However, I made an intentional goal to read several classics throughout 2026, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was near the top of my list.

Golding was an Englishman born in 1911. Educated at Oxford, Golding began teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury in 1939, returning after the war from 1945 to 1962.

In 1940, Golding enlisted in the Royal Navy. His five-year military career was notable for his participation in the D-Day invasion in 1944.

As expected, the war greatly enhanced his understanding of human depravity. After the war, he said,

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society.... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another.... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

This newfound understanding of human nature is put center stage in his 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

A Descent into Chaos

The premise is deceptively simple. A plane evacuating British schoolboys crashes on an uninhabited tropical island during a wartime evacuation. No adults survive. The boys—none older than twelve or thirteen—find themselves in a paradise without authority, free to govern themselves.

At first, they try. Ralph, an easy and decent boy, is elected leader and discovers a conch shell, which becomes the symbol and instrument of order: whoever holds it may speak, and its call summons the assembly.

Alongside him stands Piggy, the fat, asthmatic, bespectacled intellectual whose reason and pragmatism the others mock even as they depend on it. Together they attempt to build a civilization in miniature—shelters, a signal fire, rules.

But the order will not hold. Jack, leader of the choir-turned-hunters, is drawn to the thrill of the kill and the power it brings. A rumor spreads among the younger boys of a “beast” on the island, and the fear of this external monster slowly consumes them. Jack exploits it, offering the boys what Ralph cannot: meat, ritual, the ecstasy of the hunt, and a tribe that answers fear with blood. The community fractures. The signal fire—their one hope of rescue—is neglected for the hunt.

Only Simon, a quiet and solitary boy, perceives the truth: there is no beast on the mountain to be hunted and killed. The darkness they fear is inside them. He grasps, as Golding puts it, “mankind’s essential illness.” But when Simon comes down to tell the others, they fall upon him in a frenzy and kill him, mistaking the bearer of the truth for the beast itself.

From there, the descent is swift. Piggy is murdered, and the conch is shattered in the same instant—reason and order destroyed together. Ralph, now hunted like an animal by the painted tribe, flees for his life as the boys set the whole island ablaze to flush him out. He is saved only by the chance arrival of a naval officer, drawn by the smoke, who looks upon the filthy, weeping children with mild disappointment that British boys could not have “put up a better show.” He does not understand what he has interrupted. And the warship that will carry them home is, of course, hunting other men across a burning world.

A Few Theological Undertones

Baal-Zebub — The Prince of Demons

The Christian influence in this work is undeniable, even from the title.

The “Lord of the Flies” first appears in 2 Kings 1:1-16, where Ahaziah, king of Israel, falls through the lattice in his upper chamber in Samaria and inquires of Baal-zebub whether he will recover or not.

Baal-zebub is comprised of two Hebrew words: lord (Baal) and flies (zebub). In Hebrew, Baal is a name given to many gods, always referring to false gods, idols, or demons. Baal is never used to describe the One, True God.

The name “Baal-zebub” was often used as a rhetorical device to describe the prince of demons — Satan himself.

For this reason, the Pharisees called Jesus “Beelzebul” or “Beelzebub” (a Greek form of Baal-zebub) in Matthew 12:24 after He cast out a demon. The Pharisees foolishly said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.” In this, the Pharisees were accusing Christ of being Satan.

With this in mind, the title of Golding’s masterpiece sets a significant tone: Satan is about to be on display in these pages.

Original Sin

As Golding set out to write Lord of the Flies, he wanted to tell a story that would accurately encapsulate how young boys would act on a stranded island. In doing so, whether he knew it or not, Golding relied heavily on the doctrine of original sin.

The Christian doctrine of original sin asserts that humanity is born with a sinful nature that we inherit from our forefather, Adam. We are not born with a “blank slate,” so to speak. Instead, we are born in sin, corrupt in every part, and apart from Christ, we cannot please God.

The boys face not a physical beast, but their sinful nature on the island.

Who is it that leads the descent into madness? Is it a demon? An external force? No, it was from within the camp. Jack was the rotten egg of sorts, but is he all that different from the rest? In the words of Simon, “Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”

Simon — The Prophet They Killed

Of all the boys, Simon is the strange one. He wanders off alone into the forest. He is kind to the little ones, fetching fruit they cannot reach. And he alone perceives the truth: the beast is not on the mountain. The beast is in them.

If you’re reading closely, the pattern is hard to miss. Simon withdraws to a solitary place, as Christ withdrew to pray. He receives the revelation no one else can bear. He confronts the demon face to face and learns from the Lord of the Flies’ own mouth that the evil is internal and inescapable. Then he comes down the mountain—like Moses from Sinai, like Christ from the mount—carrying the truth that would set the others free.

And they kill him for it.

In the frenzy of their ritual dance, in the dark and the storm, the boys fall upon Simon and tear him apart, mistaking the very boy who came to free them from the beast for the beast itself. The bearer of the good news is destroyed by the people he came to save.

Here Golding brings us to the very edge of the gospel—and stops.

Because Simon’s death saves no one. His body is carried out to sea, and the truth he died to deliver dies with him. No one learns it. No one repents. There is no third day. There is no empty tomb. There is no atonement in his blood—only waste.

And that is the difference between the shadow and the substance. Christ, too, withdrew to the wilderness. Christ, too, was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3). Christ, too, came to His own, and His own did not receive Him (John 1:11). But Christ’s death was not a waste. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). And on the third day He rose, conquering the beast that Simon could only name.

Simon points to a Savior. He cannot be one. Golding gives us a Calvary with no resurrection—and that, in the end, is the limit of the whole book. He saw the darkness of man’s heart more clearly than most preachers do. What he could not give was the new heart that alone answers it: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Organized Government

It might sound like this one comes out of left field, but hang in there with me…

One recurring event in the book is the conch being blown. When this occurs, the group of boys, or the citizenry, assembles to engage in what is essentially a town hall. They discuss the issues they face and, albeit immaturely, they seek solutions.

The conch is treated as the beacon of truth and organization in their establishment. It’s treated as a “talking stick”—if you aren’t holding the conch, you are to be silent.

Though there is equal representation in the group (all have the opportunity to speak in turn), equal authority is not given to all members—Ralph is the duly elected leader; he is the president.

At the peak of chaos, the conch is broken. The coup, led by Jack, has met its climax. Piggy, the one most devoted to law and order, was murdered in the revolution.

But here is the point I don’t want you to miss: the conch did not fail because it was a bad system. It failed because the boys stopped consenting to be governed by it. The order was always external—a shell, a rule, a vote—and it could restrain the beast in them only so long as they agreed to be restrained. The moment the beast fully woke, the conch shattered.

