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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
September 6, 2026

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

Jeff and I discuss:

• Why excusing Lindsay Clancy means denying women moral agency

• How therapeutic culture turns wickedness into diagnosis and perpetrators into victims

• Why Protestant seminaries’ silence on demonology has left Christians unarmed

• How abortion’s “culture of death” brought us here.

It’s 14 minutes you won’t want to miss!

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Nothing is more important than educating the next generation. My friends at the Herzog Foundation are expanding access to Christian education. Watch this short clip and visit HerzogFoundation.com

Our Full Discussion:

Announcer: This is Real Truth for Today. Podcasts of the program are available on the podcast page at AFR.net. Now, back to Pastor Jeff Schreve.

Jeff Schreve: Welcome back to the program. Pastor Jeff here, talking to my friend Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, an anti-communist, and part of the team that started PayPal. His website is RodMartin.org.

Okay, Rod, at the break we were talking about Lindsay Clancy and just how horrific what she did was. It seemed like it was planned out. She got her husband out of the house and killed her kids in a gruesome way, strangling them to death. They were five and under, three kids. Then she threw herself out of the window to try to kill herself. But she slashed her wrists or slashed her throat or something like that.

I haven’t followed it closely, but what is her defense? That I was just nuts?

Rod D. Martin: Yes, pretty much. She pled that she did it, but she’s crazy. That’s probably the best defense available, because otherwise this is completely indefensible.

The evidence is absolutely clear that she did it. And the people online who say, “Oh, well, the husband really did it,” and so forth are shocking to watch.

No. Her defense lawyers actually had her plead not guilty by reason of insanity. That means she’s admitting in a sworn filing that she did it. The whole basis of her defense is that she did it, but she wasn’t mentally competent. So all this internet crazy is just really wild to watch.

It goes back to something we were fighting in the Southern Baptist Convention for several years. In the defense of women, and of course we want to defend women, critical theory takes you into this weird place where women should be given all power, and if only women existed, there would be no violence in the world. At the same time, women can kill their children randomly and can’t be held responsible for it because: hormones.

Well, wait. What?! That’s just insane.

It’s anti-biblical, because the Bible actually holds us all responsible for our actions. If she really is crazy, then of course you would modify that, but you wouldn’t let her go free. She’s a threat to society, and she murdered three children. That’s not how that works.

So what is the biblical view? The biblical view and the American legal view are that you are responsible for what you do. That’s a good thing, because that’s the basis of equality.

If women are just all ninnies buffeted about by their hormones to such a degree that you can’t leave your children with them safely, then the logical response to that would just be to lock all the women up. But that’s complete nonsense, and so is the infantilization of those same women by their so-called defenders.

Jeff Schreve: Right.

Rod D. Martin: So the defenses being made are absurd. They are a dodge of responsibility, which is endemic in this culture. Everything is made a therapeutic issue to avoid the reality of sinfulness and fallenness. Nobody is ever accountable for anything. If somebody steps beyond a certain norm, we just call it crazy so we don’t have to call it evil.

That’s unbiblical. That’s un-Christian.

Honestly, if this woman is crazy, she probably didn’t have the requisite intent to be held fully accountable for murder one in this case. But she’s still accountable. She still did what she did.

Jeff Schreve: Right.

Rod D. Martin: There’s just no avoiding that.

The other thing, in answer to your question, is this idea that somehow she was drug-addled and turned psychotic by pharmaceuticals. The evidence doesn’t seem to support it.

I saw one of the doctors give testimony on this. He was saying her real problem was that she was pill-resistant. Her defense lawyer cross-examined that, and he said, “No, we couldn’t get her to take her pills. That was the problem.” She had all these prescriptions because she wouldn’t use them.

And sure enough, the physical evidence matches that. They looked at her pill bottles very, very closely. She’d hardly taken any of them, ever.

So the defense that she was driven into psychosis by medical malpractice just doesn’t seem to hold water. I look at this evidence, and I think she meant to do it. I think she was competent, and she’s just wicked.

Mental Illness and the Reality of the Demonic

Jeff Schreve: It’s just horrific.

I’ve had this conversation with a number of people in ministry. In the Bible, you don’t read much about mental illness. They had crazy people. They said of Jesus that he’s out of his mind. But you hear and read a lot about demonic possession.

I think that in America today, we don’t ever want to say somebody is demon-possessed or anything. But if you do the things that a lot of these people are doing, you stab Iryna Zarutska on the train for no reason at all, stab her to death as that guy did in Charlotte, North Carolina, I mean, the demons are involved in that kind of behavior, just like with her behavior. I think she even said she was hearing voices.

We don’t like to talk about the demonic side of this, but I put more emphasis on the demonic side than on, “She’s got a mental illness.”

Rod D. Martin: Well, that certainly seems to be the case here. I don’t think you’re going to be able to prove that to a jury, of course. But as Christians, we know that demons are real. We know how they act. We actually are given a very clear picture of that in Scripture. Jesus certainly took it seriously, so why wouldn’t we?

The answer to that is part and parcel of what I was saying earlier. The entire culture wants to deny the idea of fallenness, and certainly of the supernatural, all of which is a bit ironic these days. We have gone way past the rationalist materialism of our youth into a culture where Wicca is prevalent and all kinds of pagan “spirituality” is everywhere. They may not all know it, but of course they’re playing with demons.

I’ve met more than a few of these people. We’ve got one young lady in our church who was a Wiccan and spent years in the occult before she was miraculously saved. She tells stories: “Of course we knew we were dealing with demons. We would make contracts with demons. Yes, we knew what we were doing.”

Crucially, she said, “We took the Bible more seriously than any Christians I know, because the demons know perfectly well who God is and that He’s real.”

So the whole aim is to twist and pervert whatever God wants into something that will give Him offense.

Well, if that’s going on even with people in my own church, I don’t think that this is hidden in a corner somewhere anymore.

It is a real shame that our Southern Baptist seminaries, and no other Protestant seminaries of which I’m aware, even have a single class on demonology. They just don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. That’s a mistake.

It is a real mistake to leave mental health issues to a professional field that is rooted in Freud’s dictum that having religious belief is itself a sign of insanity. And it’s equally stupid for us to leave demonology entirely to the Catholic Church. That’s an enormous mistake. Protestants have to start taking this more seriously.

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In any case, if it is true, and I don’t know that it’s true, but I think based on the evidence I’ve seen that it is true, that Lindsay Clancy really wasn’t taking her pills, really actually seemed to be able to form the intent, and certainly premeditated it to the degree of even getting her husband out of the house and arranging everything so that she could carry this out, she actually strangled her own three children in front of each other.

Imagine the horror in the two children who are watching the first one get strangled to death and just can’t believe that their mommy is doing this.

Jeff Schreve: Yes.

Rod D. Martin: And she did all this just completely heartlessly.

So, okay, that actually does sound a lot like demon possession in Scripture, and Christians need to take that seriously. We don’t know that for sure, but we know that it’s possible.

And it would be helpful to speak to a culture that thinks of itself as highly spiritual without being Christian: Here is the consequence of what you’re believing and doing.

When Abortion Is Called Mercy

Jeff Schreve: Rod, I’m going to play you a clip. That was from Anne Hathaway on The View. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it just shows you Isaiah 5:20 comes into view every single day: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

Here is Anne Hathaway talking about the mercy of abortion.

Anne Hathaway, recorded clip: When you are a young woman starting out your career, your reproductive destiny matters a great deal. My own personal experience with abortion, and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy.

We don’t know. We don’t know. It’s not a world in which we know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike. That follows that no two conceptions are alike.

So how can we have a law? How can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?

And where I come at it from is, when you allow for choice, you allow for flexibility, which is what we need in order to be human.

Jeff Schreve: It’s just unbelievable. Abortion is another word for mercy. Brutally murdering your unborn baby is another word for mercy. That’s where we’ve come. And then all the ladies on The View are a bunch of seals: “Oh, that’s right.”

Rod D. Martin: Yes, you can hear them.

Jeff Schreve: “Mm-hmm. How insightful.”

Well, that fits in with the women who are now supporting Lindsay Clancy, saying, “Oh, she’s not guilty because she was in psychosis.”

I look at that, Rod, and you just think: Obviously, there’s hope for humanity in Jesus, but there’s not hope for humanity outside of Jesus. We’re taking a bullet train in the opposite direction that we need to go.

The Culture of Death

Rod D. Martin: Well, we had a number of Southern Baptist leaders for a while — fortunately, many of them have left our denomination — but a number of them preached for many recent years that the worst thing about America was its Christian culture, this horrible “cultural Christianity” that deceives people into thinking they’re believers when they aren’t.

Okay. First of all, I question that anybody’s really deceived about that. Romans certainly suggests they are not. They either know Jesus or they don’t.

But the point is that what “cultural Christianity” did for us for centuries was give all of us a common moral reference point such that we just didn’t do or even think of certain things. And if somebody did, even the unbelievers understood that they were horribly wrong.

So there was a consensus that meant you didn’t get a lot of Lindsay Clancys, or Iryna Zarutskas, or the woman who in Times Square yesterday just randomly pulled a knife on a bunch of people and started stabbing them. Again, that sounds like demon possession. Apart from that it’s just weird.

And we have this increasingly prevalent view that no one is ever responsible for anything. Of course, unless you’re a Christian white male, and then you’re responsible for literally everything, of course.

Again, it is an attack on Scripture. And yes, it started with Roe v. Wade. It started with the idea that you could murder your own child in the safest place it should ever experience in its life, your womb, and somehow that’s not only morally acceptable, but in many cases morally virtuous.

No, that’s horribly, horribly wrong.

