doctrine

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Sign of the times: It's painful -- but churches divided by doctrine almost always split

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Sign of the times: It's painful -- but churches divided by doctrine almost always split

After decades of progressive dissent, the leaders of the Christian Reformed Church in America finally took a firm stand against the Sexual Revolution.

Not only did the 2022 CRC Synod, voting 123-53, condemn "adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography and homosexual sex," it added the small, but influential, denomination's longstanding teachings on these moral issues to its "declaration of faith."

The report added: "The church must warn its members that those who refuse to repent of these sins -- as well as of idolatry, greed, and other such sins -- will not inherit the kingdom of God." Dissenters should "repent of such sins for the sake of their souls."

Dissent continued, especially in congregations with strategic ties to Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the 2024 CRC Synod, it was clear the denomination would lose several dozen congregations, out of 1,000 in North America.

The Grand Rapids Eastern Avenue congregation proclaimed: "While all members of the church must always be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, it would be disingenuous for us as a church to deny, minimize, or hide a fundamental and intractable disagreement between a significant number of members of good standing in our church and the CRC's decision to make a particular interpretation a confessional matter." Thus, the "only way we can remain a Christian Reformed congregation with integrity … is under protest."

Head-on collisions are inevitable when believers in a religious institution proclaim -- in word and deed -- clashing stands on ancient doctrines, said the Rev. Michael Clary, of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. While he is a popular social-media commentator on Reformed theology, he leads a Southern Baptist congregation.

Splits will occur -- because of core beliefs on both sides. Progressives truly believe doctrines must evolve to avoid causing pain to modern believers. Orthodox thinkers in various traditions truly believe they cannot edit what the New Testament describes as the "faith which was once delivered unto the saints."

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Progressive evangelicals reject partisan theology -- in the Donald Trump choir

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Progressive evangelicals reject partisan theology -- in the Donald Trump choir

The hours after an apparent assassination attempt are a tricky time for social-media humor.

Some readers didn't get the joke when a progressive evangelical offered a hot take on the man with an AK-47 hiding in the bushes beside Donald Trump's golf course.

"This could either be somebody waiting to try to kill the former president or somebody legitimately using his AK as a putter," noted the Rev. Ben Marsh of First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on X. Then he added: "Folks, we're talking about Florida here."

As critics circulated the quip, Marsh reposted strong rejections of political violence, including this appeal: "Please protect Trump and ban these guns!!!"

The furor was timely, since Marsh was one of the first to sign "Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction," a new statement urging evangelicals to reject verbal violence in American life.

"Unlike the false security promised by political idolatry and its messengers, the perfect love of God drives away all fear," noted a key passage. "We reject the stoking of fears and the use of threats as an illegitimate form of godly motivation, and we repudiate the use of violence to achieve political goals as incongruent with the way of Christ."

Skye Jethani of the Holy Post Podcast, the document's lead author, tweeted: "The attempted murder of Donald Trump is evil & every Christian should condemn it."

In the bitterly divided evangelical world, any discussion of these issues -- such as a confession signed by A-List evangelical Trump critics, as well as some doctrinal progressives -- will automatically be framed by the rhetoric of the former president and his boldest supporters. Decades of rapier thrusts by late-night comedians, newsroom warriors and oppo-researchers fade into the past.

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Pope Francis offers strategic words on cats, dogs, babies and interfaith life in Indonesia

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Pope Francis offers strategic words on cats, dogs, babies and interfaith life in Indonesia

It was the kind of quote that, when said by the right person under the right conditions, would inspire bold headlines.

"Your country ... has families with three, four or five children," Pope Francis told President Joko Widodo of Indonesia. "Keep it up, you're an example for everyone, for all the countries that maybe … these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child."

The pope's words didn't draw much flak, especially when compared with the media firestorm when critics resurrected a 2021 barb by U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism.

"We are effectively run, in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own life and the choices that they have made," Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Maybe America could do more, he added, "to support more people who actually have kids."

Vance, of course, is now in a hot spotlight as the GOP choice for vice president. The pro-natalist views of Pope Francis, meanwhile, drew warm praise in Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation.

Visiting an often tense land -- with a population that is 87% Muslim, and 3% Catholic -- the pope did everything he could to praise the beliefs and traditions of his hosts. In that context, his pro-family views were welcomed.

The pope also praised Indonesia's more moderate approach to religious life, although the government has strengthened laws against blasphemy and apostasy and some local officials, in this vast and complex archipelago, have been stricter than others when enforcing sharia law. Also, there have been occasional terrorism threats, including what officials decided was an attempted ISIS plot against Pope Francis.

In a speech to public officials and diplomats, the pope pressed for renewed interfaith dialogues, stressing that this would be an indispensable way of "countering extremism and intolerance, which through the distortion of religion attempt to impose their views by using deception and violence."