This is why the doctrine of original sin and the matter of government belong in the same conversation. Christ delights in order, not chaos—in the beginning, He brought order to the emptiness and void, and He is not a God of confusion but of peace. Good government is a real mercy; it holds sin in check and makes life together possible.

But the government cannot do what only God can do. Law restrains the sinner; it does not regenerate him. The conch could govern the boys’ behavior for a season, but it could never change their hearts—and so, like every external order imposed on fallen men, it eventually broke against the very nature it was meant to contain. The boys did not need a better system; they needed what no system can give.

Like I said, I don’t frequently read fiction, and maybe you can relate to that. Hopefully, you can see that there is value in these stories—even if they are just fiction.

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We build an institution. The institution drifts. And rather than fight for the thing we built, we hand it to the people who took it from us, walk out the door, and start something smaller down the road. Then, we congratulate ourselves on our purity while the institution we abandoned goes on shaping the culture without us.

It is, if we are honest, a kind of suicide—the slow, deliberate destruction of our own influence, carried out with a clear conscience and a satisfied smile.

Consider the universities. The story is older than America: Oxford and Cambridge were once seminaries of the Christian faith before they became anything else. But the American chapter is the one we know best.

Harvard was founded in 1636 so that the churches of New England would not be left with an illiterate, unconverted ministry. When the orthodox grew uneasy about Harvard’s drift, they founded Yale. When Yale and the rest proved unreliable in the Great Awakening, the New Light Presbyterians founded what became Princeton.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton: each born of confessional conviction, each lost to liberalism. By the twentieth century, these were no longer fortresses of orthodoxy but the seminaries of secular and theological liberalism, training the men who would dismantle the very civilization that built them.

We did not lose them in a fair fight on the merits. They were overtaken—whether handed over or muscled away makes little difference now—because the orthodox either lacked the strength to hold them or lacked the will to try.

And here’s the kicker: You cannot simply build another Harvard. Institutions like these are the accumulated weight of centuries; once surrendered, they are not replaced, but merely mourned.

The denominations tell the same story. The Presbyterian Church (USA) went liberal, and the orthodox left—first with Machen and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in 1936, then with the founding of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in 1973. The Northern Baptists drifted into the soft mainline Protestantism that now defines the American Baptist Churches (ABC), and the conservatives who remained eventually splintered off into smaller and smaller associations.

In each case, the building stayed standing; the orthodox just moved out. And in each case, the new body, however faithful, traded a national institution for a regional one, a cathedral for a chapel, real cultural leverage for the clean conscience of separation.

The Reflex In Real Time

You can watch this reflex operating right now, live, in the PCA.

Burk Parsons, the well-known pastor of St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, was disciplined by his presbytery for being “harsh, ungentle, and unkind.” Many conservatives read the charges as tone-policing—a man punished for temperament rather than heresy. The response of his congregation? They voted, 669 to 108, to leave the PCA entirely.

Zachary Garris, pastor of Bryce Avenue Presbyterian Church in White Rock, New Mexico, was hauled before the Rio Grande Presbytery over controversial public statements—statements his critics found indefensible, and his defenders saw as persecution for conviction.

Whatever one makes of the man’s particular claims, the case became one more flashpoint, one more occasion for the same chorus: This proves it; the institution is gone; time to leave.

But not everyone drew that conclusion. A young Presbyterian layman named Richard Ackerman—better known online as “Redeemed Zoomer,” with a following far larger than most ordained men will ever have—has been making the opposite argument with surprising force.

He calls it Operation Reconquista: Do not come out and build your own, but stay in and take it back. He has pointed to cases like Garris’s not as a reason to flee the mainline but as proof of why faithful men must refuse to surrender it. Something is bracing, and a little convicting, about a twenty-three-year-old urging the church to a level of steadfastness its ordained ministers too often lack.

I think Ackerman is right. And what he is urging for the mainline, I am urging for the Southern Baptist Convention: a Reconquista. Southern Baptists, of all people, should not need to be told why these matter.

The Southern Baptist Moment

In Orlando this June, the Southern Baptist Convention will once again take up the question of women in the pastorate.

The history is brief and worth stating plainly, because it traces a conviction climbing the ladder of stature.

Institutionally, it began in 2022 with Mike Law, a then-obscure pastor from Arlington, Virginia, who moved to amend the SBC Constitution so that a cooperating church would not “affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”

The next year, Juan Sanchez—a better-known pastor from Austin and a familiar name in Reformed evangelical circles—refined it into more positive language (“only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture”) and took up the cause as his own; it has been the Law-Sanchez Amendment ever since.

It cleared its first hurdle, then fell short of the two-thirds it needed at Indianapolis in 2024, and fell short again when Sanchez brought it back to Dallas in 2025—both times commanding a clear majority of around sixty percent but never the supermajority.

Now the conviction has reached the top of the ladder. Al Mohler, president of Southern Seminary and arguably the most influential institutionalist in the convention, announced in May that he would bring his own version, the “Truth & Unity Amendment,” to the floor in Orlando, with both candidates for the presidency already behind it.

That a measure this modest—merely clarifying what the Baptist Faith and Message already confesses—has needed four annual meetings and still cannot reach two-thirds is itself the warning. The roughly forty percent who keep voting it down are not a fringe; they are the drift, measured in real time. Not all who vote it down do so for egalitarian reasons, but they serve the same end.

Furthermore, recent survey data from Church Answers tells the same story: Many who affirm a male-only pastoral office in principle are nonetheless broadly comfortable with women preaching and teaching. We have not been discipling our people, and the gap is widening.

And so, predictably, the reflex is already twitching. Scroll the Southern Baptist Facebook groups, and you will find it: “If this is what the convention is going to fight about, we’re out.” “If the amendment fails, we’re out.” “If it passes and the moderates revolt, we’re out.”

I will not name these men, only because their names are not noteworthy—they are not figures whose departure would move votes, but mere voices in SBC comment threads. Still, they are a barometer, the early symptom of the same disease that emptied the mainline of its orthodoxy: the conviction that faithfulness means leaving.

It does not. And the SBC, more than anybody in America, has the proof in its own history.

We Have Already Done This

The Conservative Resurgence is the great counterexample to the entire pattern I have described.

By the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention was sliding the way every other major denomination had slid—theological liberalism had taken root in the seminaries, professors were questioning the historicity of Scripture, and the agencies were drifting toward the tolerant, moderating establishment that has hollowed out the mainline.

The conservatives could have left. Plenty of denominations’ conservatives had.

Instead, they did the harder, less glamorous thing: they stayed, they organized, and they leveraged the convention’s own governance—a decade-long string of conservative presidents appointing conservative trustees—until the boards, the seminaries, and the missions agencies were back in faithful hands.