And not only because the excuse is frequently, “But the woman might not be able to raise the child well.” Well, guess what? Lots of people have bad mothers. That doesn’t mean they want to die.

For that matter, there are about three times as many people in the United States who would like to adopt a child as are able to. There’s no lack of demand for happy homes where these children can be raised, if somebody can just manage not to murder them before they have a chance to be placed for adoption.

So all of this is just horrible. And of course it was always going to lead here. What is the difference between killing a preborn child and a post-born child? Increasingly, the answer of many Democrats in particular is: There isn’t any difference at all.

We saw that under the previous governor in Virginia, when he was actually enacting legislation to allow the mother and the doctor to decide, after the child was born, whether they would kill it in the hospital.

This is where this goes: it can go nowhere else. And you see it with the euthanasia campaign in Canada and other countries. It is a culture of death. And if anything in the world is satanic, that’s it.

Democratic Socialism’s Openly Communist Goal

Jeff Schreve: Well said, for sure.

Okay, you are an anti-communist. It’s in your bio. They don’t call it communism. It’s democratic socialism, which I think the Nazis were the democratic socialists of their day.

Rod D. Martin: Yes.

Jeff Schreve: It’s on the rise. Young people think it’s all the rage. Are we on a collision course with disaster here?

Rod D. Martin: Well, they used to deny the communist thing. But we just had the Democratic Socialists of America convention a few weeks ago, and one of the principal leaders of the DSA stood up at the podium and said, “Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered.

So no, they don’t think it’s bad. They want to use the power of the state to punish their enemies. And we know where that goes. We know where it’s gone in every country that’s tried it. It involves mass censorship, mass theft, mass deaths, and just unbelievable totalitarian oppression.

So yes, we’re in a horrifying place in this country, and the Democrats are lapping it up like water at a trough. So we have our work cut out for us.

Jeff Schreve: We’re talking to Rod Martin. When we come back from the break, we’ll be taking your calls: 888-589-8840. That’s 888-589-8840.

If you have a question or comment, you’re listening to Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve here on American Family Radio. We’ll be right back after the break.

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by Michael Clary
August 30, 2026

“My daughter was murdered by gender ideology.”

Those are the words of Abigail Martinez, a devout Christian widow in California, who watched the state take her daughter away when she refused to affirm her daughter’s transgender identity. Her daughter, Yaeli, was struggling with depression and her sexuality, so a school psychologist recommended she join the school’s LGBT club (without Abigail’s knowledge or consent). When Abigail discovered what was happening, she refused to affirm her daughter’s transition, so the state removed her from her home.

Activists told Martinez to hold a funeral for her daughter and celebrate the adoption of a “son.” They told her she’d never see Yaeli again if she kept talking about God.

Not long after this, Yaeli killed herself.

When Martinez later testified before Congress, she said her daughter’s death was a murder. Gender ideology killed her.

Now, ask yourself a question. How many Christian leaders and churches have been outspoken about the dangers of gender ideology? How many pastors will boldly and unflinchingly denounce homosexuality, gay “marriage,” transgenderism, and the whole array of LGBT sins? Even though there is a growing movement of courageous pastors speaking out, the reality is, over the last 20 years or so, many of them have been silent.

I’m a pastor. Over more than 20 years in ministry, I’ve watched a theology take root in American evangelicalism that trains Christians to be silent in the face of all kinds of cultural tyranny. It’s a theology that says the church is at her best when she’s losing. It says we should not seek cultural influence because that would only corrupt us. Further, it says we should not seek political power because that’s beneath us. Our only public duty is to do evangelism, because eternal destinies are all that really matters. The culture war is just a distraction.

I call this loser theology, and it has done great damage to the modern church. Further, it harms society by causing Christians to disengage as the greatest conscience-shaping force in our culture.

Loser theology is promoted by prominent advocates, though that’s not what they call it. Russell Moore, one of the most influential evangelical voices of the last decade and former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote in his 2015 book that “the Bible Belt is teetering toward collapse, and I say let it fall.” He argued the church is most faithful when she exists as a “persecuted minority,” never a “moral majority.” He says Christians are better witnesses as cultural losers rather than winners.

That may sound humble, but it isn’t. It’s simply waving the white flag of surrender to cultural powers who will eagerly destroy us if given the chance. This theology is custom-built to explain away defeat after defeat, training a generation of Christians to lose and feel good about it. Loser theology regards retreat as a virtue.

When loser theology is a dominant motif of modern evangelicalism, what do you think will happen? We don’t have to guess. The same year Moore’s book came out (2015), the Supreme Court invented a right to “gay marriage” in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In the six years that followed, public support for gay marriage skyrocketed to 70 percent. During that same period, LGBTQ identification among Gen Z nearly doubled.

Let that sink in. Roughly one-fifth of an entire generation of children who were seduced into sexual perversion in the immediate aftermath of Obergefell. The culture didn’t just suddenly change its mind. Rather, people changed their minds because powerful people signaled this was the new morality.

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And where was the church? She was largely silent because many Christians believed we should just focus on soul-winning rather than culture-warring. Thus, LGBT activism marched on, unopposed.

None of this happened because the culture simply changed its mind. Rather, it happened because the church had abandoned its post as the most powerful conscience-shaping institution in the world.

Obergefell has already done its damage, and it will be very difficult to get that toothpaste back in the tube. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian parents are now losing custody battles over their kids’ gender identities because their churches never gave them a theological framework for resistance, only permission to suffer and lose. And when the church loses her spine, the sheep are left without protection.

Other battles are ongoing and have yet to be settled where Christians need to assert a strong, prophetic voice. As Islam is already taking Europe hostage, its footprint in America continues to expand. Is it too late? Will we lose this battle also? We certainly will if the church is convinced that our only job is to ignore the culture and just do evangelism. And if we lose the culture, we will be ruled by a jihadist religious system that has no scruples against wielding power to crush its enemies.

That’s what Islam is. It’s a system of domination with a religious veneer. They will not simply coexist with us if we let them win.

So, should we let them win so we can be losers for Jesus? If so, how else might we choose to lose? How about family courts, school boards, and city councils? The pattern repeats across every civic institution because the best people to hold the line have been taught for two generations that line-holding is somebody else’s job.

Here’s the part that should bother you most, whether you’re a churchgoer or not. This isn’t happening because Christians are cowards. They’re not. It’s happening because many of them have been discipled to regard passivity as a form of holiness. They’ve been trained to think losing is “the way of the cross” because “Jesus calls us to be weak.”

These statements sound pious, but they profoundly misunderstand scripture. Yes, when we are weak, he is strong, but scripture never commands us to pursue weakness as an end in itself.

I’ve sat across from men and women in my office who suppress every instinct toward leadership and strength because they’ve absorbed the idea that ambition is sin and confidence is pride. I’ve watched churches refuse to speak plainly about cultural evil because plain speech might be regarded as unkind. This is no accident. It was discipled into people, one sermon at a time.

In short, some Christians are afraid of winning because we’ve been conditioned to believe power can only be used for evil purposes, never as a force for good. That’s not true. To be sure, scripture is full of warnings about the corrupting potential of power, but Jesus also promises to give his people power, and he expects us to wield it righteously (Acts 1:8).

Further, there’s a difference between refusing to worship power and refusing to use it at all. The same Christ who died on a cross now reigns at the right hand of the Father, and scripture says every knee will bow to Him — kings and nations included. That’s not a losing vision. The men and women who built the church that shaped Western civilization understood this. They didn’t do it by convincing themselves that losing was the point.

If you’ve ever sat in a pew wondering why your church seems allergic to contesting anything, or why every act of Christian courage gets treated with more suspicion than every act of Christian retreat, that’s not your imagination, nor is it biblical faithfulness. It’s loser theology. It’s a theology of defeat that’s presented as humility. And it’s long past time we reject it and step into the arena where we belong.

— Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. His latest book, Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth is now available.

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Our Full Discussion Transcribed After the Break

by Rod D. Martin and John Anderson
August 23, 2026

In this episode of “Wisdom for the Church,” former SBC Executive Committee officer Rod D. Martin shares his perspective on the current state of the Southern Baptist Convention.

We discuss:

• Why the SBC Annual Meeting is a stewardship responsibility, not merely another worship gathering

• How Baptist polity gives ordinary church members real authority over seminaries, missions, budgets, and denominational leadership

• What Willy Rice’s election says about the SBC’s rejection of critical theory and institutional drift

• Why the Mohler Amendment and the female-pastor debate concern the authority of Scripture, not merely denominational politics

• How presidential appointments shape the SBC for years, and why phone calls, messengers, and faithful attendance can overcome institutional groupthink

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Our Full Discussion:

John Anderson: Welcome back to Wisdom for the Church. I am John, and I have a special guest on this episode: Rod Martin.

Rod, I’ve had you on before. Before I started recording, I was thinking, “What do I introduce Rod as?” You wear a lot of hats. How do you typically introduce yourself in terms of what you do?

Rod D. Martin: Well, I’m CEO of Martin Capital. We do technology investments. As you know, I was one of the early guys at PayPal, so I’ve got a bit of a background in that.

For the purposes of your podcast, though, I’m a former officer of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, so I’m very, very interested in the things in which you’re interested.

John Anderson: Amen. Before we get into that - because that’s your credential with the SBC, and you are someone who knows what he’s talking about — I will say, Rod, and this is a compliment: You look like you have so much fun in life.

Maybe it’s just an act. Maybe it’s all a big act. But every time I see a picture of you, I feel like you’re on Fox Business with a fedora on, just living your life.

Rod D. Martin: Very, very often, yes.