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Journalism is a tricky business in Roman Catholic cyperspace

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Journalism is a tricky business in Roman Catholic cyperspace

When U.S. Catholic bishops gathered in Baltimore in 2023, they were prepared to vote on an updated document for believers seeking guidance in voting booths.

The draft prepared beforehand called abortion "a preeminent priority" for the bishops, but not -- in a rhetorical switch -- their most important issue in political life. Editors at The Pillar website obtained a copy of the proposed language and published a news story.

"Well, a number of bishops read that in The Pillar," noted Ed Condon, one of the website's two founders, "so several of them proposed amendments to change the text to stronger language. … More than one bishop told us he was only informed about the issue because he read it in The Pillar."

The final text included this phrase: "The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority." In moral theology terms, "a preeminent priority" is quite different from a statement that abortion remains "our preeminent priority." That bright red line has caused fierce debates, especially with a pro-abortion-rights Catholic in the White House.

A heated opinion piece would have generated as many, or more, reader "clicks" than a hard-news report, which would have been "good for business," noted Condon.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting is expensive.

"We don't have ads on our site, which means we don't make a penny from page views," he wrote, in the website's newsletter. That was a strategic choice, "because we don't ever want to set ourselves up with a perverse incentive to write sensationalist stories we aren't sure about."

In the heated environs of Catholic cyberspace, that kind of reporting will draw fierce criticism from partisans on the other side of doctrinal debates that have political, moral and cultural implications.

Catholic liberals and many mainstream journalists screamed "foul" when The Pillar printed several 2021 stories -- built on patterns in cellphone data -- claiming that some important Catholic clergy in the United States, and in non-tourist zones inside the Vatican, were using the hookup app Grindr. A Religion News Service column called this coverage "unethical, homophobic innuendo."

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

As a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, Father Stephen Noll felt a sense of loss when he learned he would need a smartphone app to attend baseball games.

Noll calls himself a "digital dinosaur, perhaps from the Jurassic period." What he didn't expect, after 50 years of priesthood, was for this digital divide to affect his ministry.

"I am fundamentally app-horrent," he wrote in "Millennial People, Boomer Priest," a book of lessons from his year as a young parish's interim pastor. The big problem was staying in contact with members of Redeemer Anglican Church, in north Pittsburgh. It was even harder to reach potential converts who kept walking through the doors.

"Caving to the need to reach my Millennial parishioners," he wrote, "I learned to text with the help of the voice input mic, which is a good thing since it seems no one answers voice messages -- or even answers the phone at all!"

Noll was 74 when he became interim pastor on May 1, 2021, after the traumas -- in pews and pulpits -- of the coronavirus pandemic. He decided that many young adults were wrestling with anxiety, loneliness and other painful realities that were both modern and ancient.

According to the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey, many people stopped attending worship during the pandemic. Surveys before 2020 found that 25% of Americans never attended services. It was 33% in 2022.

But something else was happening during those years. Surveys found that 19% of Americans changed from one religious affiliation to another, including 6% of those who were religiously unaffiliated before COVID-19.

Noll said some of the young adults in his pews were asking hard questions about the brokenness around them, including in their own lives and the homes in which they were raised.

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Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla: Battles with ambition and pride, appeals for grace and faith

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Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla: Battles with ambition and pride, appeals for grace and faith

It's rare to hear eight seconds of dead silence during an NBA Finals press conference.

Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla was asked if -- because of the "plight" of Black head coaches -- it was significant that both teams were led by Black men. Was this a source of "pride" for him?

The son of an Italian father and a Black mother, Mazzulla is an outspoken Catholic whose pre-game routine includes pacing through an empty arena, praying with a rosary made with wood from the court of the original Boston Garden.

Mazzulla's answer was blunt: "I wonder how many of those have been Christian coaches?"

While this response drew many cheers in social media, Los Angeles Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was not amused.

Mazzulla "decided to ignore a legitimate question about race that might have been illuminating and inspiring for others, and instead decided to virtue signal," the six-time NBA Most Valuable Player wrote on Substack. The answer was "strangely aggressive since Christians are not discriminated against but, as a group, are more likely to discriminate against others," Abdul-Jabbar added.

The reporter who asked the pivotal question went further, suggesting that the Celtics coach apparently didn't grasp that it's "possible to be both Black and Christian."

"This didn't feel like a denouncement of Mazzulla's Blackness, so to speak," wrote Vincent Goodwill of Yahoo Sports. "It wasn't quite the 'I'm not Black, I'm OJ' moment; it just leaves room for interpretation."

This wasn't the first time that Mazzulla has puzzled journalists. In 2022, he was asked if he met the "royal family," after Prince William and Princess Kate Middleton attended a game.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? … I'm only familiar with one royal family," he quipped.