The capstone was the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which closed the ambiguities the moderates had hidden behind, including by limiting the pastorate to men. They did not build a chapel down the road. They took back the cathedral.

That was our Reconquista. We didn’t borrow the idea from a Presbyterian YouTuber; we wrote the playbook. And the men who threaten to bolt the moment things get difficult are proposing to throw away the very thing their fathers bled to win back.

What is more, the playbook is working again right now. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the cost of the SBC’s more recent drift—on sexuality, on critical theory, on the ERLC’s betrayal of the convention’s own abortion convictions—is real, and it is always paid downstream. But the messengers have not been silent.

In 2025, nearly forty-three percent of them voted on the record to abolish the ERLC outright; that summer, Brent Leatherwood resigned, ending the Moore–Leatherwood era. Clint Pressley was elected and then overwhelmingly reelected on a charge to “hold fast,” and men are running to succeed him on platforms of genuine Baptist renewal.

The tide is visibly turning—and it is turning precisely because faithful men stayed in the boat and rowed against the current. To abandon ship now, at the very moment the water is shifting in our favor, would not be principled separation. It would be desertion at the turn of the battle.

The alternative is sitting right across the aisle of Baptist history. The American Baptist Churches are what the SBC becomes if the orthodox keep walking out. Not overnight—these things never happen overnight. But ten or twenty years of this, of the convictional men quietly transferring out while the institution is left to those with no stomach for the fight, and the SBC will be a hollowed-out mainline relic with a cooperative program nobody cooperates with. The road is well-paved and well-traveled. We know exactly where it ends.

Here I Stand; I Can Do No Other

So this is not a call to piety. It is not the old separatist instinct—touch not the unclean thing—dressed up as holiness. That instinct feels righteous and costs nothing, which is precisely why it is so attractive and so faithless.

The SBC is not the unclean thing. It is a body that still sends missionaries to the nations, still trains pastors, still confesses the gospel and the inerrant Word and the headship Christ assigned to men. To hand that to the people you fear, on the grounds that associating with them is beneath you, is not purity. It is surrender with a halo.

Consider this: What happens when masses of conservatives leave the SBC? Does the SBC get healthier? Will it cling tighter to sound doctrine?

When a conservative church leaves the SBC, a small step is taken toward giving away our Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. What will happen to our entities? Will the IMB push out more faithful missionaries or more theologically liberal ones? Will the seminaries train more biblically literate pastors or heterodox ones?

I will say plainly what I suspect is underneath much of it: a failure of nerve. Holding ground is hard, unglamorous, conflict-ridden work, and somewhere along the way we trained a generation of men to mistake retreat for righteousness and to call their flinching “faithfulness.”

A church does not need men who will flee at the first hard vote and pronounce a benediction over their own desertion. It needs men with the spine to stay in the fight—the kind of courage that a denomination, like a household, cannot do without and cannot fake.

Institutional drift does not announce itself. It does not arrive in the pew with a banner; it seeps from the boardroom to the seminary to the pastor to the people, quietly and without announcement. And the ordinary, trusting saints in the pew—the ones who give faithfully through the Cooperative Program and assume their convention shares the convictions they were taught—are always the last to know that the ground has shifted, and the first to pay for it. They are not the enemy. They are the ones being failed. And between them and the men pressing false doctrine forward, somebody has to stand.

That somebody is not an abstraction. It is the man who shows up to vote when it would be easier to stay home. The pastor who mentors the next generation in the truth instead of conceding the field. The elder who will not transfer his letter the first time a vote goes against him. The man who, when the easy thing is to leave, plants his feet and says: Here I stand; I can do no other; I will not give an inch.

We need that man in Orlando. We need ten thousand of him. Not men who will throw up their hands and build something smaller and purer and weaker, but men who will stay and contend for the institution because the institution is still doing the work of Christ—and because the moment the faithful abandon it is the moment it is lost.

Don’t give them the SBC. It cost too much the first time we took it back.

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A regular topic of conversation between us is the conversion of young men to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. We both find the shift fascinating, for both cultural and theological reasons.

I’ve commented on the theological side before. I want to elaborate further here.

If Protestants are primarily engaging the shift to Rome and Constantinople with theological arguments, we are missing one of the primary draws of these traditions.

Young men especially find them rooted in history, in unchangingness, and in biblical gender roles. The women head cover. The men speak strongly and with conviction against the ails of our society — multiculturalism, feminism, pluralism, and the rest.

To my knowledge, theology is largely a secondary issue. If paedobaptism, transubstantiation, apostolic succession, and Mariology come with the masculinity and cultural prowess, so be it. This may be the decision-making factor for some, but not most.

In many cases, Protestants have forfeited the political square and become the biblical face of feminine masculinity. This is largely due to “Protestantism” being a vast umbrella term — but perception determines reality.

What many Evangelicals don’t understand is that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, the first Republican to do so in twenty years. The country, at that moment, was not the leftist monolith that Evangelical leadership treats it as. Most of America is conservative in broad terms.

We Evangelicals often try to speak gently, to attract and not offend liberals. The fact of the matter is that they already hate us. Speaking out on political issues — which are largely theological issues — will not change their position on us. Speaking gently will not change their position either. The only question is whether we will be hated for saying the true thing or for saying nothing at all.

Say the conservative thing if it is rooted in biblical principles. Most of the country will agree with you. The ones who don’t were going to hate you anyway. Who cares?

Young people want strong men to tell them how to think about these issues, and they know the church is to be the beacon of light in the darkness. That, in my opinion, is why we are seeing such a shift toward Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

What registers, again and again, in convert testimonies is some version of the same line: Finally, someone said it.

Finally, someone spoke with conviction about pornography. About the duty of fathers. About what a man is and what a woman is. That hunger is not exotic. It is a hunger for fathers — for pastors who sound like men, for a church that knows what it believes, why it believes it, and is not embarrassed of it.

So, a word to pastors: If you are watching young men drift toward Rome or Constantinople, do not respond first with another careful refutation of transubstantiation. Most are not listening for it.

Respond by being the kind of pastor those young men cannot find in the average Evangelical church. Preach the whole counsel of God, including its hard edges. Speak plainly about feminism and womanly submissiveness, sexual ethics, abortion as the murder of the preborn, the duty of fathers, and the goodness of biblical patriarchy in the home. Call your young men to courage and self-mastery, and demand it of yourself first.

To most, that is the only answer to the shift worth giving.

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A great field stretched out, and through the middle of it ran a fence.

On one side stood Christ, calling, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

On the other stood Satan, calling, “Come to me, and I will give you the desires of your heart.”