John Anderson: There we go. It just looks so Florida. You’re helping people understand the world on Fox Business and various Fox channels. Every time I see a picture, I get a kick out of it because it looks like you enjoy your time on those programs.

Rod D. Martin: Things are complex. The world has not gotten simpler because of TikTok. We all have the attention span of a fruit fly, and people get their news that way. I’m just as guilty as anybody.

I see a video on YouTube that’s more than about three minutes long, and I’m just like, “Eh, I don’t have time for that.” But the truth is, we have to make time for that. We have to understand how all these things interrelate. When we don’t, we make bad decisions.

That just isn’t okay. It’s not okay for yourself. It’s not okay for your family. It’s not okay for your church. But it’s really not okay from a stewardship perspective.

The Lord has put us here to steward His world. This all belongs to Him. It may be in the hands of rebels for a little while, but He is still sovereign. He is still on the throne. Everybody is going to bow down at the throne of judgment, and it’s our job to steward His world until He comes.

Well, you have to understand it to steward it.

John Anderson: Great point. I know you might be alluding to how, with short-form content, we consume something and then come to a conclusion even if it isn’t the full story. I feel like we’ve seen a lot of that over the last three or four years in post-COVID times, even on the conservative side. If a conspiracy theory sounds pretty good, a lot of people think it’s probably right.

One thing I am tired of — and I try not to do this on my channel, though I can’t say I’m batting a thousand — is hearing stories and watching videos about, “Did you hear what so-and-so said about such-and-such, or what so-and-so said back?” I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, but there seems to be a lot of personality-driven slop out there.

I’m interested in people, but I want to hear the actual facts of the situation. I don’t always get it right, but I am certainly tired of that. I don’t want my channel to be clickbaity.

Rod D. Martin: Lots of this is just high school. Again, the attention span drives that. If all of your media is consumed in 30-second chunks, you’re not getting any depth. You’re not getting any real understanding.

Someone produces a slick enough reel with ominous music and tells some terrible story about somebody. You’re already conditioned, by the immense lying of our institutions, to disbelieve authority.

John Anderson: That’s true.

Rod D. Martin: Well, sure. It’s super easy to say, “This says something other than the received wisdom, so it must be true.” Wrong. That’s not how that works.

John Anderson: It doesn’t make it right, especially the more superficial it is. A few years ago, we were all saying that the difference between a conspiracy theory and an established truth is about six months.

Rod D. Martin: And that’s frequently true. Don’t improve upon it by making the same errors. That’s the thing.

We actually have a standard of truth. We have something by which to judge all these facts. The first and foremost thing we get from that standard is well summarized in the proverb that says it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out. We are supposed to be diligent in finding truth, not merely things that contradict people we don’t like.

John Anderson: Yes. The confirmation bias and echo chambers — we’re all prone to that error. In our sin nature, we want to be right, and we don’t want to investigate because it does take work.

Rod, I appreciate you being on because I’ve wanted to debrief with you for a while. The Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting back in June. It seems like a while ago now, but I didn’t get to talk to you about it. I thought, “Well, Rod always has an opinion on certain things.”

Overarchingly, I felt like it was a positive step in the right direction on a couple of key issues. First, just off the cuff, what did you think about it? I think you’re still part of an SBC church.

Why the Annual Meeting Matters

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely. They may have to bury me in the sanctuary.

I’ve told you before that I was a Southern Baptist before I was a Christian, which is true of most of us who were born in the church. I believe in it. It matters. It has sometimes gone awry. It is sometimes a mess.

This is the exact same thing: We have a stewardship responsibility. That’s what the annual meeting is. The annual meeting is a stewardship event that, honestly, a lot of our leaders want to turn into something else.

Sometimes that’s out of a good motivation. They say, “This is a great time to get together and worship.” Well, yes, it is. But we have a two-day Pastors’ Conference immediately before it for that.

The annual meeting itself, back in the day, used to be four whole days. We had four days of business meetings in my short lifetime. That’s actually how we did it. There was plenty of time to debate literally anything and get real work done.

We don’t have that luxury anymore. We now meet for two days. Those two days are truncated to a morning and an afternoon session on Tuesday, a morning session on Wednesday, and then an afternoon session after everybody has already left.

It is frequently true that the Committee on Order of Business — and I’ve chaired that committee, so I know a little bit about this — will schedule things for late Wednesday afternoon to make sure nobody is there to vote on them. Just the hard-core attendees will actually be making those decisions.

That’s a problem in a fundamental way, because guess who doesn’t get his way paid to the annual meeting? That would be messengers from little dinky churches, and little dinky churches are the overwhelming majority. Seventy-four percent of Southern Baptist churches have 100 members or fewer. Almost 50 percent have 50 members or fewer.

There’s nothing wrong with those churches. They just don’t have a big budget to fly people across the country every year. Compare that with Lifeway, the International Mission Board, the North American Mission Board, and all the seminaries. They know what matters to them is going to be up for a vote, and they pay for plane tickets and hotel rooms for staff members who are absolutely going to the convention and will vote the way they are told.

That is endemic. There probably is a fix for it, but that doesn’t really matter at the moment, because it is what exists.

If Southern Baptists want to have a say over how their tithe money is spent, how we conduct missions, how we conduct seminary education, and how we conduct all the work of the Lord that we delegate to this larger body — not delegating authority over our churches, but delegating authority to spend this money because it can do that work better collectively than we can individually — then we actually have to show up.

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The decisions are made, always, in all things and in all of life, by the people who show up.

John Anderson: Very pragmatic.

Rod D. Martin: That’s very practical and very biblical. The Bible is an incredibly practical book. There’s no escaping the need to do the things that are effective to achieve righteousness in a world entirely populated by sinners who, under the best of circumstances, are going to have mixed motives and occasionally evil intent, even when they don’t think they’re being evil.

The way you guard against that is to have more of the people of God in one room, in one place, making decisions together, checking and balancing one another. That is the essence of Baptist polity going back centuries.

John Anderson: Amen, brother. When I said pragmatic, I really meant practical. God is a God who uses means. He’s not a God who is going to contradict the sense He has given us. He has given us logic and a sense of order for a reason.

I think the SBC, in terms of the convention, conducts things mostly in an orderly way. It was my first annual meeting. The massive endeavor that it is was really impressive from a logistics standpoint and many other standpoints.

I did notice a smaller detail. After being there for the entire two days of the actual convention, apart from the Pastors’ Conference, I realized that I needed to be in that convention hall with thousands of people as early as possible and stay until the final thing was done, and do the same thing the next day.

Sometimes they would say approximately when a vote would be held, but then it would be later or earlier. I’m not saying there was a sleazy motive, but it felt like, “I thought we were voting on this a little later. I’m glad we’re in the room now, because it’s 8:35, and I thought this was supposed to happen at 9:05.” Have you noticed that in the past?

Rod D. Martin: In most cases, I would say it’s perfectly well-intentioned. Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But that doesn’t change the fact that the people trying to run this are usually doing a good job and usually have good intent. Even when they happen to disagree with me, they’re usually trying to do something they believe to be good.

That’s exactly why we have a business meeting every year. And no, guys, it’s not a worship service. It’s a business meeting, and you’ve got to have those. Somebody has to be the janitor. Somebody has to be the plumber. Everybody doesn’t get to sing all the time. That’s what business meetings are.

I grew up in Southern Baptist churches. Now a lot of our churches have elders. My church has elders, and a lot of the business gets done in an elders’ meeting somewhere. You very rarely have a business meeting.

But when I was a kid, we had one every month on a Wednesday night, which admittedly is not when everybody was showing up. The people who cared about those kinds of things showed up. At any given business meeting, big things could change. They might fire the preacher and kick him out of the parsonage. That’s part of the reason we don’t do that quite so much anymore.

But the truth is, the business meeting is where we determine how to do the ministry that is the business of the rest of the church’s time. You determine who is going to be the music minister and lead the music. You determine the theological content of various church programs and Sunday school classes. You vote for or against an existing pastor, a future pastor, the succession of the church, and the future of its members.

That sounds really boring to most people, but it’s some of the most important stuff. You don’t get to eat and live indoors if somebody doesn’t build a house or a restaurant, and it’s the same with this.

At the Southern Baptist annual meeting, we don’t directly decide, for instance, which missionary gets assigned to which country. That’s not what the meeting is for. But we do pick the people who do. That’s crucial.

We pick the people who serve on the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board. They’re the people who hire the heads of those entities. We pick the people who determine the future of each individual seminary.

Our seminaries matter. We educate one-third of the seminary students on this continent in just six Southern Baptist schools. It’s amazing. They don’t all finish. They don’t all get an M.Div. or a doctorate, but they go. We have a ridiculously outsized influence on the state of the church in America, and therefore the world.

If you’re not participating in that, you’re really missing out. It’s a wonderful way to worship, in a way we don’t normally think of as worship, and to make sure things stay on track.

Good men make mistakes. We’ve seen that over and over. I think the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force was entirely composed of wonderful, godly men, many of whom are good friends of mine. I also think they really screwed up. I think the whole thing has been a disaster, and I voted for it. I was for it.

If we had had a few more guys in there like Chuck Kelley telling us, “Wait. This is going to go into a ditch in these three very predictable ways,” maybe we wouldn’t have done it. But we listened to the guys on the platform. They thought they knew best. They had every reason to be trusted, and they were trustworthy men. They were just wrong. If we had had more people in the room, it might have gone better.

Baptist Polity and Institutional Accountability

John Anderson: Good point. You’ve talked before about the SBC’s importance, and I’ve become more and more convinced of it. It’s a massively important denomination, a cooperation of so many churches, because of its far-reaching influence across the world, not just the United States.

