously legitimate reasons to oppose Jewish people in justified ways when they pursue public evil, just like any other group, but that is not what I am referring to. I do not care how popular hatred for Jews becomes, I do not want that on my conscience before God.

This is the lesson that Haman learned while Jews were under judgment in the Assyrian Empire, as recorded in the book of Esther. He tried to destroy the remaining Jews who had not to return to Canaan, but still lived in Assyria and he ended up forfeiting his life. This serves as a warning today for what it means to curse Israel.

Who are the Real Jews?

In light of the recent war between Israel and Gazans, there is a movement to discredit Jewish claims to Palestine by showing through DNA research that Palestinian Christians are more genetically linked to ancient Levantine populations than their Jewish neighbors are. These studies are not establishing lineage through Isaac, but rather connection to Bronze and Iron Age populations from 3,000–4,000 years ago, which would include Canaanites, Philistines, and various Semitic groups. There is also increasing popularity to the claims that modern Jews are somehow not really Jews at all, but rather Eastern European Khazars or Edomites.

This is a worthwhile discussion for Christians, because if there are no modern Jews, then this has implications for our theology. It would mean that Paul was wrong in Romans 11 because there would be no pending “fullness of the Gentiles” or salvation for Israel. Jews would have died under a partial hardening. The prophets Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31–34) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 36–37) would also be wrong to associate this salvation with a future kingdom. There would be no valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) and no ingathering to Jerusalem (Zechariah 12–14). This would challenge the accuracy of Scripture directly.

First, many of the theories today about Jewish identity, including ideas that modern Jews are imposters who are actually Eastern European Khazars or Edomite descendants, do not exist before the 19th century and were not popularized until after World War II. The Khazar theory was first proposed by Ernest Renan, a higher critic who challenged orthodox teaching. The Edomite theories are found in British Israelism, Black Hebrew Israelism, and white identitarian circles. The first time I encountered this was as a teenager evangelizing in NYC around Black Hebrew Israelites.

Throughout church history, no one questioned who the Jews were, not even Martin Luther. They are denoted by both ancestry and custom. A genetic study (Skorecki et al., 1997, Nature, with follow-up in Thomas et al., 1998) on the Cohens and Levites traces them both back to a “Y-chromosomal Aaron” who lived 3,000 years ago. Half of Ashkenazi ancestry comes from the Levantine region (according to this study). Sephardic Jews, who make up half of Israel’s population, are more closely tied to the Levant, with most studies showing 50–70% Levantine ancestry.

It is also important to remember that while genealogical lines are tremendously important, Israel was never fully monolithic. The mixed multitude that left Egypt, along with biblical figures like Caleb, Rahab, Doeg the Edomite, Ruth, and Uriah the Hittite, shows there was a practice of assimilation into Israel’s bloodline.

This is true for most populations throughout history. For example, modern Persians have significant Turkic admixture (20–40%). Yet, they still think of themselves as Persian. English people are a fusion of various groups such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Romans, and Vikings. The incredible thing about Jews is how they have held on to their identity by maintaining a close cultural connection despite 2,000 years of captivity.

The Jews that Paul was concerned about evangelizing were kinsmen according to the flesh, but they also kept a religious element in their “zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). Paul was talking about branches who were broken off, who had forsaken their Messiah, like modern Jews do. Thus, the difficulty of recognizing modern Jews has always had a religious component that makes it a complicated identity, but no one ever considered that a major problem until recently.

For those who want to go deeper on the genetics, I recommend checking out my friend Razib Khan’s Substack. He is not Jewish or religious and does not share Christian theological assumptions, but he does good work in genetics.

Conclusion and Warning

As we have seen throughout this reflection on biblical covenants, church history, and practical ethics, it is reasonable to conclude that God’s plan for the Jewish people includes a restoration in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. The nature of this restoration has been conceived of in various ways by Christian theologians, but there is broad agreement that it will happen, and Christians bear a responsibility in extending evangelistic kindness and withholding hatred toward Jews. Part of the reason this must be said, in addition to reinforcing essential doctrines such as the truth of Scripture, the character of God in keeping his promises, and the human identity of the Messiah as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, is that there is a developing attack online that undermines these doctrines.

There are four emerging elements that Christians who adopt online anti-Jewish ideology seem to start embracing.

First, there is a belief that Jews presently represent a universal evil, with some going so far as to claim they are without the hope of restoration. Some refer to this as a permanent supercessionism. We see this reinforced in reinterpretations of passages such as 1 John 2, 1 Thessalonians 2, and Revelation 2–3 to claim that the spirit of anti-Christ is unique to Judaism, that the Jews are the enemies of mankind in a universal cultural sense, and that the synagogue of Satan encompasses all non-Christian Jews. Some voices claim the term “Jews” is also used in an exclusively negative sense in Scripture, such as in John’s writings. This approach to Scripture threatens our hermeneutic more than it does anything else.

Share

1 John is writing to false teachers who were previously part of the Christian community but were never truly believers (1 John 2:19). These false teachers denied the incarnation and that “Jesus is the Christ,” but still claimed to follow Him (1 John 2:22, 1 John 4:2–3) as Christians (1 John 3:14). They are able to deceive believers precisely because they claim to be believers themselves (1 John 2:26). While it is true that Judaizers threaten the gospel, the proto-Gnostic false teachers of 1 John pose a unique deception that John wanted us to be aware of. The spirit of anti-Christ is a false Christ who cannot save, and many religious cults commit the same kinds of Christological errors that those in 1 John did.

Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 2:15–16, claims that the Jews who “killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out . . . are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved.” Verse 16 continues by foreshadowing how they will be judged in the impending destruction of Jerusalem. However, in verse 14, Paul tells the Thessalonian Christian Gentiles that “they also endured the same sufferings at the hands of their own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews.” In other words, Paul is talking about a specific group of Jews who prevented the spread of the gospel and were punished for it, just as Gentiles in Thessalonica prevented the spread of the gospel. It is in this sense that they are “hostile to all men,” not in a universal sense because of participation in modern liberal causes or social influence.