And the crowd that filled the field began to move—some to the right hand, some to the left—each one going to the voice he loved.

But one man would not move. He liked the sound of both voices, and he didn’t want to lose either.

So he climbed the fence and sat down on top of it. He was pleased with himself, laughing that he outsmarted both Christ and Satan.

“I have chosen neither,” he said. “I keep my freedom, my options. Let the others commit themselves, and I will sit above it all.”

In time, the field emptied. Christ gathered His own and departed, and they were gone. Satan gathered his own and departed, and they were gone. And the man sat alone on the fence in the gathering dark, still congratulating himself on his cleverness.

He then saw a figure coming back across the empty field. It was Satan, walking slowly, his eyes on the ground as though searching for something he had dropped.

“Have you lost something?” the man called down.

Satan lifted his head and looked straight at him. “No,” he said. “Come with me.”

The man drew back. “But I never chose you. I sat on the fence. I was neutral. I chose neither you nor Him.”

“That’s quite all right,” Satan said with a grin. “The fence belongs to me.”

— Attribution Anonymous

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Since I became a believer in 2014, I have been a member of the church of Niceanity. Well, that was until I was excommunicated in September of last year.

Niceanity is close to Christianity — almost indistinguishable. The major difference is that Niceanity cherishes the second greatest commandment over all others.

And 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. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37-40 ESV

The second commandment is real and binding. But it is the second. Niceanity has made it the first in the minds of those it captures — and once the second commandment is in the first commandment’s seat, everything else has to be reorganized to accommodate it.

The reorganization runs like this: To love is to not offend. To not offend, you must not name. Therefore, to love, you must not name.

Niceanity avoids actions or words that could be perceived as aggression, even when they are righteous and true. Sodomy becomes “same-sex relationships.” Trans-identifying men become “she.” False teaching becomes “a different perspective.”

The categories Scripture uses to describe sin are quietly retired because the categories themselves are perceived as unkind. In Niceanity, offense is the greatest sin because, if someone is offended, the offender must not have been loving — thereby breaking Niceanity’s greatest commandment.

Niceanity avoids politics at all costs and often embraces what’s called Thirdwayism. To be Third Way is neither Republican nor Democrat, as identifying with either party is idolatry. Instead, the church embraces a pietistic “Third Way,” which is neither left nor right.

To be of the church of Niceanity is to be Third Way — few diverge from it.

The political dialogue of Thirdwayism swings fists to the right more than the left, so this church isn’t perceived as being one of those Republicans. They want to be nice, and perception determines reality.

This is how you get Never-Trump evangelicals in Niceanity: Trump isn’t nice. Kamala is. It must be Kamala’s hour.

They do not think about the vigorous abortion policy that would have come into effect under Kamala because Trump isn’t nice. He isn’t winsome. He doesn’t possess Niceanity’s core virtues.

Niceanity Rears Its Head

As I said, I was a member of the church of Niceanity until last year. What changed?

On September 10th, 2025, I received an unexpected text: “Charlie Kirk was shot.”

My heart began to race. I had looked up to Charlie for some time, occasionally coming across his videos and being impressed by his articulation, his clarity, and his willingness to debate anyone, anywhere, on anything.

It was all over X. Charlie Kirk was shot dead at Utah Valley University at age 31.

I was distraught. I cried for days over the loss of someone whom I had never met. I didn’t know it at the time, but Charlie’s death would change my life forever.

The reaction online told me everything I needed to know about the country I lived in.

Charlie left behind a wife of four years and two young children, and the Democrats — the tolerant left — rejoiced. They blamed Kirk for what happened to him. After all, his rhetoric wasn’t nice. In other words, Kirk didn’t say what they wanted him to say.

I saw much of the Democratic voter base rejoice over Charlie Kirk’s death — leaving a widow and two fatherless children — I was assured they would also rejoice over my death. They would rejoice over a newly widowed woman and four fatherless children.

In the days that followed, I watched evangelical pastors line up to qualify their condemnation of Kirk’s murder by also condemning Kirk.

Mike Kelsey, the Lead Pastor of McLean Bible Church — the congregation David Platt led until handing it to Kelsey — delivered a Sunday sermon that strongly denounced the murder and the celebration of it. To his credit. But he did not stop there.

He told his congregation that there was “some rhetoric from Charlie Kirk that followers of Jesus should firmly denounce.” He told them he had spent “hours” watching long-form Kirk content, and that “in a lot of cases the context didn’t help at all.”

He claimed to be “shocked that so many professing Christians were rationalizing things that were so demeaning and un-Christlike.” The one example he offered was Kirk’s rhetoric on illegal immigration, which Kelsey characterized as “ignorant and derogatory.”

What Kelsey did not offer was a single specific instance.

Megan Basham, among others, pointed this out within days. The shape of the sermon was the shape of Niceanity itself: Condemnation of named conservatives without supporting evidence, paired with extended pastoral concern for the feelings of the audiences allegedly offended by them.

My Excommunication

I didn’t yet know that I was engulfed in the Niceanity church. Sure, that’s happening at McLean and other Evangelical churches, but I’m safe, right?

I worked as a middle school Bible teacher at a local evangelical Christian school. After Charlie’s murder, I began commenting publicly on Facebook about political and cultural issues: Abortion, IVF, immigration, feminism, the shape of public life in a post-Christian country.

The school’s administration confronted me about my posts repeatedly. I want to be careful here, because the strangest part of these conversations was always the same: I was never told the posts were factually incorrect.

One administrator told me directly that he agreed with what I had written. The objection was never substance. The objection was tone. The objection was that I was disrupting the stakeholders. Eventually, I was identified as a disunifying figure and given the option to resign or be fired.

A Christian school. With a doctrinal statement. Whose business is the formation of Christian young people for a country that hates them. Could not find a way to keep a Bible teacher who said in public what the Bible says in public.

While this was happening, my family and I were members-in-process at a local Southern Baptist church. We had attended Sunday school, the worship service, and Wednesday evening Bible study faithfully for months. We had built friendships that our family still cherishes. We had done everything the church asked of prospective members.

When the time came for my membership interview, I was told that I would not be invited into membership. I was told that I was uncharitable and unkind on Facebook. I was told that if I wanted to join, I would need to undergo counseling and discipleship — to be retrained as a more acceptable communicator.

Read that sentence again. An SBC church told a confessing Christian, with a wife and four children, that he could not join their congregation until he had been counseled into speaking the way they wanted him to speak. Not because his theology was wrong. Not because his life was disordered. Because the posts on his Facebook page were not nice enough.

I left the meeting and called the five men I trust to tell me when I am wrong. I asked them honestly whether I was the problem — whether my posts had crossed a line I could not see. Every one of them, without coordination, told me the same thing: This is not your failure. This is Niceanity protecting itself.