I’ve also become convinced that it’s such a privilege to be part of it. For all its warts and flaws — and there are some that always have to be dealt with — you’re in a denomination where you actually do have a say. Not everyone can say that.

Rod D. Martin: Let’s put a fine point on that. It’s really important.

Look at Harvard. The men who started Harvard did it 10 minutes after the Pilgrims got here. Seriously, the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, and in 1636 somebody founded Harvard University. That’s amazing. They did it to educate preachers. That was the point. By 1800, it had already gone Unitarian. Still, 1636 to 1800 is a really long time, so they were very successful in what they did. It’s still a shockingly important and successful institution.

But here’s the thing: You don’t have any say over it. Even if you were an alumnus, you wouldn’t have a say. It has what’s called in law a self-perpetuating board. The board picks its own successors. Nobody outside the board ever gets any say whatsoever, unless they write a big check or something, and most people aren’t going to be able to do that.

That board picks the people who succeed it. Once it moves in a direction, you’re never going to change it unless God does a miracle.

That is not so in the seminaries that educate a third of the seminary students on this continent. If enough people show up at the annual meeting in any given year, they can meaningfully change the direction of any of these institutions. If one goes bad, it can be fixed.

We had that in the 1980s. Pretty much all of them had gone bad, and that changed. It didn’t change by itself. It changed through the faithful attendance of tens of thousands of Southern Baptists.

At the height of it, at the convention in Dallas, Texas, in 1985, we had 45,000 messengers in attendance. It was the largest deliberative body in the history of the world, determining the direction of the largest Protestant denomination in North America.

So yes, it’s a privilege to be part of it. It’s also, “Hey, where are all you guys? Shame on you. Show up.” Everything can’t be singing. Now, we sing a lot at the annual meeting, so if you want some good singing, they’ve got it. But that’s not why you’re there. It’s a business meeting, and it matters.

John Anderson: The motion for you to have your solo did fail. For anyone going next year, Rod will not have either a vocal or a guitar solo.

This year, more than a couple of important things happened. Two big ones that I was part of and saw a lot of reaction to were the election of a new president and a very important amendment.

Overall, what was your take on Willy Rice becoming the president of the SBC? Josh Powell, I believe, went up against him, and the vote wasn’t too close from what I saw. It seemed like two overarchingly good candidates, given recent years. What did you think?

Willy Rice and the Turn Against Critical Theory

Rod D. Martin: We didn’t have a single plagiarist on the ballot. That was a big improvement. I appreciate and approve of that. Nobody was woke. This is all good.

Willy Rice is the man for the hour. He’s a friend, and he’s been doing the work in the SBC forever.

The thing I love about Willy is that he did go over to the dark side for a little bit. He drank the Kool-Aid a little bit on the whole woke thing, not because he believed in it, but because his friends told him, “This is good. We’re not doing that crazy Marxist stuff. We’re eating the fish and spitting out the bones. This is going to make us more effective with certain groups in the country.”

No, it’s not. It’s poison. It’s complete poison, and it’s antithetical to the gospel.

We serve a God who literally gave His own life to redeem you. You are a rebel and a traitor to the King of all creation. There’s no reconciling that. One sin is enough for eternal hell. Yet Jesus personally, in the flesh, made a way for you to be redeemed and set judicially innocent, as though you never did any of that.

That’s even true after you’re saved and you keep sinning, because you do. There’s no escaping that. Yet it is a once-and-for-all salvation that allows you to stand with your head held high at the throne of judgment.

That’s Christianity. We’re for the underdog. We believe in redemption stories. We want to see people become more than they are.

Not so with critical theory, which defines you by your most superficial characteristics — things like skin color and private parts. Those things define not only who you are and what you can ever be, but also what you are required to believe or, alternatively, what you are defined as believing.

There’s a reason the National Museum of African American History and Culture had that big poster about whiteness and everything defined as whiteness on that poster. Fortunately, it was up for only about five weeks, and the Trump administration got it taken down, because it was evil. It was racist.

The gist of it was that things like reasoning ability and hard work, all these virtuous things, are characteristics of whiteness.

John Anderson: I remember seeing that.

Rod D. Martin: That’s horrifying. The whole thing says, basically, that if you’re you, John, you are irredeemable.

Hillary didn’t use those terms lightly: deplorable and irredeemable. You cannot be redeemed. You will always be a racist. You’ll always be a misogynist. You’ll always be a class enemy. But you can make amends for it a little bit through a regular penance of antiracism or allyship.

This is ridiculous. This is evil. Again, it’s antithetical to the gospel. It says one group of people can never repent and another group never needs to. It teaches the opposite of Christianity.

Willy Rice, like many of the guys in leadership, saw that the wind was blowing in a way that suggested we needed to fine-tune our messaging to reach various unreached groups. He drank the Kool-Aid for a minute. Then one day he woke up — he didn’t go woke; he woke up.

Willy did the most amazing thing I’ve seen in Southern Baptist life, probably in my whole life: He publicly repented. You’re not allowed to do that! In public, he said, “I was wrong. Here are the reasons I was wrong. Nobody should believe this stuff that I taught. It’s wrong.”

He wins my vote just on humility.

I know virtually every Southern Baptist leader you can name, and none of them did that except Willy Rice. Some of them were on the right side all along. Some were on the wrong side and are pretending they never were. Willy Rice told the truth, said he was wrong, and then started working against the things he had been wrong about.

That by itself deserves the presidency of the SBC. And that’s not all. He understands the institution. He understands how it works. He understands who is and isn’t qualified for various boards and committees. He’s going to do a fantastic job. He already is.

I’m thrilled with Willy, but I’m mostly thrilled because that was probably the most Christian thing I have seen an SBC leader do. Boy, I’ve seen them do the other.

John Anderson: That was well stated. On critical race theory and the various problems, the bottom line is that it’s contrary to the Bible. It’s contrary to the gospel. It’s racism rebranded. It’s not so much a political fight as a theological one.

That all got shoved under the rug: “No, no, this is just an analytical tool.”

Rod D. Martin: No, it’s not. Even if it works, if I judge everything by Satan’s standards, I’m going to end up with Satan’s conclusions. If it is an analytical tool, it’s one you shouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. It’s horrifying.

John Anderson: The reason I know who you are is that I used to watch a lot of videos by Jon Harris, and I still watch some. The first time I saw a video of you was when you were on his podcast, which I still think is one of the top-quality podcasts.

He’s the real deal in terms of Christian character. He’s not trendy. He isn’t just hit by different winds and waves. You were a voice at that time against wokeness, so praise the Lord for that.

Even for those who fell a little captive to it — I think I did as a young Christian for a little while, probably around 2016 — I didn’t go fully for it, but I remember hearing those thoughts and thinking, “Of course I want to care about my nonwhite brothers and sisters,” not realizing that the person I was hearing was importing a lot of poison.

After a year or two, I thought, “Whoa. This is Satan. It is not about loving your neighbor as yourself. It’s about guilting one group, uplifting another, playing games with prejudice and partiality, and imposing double standards. I don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole.”

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Rod D. Martin: Even if it’s well-intentioned - and for most of these guys, it was - it was wrong.

Let’s be very clear: Some guys used this stuff to displace political opponents and take power in an inappropriate way. There were certainly people who were true-believer Marxists, and they have largely outed themselves over time, whether they meant to or not.

But the truth is that most of these guys meant well. They meant exactly what you thought in 2016: “We’ve got to love our brothers, and we’re being told that this is how.”

But you’re being told wrong. It is exactly like when physicians came to treat a dying George Washington and their cure was to bleed him. They eventually bled him out. He died of the treatment, not the disease.

You can mean to do well and still do something patently harmful. That’s what was happening here, led in part by people who were not acting in good faith and have shown that over time, but in many cases by people who really meant to do well.

I’m glad to see them do better now. But I’m more glad that Willy Rice said it straight out: “I was wrong. This is what’s right. We’re sticking with the Bible.” That was courageous. It was not obvious that it would be rewarded in any way, but ultimately it was.

John Anderson: Praise the Lord.

He was more of what you might call the reform candidate — not Calvinistic Reformed, but someone saying, “We need to push forward, and we need to change some things.” You might not call them foundational matters, but there are some things we really need to get right.

The other candidate seemed okay, but he was a little more status quo. I attended a panel where both of them were present and got that feeling.

The problems with institutions that have theological issues or are dealing with female pastors may not be stage-four cancer, but they’re not not sick. It’s becoming far more serious than it should be, and we should try to kill the sickness.

That’s why I felt Willy Rice was the better candidate. These aren’t mere tweaks or maintenance issues. If the Bible is clear on female pastors, for example — and it is — that’s a little leaven that leavens the whole lump if we just let it go or aren’t clear. Willy Rice was clearer on this where we really needed clarity.

The Presidency, the Committees, and the Egalitarian Question

Rod D. Martin: It was a huge win. We’re so happy. We’ve been working for a better presidency for many years now, and we had six years of frankly very poor presidents.

J.D. Greear is an amazing guy. He’s shockingly capable. I have tons of respect for him, but he was a terrible president. The appointments he saddled us with were just awful.

Then you get Ed Litton, who was convulsed in a plagiarism scandal, for heaven’s sake, and didn’t have the decency to resign. I’ve never seen anything like it. And this guy’s appointments — oh my gosh.

Then you get two terms of Bart Barber. I like Bart, but he’s a goober. He’s a company man, and his appointments show it.

It’s going to take several years to work through that. I know most of your viewers probably don’t realize how this works, so let me explain it very quickly.

The president appoints a bunch of committees. But the most important thing he does, and almost the only power he has that really matters, is that he solely appoints the Committee on Committees. The Committee on Committees appoints the Committee on Nominations.