In Revelation 2 and 3, John writes about the “synagogue of Satan” persecuting the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia. John attacks them by claiming that they say they are Jews, but they are not (Rev 2:9; Rev 3:9). This is best understood as a denial of religious Jews spiritual legitimacy, as evidenced by the fact that they are attacking the true Jewish religion, which is Christianity. John is encouraging these churches under persecution from Jews that Satan is the one ultimately motivating these circumstances. It is not a universal statement that all ethnic Jews are being used by Satan to persecute the church.

The term “Jew” is used in various ways throughout John’s writings to describe unbelieving Jewish leaders (John 5:16–18; John 7:1; John 9:18), unbelieving Jews (John 6:41; John 8:48), believing Jews (John 8:31; John 11:45; John 12:11), and Jesus himself (John 4:9). John says that salvation is from the Jews in John 4:22. So, to claim that the term “Jews” is always used in a negative sense is not accurate.

There are plenty of passages refuting the Judaizer heresy and demonstrating that Christianity is the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies despite their denial. It is best to use those passages, in the ways they were applied, when refuting modern Judaism. The open distortion of New Testament passages in order to use them as universal cudgels against ethnic Jews reveals a different motivation, though.

This brings us to the second concerning element. There seems to be a lack of Jewish evangelism while, simultaneously, there is a rise in hatred for Jews. This is a peculiar situation, especially in light of the fact that even figures like John Chrysostom and Martin Luther never completely gave up in working toward Jewish conversions. A concern for erroneous or dangerous beliefs that religious Jews hold should produce a zeal reflecting Jesus’ and Paul’s motivation to share the gospel with Jews. The absence of this focus is revealing, and we cannot cater to it.

I live not far from Hasidic communities that have caused local frustrations for the ways they politically operate. There are efforts to prevent them from taking advantage of religious loopholes for tax purposes and to counter their political influence. These are perfectly understandable actions for Christians wishing to preserve the character of their communities. But part of our interactions, even when Jewish groups pose social threats to the way of life we cherish, is to continue to invite them into our churches and as co-heirs of Christ (Galatians 3:29).

The third troubling element of developing online anti-Jewish ideology among Christians is the tenuous way in which it treats Christ’s Jewish identity and return. Not everyone engaged in the first two elements engages in this, but I have started to see multiple examples of a shift toward accommodating the belief that Christ was not Jewish. There is also a growing interest in a version of Preterism that claims Christ’s return happened in AD 70, which leads to the belief that there are no promises left for the Jews.

Both of these claims are wildly out of step with orthodox confessional teaching though. The Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds affirm the belief that Christ is of the Virgin Mary and roots his identity in Jewish fulfillment of prophecy. The Belgic Confession of Faith (Article 18) explicitly confesses that “Christ is a fruit of the loins of David according to the flesh . . . a branch of David; a shoot of the root of Jesse; sprung from the tribe of Judah; descended from the Jews according to the flesh; of the seed of Abraham.” The Second Helvetic Confession reiterates this as does the Westminster Confession of Faith. All of these creeds and confessions also consistently affirm a future Second Coming, bodily resurrection, and final judgment yet to occur.

The fourth element of this recent anti-Jewish push involves a chipping away at the authority of the Old Testament, whether it is the denial of the authority of the Hebrew Old Testament, which Jesus would have honored (Luke 4:16-21), teaching that Old Testament ethics are somehow in conflict with the New Testament, such as claiming the Jews were bloodthirsty and administered group punishment, but the New Testament teaches judging individuals and being kind, or complete denials of the ongoing authority of the Old Testament, which has not taken place except among those who have converted away from Christianity because of its Jewish flavor, but if history is any guide, will likely happen if unchallenged.

I have a folder on my computer now of former Christians who deconstructed because they claim that Christianity is too Jewish.

So where does that leave us? We should remember what God told Moses in Deuteronomy 4:30–31: “In the latter days you will return to the Lord your God and listen to His voice. For the Lord your God is a compassionate God; He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them.”

As Gentile believers, we ought to recognize what Paul argued in Romans 11, that the same God who has not revoked his promises to Israel will not revoke his promises to us (Romans 11:29: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable”). We need to stand with our Christian forefathers in defense of God’s word, Christ’s humanity, and our responsibility to bless Israel with the gospel.

— This article first appeared at From the Desk of Jon Harris, which you should follow.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

Share

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.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

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 violate.

The enduring significance of that magnificent 18th century document and how its original principles have been all but lost in the 21st century is the focus of a landmark new book, Endowed by Our Creator, by the Discovery Institute’s John G. West. It is one of those rare books by which every American, especially every evangelical Christian American, will profit by reading it closely and carefully considering what it tells us about the spiritual and political condition of our beloved nation in 2026.

Yes, there were slaves imported from Africa in the Southern states of the then-new nation — including those owned by Jefferson — but the Declaration’s influence was in part why, in the late 1780s, freedmen voted along with their white neighbors in many of the states’ ratification elections of the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. By contrast, it would be nearly two decades before William Wilburforce would finally persuade the British Parliament to ban the slave trade.

The Declaration of Independence made America the first nation in human history founded on God-given, unalienable, and individual rights, and on the equality of men and women everywhere. And in the early decades following the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, those essential principles enunciated in the Declaration provided significant impetus toward the ultimate abolition of slavery.