For the first time, I saw that I had no refuge in Niceanity. If I uttered gospel truths — as Charlie frequently did — I would be called uncharitable, unkind, and a disunifying figure.

Is there a place for me — a Christian who’s bold enough to bring my theology to the public square?

For a while, I didn’t think I would find that home. That is, until I found a new church — one that rejects Niceanity. I call it Biblical Christianity.

Scripture Without the Niceanity Filter

Biblical Christianity prizes the second greatest commandment — love your neighbor as yourself — though it treats it as what it truly is: The second greatest.

The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. If we love our God, then we love our neighbors as God loves them. Namely, we tell them the truth unapologetically. We refuse to use euphemisms to spare feelings at the expense of truth.

How does God speak to His neighbors? Interestingly, when we read God’s Word, we see God using several figures of speech that the church of Niceanity would call uncharitable.

Allow me to provide examples to substantiate my claim:

Jesus: Invective, Sarcasm, and Insult

* Jesus called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7; 12:34; 23:33).

* Jesus called the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27).

* Jesus said of religious leaders, “You are of your father, the devil” (John 8:44).

* Jesus called debate opponents fools (Matthew 23:17; Luke 11:40).

* Jesus calls Peter “Satan” (Matthew 16:23).

* Jesus calls the Syrophoenician woman a dog (Mark 7:27; Matthew 15:26).

The Prophets: Scatology, Mockery, and Outrage

* Amos addressed the women of Samaria as “cows of Bashan” (Amos 4:1).

* Isaiah addresses Judah’s leaders as “rulers of Sodom” (Isaiah 1:10).

* God commands Jeremiah to bury a soiled undergarment, then dig it up rotten, as a sermon illustration of Judah’s corruption (Jeremiah 13:1-11).

* Hosea’s marriage of whoredom was commanded by God as a living parable of His relationship with Israel (Hosea 1-3).

* God instructs Ezekiel to bake bread over human excrement as a sign-act of Israel’s uncleanness (Ezekiel 4:12-15).

The Apostles: Carrying the Tone Forward

* Paul wishes the Judaizers would castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12).

* Paul counts his religious credentials as excrement (Philippians 3:8).

* Peter calls false teachers “irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed” (2 Peter 2:12).

* Jude likens false teachers to “waterless clouds,” “fruitless trees, twice dead,” “wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame” (Jude 12-13).

What I Owe You

If you are reading this, the odds are good that you have lived some version of what I lived. You have been told you are uncharitable for saying what the Bible says. You have been told you are divisive for naming what the Bible names. You have been disinvited, defriended, denied a job, denied a platform, denied a membership, because the tone of your faithfulness did not match the tone of the institution. You have wondered whether the problem was actually you.

I owe you the same thing my five friends owed me. The problem is not you. The problem is that Niceanity has captured the institutions around you, and Niceanity will keep telling you that you are the problem because the alternative is to admit that it is.

Niceanity is the most successful corruption American evangelicalism has yet produced because it preserves the entire vocabulary while inverting the rule. It tells faithful believers in real churches to be silent and calls the silence love. It tells false shepherds in those same churches to be heard and calls the hearing unity. It tells the Christ of the four Gospels — the Christ who called Pharisees a brood of vipers and named their father — that he would not pass the search committee.

My wife and my four children will not be catechized in Niceanity. The God we worship is the God who laughs at kings, calls hypocrites whitewashed tombs, and watched his Son speak the way He spoke and pronounced it good.

There are churches that have not been captured by Niceanity. They are often smaller. They don’t always agree with your nuanced theological positions. They do not have the platforms or the conferences or the publishing deals. But they preach the prophets, the Son, and the apostles speaking the way they actually spoke — and they worship the kind of God who is not embarrassed by his own book. Find that church.

A Word of Caution

If you are still a member of the Niceanity church, there are more of us than you think, and we are tired of our speech being policed by you. We increasingly find that you prey on our downfall. We’re building our own institutions, our own platforms, and a movement — and we would rather have you with us than against us.

I have drawn a line, and there is room beside me. I am not asking for company, but I am offering it.

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Euphemism: a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.

I enjoy using euphemisms — they liven up speech in creative and lighthearted ways.

Instead of saying, “He’s cheap,” you can say, “He’s thrifty,” or “He’s penny pinching.”

Instead of saying, “She’s stupid,” you can say, “The lights are on, but nobody’s home,” or “She’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”

To this day, I regularly call an alcoholic beverage an “adult beverage,” and an ugly face is “one only a mother could love.”

They’re amusing and often harmless. However, I’m increasingly noticing harmful euphemisms in everyday rhetoric that need to be acknowledged.

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Who Controls the Goalposts?

Do you remember when illegal immigrants were openly called “illegal aliens” or “foreigners”?

Generally speaking, these weren’t said with hatred, but to denote specific legal status. Then came the accusations of xenophobia and racism, and our language had to change to accommodate the manufactured public outrage.

As a more provocative example, we used to be allowed to call people retarded. Again, this wasn’t meant with disdain or hatred. It’s a medical term: mental retardation. At some point, “retard” was off limits, and mentally disabled was the only acceptable term.

My point: the goalposts change, as often happens with language. But who controls the goalposts? It’s not the conservatives. Overwhelmingly, the goalposts are controlled by the left.

I can say this with confidence because the euphemisms support their purposes. They soften actions and ideas that they want to promote.

The Catalog

We can’t say “illegal aliens.” We have to say “undocumented migrants.”

The first phrase names a legal status: this person has broken the law to be here. The second phrase reframes the lawbreaker as a victim of paperwork, as though the issue were a missing form rather than a violated border.

We can’t say “sodomy.” We have to say “same-sex relationships” or “marriage equality.”

Sodomy is the biblical and historical term for a specific sin God names and judges. “Marriage equality” smuggles in the conclusion that the arrangement is a marriage at all — and dares you to be against equality before any argument has been joined.

We can’t say “transvestites.” We have to say “drag queens.”

“Transvestite” describes a man dressing as a woman and carries the appropriate weight of disorder. “Drag queen” rebrands the same act as performance art and royalty — a costume and a crown rather than a category confusion.

We can’t say “fornicators” or “adulterers.” We have to say “polyamorous.”

The biblical words name the sin: sex outside the one-man-one-woman covenant of marriage. “Polyamorous” dresses the same sin in Greek roots — “many loves” — and calls it a lifestyle. Adding participants does not sanctify the degeneracy. It multiplies it.

We can’t say “genital mutilation.” We have to say “gender affirming care.”