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The big idea: Harrison Butker focused on pandemic-era Catholic pain about sacraments

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The big idea: Harrison Butker focused on pandemic-era Catholic pain about sacraments

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Catholic clergy -- along with pastors in many other traditions -- struggled with secular authorities or even their own leaders while trying to provide sacred rites at the heart of their faith.

Churches were locked. Some priests turned to open-air confessions, even automobile drive-through lanes. In some cities priests in hazmat suits were allowed to offer last rites, usually without family members present. Some officials, secular and sacred, were more flexible than others.

A network of Catholic activists wrote an urgent plea: "Bishops, we, your faithful flock, implore you to do everything you can to make the sacraments more available. … Something is terribly wrong with a culture that allows abortion clinics and liquor stores to remain open but shuts down places of worship."

This bitter divide resurfaced during the May 11 Benedictine College speech by Harrison Butker, a three-time Super Bowl champion from the nearby Kansas City Chiefs. While remarks about women and family life dominated headlines, most of the placekicker's 20-minute address focused on divisions inside Catholicism.

Cultural chaos is "in our parishes, and sadly, in our cathedrals too," said Butker. "As we saw during the pandemic, too many bishops were not leaders at all. They were motivated by fear, fear of being sued, fear of being removed, fear of being disliked. They showed by their actions, intentional or unintentional, that the sacraments don't actually matter. Because of this, countless people died alone, without access to the sacraments."

Thus, many Catholics have simply stopped listening to bishops they believe are acting like politicians, instead of spiritual fathers, he claimed. "Today, our shepherds are far more concerned with keeping the doors open to the chancery than they are with saying the difficult stuff out loud."

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Critics insist that star placekicker Harrison Butker's Catholic speech sailed way right

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Critics insist that star placekicker Harrison Butker's Catholic speech sailed way right

There was nothing unusual about the conservative Catholic leaders of Benedictine College inviting a conservative Catholic to deliver a conservative Catholic speech.

But the May 11 commencement ceremony was different, since the speaker was three-time Super Bowl champion Harrison Butker of the nearby Kansas City Chiefs.

The team's star placekicker stressed that "being Catholic alone doesn't cut it," while attacking many famous Catholics, including President Joe Biden for, among other choices, making the sign of the cross during a Florida abortion-rights rally. Butker spent most of his 20-minute address criticizing many American bishops, while also offering blunt defenses of Catholic teachings on sexuality.

But the words that ignited a media firestorm hit closer to home.

Butker asked the female graduates: "How many of you are … thinking about all the promotions and titles you're going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world."

Butker stressed that his wife, Isabelle, is "a primary educator to our children. She is the one who ensures I never let football, or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father. … It is through our marriage that, Lord willing, we will both attain salvation."

Pundits and comics claimed that Butker criticized working women -- while his mother, Elizabeth, is a medical physicist in the radiation oncology department at Atlanta's Emory University School of Medicine. In a 2020 Mother's Day tribute, he tweeted: "Growing up my mom was my biggest supporter, guiding me to be the man I needed to become."

Early this week, Change.org had gathered 221,866 signatures urging "Kansas City Chiefs management to dismiss Harrison Butker." The petition said the kicker's remarks "were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist," thus hindering "efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion in society. It is unacceptable for such a public figure to use their platform to foster harm rather than unity."

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When it comes to 'religious liberty,' Southern Baptists are pro religious liberty -- for all

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When it comes to 'religious liberty,' Southern Baptists are pro religious liberty -- for all

At a pivotal moment in world history, the president of the United States asked citizens to join him in an urgent prayer.

"Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization," he said. "Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. … Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom."

That was Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day, as Allied troops entered northern France.

"FDR said things about God and America that if anyone spoke those words today people would have heart attacks," said Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

"Presidents have always talked about God and faith, because they're speaking to ordinary Americans," he added. Biblical language has also been common, and not just among presidents backed by evangelical Protestants. President Barack Obama, Darling noted, "quoted scripture more often than George W. Bush, who may have avoided that since his critics screamed 'THEOCRACY!' whenever he did."

In recent years, academics and journalists have been especially critical of "Christian Nationalism," a concept that has become hard to clearly define and monitor in political life.

Researchers with Neighborly Faith -- a group that helps evangelicals build stronger relationships with other religious groups -- studied academic publications addressing this issue and created a detailed, 14-point compromise definition stating, in part: "Christian Nationalism is a movement advancing a vision of America's past, present, and future that excludes people of non-Christian religions and non-Western cultures. Christian Nationalists romanticize Christianity's influence on America's development, attributing the nation's historical provenance to God's special favor."

Some researchers add "white" before "Christian Nationalism" and stress that adherents believe America is increasingly threatened by immigration, Critical Race Theory, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and other trends.

Neighborly Faith concluded that 5% of Americans self-identify as Christian nationalists, and 11% can be considered "adherents," Darling noted.