Evidence that such impetus was deeply effective is seen in Jefferson’s statement a few weeks before he and Adams both passed away on the same day in 1826: “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Jefferson further observed that he saw “a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation…”

For the signers of the Declaration, faith in the God of the Bible and the power of the rational faculties He gave all men were fundamental. West points to signer James Wilson, who called the human mind “the noblest work of God,” and observed that “the power of reasoning is frequently selected as the characteristic quality, which distinguishes the human race from the inferior part of the creation.” Wilson’s words represented something quite close to the consensus view among the Founders, as seen in similar signers’ quotes West cites from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, and others.

As West notes, however, in March 1861, just 35 years after the passing of Jefferson and Adams, and as the United States staggered into the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, the former U.S. Representative from Georgia and the newly elected vice president of the seceding Confederate States of America, delivered a speech in which he totally and comprehensively rejected the Declaration’s fundamental claims about God, individual rights, and human equality. In the process, he also blasphemously rewrote a Bible verse.

Stephens acknowledged that equality was among “the prevailing ideas” of the founding era,” yet “those ideas…were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’”

Share

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

Two points are notable here: First, in alluding to Paul’s description of Jesus Christ as the “cornerstone,” Stephens substitutes the inequality of the races for Jesus Christ as the source of salvation for Southerners, and, second, he attributes that change to newfound knowledge from “the various departments of science.”

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in the year prior to Stephens’ address, but it is not known if he had read it before speaking. As West makes clear, he didn’t have to have read Darwin to reach the same conclusions. How to account for the reversal on so fundamental a principle as human equality as occurred between Wilson and Stephens without reference to Darwin is not a mystery.

“Stephen’s claims seem outlandish today, and deservedly so. Yet, they reflected a powerful new intellectual current of the day that had been growing for decades among philosophers and scientists. Even as American patriots were declaring that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, a vanguard of intellectuals was enlisting science to supply a justification for racism by repudiating the natural unity and equality of mankind,” West writes.

Two years before the Declaration, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames claimed multiple origins accounted for differences among white and black men, and he was followed in the decades after by thinkers like physician Samuel Morton, biologist Louis Agassiz, and ethnologists Josiah Clark and George Glidden, who enjoyed growing receptivity, especially among the American elites, West explains.

After the Civil War destroyed the Confederacy, there was a steady and deep expansion of the influence of Darwin’s several books advocating multiple lines of evolutionary development producing mankind on the basis of natural selection of characteristics that increase survivability — “survival of the fittest” — and random variation. Darwin’s evolutionary process completely excluded anything resembling a purposeful designer, or God, thus pointing the way to a purely materialistic understanding of creation.

By 1906, few protests were heard when a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga was displayed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. West tells us The New York Times defended the exhibition, claiming it made no difference if pygmies are “really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.”

And then came 1913 and an address at the University of South Carolina by Charles Francis Adams Jr., the great-grandson of John Adams. West cites this passage from the address as Adams recalled his service in the Union Army:

“In utter disregard of fundamental scientific facts, we theoretically believed that all men — no matter what might be the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair — were, if placed under exactly similar conditions, in essentials the same. In other words, we indulged in the curious, and as is now admitted, utterly erroneous theory that the African was, so to speak, Anglo-Saxon … In other words, though carved ebony, he was also in the image of God.”

In the decades that followed, Darwin’s successors — many now securely occupying positions of great public power and influence — prudently dropped the racial angle, and in their subsequent ascendancy, saw evolutionary scientific materialism become the conventional wisdom about human origins throughout the commanding heights of American politics, academia, science, and media.

In 1916, a survey of biologists found a mere 17 percent still believed in God, according to West, and in 2016, he and colleagues at the Discovery Institute conducted a public opinion survey that confirmed both the continued dominance of the evolutionary scientific materialism and the corrosive impact on Americans’ understanding of the nation’s fundamental founding principles and the relevance of those principles to contemporary governance.

“The steady drumbeat of criticisms against the truths expressed in the Declaration has taken its toll. As America celebrates the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, many Americans are ignorant of its meaning or ambivalent about its teachings. To be sure, according to a national survey commissioned for the writing of this book, eight in ten Americans still affirm the truth of the Declaration’s propositions about life, liberty, and equality; however, fewer than four in ten Americans accept the Declaration’s view of the source of our rights. Fewer still accept its understanding of the purposes and limits of government,” West reports in his book on the survey’s results.

In an interview with The Washington Stand, West said he wrote this book because he believes “America is really at a crisis point where most people on the Left and the Right seem very confused with some very dark ideas … we really need to understand why our founding was a good thing, was actually built from Christian principles, how it was attacked and subverted, and why that is true today.”

Share

“The first step to going back if you’ve made a wrong turn is understanding the map, that you took a wrong turn, and you can’t get back to the right road if you don’t understand that,” West continued. “I want to lay out the positive alternative to the decline, why the problems we have today are not because of the American founding but because we have evaded that, and there is in fact a path back to a better society.”

In the same interview, West was asked how such a profound change in the Declaration’s public acceptance could develop in the mere 55 years elapsed between Stephens’ speech in 1861 repudiating the Declaration’s equality clause and the 1916 survey that found the vast majority of biologists either took no position on the issue or rejected the idea of a Creator.

“It is an amazing story, especially in an age without the internet, how this took over. I think the answer in a nutshell is in post-Civil War America, you have many Americans who have Europe-envy. They went to Europe, especially to Germany, and basically brought back ideas — Hegelian ideas and the German administrative state. So the founders of the modern political science in America basically were all trained in Europe with those ideas, and they took over the graduate schools and they reshaped everything — Harvard, Princeton, Yale,” West responded.

He added that the 1916 survey showing so few biologists still believing in a creator shocked many Americans, most of whom at the time “were still pretty devout Christians.” But their response was essentially to ignore the fact that most of the American intelligentsia, especially in the political and physical sciences, no longer were.

“When I share that survey today, most people think the materialist, atheist, agnostic, elite academics is something from the last 20 or 30 years, maybe in the 1960s, but what they don’t realize is that by the early 20th century that dominance had already happened,” West said.