Mutilation is what surgeons do to healthy organs in these procedures, full stop. “Gender affirming care” reverses every term: the disorder becomes the identity, the mutilation becomes affirmation, and the butcher becomes the “caregiver.”

We can’t say “murdering a child” or “child sacrifice.” We have to say “reproductive healthcare.”

This is the most consequential euphemism of our age, because it conceals the most consequential evil. Healthcare heals. Abortion ends a human life made in the image of God. To call the second the first is not softening — it is a lie told to make the murder of children sound like a doctor’s visit.

We can’t call false religions “idol worship.” We have to affirm it as “religious liberty.”

The Founders wrote the First Amendment against the backdrop of Christendom. “Free exercise” meant the freedom of Protestants and Catholics to worship according to conscience without the state establishing a single denomination — not a guarantee that Wiccans, Hindus, Muslims, and Satanists would be granted equal civic standing to build temples next to churches.

“Religious liberty” in our current usage has been stretched beyond recognition, transformed from a Christian principle of intra-Christian tolerance into a secular dogma that demands Christians celebrate idolatry as one valid path among many. That is not what the Founders meant, and it is certainly not what Scripture allows.

We can’t say “riots.” We have to say “peaceful protests.”

We watched cities burn on live television while news anchors stood in front of the flames and called the gatherings peaceful. The euphemism was not describing reality. It was instructing us which reality we were permitted to see.

The Trick

Each of these substitutions does the same work. It takes an act Scripture names plainly — lawbreaking, sodomy, fornication, mutilation, murder, idolatry, riot — and replaces it with a phrase engineered to make opposition sound monstrous before any argument has begun. Who, after all, is against equality? Against care? Against liberty? Against peace?

This is the trick. The euphemism does not invite debate. It forecloses it.

Recovering the Ground

He who names reality rules it. Christians, who serve the One who defines what is good and evil, ought to have understood that first.

We can recover the ground. But not by asking permission to use words the regime has placed behind bars. We recover it the way it was lost — one word at a time, said plainly, and without apology.

Reject their euphemisms and live in reality.

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* Israeli Defense Force Soldier Desecrates a Crucifix in Lebanon — April 19-20, 2026

A photo emerged online showing an Israeli soldier taking the blunt side of an axe to a fallen sculpture of Christ on the cross in Debel, a southern Lebanese Christian village.

“The cross was part of a small shrine in the garden of a family living on the edge of the village,” said Fadi Falfel, a priest in Debel.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) confirmed the photo’s authenticity on April 19th. It was not the first such incident.

The event was significant enough that it prompted a response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said,

As the Jewish state, Israel cherishes and upholds the Jewish values of tolerance and mutual respect between Jews and worshippers of all faiths. All religions flourish in our land and we view members of all faiths as equals in building our society and region.

Yesterday, like the overwhelming majority of Israelis, I was stunned and saddened to learn that an IDF soldier damaged a Catholic religious icon in southern Lebanon. I condemn the act in the strongest terms. Military authorities are conducting a criminal probe of the matter and will take appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender…

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land give the most authoritative public statement, saying,

The Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land expresses its profound indignation and unreserved condemnation of the desecration of a representation of Jesus Crucified by an Israeli soldier in a Lebanese village.

This act constitutes a grave affront to the Christian faith and adds to other reported incidents of desecration of Christian symbols by IDF soldiers in southern Lebanon. It further reveals a disturbing failure in moral and human formation, wherein even the most elementary reverence for the sacred and for the dignity of others has been gravely compromised.

The Assembly calls for immediate and decisive disciplinary action, a credible process of accountability, and clear assurances that such conduct will neither be tolerated nor repeated…

The IDF’s internal investigation concluded within 72 hours.

The soldier who destroyed the statue and the soldier who photographed him were removed from combat duty and sentenced to 30 days of military detention. Six additional soldiers who witnessed the act and did nothing were summoned for “clarification discussions,” with no public update on their outcomes. The IDF replaced the statue in coordination with the Debel community, and on April 22 — three days after the photo went viral — Lebanon’s papal nuncio presided over its reinstallation with Italian UNIFIL peacekeepers in attendance.

No criminal charges were filed. The matter was resolved entirely within the military chain of command. A Franciscan priest near Jerusalem called the response “appropriate but incomplete,” warning that “they’ve got a lot of work to do to address the wider issues that led up to it.” The speed of institutional closure — condemnation, jailing, and a replacement statue all within 72 hours — reflects acute awareness of the reputational damage. The lightness of the penalty does not.

* The Dead Sea “Pride Land” Festival — April 20, 2026

On April 20, Israel’s main X account announced its upcoming LGBTQ festival at the Dead Sea.

The irony is not subtle. Archaeological evidence asserts that the Dead Sea is the site of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities that God destroyed due to their sexual immorality. Thousands of years later, the state of Israel is holding its largest sodomy festival to date on that land.

As expected, many Christians responded with disgust and outrage.

Bradley Pierce, the President of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, said,

Yes, this post is real.Yes, they really are celebrating sodomy at the location where God destroyed Sodom with fire and brimstone.Leviticus 18:22 (ESV) “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”God will not be mocked.

What makes this more than a cultural provocation is who promoted it. This was not a private organization or a fringe activist group — it was Israel’s official Foreign Ministry account, posting under the government’s verified handle. The promotional language was deliberate: “Pride rises at the lowest place on earth.”

Whether intended or not, that phrase reads as a taunt to anyone with a Bible. The Israeli government did not stumble into this. They chose the location, wrote the copy, and hit publish. The speed with which Christians recognized the symbolism — and the silence from those who normally police such observations — tells you everything about where we are.

How does this affect Israel-American relations?

The moral case against both incidents is straightforward. But political consequences follow moral failures, and here they are arriving on schedule. Conservative support for Israel is at its lowest in two decades, and the people Israel most needs in its corner are the ones who noticed.

Consider who these stories would frustrate. Not Democrats — they broke with Israel long ago, and their coalition is now openly hostile to it.

It’s the Conservatives who were angered. The Republican Party is the home of most Christians, those who are most against LGBTQ ideology, and those in America who are most sympathetic to Israel.

When Israel does things Christians inherently dislike, they erode support from the very allies they need most. The data makes the erosion visible:

In the chart above, the blue line tracks overall Republican sympathy for Israel, at 70%; the red line tracks the rising unfavorable view among Republicans under 50 at 50% — a separate but related measure of the same erosion.

Why is there a disparity between sympathy in the Republican Party overall and among Gen Z Conservatives?