I just lost half the audience right there. How many committees can you have?

This is all about checks and balances. It’s intended for the presidential vote to matter, but ultimately for a group of godly people to get together in a room and pick the nominators, who then pick the trustees of all the different entities. That’s how it works. Of course, all of this has to be ratified by the annual meeting. That’s why you show up.

In any case, we had six years of terrible Committees on Committees. That meant terrible Committees on Nominations, which meant terrible trustees, and nowhere worse than the Executive Committee. That’s a bad place to mess up.

We’re going to have to dig out, and that’s going to be a multiyear process. It’s going to take longer than Willy Rice has. He’ll be president this year and probably next year, and then he’s out.

We have to keep going. We have to keep picking great, godly, humble men who are savvy enough to understand how the system works, which Willy absolutely is. That’s vital.

You hit on the other big issue of this annual meeting, which is female ordination. I marvel that this could even be an issue in Southern Baptist life, except that I lived it in the 1980s. They were pushing it then, too. Nothing has really changed. Many of those people didn’t go away. They just went underground. Now they’re pushing it again.

The first round of this was the Law Amendment. Mike Law proposed it, and it went to a vote in New Orleans in 2023. It won by a huge margin. You have to pass a constitutional amendment by two-thirds and then do it again the next year.

It was a thumping victory in New Orleans for something that did not come from the establishment. The establishment worked against it, though not super hard. They tried to make it look stupid: “This is unnecessary. We already have the Baptist Faith and Message. There might not be 20 women pastors in the entire denomination.”

Then, within two weeks of the Law Amendment passing in New Orleans, the narrative completely changed: “There are thousands of women pastors in African American Southern Baptist churches, and what you’re doing is racist.”

That’s savvy. It’s terrible, but it’s savvy. What they’re doing is unbiblical.

John Anderson: Yes.

Rod D. Martin: We’re not telling them they can’t do it. This is a big misnomer, and your audience needs to understand it. We aren’t telling any church what to do, ever. That’s not what we do.

What we’re saying is that, if you do certain things that take you outside the shared confession of faith we all agreed to as part of the Southern Baptist Convention, we’re not going to let you vote on the budget anymore. We’re not going to let you pick the president of something when you don’t believe what it believes.

It’s no different from saying you’re not going to let Hindus join your church. You’re not going to let Democrats join the Republican Party. You’re going to fence the table a bit. That’s all that’s happening here.

This time it worked because Al Mohler proposed the amendment, so the establishment guys fell in line. I feel reasonably confident that we will pass it next time and the constitutional amendment will take effect. That’s all positive.

But we have to understand why it matters. It’s actually brief, so you’ll be thrilled, because I keep talking.

John Anderson: This is gold.

Rod D. Martin: It’s very simple. First, there is the elections aspect. If people lie about what they believe, they shouldn’t get a vote over the money and the leadership.

Second, and this is much more important theologically, 1 Timothy is extremely clear on this issue. There’s no escaping it. First Timothy doesn’t contain the only passages on it, but it’s certainly the most prominent, and there’s no question what the Lord said.

Not only that, but it isn’t situational. It isn’t limited to a single church somewhere in Asia Minor. Paul argues it from the creation order. This is clearly a permanent statute.

If you’re going to interpret that away, is there any passage of Scripture exempt from the exact same approach?

That’s what we’ve seen in all the liberal denominations. They start here, and within a decade or two they have compromised on every other key doctrine in Scripture. You’ve already said that Scripture doesn’t mean what it says, or that it doesn’t matter what it says and you can change it. So you have no reason to take on any of the other beliefs that don’t tickle your fancy.

That’s what we’re guarding against. We know it’s not popular. We know the culture doesn’t understand it. We know some Baptists don’t understand it.

But if we don’t stand on, “I’m sorry, I didn’t make this rule. God made this rule. The Bible says it. That’s all I need to know,” then we aren’t Baptists anymore. We aren’t even really good Christians anymore, if we’re Christians at all.

It’s a vital, vital debate. I’m so glad Al finally took it up. I wish he’d come along a little more quickly with the Law Amendment, but he was making good statements. He just wasn’t out there quite as strongly as he is now. It made a difference when he did.

How Grassroots Baptists Move the SBC

John Anderson: Amen. We can end with this, because that’s a good segue to Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s been a very prominent voice for decades and was important in the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.

As a member of an SBC church and a messenger this past year, I felt there was an organic ground game from run-of-the-mill laypeople who want to see things change in a positive direction. They don’t know every last detail of how the SBC works, but they know we want to stand on Scripture and see God honored according to what we believe to be a biblical standard.

Do you think someone like Mohler responds to that? Is there a give-and-take? Do those with more institutional power feel some pressure?

We respond to people with institutional power. We followed Mohler’s lead here. He leaned in hard, so his muscle meant something. But was there also something organic, from the layperson’s point of view, putting pressure on those with more oomph to make more of a statement?

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely. You hit a certain critical mass where enough people are concerned about something, and it absolutely influences the institutional leadership.

Al Mohler isn’t on a ballot anywhere. Well, actually, he was on the ballot for SBC president in 2021, and he came in third. But other than that, Al isn’t on the ballot.

Al got the job as president of Southern Seminary when he was just 33 years old. My guess is he’ll probably be there at 350, if the Lord allows such things. He isn’t standing for election, but he knows that tithers don’t have to give to his seminary.

He also knows something the Executive Committee isn’t very honest about. Sometimes that’s because it’s a bunch of preachers and they just don’t know about these things. But sometimes it’s because they’re actually obfuscating.

But the truth is that, when you look at Cooperative Program giving over the last 15 years and adjust it for inflation, it’s all fine and good to talk about how much money we have. In real dollars, it has dropped off a cliff. We’re running on 40 percent less than we had in 2010. It’s obscene. It’s terrible.

There’s a reason, and it matters. It matters for real ministry, sending missionaries, church planting, evangelism, and seminary education.

We’re moving into a period when there aren’t enough pastors to go around for all the churches. You’ve got to educate more men, and you can’t do it if you can’t pay to train them.

Al is aware that people have a choice in whom they give to. It doesn’t have to be Southern Seminary, and it doesn’t have to be the SBC.

Yes, it makes a difference when regular people make phone calls. Of course pastors are great. We really, really appreciate it when pastors do it. But when regular Billy Baptist, sitting on the 14th pew, calls these guys and says, “I really care about this. It matters. I want to see some action,” it matters.

It’s no different from a member of the U.S. House. Members of Congress have long had a rule that, if 10 people call their office on the same issue, it means there are probably thousands back in the district who are really upset, because people just don’t make those phone calls.

Regular, everyday Baptists can make all the difference in the world. They have to make phone calls. They have to go to meetings. Otherwise, they’re just ignored.

Honestly, all these guys went to seminary together. They’ve all known each other since they were barely more than teenagers. They have groupthink like a bunch of high school girls. There’s no kidding around it. It’s just part of the situation, and that has to be broken through.

That’s why we have a system that is grassroots-based, bottom-up rather than top-down. But that means the people on the bottom actually have to speak to the people at the top. It’s an easy phone call. They all have a phone number. It isn’t hard to get.

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So yes, it made a huge difference. I think we’ll get real action on this. I think the SBC is in the best hands it’s been in for quite a while, and we really are making progress.

That doesn’t mean it’s over. It ain’t never over. You’ve got to keep maintaining. You don’t drift anywhere you wish to go. That’s really true in a fallen world composed entirely of sinners. If we’re left to our natural inclinations, everything will decay.

It’s possible to build only when people make a concerted, careful, deliberate effort to be faithful to the Lord. Even then, they’re going to disagree on a bunch of things. That’s why you have a meeting. That’s why you have Robert’s Rules. That’s why you have a vote.

That’s also why everyone in your audience should become a messenger and go to the annual meeting in June 2027 — except for you Presbyterians.

John Anderson: Except for the Presbyterians.

Rod D. Martin: But y’all can join us, too. Come be Baptists, and you can go.

By the way, for the Presbyterians - those of you who are CREC or PCA, and others like them - you have a general assembly you can attend. You have places where many of these fights are very active and really do matter. You can have a say there, too. You just can’t have as much of a say as you can in the Southern Baptist Convention.

John Anderson: You’re definitely a champion of the SBC. You champion it well. Like we said earlier, it has its problems and warts. It’s a human institution. But we’re praying that the Lord will continue to refine us and reform us into a greater image of Christ. I think we’re moving in the right direction.

For those who don’t know, Rod, you have The Rod Martin Report. That’s one thing I wanted you to speak about briefly. You wear a lot of hats. You write, and sometimes you have guest writers. What is your report all about, and how can people find you?

Rod D. Martin: As we mentioned at the outset, church is not my day job. Christianity is my passion, and Christ is my Lord. But I work for a living. I don’t just teach Sunday school or something.

What we do is largely based on global macro analysis. A while back, we decided there was no reason we couldn’t package it in a way that’s useful to policymakers, engaged citizens, and people who just don’t understand what’s going on in the world because there’s so much going on.

It really does all fit together, but it isn’t obvious, and nobody is giving you a roadmap. So we decided to give you a roadmap.

At RodMartin.org, we do daily geopolitical analysis. Fox Business calls it “absolutely phenomenal.” We have tens of thousands of subscribers to daily long-form content that many people would never want to read, but lots of you might. We also have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. There’s a reason.

Come join us at RodMartin.org.

John Anderson: You heard the man: RodMartin.org.

From my experience, it is informed by the correct foundation, a biblical Christian worldview, but it is also in-depth. It offers skill and depth of knowledge on geopolitical and economic issues that the average person, including me, hasn’t delved into or experienced.