West is cautiously optimistic about Americans’ capacity to recover the great truths of the Declaration in the daily life of the republic. Noting in his concluding paragraph the tremendous recent upsurge in interest across the science community in the Intelligent Design (ID) approach to the science of studying the origins of the universe and human beings, West observed, “The message of this chapter is that the eclipse of reality that placed the Declaration of Independence in the shadows is ending. Once again, science is pointing to a creator who endowed us with life and liberty, affirming the wisdom of the Bible and the American founders.”

“And the misuse of science during the COVID era is reawakening the resolve of many Americans to insist on government by consent rather than government by unelected elites,” he added. “The door to a return to the principles of America’s founding stands open. The question is whether we as a nation are willing to walk through it.”

— Mark Tapscott is an award-winning senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand, where this article first appeared. 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.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Jeff Maples
March 29, 2026

For years now, we’ve been told to cool it with the comparisons of abortion to ancient paganism. Stop invoking Molech. Stop talking about sacrifice. Stop saying that modern society is quietly reenacting the most perverse rituals of the ancient world. We’re told, even by our church leaders, that it’s “rhetorical excess” from people who take the Bible too seriously and modernity not seriously enough.

And yet here we are. A judge in Indiana has now ruled that there can be a religious right to abortion. Not metaphorically or rhetorically. Not even as a philosophical analogy.

Literally.

In a March 5 order out of the Marion Superior Court (pasted below), Judge Christina Klineman granted summary judgment to a group of plaintiffs — two anonymous women and an advocacy group called “Hoosier Jews for Choice.”

Their argument was simple and impudent. Indiana’s abortion restrictions violate the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because their religious beliefs require access to abortion in certain circumstances. The judge agreed and issued a permanent injunction preventing the state from enforcing portions of its abortion law against members of the plaintiff class when abortion is claimed as a religious exercise.

The court concluded that abortion can qualify as an exercise of religion, and therefore the state may not prohibit it if doing so would substantially burden that religious practice.

One plaintiff testified that her religious belief is that life begins at first breath and that Jewish law requires abortion when the physical or mental health of the mother is threatened. Another claimed a spiritual belief rooted in something like a cosmic collective consciousness — a kind of vague New Age metaphysics — which she says gives her a religious obligation to maintain bodily autonomy, including the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The court took those claims at face value.

Because Indiana’s RFRA bars the government from substantially burdening a person’s religious exercise unless the state can prove a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means, the judge concluded that the abortion ban could not stand in those situations.

And there it is. The quiet admission.

For decades, critics of abortion have said the practice functions like a religion — complete with sacred language, sacred rites, sacred defenders, and a priesthood of professionals who administer the sacrament. We were told that was overheated rhetoric.

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.

Now a court has effectively confirmed it.

Abortion is a religious act.

The ancient world would understand this perfectly.

In the Old Testament, the worship of Molech involved the ritual killing of children. It was presented as devotion, as necessity, as a transaction with a higher moral order. Parents surrendered their offspring on the altar of a god that promised security, prosperity, stability — some version of a better future purchased with the blood of the next generation.

Sound familiar?

The modern version just looks cleaner. No bronze statue heated with fire. No drums beating to drown out the cries of the infants.

Instead, we have courtrooms, sterile clinics, legal briefs, and judges solemnly declaring that “terminating a pregnancy” can be part of someone’s religious life.

The altar has changed. The theology hasn’t.

And the social logic is exactly the same. Children are sacrificed so that adults can preserve their autonomy, their comfort, their plans. In the modern West, motherhood has been recast as an obstacle — a detour from career trajectories, personal fulfillment, travel plans, professional ambitions. The language used to justify abortion often circles around the same theme. This child would interfere with the life I want to live.

So the child goes and the world keeps spinning.

And society barely notices.

That might be the most chilling part of all this. Not the ruling itself, but the collective shrug that surrounds it. Forty years ago something like this would have detonated like a bomb in the public square. Today it barely registers as a blip on the news cycle.

Share

We have become accustomed to it. The sacrifice has been normalized. Institutionalized. Litigated. Even celebrated.

The judge’s reasoning, though dressed in legal language, reveals the strange moral terrain we now inhabit. The court argued that the state’s interest in protecting prenatal life isn’t fully compelling because the law already contains exceptions — rape, incest, certain medical circumstances — and because Indiana law doesn’t explicitly define embryos or zygotes as human beings.

In other words, because the law doesn’t protect unborn life in every possible situation, the court concluded the state’s interest in protecting that life cannot be compelling enough to override religious claims.

That reasoning is very disturbing, and demonstrates the shortfalls of the mainstream pro-life movement, which seeks to regulate, rather than abolish abortion completely. It illustrates the need for the Church to make the case that the unborn child is a person, deserving of equal protection under the law as any other person.

So legally speaking, this fight isn’t over.

Not even close.

But culturally, the trajectory is hard to ignore.

This ruling didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the product of decades of moral drift, decades of reengineering the public conscience until something that once horrified the human heart now feels routine. Courts do not create cultural revolutions — they ratify them.

Which means the deeper problem isn’t the judge in Indiana.

It’s the civilization that produced the lawsuit.

We are living in a moment where child sacrifice can be reframed as spiritual devotion, where autonomy has become the highest good, and where the destruction of the unborn can be baptized in the language of religious freedom. And that’s not a legal anomaly. It’s a moral diagnosis.

And it explains why so many of these battles now feel like playing defense in a collapsing structure. The laws change and the courts waffle. The arguments evolve. But the deeper current keeps moving in the same direction.

Away from life.
Away from truth.
Away from the God who created both.

Which is why Christians cannot place their hope in courts or legislatures alone. Those things are important, of course — they restrain evil, they shape public order — but they cannot heal a civilization that has forgotten the most basic truth about human life.