The disparity is partly generational transmission. Older conservatives inherited a default posture of sympathy toward Israel — passed down from parents and grandparents who lived through the Holocaust, celebrated Israel’s establishment in 1948, and were shaped by a church culture that read Israel’s national restoration as prophetic fulfillment. That posture was assumed; it didn’t need to be argued.

By the time it reached Gen Z and younger Millennials, it had lost most of its explanatory power. We were handed a conclusion without the premises. And when what we see in the news contradicts the conclusion, there’s nothing theological holding it in place.

The Theology Behind the Alliance

To understand why that church culture was so uniformly pro-Israel, you have to understand John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible.

Darby, a 19th-century Irish theologian, developed the framework now known as dispensationalism — a system of biblical interpretation that divides history into distinct epochs of God’s dealings with humanity, and maintains that God’s covenant promises to ethnic Israel, including the land, remain literally unfulfilled and await future completion. The modern state of Israel, in this framework, is not merely a political development. It is a theological one.

That system found its way into American pulpits primarily through C.I. Scofield’s 1909 Reference Bible — arguably one of the most influential single volumes in 20th-century American Protestant history. By placing dispensationalist commentary directly on the page alongside the biblical text, Scofield effectively taught a generation of pastors and laypeople to read Scripture through a dispensationalist lens without necessarily knowing they were doing so. The notes and the text blurred together.

When Israel was established as a nation-state in 1948, the emotional conditions were already primed. The world had just emerged from the Holocaust. Sympathy for the Jewish people was deep and legitimate. And for a church culture steeped in Scofield, the founding of Israel looked like prophecy being fulfilled in real time. Theological conviction, historical sympathy, and geopolitical excitement fused into a single posture — and that posture calcified into the Christian Zionism that dominated evangelical culture for the next several decades.

That posture was institutionalized over the following decades — through figures like Jerry Falwell Sr. and, later, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel — until pro-Israel sentiment became a near-litmus test for evangelical political identity.

The consensus is now fracturing — not primarily because of theological revision, but because the assumed conclusions are being tested against observable reality. And Israel is failing the test in the eyes of the generation that was never given the dispensational framework to begin with.

The Floor Hasn’t Been Found

If this pattern continues, conservative support will continue to erode — and no one should be surprised. Christians are not obligated to support a government that mocks what they hold sacred. The alliance was never unconditional, even if it was treated that way. Israel is discovering, slowly, that it had a constituency it could afford to take for granted — until it couldn’t.

Whether the theology that built that alliance deserves the same scrutiny as the politics — that’s a question for another piece.

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Gen Z is the most depressed generation in recorded history. We inherited a secular framework that cannot answer the questions it raised. So we’re looking elsewhere — and for many, that means Rome or Constantinople.

Here’s what’s actually driving it:

Authority: Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy claim to be the one, true, apostolic church. They don’t change. Thoughtful Protestants know the historical and theological problems with that claim — but a spiritually starved 24-year-old doesn’t.

Here’s the irony: confessional Protestantism has a serious answer to Rome’s authority claims. The confessions, the catechisms, the marks of the true church — these aren’t Roman inventions, they’re biblical categories. We’ve simply stopped teaching them.

Clarity: Evangelical Protestantism runs from Pastor Susan to Joel Webbon under the same banner. To an outsider, that doesn’t look like theological diversity — it looks like an identity crisis. Gen Z grew up watching gender dissolve in real time. We want less ambiguity, not more. Part of that ambiguity is pastoral: when almost anyone can be called a pastor, the office loses its weight.

Confessionalism is Protestantism’s answer — subscribe to a confession, define your terms, know what you believe and why you believe it. The 1689 London Baptist Confession (the confession I adhere to) doesn’t leave much room for confusion about who a pastor is or what a church is for.

Embodiment: This is most notable to me because I haven’t always cared about it — and it’s where evangelicalism has most severely impoverished itself. Catholicism physicalizes worship: take the body and blood of Christ, kneel in confession, recite the creed in unison, and inhabit a church calendar. There’s a reason this feels weighty and serious.

Evangelicalism leans toward spiritualizing Christianity. Jesus is my personal friend. I pray mostly in my mind. My body stands and sits. Historically-grounded Protestants should note: this isn’t what the Reformation produced. The regulative principle — worship as Scripture directs — gives us creeds, confessions, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, corporate prayer, and the preached Word as real and substantial means of grace.

On the Eucharist (or Lord’s Supper) specifically, the Reformed Baptist position isn’t that it’s merely a memorial with nothing happening. Christ is truly present and nourishes his people spiritually as they receive in faith. That’s not Rome’s Mass, but it’s far more than a symbol. We’ve undersold our own ordinances.

I’m not heading to Rome. But the answer to Rome isn’t a fog of evangelical vagueness — it’s a recovery of what we actually confess. Restore the creeds, confessions, and catechisms. Set clear, biblical distinctions between orthodoxy, heresy, and heterodoxy. Recover a robust theology of pastoral office — men who lead as men, and churches that know what they are.

Bring clarity in an age of confusion with the creeds, confessions, and catechisms as your compass.

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My gut reaction is that this is a net positive for the President, the nation, and the world.

For the President, the timing is notable. A week ago, Trump feuded publicly with the Pope and posted an AI-generated image of himself in Christ-like robes — an image so widely condemned as blasphemous that even his own supporters pushed back until it was taken down. Whether his participation in this event represents genuine repentance or careful image rehabilitation, I cannot say. What I can say is that the effect on his base may be reconciliatory, and I’ll leave the question of motive where it belongs: between Trump and God.

Further, the President is reading the Scriptures. As Christians, we believe that the Bible is, in a literal sense, the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16). We also believe “...the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).” In other words, as Trump reads and hears the Word, it has the opportunity to pierce his heart.

For the nation, it is good to see our leader reading God’s Word. In doing so, he is acknowledging its significance, and, for those who are devoted to Trump as a politician, this may cause them to investigate the Bible for themselves. Christians often get excited when popular individuals show interest in Christ. Why? Because that leads their followers to investigate the claims of Christ as well.

The world needs to see that we are devoted to a heavenly morality. At this moment in time, the West is engulfed in decadence. It has gotten better since Trump has been in office, but we are not politically devoted to Christ — America is devoted to the self.

My only issue is that I’m unsure Trump — or the organizers — fully reckon with what he was reading.

2 Chronicles 7:11-22 was almost certainly selected to emphasize the fourteenth verse:

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That verse has functioned as a national prayer movement touchstone for decades, and its selection for the President carries obvious symbolic weight. But the passage doesn’t end at verse 14. It continues into a covenant lawsuit — a direct warning from God to the king that faithlessness will bring judgment, exile, and national disgrace. The organizers reserved this passage for Trump specifically. It is worth asking whether they intended the blessing, the warning, or both — and whether anyone in that room was prepared to receive the full weight of what was read.