That’s one great thing about The Rod Martin Report: It’s very in-depth, but presented in a way you can actually understand.

Rod, I really appreciate your time. You’re a busy man, wearing fedoras, appearing on Fox Business, and doing everything. It’s an honor to have you.

You’re a good brother in the faith. Thank you for continuing to fight the good fight for Christ’s name.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you. I love your show. I love your work, and I’m so glad you’re doing it. It’s an honor to be here.

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by Doug Ponder
June 8, 2025

In view of the importance that our Lord gives the command to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–33; cf. Matt. 7:12; Luke 10:25–28), it is no mystery why Christians have followed suit in making much of the same. This is well and good, provided that we understand what is (and is not) required of us. Unfortunately, there are two common ways the neighbor-love command is hellishly misinterpreted and misapplied.

The first is when someone turns the command into a cudgel for beating the consciences of Christians, all but forcing submission in matters not required by the Lord (whether explicitly or by good and necessary consequence). This is not new, but we did see a recent example of it in the dogmatic insistence that Christians who dissented from the government’s demonstrably arbitrary lockdowns and/or abstained from getting the COVID vaccine were failing to love their neighbors.1

Cards on the table: I think mounting evidence continues to justify the courage and prudence of those who refused to be blown about by every wind of the zeitgeist. As such, I think it would be good for the souls of any who publicly employed the neighbor-love argument in that way to issue an apology in the form of, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. You didn’t fail to love your neighbor.”

Yet I am even more concerned about the second way that we can abuse the command to love our neighbors, which I fear is even more common — and significantly more destructive — than the first. Namely, there is a growing tendency among many Christians in the West to redefine the second greatest commandment instead of simply misapplying it. To these misguided minds, when Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he actually meant, “Make sure your neighbor feels loved by you.” The difference between those statements can be a matter of (eternal) life and death.

When Man Is the Measure, Truth Always Comes up Short

Though it was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things,”2 it is postmoderns who have embodied that outlook par excellence. For the West today is a place where people not only feel free to determine what is true for themselves but also assume that everyone constructs reality according to their own desires.3 This is why Francis Schaeffer felt the need to speak of “true truth” (a tautology in every age before ours).4 He foresaw that a day was coming, and is now here, when people will speak of “my truth” and “your truth” as if such phrases have the power to settle any dispute about reality. Perhaps ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true for you, a Harvard PhD recently opined, but ‘2 + 2 = 5’ is also true for others.5

That is the way of madness.

Yet many well-meaning Christians have failed to grasp how the postmodern ethos has infected (to the point of destruction) their own understanding of Christ’s command to “Love your neighbor.” In our hyper-subjective age, this command is emptied of all objective content. The result is that some cannot even conceive of a situation in which a Christian could fulfill this command in such a way that a neighbor who is loved according to God’s standards might not feel loved according to his own..

I have spoken about this with pastors around the country, and I regret to inform you that it is not a problem found only along America’s progressive coasts. To give just one example, a friend who lives in the pejoratively labeled “flyover country” recently told me that his ecclesial superior rebuked him for failing to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). My friend was not at all certain that this was the case, nor were many of those who knew him best. So he asked, “Who gets to determine whether the truth is spoken in a loving way?” My friend’s interlocutor replied, “It all comes down to whether the person we are speaking to feels loved after we have spoken the truth to them.”

If Feelings Are the Standard, Then Jesus Is a Sinner

All who think this way have fallen for the poisonous lie that hurt feelings, per se, are proof that you have failed to love your neighbor. Yet if that is so, we make Christ himself out to be a sinner! For there were not a few times when his words were poorly received by some of those who heard him. Indeed, Jesus was not murdered because he was too nice but because he did and said things that caused some to despise him — yet in all this he was “without sin” (Heb. 4:15; cf. 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5).6

The point here is not that we have the license to be jerks for Jesus.7 We plainly do not. We cannot turn the phrase “Love your neighbor” into “Hate your neighbor.” Even so, the idea that we are commanded to make our neighbor “feel loved” is ultimately a form of relativism in Christian drag, a kind of sentimentality that holds to the form of godliness — “love your neighbor!” — while denying its true power.8

Furthermore, in addition to making Jesus guilty of sin (by definition), such a view of Christ’s command places the standard for fulfillment not in the hands of the Creator but in the hands of creatures who are estranged from him (James 4:4). If feelings are the standard, then there is no standard. There also are no constraining limits. For if making someone “feel loved” is the requirement for being loving, there is no end to what darkened hearts may demand in order to feel sufficiently loved. This is, of course, precisely what is happening everywhere in the West.

The Devil Is Cashing the Blank Checks You’re Writing

We have reached the point where no matter how kindly you articulate the biblical view of gender and sexuality, you will be branded a “hater.” Which is to say, you will be seen as unloving (even though you aren’t), and you will hurt feelings (no matter how lovingly you speak the truth). Yet if you have wed the fulfillment of Christ’s command to a runaway train, where then will you go?

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In case the answer to that rhetorical question was not plain: you will go to wherever you are told to go, and Christians who are ruled by their sentiments instead of by the Scriptures are sitting ducks for this sort of manipulation.9 They have turned Christ’s command to love our neighbors — along with the many biblical commands to be compassionate and kind — into a blank check for the world to cash. “If you aren’t a bigot, then you will bake the cake” (never mind your religious convictions). “If you truly love me, then you will use my preferred pronouns” (never mind God’s commands not to lie or bear false witness). “If you really cared about the poor, then you will vote for this candidate” (never mind their manifestly destructive policies that mutilate children or undermine the family).

The devil is only too pleased with this arrangement. Indeed, the situation reads like a new chapter in The Screwtape Letters: since the powers of hell cannot make Christ’s command go away, they will settle for leading Christians to think the ultimate arbiters of whether we’ve obeyed the command are precisely those who are least qualified to understand it (1 Cor. 2:14). In a demonic inversion of Christ’s own words, the worldly person says: “If you really love me, you will obey my commandments.”

The Dead End of Subjectivity (And The Only Way Out)

I am not suggesting that every professing Christian who has fallen prey to the devil’s lies at this point will go to hell — but their neighbors will unless these Christians find the courage to begin doing and saying what is actually loving, according to Christ, instead of according to what makes their neighbor always feel loved. In other words, the only way out of this demonic cul-de-sac of subjectivity is to anchor the command of Christ in the Scriptures, letting the character of God, the acts of God, and the words of God define for us what is (and is not loving) according to the One who gets the final say on the matter.

This is precisely what the apostle Paul alludes to when he says, “The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not covet;’ and any other commandment, are summed up by this commandment: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:9–10).

These words can set us free if we let them (John 8:31–32), for they remind us that our Lord has not commanded us to love our neighbors without telling us what he means. Indeed, he has given us explicit teaching on the nature of love (1 Cor. 13:1–8), including additional commands that fill out what love is and what love does (Rom. 12:9–22). On top of this, he has given us examples in the Scriptures, not only in himself (John 8:12; 13:5; 1 Cor. 11:1) but also in those who belong to him (Rom. 15:4; Phil. 3:17; 2 Thess. 3:9; James 5:4; Hebrews 11:1ff).

Learning to Love a World That Hates You

Yet some will say to me, “Physician, heal thyself!” It is true that I write as a man who has at times been too quick to speak and too slow to listen (James 1:19). My carelessness has caused unnecessary offense (Prov. 18:19). My pride has hindered apologies for legitimate wrongs (Matt. 5:23–24). And my selfishness has surely been the occasion for many missed opportunities to serve others in a way that accords with their salvation (1 Cor. 10:33).

But I have also known the pressure to keep quiet about matters of eternal significance. I have been tempted to soften the truth in the name of “love.” And I have, in the past, been guilty of espousing a caricature of winsomeness that replaced the real Jesus of history with a false Christ of impotent faith.10 All this was a fool’s errand, for our Lord said the world would hate us in the same ways and for the same reasons that it hated him (John 15:18–20).

This doesn’t mean I now have a desire to be hated (I don’t), but it does mean that I have a firm resolve to fulfill Christ’s command to love my neighbor on Christ’s terms, not on my neighbors’. We cannot be more loving or winsome or compassionate or kind than Jesus. Therefore, he and his Word are the standard — which means learning to love a world that hates us begins with the One who was hated first.

In view of all this, Christians must no longer ask, “Does my neighbor feel loved?” (according to their standards) but rather, “Has my neighbor been loved?” (according to Christ’s Word). Or, to borrow a phrase from the apostle Paul, we all must ask ourselves: Am I seeking the approval of my neighbor or of God? For if I were still trying to please my neighbor, I would not be a servant of Christ (cf. Gal. 1:10).

— Doug Ponder is Biblical Studies Professor at Grimké Seminary and Teaching Pastor at Remnant Church in Richmond, Virginia. He writes on X and Substack, and sometimes here.

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by Rod D. Martin
August 9, 2026

I actually think evangelists and revivals were valuable. I wish we still had them.

I grew up in churches that brought in evangelists and had revivals regularly. I can distinctly remember at least one who was quite manipulative. He was never brought back. The rest seemed valuable to my young mind, at the very least for shaking things up and causing people to actually bring other people to church.

Oh, and they were also useful for proclaiming the Gospel.

It seems to me that the reason Southern Baptists (and specifically, the North American Mission Board) killed their evangelism and revival emphases was a growing dismissal of such things among then-younger seminarians and their “cool” younger professors. Perhaps I’m mistaken. But I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that this growing culture was the leading edge of the trend away from all such things.