Only Christ can do that.

Because the gospel does something the courts never can.

It exposes the darkness, calls people to repentance, and replaces hearts of stone with hearts that actually love life.

And until that happens on a broad scale, things like this will keep coming.

More creative.

More brazen.

More openly religious in their defense of the ancient practice we thought civilization had left behind.

Turns out we didn’t leave it behind at all. We just gave Molech a law degree.

Proposed Order 3

336KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

— This article first appeared at The Dissenter, which you should follow.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Articles:

Share

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by CrossPolitic
March 22, 2026

From the Cinedoc description:

“An unlicensed investigation, a lawyer editing a report about her own client, and $13 million in tithes later, the largest conservative Protestant denomination in America learned what happens when men fear the mob more than they fear God.

“Special thanks to Megan Carl Basham and Rod D. Martin for their contribution to this project.”

If you want to understand the recent history of the SBC, why it matters, and how the Woke really operate, take the time to watch this Cinedoc. You won’t regret it.

Oh, and don’t miss these essential resources:

1. Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, by Gary North

2. Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, by Megan Basham

Share

See Also:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
March 15, 2026

My discussion on American Family Radio’s "Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve" about discerning the times: a Biblical lens on global events. Sign up NOW for the AFR YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

In this episode:

• What does the Bible say about discernment and discerning the times?

• The truth about what’s happening in Iran, and the unique nuclear danger of the Iranian regime’s theology.

• Israeli vs. U.S. defense tech, and Israel’s free market revolution.

• Differences between Venezuela and Iran.

• The different sects of Islam across the Middle East.

• Opportunities for the Gospel — and freedom — in Iran.

• The rise of Islam in America, and the complicated response.

• Election integrity, the SAVE America Act, and the filibuster.

• The pro-immigration case for border security.

• Plus, Trump’s effort to ban the evil of irreversible gender surgeries on minors.

It’s a wide-ranging 48 minutes you won’t want to miss!

Recent Articles:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Rod D. Martin and Sharayah Colter
March 1, 2026

With Operation Epic Fury underway in Iran, it’s worth understanding the threat not only of Islamic terrorism but of the Islamist idea itself, its spread in America, the “Red-Green Alliance”, and how Islam relates to Christianity, Socialism, and the American Constitutional order.

In this episode of the Life & Liberty Podcast, host Sharayah Colter is joined by Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, geopolitical strategist, and former Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee officer, to discuss these vital issues from a distinctly Christian and American point of view.

Like, subscribe, and share: it’s 18 minutes you won’t want to miss!

Share

See Also:

Join Rod's 275,000+ Followers on X!

Recent Articles:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

NOTE: This essay may seem a bit inside baseball, but it isn’t. It pertains to a possible perversion of the First Amendment, now before the Supreme Court at the behest of Baptist leaders who’ve blatantly lied under oath. The effect? To give them — and religious leaders of countless other denominations — a legal exemption from defamation law.

And the inside baseball part? It would also turn the nation’s largest Protestant denomination into a top-down, quasi-Catholic structure, instead of the bottom-up delegated ministry of local churches that Baptist belief requires and that the law has long recognized. This would upend Baptist doctrine, which is exactly what the First Amendment must protect. It would also make your church legally and financially liable for a slip-and-fall at a church you’ve never heard of.

Along with more than 50 other SBC leaders, I have signed an amicus brief opposing this gross perversion of …

Read more

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Michael Clary
February 15, 2026

So, let’s talk about that video Trump posted last week that ignited a lot of controversy.

But I need to say something before I proceed. This piece is about discerning how propaganda works in Christian circles, not about the video itself.

I’ll say this upfront so it’s crystal clear: This article is not about rushing to Trump’s defense because I voted for him. This article is not about whether or not the clip at the end is racist. This article is not about whether or not Trump should have posted it, or whether the White House should have better quality controls, or whether or not Trump knew what it contained. Finally, this piece is not about Trump’s response to the controversy or whether or not he should have fired whoever supposedly posted it.

This piece is about us. This piece is about how so many Christians and pastors got bullied — once again — into engaging in a virtue-signalling denunciation ritual that communicates unquestioning allegiance to a misleading narrative pushed by the Left.

Slow Down: Scripture, Discernment, and Refusing to be Steered

Let’s start with some scriptural reminders about how to assess “breaking news” and “shocking claims.” First, Proverbs 18:13 teaches us that, “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.” I’ve done that before. I’ve weighed in prematurely and ended up with egg on my face. Have you?

Exodus 23:2 is even more to the point: “You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice.” In other words, time and truth go hand in hand. Hot takes, not so much.

I first heard about the video because of the outrage it triggered. I hadn’t seen it myself yet, but my initial assumption was that Trump had posted something intentionally provocative. I usually ignore such things. Trump does like to troll people sometimes, so I didn’t give it much thought. But it kept coming up again and again, and I started to wonder if something bigger was afoot.

I wondered, “Did Trump really post a video depicting the Obamas as monkeys?” If so, that would have been politically foolish. What’s the upside? What did he have to gain from doing something that would obviously trigger such a massive backlash?

So I found the original video online and watched it for myself.

Here’s what I saw: a serious video about election integrity, a topic Trump has been talking about ever since 2020. It wasn’t a cartoon. It wasn’t a troll video to make fun of people. It was one minute long and, as I said, the tone was serious throughout.

Since Trump prefers to post on Truth Social, his own social media site, any video posted there must first be recorded from the original source and then reposted there. But as the original video was ending, the algorithm autoloaded another video, which was an AI cartoon depicting the Obamas as monkeys with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” playing in the background. The Obama video had nothing to do with the original video, and it is plain to anyone willing to be honest. Whoever did the screen recording didn’t edit that part out and posted it, unedited.

Share

The most plausible explanation—by far—is that this was an editing or screen-recording error, not an intentional act of racism.

But the propaganda machine doesn’t care about that. Propaganda isn’t interested in truth; it is interested in provoking action, and that’s where this incident is relevant for Christians.

How Emotional Manipulation for the Outrage Machine Works: Denounce First, Truth Later, Apologize Never

I’ve written a couple of pieces about propaganda recently. The first piece is “How Propaganda Works — And Why Christians are Easy Targets.” The second piece is “Christian–Stop Falling for Weaponized Empathy.” Consider this the third entry in that series, where I’m trying to help Christians better discern how we’re being played by propaganda, weaponized empathy, and emotional manipulation.

As I argued in the “How Propaganda Works” piece, propaganda isn’t so much about spreading outright lies; it’s about provoking a particular action, which the individual later justifies with adjusted beliefs. I’ll say that again, because this is important: Propaganda aims to provoke action without reflection. This is the action-first engine of propaganda.

But every engine needs fuel. Propaganda doesn’t give us a new set of values. Propaganda takes our existing values and moral instincts and points them in a particular direction. Don’t miss that — propaganda doesn’t create moral instincts for you. Propaganda takes your existing moral instincts and tells you what you must do with them, always insisting that you ACT NOW!

In other words, propaganda is about compliance, and the moral urgency doesn’t give you time to think or reflect. Its goal is to “move you, hurry you, shame you, flatter you, or frighten you until the actions you take feel like Spirit-led instincts — which you then justify with changed beliefs after the fact.”

The Trump video from last week gave us a textbook example, and Christians walked right into it. Many Christians did not discern the situation properly and got played. How so? Let me show you.

There’s a three-move pattern: (1) Highlight suffering, (2) Create urgency, and (3) Enforce compliance.

Step One: Highlight suffering. In this instance, the video was seen as clear evidence of Trump’s racism, which activated the outrage machine to talk about how much “harm” and “pain” the video caused. When I (and many others) pointed out that it was actually an editing error, not a deliberate act of racism, the responses clearly demonstrated that propaganda was at work. It was obvious because so many were absolutely convinced that the only explanation is that Trump is an unhinged racist and he deliberately posted a video to inflict maximum suffering. Even though that’s not true, it doesn’t matter. Propaganda doesn’t care about what’s true. It only cares to provoke the desired reaction (I’ll get to that in a moment).

Step Two: Create urgency. Urgency is an essential feature of propaganda because you need people to take action on what they perceive as an emergency. No time to think, pray, reflect, or discern, something must be done NOW. Why now? Because people are suffering, and human suffering makes everything an emergency. Refusing to be rushed is not indifference to sin or suffering; it’s obedience to the ninth commandment.

Step Three: Enforce compliance. Another feature of propaganda is that it isn’t centrally controlled. There doesn’t need to be a mastermind behind the curtain pulling the levers to make propaganda work. It’s largely an organic phenomenon that seems to operate on its own. So what do I mean by “enforce compliance?” Nobody sent you a memo telling you what to do, right? And yet, so many people did the very thing propaganda aimed at: they performed a denunciation ritual.

I’ll give you some high-profile examples. First, Russell Moore posted a screenshot of the image of the Obamas looking like monkeys, and said, “Racist. Deranged. Humiliating to our country. The fact that we have decided to pretend to this is normal every day is a moral abomination.”

He didn’t post the entire video, of course, because if he did, it would be more obvious that this was an editing error. No, he only posted a screenshot that would inflict maximum PR damage on Trump.

Second, John Piper chimed in. He reposted Moore’s post, but added this commentary: “One not to be so afraid of sounding “quasi-woke” that one cannot agree with Russell Moore on this.” So, Piper approves of Moore’s assessment that Trump was posting something “racist” and “deranged.”

There’s something interesting about this. John Piper is a “father in the faith” to many and is considered a reasonable, valuable voice on a number of subjects. Piper doesn’t post often on social media.

A few weeks ago, when a worship service at Cities Church in Minneapolis was invaded by a horde of disruptive agitators, Piper said nothing, even though Cities Church was planted by Piper’s own church in the city where he’s ministered for decades. Certainly, if anything would merit Piper’s unique comment and wisdom, it would be this one. But he said nothing.

That’s fine; he does not owe anyone a comment unless he chooses to give it. But it’s at least worth noticing what does and does not prompt public comment from Piper: Not a hostile invasion of a church planted out of his ministry, but a meme video he assumed was racist, even though that’s highly implausible.

A third example, this one from Mike Cosper, from Christianity Today, who posted this: “Let’s be very clear: Donald Trump, who took out a full page ad calling for the summary executions of the Central Park 5, who was the chief profligate of the Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy theory, who made sh**hole countries comments in his first term in the oval… I’m supposed to believe there’s no way he intentionally reposted a racist meme presenting his black predecessor and his wife as apes? Okay folks.”

Cosper is certain Trump posted this intentionally, though in so doing, there’s nothing to gain and everything to lose.

This is the power of propaganda. Upon close inspection, the manipulative outrage offered and demanded by Moore, Piper, and Cosper is unwarranted because the facts clearly point to the video debacle being an editing error, not a deliberate act of sinister racism.

But truth doesn’t matter in this case. What matters is ensuring the whole world knows you denounce it. Why? Because propaganda has told you to.

Propaganda told you the video was racist, sinful, and had caused great pain to many people. Since people are suffering, it’s an emergency, and we need to act as quickly as possible to ease their pain. Therefore, we must perform a denunciation ritual. We must tell the world how evil Trump is, how racist he is, how we’re not like that evil man, who is a moral monster and beyond redemption.

Further, anyone who claims the video is simply an editing error is also an evil person, most likely a racist, who doesn’t care about all the pain and suffering Trump has caused, and we want nothing to do with them.

Sound familiar?