That hasn’t worked out very well. There are many reasons Southern Baptists lost 4 million out of 16 million members — 25 percent of total membership — over the last 15 years. There are many reasons for the inflation-adjusted collapse in Cooperative Program giving (never mind that Nashville never adjusts for inflation: the real numbers are ghastly, but never reported). There are many reasons we’re baptizing fewer people than we have in over half a century.

But wouldn’t it make sense that one of those reasons might be that we no longer ask people to become Christians? You know: actually ask them.

We did once. Now we don’t. And the difference in results is pretty obvious.

Nothing I say here is intended to step on anyone’s soteriology. I affirm that God is sovereign. I’m talking about what is expected of us. I would argue this just the same with Tom Ascol as I would with Jerry Vines (although with the former, I’m sure we’d veer off into a discussion of the Regulative Principle).

The thing is, the Great Commission teaches us one particular lesson of universal applicability: that for us, God commands persuasion rather than force. This applies to economics, to politics, and certainly to discipling the nations.

At the Final Judgment God will use force. But in this life, he does not send Paul to Mars Hill with a sword (like a jihadist); and at the same time, He does not refrain from sending Paul to Mars Hill (like a Zoroastrian). He does not plead like a beggar (as some maintain, shamefully), but he pleads nevertheless, as a Father who knows the fate of His wayward children and earnestly desires their return.

He would have been entirely right to kill Adam and Eve in the Garden; and likewise, to give no warning to Noah and let His greatest of resets be complete. He would have been entirely within His right and His power to create men who would entirely choose Heaven.

He did not. And He chose persuasion as His mechanism of action. We are commanded to persuade. By implication, we are also commanded not to compel.

Now anyone who’s sold, or been sold to, recognizes what’s happening when the salesman hands his prospect off to his manager. And likewise, the Holy Spirit must close the sale. None of us are that persuasive.

Yet persuade we must. And I invoke the Great Commission as a universal principle, because it informs everything else. If God would entrust the most important matter in all of life to persuasion (humanly speaking), that fact teaches us how He addresses other lesser matters too. Government must be by the consent of the governed. There is a time for force (as there will be at the Judgment), but it is limited. Even the offerings for the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple were voluntary, and God Himself (in 1 Samuel 8) limits the government’s legitimate taxing power to less than the tithe, leaving the state with very little capacity for compulsion.

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We should live as free men. We should reason lovingly with our wives and children as we disciple them. We should organize our economies on market principles rather than state planning. In all things, we should be imitators of Christ, applying God’s own chosen priorities.

So as Zig Ziglar would have said, we are all salesmen, and everything is selling.

Now if God has made persuasion a guiding principle in virtually all arenas, how much more so in that core arena of the Gospel, in which He states it boldly and explicitly?

I am persuaded by our many Calvinist friends that invitations, and revivals, and evangelistic appeals may be manipulative. I have witnessed it myself. But I am equally persuaded by our many Provisionist friends (and what Calvinist could disagree?) that the mere fact that there are bad evangelists should not abolish evangelism.

Church planting is wonderful, and sometimes involves evangelism (though it often relies far more on proselytizing). But it is not itself evangelism. For fifteen years, NAMB has gutted the latter in favor of the former, and the results are plain to see. But NAMB did not do that alone.

Our numbers bear out our neglect of such things. We are told our prior numbers were inflated by the aforementioned emotional manipulation, and perhaps that is so. But is the current system working? And did the prior system actually fail? Or are these two assertions without adequate evidence, and once we examine the evidence, we find that it was the innovators who were wrong?

The Great Commission commands persuasion. We grant that the Holy Spirit must “close the sale”, but “how will they hear without a preacher?” Evangelistic meetings and revivals incentivized members to invite their lost friends (and to come themselves) to hear the Gospel, night after night. They came, they heard, and many were unquestionably saved. They multiplied. They were made new, they went about making new converts, and the world was made better with them.

The less we do of this, the more we preach only to the faithful. Except even that is not true, because in fact, our churches now hardly meet at all. Where is Sunday night? Where is Wednesday night? Prayer Meeting is gone. Church Training is gone. How can we even consider whether or not to give an invitation at a service that never takes place?

The first rule of political advertising is that a voter must hear your message seven times before it connects. How many fewer times do average people hear the Gospel message now than they did 25 years ago? Than 50?

This all began at NAMB and in the seminaries. It culminated in the SBC’s ill-fated “Great Commission Resurgence”. The men who led that effort tried to do something great, no matter what their detractors may say. And yet like the men who brought you Betamax, Pets.com, Billpoint, and the Zune, they were still wrong.

We are failing by our own hand. We have lost a quarter of all Southern Baptists in a country that is growing. We are doing so in precisely the same way so many businesses have failed: by ceasing to do what we originally did that succeeded.

It’s not too late to change course.

We could start at your church.

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NOTE: I have above-average experience with Michael Clary’s topic. As a former officer of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention while many of us fought the infiltration of “Woke” Cultural Marxism into the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, there is virtually no limit to the demonization we experienced. The aim was simple: to cow those who stood against “Big Eva” into submission. I, however, am not one to tamely submit. You should not be either. In the words of the Apostle Peter (to the highest religious body of his day), “we must obey God rather than men.” — RDM

by Michael Clary
August 2, 2026

“Struggle sessions” aren’t just relics of communist China. They’re creeping into evangelical churches, and Christians need to learn how to spot and resist them.

Originally, struggle sessions were a form of psychological torture. Victims were publicly humiliated, accused of imaginary crimes, and pressured by friends and enemies alike to confess their guilt. These sessions served to advance the political goals of communist China’s Cultural Revolution: break social bonds, coerce ideological conformity, and force total allegiance to the state.

As crazy as it may sound, a softer version of this has become common in Bible-believing churches. Typically, outspoken conservatives are the primary targets.

Why? Because those conservatives hold views that make their left-of-center peers uncomfortable, and their willingness to speak out makes them anxious. If someone is vocal about hot-button cultural issues, like LGBTQ, feminism, race, or immigration, people at church will start getting nervous, accuse him of “getting too political,” and tell him he should keep his opinions to himself because the church should focus on “preaching the gospel.”

Ironically, these conformity enforcers may not even disagree with the speaker’s views. They just think Christians shouldn’t talk about them publicly because doing so might offend people who disagree. They might say something like, “Brother, I agree with you that illegal immigration is a problem in our country, but that’s not our focus as a church. We just need to preach the gospel and love people.” Meanwhile, our neighborhoods are being rapidly overrun by lawbreakers who worship idols and can’t even speak English. Suddenly, the admonitions about Romans 13 so common during COVID disappear.

Sometimes, they pit neighbor-love against confronting sin. They might say, “Brother, we believe homosexuality is a sin, but it’s not our job to play the Holy Spirit or alienate people with hurtful rhetoric. We just need to show them the love of Christ.” Meanwhile, our local schools and libraries are pushing a gay agenda on our children.

In these and similar cases, those holding unacceptably conservative views must be silenced. The Christians trying to silence them see themselves as doing the right thing — serving the body of Christ by correcting their overzealous and judgmental brothers. They see themselves as just doing what Jesus would do — eating with tax collectors, welcoming sinners, and spreading the love of God. Speaking boldly about cultural sins is an obstacle to that mission.

Their moral compass is calibrated by Progressives’ priorities. If a leftist is offended by what a Christian says, that’s clear proof that the Christian is in error. The church’s “public witness” must be protected. This is done by staying “above the fray.” They say the church should just “preach the gospel,” which is narrowly defined as preaching about God’s love, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and forgiveness of sins (without naming them).

Sometimes, a disagreement may escalate to the point where corrective action must be taken. A common example is a social media post that gets people worked up. Sometimes, a pastor may preach a bold, uncompromising sermon that offends church members, so they grab their pitchforks and torches to make sure that never happens again.

Regardless of the particulars, struggle sessions are usually triggered by a single inflection point, where someone did something that prompts a wave of collective anxiety in the church, often led by anxious women (and their compliant husbands). This inflection point enables everyone’s accumulated frustration to focus on one person who “went too far.” An example must be made of him. Everyone must learn that outspoken conservatism is not Christlike and such behavior will not be tolerated.

From here, the subsequent struggle sessions follow an all too familiar script: call out the offending party; accuse him of vague, subjective, and imaginary sins; demand a public apology to those who were “hurt” by his insensitive actions; and take disciplinary action to ensure neither he nor anyone else repeats his error. Perhaps he is required to submit to some kind of counseling. In extreme cases, he is cancelled or fired.

The emotional dynamics in such situations are wonderfully described in Joe Rigney’s book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. The people behind the struggle session think they’re doing the right thing. They don’t realize they are punishing courage and reinforcing a church culture of capitulation and weakness. Sometimes, church leaders can put members through struggle sessions to silence them. At other times, church members, elders, or deacons can put their senior pastor through a struggle session.

I’ve seen it many times, and it always follows the same playbook. I’ve outlined three steps below to help you identify and resist it.

Step One: Accuse the Victim of Imaginary Sins

The goal of a struggle session is control. The accusers want to extract a confession from the accused for imaginary sins, subjective offenses, and violations of the therapeutic code that can’t be measured. In the woke struggle sessions of the world, people are charged with an array of -isms and -phobias, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or xenophobia. The harm supposedly is always psychological. Someone’s feelings got hurt because the truth spoken was too much to bear.

Churches do the same, using biblical language to lend weight to their accusations. But the supposed “crime” is never a violation of clear biblical teaching. It’s always an accusation of some vague, difficult-to-define, “heart-issue” sin. For example, a man who speaks plainly against the popular sins of the Left and refuses to caveat his words may be accused of arrogance, quarrelsomeness, stubbornness, lacking compassion, or being hurtful. In each of these cases, the accuser’s subjective interpretation of his actions is sufficient evidence to prove the charge. Sometimes, a vague cloud of witnesses is summoned to amplify the charge: “Brother, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’ve heard reports from others who also found your comment hurtful.”