The Real Danger: Christians Forsaking Truth and Becoming Pawns of the Media Outrage Machine

Here’s what concerns me most. It’s not that Christians got this one incident wrong. It’s the pattern that keeps playing out every few weeks. Whenever a new outrage cycle begins, people get worked up and impulsively say and do things before the facts have a chance to come out.

Remember this: every time there’s a politically and emotionally charged news story, the initial reports are almost always wrong. But when we go online and perform a denunciation ritual before all the facts are known, we end up looking foolish. But rather than just admitting it and saying, “Hey, I got that one wrong, I’m sorry,” we double down. We don’t want to give our enemies ammunition to use against us, so we stand by our naive takes and foolish posts, even though we know they were wrong, until we start believing them. Eventually, we lie to ourselves so many times that it gets harder to discern the truth at all.

I’m a pastor, and yes, I’m also a conservative who enthusiastically voted for Trump. But I’m not writing these things to defend Trump. I have no problem criticizing the President if I think it’s needed, and I’ve done so in the past. Allie Beth Stuckey offered helpful remarks on what legitimate criticism vs. weaponized (and suspect) criticism of President Trump looks like (especially from the Big Eva class).

I’m writing because truth matters, and I’m worried that Christians are getting pulled deeper and deeper into the vortex of propaganda, and it’s distorting their ability to see clearly, discern rightly, and obey God according to the truth.

And yes, I’m aware that conservatives fall for propaganda too, which I addressed in my “How Propaganda Works” piece cited above. I’ve seen the same dynamics on the right — selective clips, inflated claims, premature moral outrage. I’ve addressed that elsewhere, and I’m not pretending immunity here. But ultimately, this isn’t a Left-or-Right issue. Discernment is predicated upon a relentless pursuit of the truth, even when truth is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even damaging to “my side.”

I’ve fallen for propaganda before myself. I’m not immune to manipulation and deception. We’ve all jumped to a false conclusion, posted about it online, and then felt the sting of embarrassment when the facts came out later.

The question is whether we’ll learn from it or keep doing it. The people most easily deceived and propagandized are those who assume they are immune to it. That certainty — that unshakable confidence that your emotional reaction is identical to moral truth — is not discernment. It’s the absence of it.

So, I’ve made it a priority in my own life to follow the truth, difficult as it can be to discern, and follow it wherever it leads. Christians must learn to pause, verify, and refuse to be rushed, especially when outrage feels righteous.

— Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. This essay originally appeared at his Substack.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

See Also:

Recent Articles:

Share

This article is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

NOTE: In honor of Valentine’s Day, I am republishing this instant classic, beloved by so many of you last year. Enjoy. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
February 14, 2026

Let’s be honest: you’ve seen it. A baby goat topples over in slow-motion faint, and suddenly every girl in the room squeals like she just got proposed to at the Magic Kingdom. Someone whips out their phone. Another gasps, “I literally can’t.” And before you know it, the video has been shared to fifteen group chats with two dozen emojis and forty-seven heart reactions.

To the untrained (i.e., male) eye, this might seem…unhinged. But it’s not. In fact, it’s divinely designed behavior. Because beneath the giggles and the “it’s so precious! Look at its ears!”, there’s something serious going on — something theological, biological, and deeply human.

Let’s dig in. With a smile.

Women Were Built to Care

Let’s start at the beginning. Literally. Genesis.

God made humanity male and female — in His image, yes, but not at all identical. He made Adam from the dust and gave him the job of tending the Garden and taming the wilderness. Then He made Eve from Adam’s side, not as an afterthought but as the necessary completion of the human project. Her design is not only biological — it is spiritual, emotional, and symbolic. She is the life-bearer, the sustainer, the one through whom future generations pass. She’s essential. And her superpower? Nurture.

Eve was designed to bring life into the world and care for it. That doesn’t stop at babies (though it certainly includes them). Her heart is wired for compassion, tenderness, and relational depth. This is not learned behavior. It is created nature. And that wiring shows up not just with people, but with anything small, fuzzy, and helpless.

So when she sees a chick peep in a cupcake-liner skirt, or a puppy wobbling around in socks, her soul lights up like a Christmas tree. Yes it’s silly. But it’s sublime.

God didn’t just make women able to carry life. He made them delight in it.

“Cute” Isn’t Random — It’s Engineered by Heaven

Ever wonder why all the things girls go crazy for have the same features? Tiny limbs. Big eyes. Wobbly movements. High-pitched sounds. Whether it’s a baby rabbit or a baby Yoda, it all triggers the same response.

Secularists argue that women evolved to nurture in order to ensure offspring survival. But the Christian understands something deeper: God designed those neural pathways, those hormonal reactions, those feedback loops. The release of oxytocin — the so-called “bonding hormone” — when a woman sees a helpless animal? That’s not an accident. It’s not evolutionary coincidence. It’s intentional craftsmanship. It’s God’s wiring.

God hardwired our brains (especially women’s) to light up when we see the vulnerable. This is the polar opposite of the pagan “might makes right” or the Nietzschean “will to power”. That warm rush of “awww” is fueled by a hormone cocktail — oxytocin, dopamine, even a little adrenaline — not to manipulate, but to motivate. To make us want to protect, cuddle, and care.

Oppression is not merely a sin against God and man. It’s a revolt against nature.

Share

And no, this doesn’t mean all women are destined to be stay-at-home moms with fifteen kids and a chicken coop (though some certainly are, and God bless them). It simply means the feminine soul is tuned to the frequency of tenderness. God set the dial Himself.

So when a girl loses her mind over penguins in love? That’s biology. And theology. It’s heaven and hormones holding hands.

Culture Thinks It’s Silly. God Thinks It’s Strength.

We live in a world that sneers at softness. The modern ideal is cold, efficient, optimized. Women are told to lean in, toughen up, and suppress anything that smacks of “tradition” or “emotion,” even as men are pushed to be effeminate. The combination, all too often, is proving monstrous.

But Scripture tells a better story.

God doesn’t just tolerate tenderness — He embodies it. He describes Himself as a father carrying His children (Deut. 1:31); He compares Himself to a mother comforting her infant (Isa. 66:13), and a hen gathering her chicks (Matt. 23:37). Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He stopped to bless children while others saw them as a nuisance. He’s the Lion, yes — but He’s also the Lamb.

Make no mistake: this is just one facet of His infinitely complex personality. He describes Himself, after all, as a heavenly father, not a heavenly mother, as much as that truth may offend modern sensibilities. He is the King of Kings, the Lord of Armies, the Husband of the Bride, our rock, our fortress, our deliverer. None of this discussion is meant to demean the masculine.

But that’s just the thing: the two are complementary, not contradictory. God has designed both so that they may complete one another, and in so doing, find peace and joy, a picture of Christ and the Church, and of the life to come.

God is infinite. We are not. He has given the two halves of mankind different facets of His character. Women are made to marvel at penguins, and men are made to marvel at the women who do.

So when women melt at the sight of chickens in bonnets, or piglets, or baby elephants in pajamas, it’s not weakness. It’s divine resonance. She is reflecting the character of God, whose eye is on the sparrow and who numbers the hairs of our head. She sees the helpless and does not turn away — she rejoices.

That instinct to guard the innocent and cradle the fragile? That’s strength. That’s spiritual muscle. That’s what keeps civilizations from descending from the beauty of Bach and Beethoven to the horrors of Hitler and Himmler.

The Garden Still Whispers

Our world is fallen. Sin, death, and decay touch everything. Yet beauty remains — not as a relic, but as a witness. Romans 1 and 8 make clear that creation still declares the glory of God. And within that creation are signs that point to Eden.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Baby animals — and the female delight in them — are part of that signpost. They are vestiges of innocence, glimpses of a world before thorns and death. They are reminders that death is not natural, that life is still precious, that joy still exists, and that not all is corrupted.

When women gather around a video of a duckling waddling after its mother or a baby penguin stumbling across the yard, they are not escaping reality. They are remembering it — the deeper reality lost, but that still echoes in our bones and that will come again in the New Jerusalem.

This is not nostalgia. It’s eschatology. One day the lamb will lie down with the lion. The child will play near the hole of the cobra. The man who dies at 100 will be accounted to have died young. And tears will be wiped from every eye.

Until then, God gives us foretastes. And women, in their delight, are often the first to notice.

God Made Joy — and Giggling at Goats Is Part of It

You know what God didn’t have to do?

He didn’t have to make baby goats faint dramatically like Victorian ladies seeing a mouse.

He didn’t have to make chicks chirp like squeaky toys or kittens purr like little engines of joy.

He could’ve made the world gray and practical and boring.

But He didn’t.

He made it wild and wonderful. He made it sing and sparkle. He made things that exist just to delight. Not everything is utility. Some things are just grace.

And the ability to stop — to delight, to laugh, to feel — is a spiritual gift. It reminds us we’re not machines. We’re image-bearers.

So if a girl watches a video of a duck slipping on ice six times in a row with tears of laughter streaming down her face? That’s not immaturity. That’s worship. That’s a soul responding to joy the way it was meant to.

Why Women Share These Things

There’s one more aspect to this phenomenon worth noting: the communal instinct.

Women don’t just watch cute animal videos — they share them. The experience is not complete until it’s relational. This reflects the relational design of womanhood itself. From the beginning, woman was created not as an accessory, but as a helper suitable — a complement, a co-creator of civilization, a relational being mirroring a relational God.

God Himself is triune — Father, Son, Spirit — a perfect communion of persons with different, mutually reinforcing roles. So it’s no surprise that those made in His image would feel the deepest joy when joy is shared.

When a woman sees baby elephants teasing their siblings, she doesn’t just think “that’s cute.” She thinks, “Who can I show this to?” Because part of the pleasure is in the giving of it.

This too is divine. For God did not create a private world for Himself. He created a universe bursting with life and color — and then made man and woman in His image, so He could share His joy with them. The universe, at its core, is relational. And women are evangelists of delight.

Against the World, For the Beautiful

In a society increasingly marked by utilitarianism, rage, and detachment, of women who choose to be caricatures of men, and men who desire to become caricatures of women, real women’s instinctive joy in fragile, beautiful things stands as an unintentional protest — a testimony to what is good and right and true.

Share

The world mocks tenderness. The enemy mocks innocence. But God delights in both.

And when women light up at the sight of a baby goat fainting on a spring hillside, they may not be thinking about Genesis or Isaiah or Romans or Revelation — but they are embodying them. They are declaring, with eyes wide and hearts soft, that life is still good. That beauty still matters. That the vulnerable still deserve protection.

And that in a fallen world bent on power, there is still room for joy.

Conclusion: Theology in a TikTok

So why are women “weirdly excited” about kittens and penguins and baby fainting goats?

Because God made them that way. And it’s one of the best arguments for God you’ll ever find.

No accidental cosmos, no abiogenesis, no blind evolutionary process, no nihilistic machinery of chance could ever have forged such a delight — a spontaneous, uncalculating love of the small and fragile.

That is the work of a Creator. A Father. One who loves His children — and the lambs and chicks and baby goats too.

Let the world scoff. But the women who squeal at cute baby animals may be seeing something the rest of us are not. They are certainly silly. They are also saints of sentiment, prophets of joy, remembering Eden and pointing quietly toward the coming Kingdom.

Because God made them to.

So next time you hear the squeal, don’t roll your eyes, at least not too much. Don’t mutter something about attention spans or estrogen, or at least not more than affectionate teasing requires.

Smile.

You’re witnessing something sacred.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Articles:

Share