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Evangelical struggle sessions are effective because they weaponize the Bible’s teaching about sins of the heart against the victim. Since all Christians acknowledge that our actions and motives matter, accusers work to convince the accused that there must be some sin to confess, even if the action that triggered the struggle session isn’t itself sinful. The spiritual vagueness is key, because we believe that even our best good works are tainted with sin (Rom 7:21). So even if people are upset at the accused for saying something true, they will accuse him of saying it in a sinful way.

Sincere Christians are especially vulnerable. They’re accustomed to humble, self-examination, so they start to wonder if the accusations might be true. Churches that emphasize “heart idols” and introspection can be especially prone to this, since vague accusations feel spiritual and humble. Reformed churches, ironically, are often the easiest targets. Then, the accusers add to the weight by saying things like, “You don’t want to wound your brothers and sisters in Christ, do you?”

One of the most common charges is the failure to “love your neighbor.” That sounds weighty. After all, it’s the second greatest command (Matt 22:39). But in practice, even loving one’s neighbor is defined subjectively, according to the accuser’s feelings, not God’s law.

The accusers may present themselves as wise, voices of reason. Being captive to the therapeutic spirit of the age, they think they can “see the sin beneath the sin.” They rely heavily on secular, psychological concepts. Being outspoken for truth becomes “bullying.” Being decisive becomes “controlling.” Being a strong leader becomes “authoritarian.” Not caving to the emotionally manipulative tactics of the angry mob makes one “divisive.” All of these labels are rhetorically powerful. These words can ruin a man’s reputation.

He’s trapped in a Catch-22. There’s no escape. Any response reinforces their narrative. If he denies any wrongdoing, he will be accused of being “defensive.” His refusal to confess his sin is regarded as further evidence of his “pride.” And if all the above labels fail to accomplish their objective, the granddaddy of them all is “narcissist,” which means the accused is hopelessly imprisoned in his sinful self-delusion.

Remember, the goal of the struggle session isn’t justice. Nor is it truth. The accusers running the struggle session will say they are seeking “accountability” or even “restoration.” Not true. The goal is submission. The accusers are trying to control the accused by asserting enormous psychological pressure on him to participate in their humiliation ritual.

And their accusations against him don’t even need to be true. They just need to feel true enough to get him to question his reality or even his own sanity.

Step Two: Leverage His Social Circle Against Him

As the social pressure mounts on the accused, those closest to him also feel the heat. If he caves to the pressure, he will be publicly humiliated and hung out to dry. If he stands his ground, the pressure will continue until no one wants to associate with him. This is especially difficult for his wife, because she is torn between two important feminine instincts. On the one hand, she doesn’t want her relationships disrupted. But on the other hand, she wants to stand by her man.

The accused knows how burdened she is, and he fears she may resent him for the pain she’s feeling. Even though he knows, deep down, he’s not guilty of what they’re accusing him of, he’s nevertheless under enormous psychological strain. So he shuts down, panics, loses sleep, and maybe even relationships. In extreme cases, he loses his job. He becomes a hollow shell, demoralized, living in a confusing world where truth seems irrelevant.

As he and his family feel the noose tightening, paranoia can easily set in. He feels as though his world is collapsing around him. One by one, the people who initially stood by him start abandoning him. They see the strain he’s under and interpret it as a man with a guilty conscience beginning to break, which only supports the agenda of his accusers.

Step Three: Require Penance Through a Humiliation Ritual

Struggle sessions follow a predictable pattern. Most often, the accused will cave, confess his guilt, and issue a public apology. Sometimes he might be required to go on an “apology tour,” personally grovelling before various accusers as a form of penance. He may be required to attend counseling or submit to other corrective measures.

If he is truly innocent of wrongdoing, yet he submits to the humiliation ritual to appease the mob, he’s cooked. Even the smallest of apologies empowers the accusers and sets the template for their next victim.

Mentally, he might justify the confession, knowing there was probably some kind of sin going on, even if he doesn’t know what it was. In this way, his conscience gets distorted. He starts equating righteousness with submitting to mob demands. He loses confidence. His moral clarity is eroded. He’s been neutered and gaslit. His “guilt” is now a matter of public record, making him vulnerable to future manipulation.

I’ll say it again: Struggle sessions like these in the church are a form of psychological torture and spiritual abuse. I’ve seen many good men be subjected to them by weak, spineless men who targeted them. I’ve known many courageous pastors who were accused of fake, unprovable, therapeutic thought-crimes and lost their ministries as a result. Yet their accusers are dead certain of their victim’s guilt.

They didn’t see it coming. They were probably naive enough to think the church is the one place where speaking the truth is valued. And they paid a steep price for being gullible.

Conclusion: Stand Firm

If this is happening to you, I have one simple word of counsel: Don’t give in. Yes, your theology tells you to humbly confess your sins, but scripture also forbids false accusations. Yes, all deeds are tainted by sin, but that’s not a valid basis for subjective guilt. You are being bullied and manipulated. They’re trying to silence you.

Require them to name a specific, concrete sin. If you are guilty of an actual sin, then of course, repent.

But if you are accused of a made-up, subjective “sin”, and if the only evidence of guilt they can provide is someone else’s hurt feelings, you are being struggle-sessioned, and it is your duty to resist the manipulation. Yes, doing so may cost you friendships, but the alternative is worse. You’ll wound your conscience and damage your soul if you cave to manipulation by confessing faux guilt. You’ll also stop speaking the truth, in an age that desperately needs it.

Trust God. Stand your ground. Preserve your dignity. It’s hard, but holding the line is worth it. You are not alone. Be courageous. Speak truth with wisdom, pray for clarity, and let your conscience — not the mob — guide your actions.

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

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by Jason Mills
July 26, 2026

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

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

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

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

That is not reform. That is confusion, codified.

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

If we misunderstand Genesis, we will misunderstand reality itself.

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

The Foundation of Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominion: What God Actually Said

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

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

He also gives mankind a gift:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Inversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding

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

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

That blueprint has not changed since the days of Noah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Virgil Walker
July 19, 2026

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

Open the Book. He has something to say.

God Reveals Himself as Father and King

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

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

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

Adam’s First Sin Was Silence

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

Then the serpent spoke. And Adam stood there.

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

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

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

The Faithful Men of Scripture Took Ground

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

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

Jesus Died Because He Was Strong

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

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

Scripture Commands Men to Be Men

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

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

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

The King Is Coming on a White Horse

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

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

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

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

What This Requires of You

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

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

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

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

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

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by Michael Foster
July 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

Eve responds:

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

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

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

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

Not all questions are innocent. Some are weapons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the trick.

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

“What city was like the great city?”

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

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

Questions matter.
Their framing matters.
Their authority matters.

And no one is ever “just asking questions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rod D. Martin
July 8, 2014

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

Archer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Dad

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

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

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by Seth Brickley
June 28, 2026

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

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

A Great Neglect of People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neglecting Earthly Affairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strong Commitment to Extra-Biblical Teaching

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

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

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

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

Public “Holy” Acts

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

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

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

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

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

Valuing Acceptability in the Pietist Club

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

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

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

The Way Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rod D. Martin
March 30, 2025

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

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

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

He was also explaining what kind of Father God is.

What Roman Adoption Meant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Slaves to Sons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt Forgiven, Identity Rewritten

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

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

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

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

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

The Father’s Heart Behind the Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

And He will never disown His children.

The Healing Doctrine Our Age Has Forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

Not Just a Theological Detail — The Theological Core

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Voddie Baucham
June 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Rod D. Martin
June 9, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what Christianity is about.

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

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

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

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

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

The Trilemma: Who Is This Man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resurrection Is the Crux

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

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

Here are just a few facts that demand explanation:

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

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

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

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

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

No Other Explanation Works

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

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

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

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

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

Why It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

You Must Decide

The choice is yours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will you say?

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

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

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Further Reading:

• Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

• Evidence That Demands a Verdict — Josh McDowell

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

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

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

by Rod D. Martin
July 1, 2024

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

Don’t.

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

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

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

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

Examples of such are legion.

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

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

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

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

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

As a result, two things are true:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— This essay originally appeared at ClearTruthMedia.com.

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

by Tim Overton
May 31, 2026

The Southern Baptist Convention stands at an important crossroads. Controversy has grown in recent years regarding churches within the Convention that employ female pastors. While some of these churches continue to cooperate with the SBC, others have b…

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by Michael Clary
May 24, 2026

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

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

In retrospect, I would now say that the multi-year, coordinated efforts to force change at the ERLC, one of the most liberal entities in the SBC, over the last decade turned out to be a big win for the Reformers. Just six weeks after a 43 percent vote in Dallas in favor of abolishing the entity outright, Brent Leatherwood resigned as President of the ERLC, marking the end of the Russell Moore-Bren…

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by Mark Tapscott
May 17, 2026

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

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

This dominant narrative that underlies and thus frames the vast majority of what passes for journalism in the MSM’s news and analysis precincts can be summarized thusly: America was founded on and remains forever a product of an enduringly virulent brand of White Racism. The country is thus epito…

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by The Baptist Report
May 10, 2026

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

The film traces its origins to July 23, 2019, when Founders Ministries released a trailer for By What Standard. The trailer briefly included a blurred image of attorney and abuse survivor Rachel Denhollander. Within days, three board members resigned from Founders Ministries, a moment the documentary now frames as an early indicator of the cultural pressure surrounding the SBC’s unfolding crisis. As the narrator recalls, “They did no…

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

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

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

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

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

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