In verses 19-22, the Lord says to Solomon,

But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments that I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from my land that I have given you, and this house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples. And at this house, which was exalted, everyone passing by will be astonished and say, “Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?” Then they will say, “Because they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore, he has brought all this disaster on them.”

Right now, I don’t perceive that Trump is dedicated to Christ. He has done much good for Christians, but I don’t believe that he himself is a Christian.

Everyone worships something. If Trump doesn’t worship Christ, what does he worship? Popularity? Fame? Fortune? I can’t answer that question, and I don’t venture to. However, I hope this passage becomes a blessing to Trump and not a curse upon him. I pray that the nations will not much longer say of America, “Because they abandoned the Lord, he has brought all this disaster on them.”

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On Sunday night, President Trump posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social depicting him in white robes and a red sash, hand extended over a sick man in a hospital bed, light radiating from his palm. The composition is unmistakable: it is structured as religious art, styled after depictions of Christ the Healer.

The image was a slightly altered version of one originally posted by right-wing influencer Nick Adams on February 4, who captioned it: “America has been sick for a long time. President Trump is healing this nation.” The intended meaning, on Adams’s end, was not subtle.

Trump posted the image less than an hour after attacking Pope Leo XIV, whom he condemned as “weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy.”

The backlash was swift — and it came from within his own coalition. Conservative activist Riley Gaines wrote: “Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this... a little humility would serve him well... God shall not be mocked.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously called herself a “proud Christian nationalist,” wrote that Trump “posted this picture of himself as if he is replacing Jesus,” and called it “more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

By Monday morning, the image was gone from Truth Social — a comparatively rare and rapid walkback for a president who has previously dodged responsibility for controversial posts.

When confronted by reporters outside the Oval Office, Trump said, “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor... It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better.” Vice President Vance offered a different explanation: he told Fox News that “the president was posting a joke and, of course, he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor.”

Neither explanation is entirely convincing.

To give Trump ample grace, however, there is a possible reading worth considering. Nick Adams's original caption framed the image as Trump healing the nation — a political claim, not a theological one. Trump, when confronted by reporters, said he believed he was being portrayed as a doctor. It is at least conceivable that he reposted the image with Adams's framing in mind, oblivious to the divine iconography until the backlash hit. If so, the rapid deletion makes sense — not as an admission of blasphemy, but as a correction of an unintended message.

Is that what happened? Maybe. Regardless, the post is sacrilegious at best — and the speed of its deletion suggests the President knew it.

The Pope Problem

The Jesus post did not occur in isolation. It came on the same night Trump launched a public attack on Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago-born pontiff who has consistently criticized the administration’s posture toward war and immigration. Trump stood his ground on that front, saying, “Pope Leo said things that are wrong.”

That refusal matters for the same reason the deleted Jesus image matters. A significant portion of Trump’s base is Catholic. Antagonizing the Pope — especially a newly elected American Pope — while simultaneously posting an image of himself in Christ’s posture is not a neutral sequence of events. It is a pattern.

What the Deletion Reveals

Trump seldom backs down. That is, in many ways, his brand. The Jesus image, however, was gone before the morning news cycle.

That is notable. It does not prove remorse — Trump denied that the criticism drove the decision — but the speed of the deletion suggests someone in his circle understood what his base was actually seeing. Conservative Christians were not confused about the imagery. They recognized it immediately.

The question worth asking is whether the president did too.

A Word to the Christian Right

I said on Facebook when this story broke: Trump is teaching a masterclass on how to alienate his base. That is still my read.

Christians who voted for Trump in good faith — who prayed for him, defended him, and genuinely believed he would govern with some deference to the God he invokes — deserve to be told plainly what they are looking at: An image of a political leader depicted as the Healer of the Nations, posted in the middle of a feud with the Pope, is likely not a gaffe. It is a statement about where the idolatry of political power can lead when it goes unchecked.

The President needs to do more than delete the post. He needs to apologize — to Christians, and to God.

When our leaders refuse to walk in repentance, they invoke the wrath of God on the nation. Only repentance is what will truly heal our nation.

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Good Friday

Have you ever wondered why Christians call Good Friday “good”?

On this day, the God of the universe — the One who created all things — died on a Roman cross. Christians believe that God is omnibenevolent, so how can it be good that a benevolent God died?

The answer is simultaneously simple and complex.

John the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Why? Because, according to the Old Testament sacrificial system, a lamb would be slain on the Day of Atonement — Yom Kippur — and would bear the sin of Israel (Leviticus 16). This event points to the cross, where the Lamb of God is slain, and the sins of all who have believed and will believe are placed on Him. He bears the weight of sin for all who trust Him — atoning for them fully and finally.

Good Friday is a victorious day for God. He accomplishes what no mere man can do. And He confirms that victory three days later.

For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV

Holy Saturday

Imagine what the apostles must have felt on Holy Saturday.

The day before, their mentor and friend was put to death unjustly — crucified by the Roman Empire. They had spent three years with this man. They left their jobs, their families, and a secure way of life to follow a carpenter from Nazareth. And what did they get for it? Certainly not what they expected.

They had trusted Jesus and expected Him to inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven — to defeat the Romans, to set things right. Now He was sealed in a tomb. The Romans knew, at least in part, who had traveled with Jesus. If that was His end, would they face the same?

Imagine their confusion. Jesus had healed the sick, made the blind see, and made the lame walk. Perhaps some of them began to sound like the man on the left cross: He saved others — why couldn’t He save Himself?

Nearly all had fled, just as Zechariah prophesied: “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.” The Shepherd was struck. The sheep scattered.

And yet — Jesus was still working.

The tomb was sealed. The guards were posted. Every visible fact said it was over. But the finished work of Friday was already accomplishing what Saturday could not yet see. The silence was not absence. It was the quiet of something death could not hold. Sunday was already coming.

Perhaps you are living in a season of Saturday — where the promises are real, but the vindication is not yet visible, where you know what Friday accomplished but cannot yet see what Sunday will reveal. Take heart. Jesus is still working. Sunday is coming.

Christ is King.

Resurrection Sunday

The disciples did not expect to wake up on Sunday to a risen Savior.

Many of them remained in doubt until they saw the risen Lord with their own eyes. Even then, some struggled to believe what stood before them.

Consider the man history has labeled “Doubting Thomas.” It is, perhaps, an unfair name — one that assumes we would have done better. Thomas knew what Roman crucifixion meant. He knew the soldiers were skilled at their work. He had heard the reports, and perhaps he even believed much of what Jesus had taught. But a resurrection? That was another matter entirely.

When the other disciples came to him, saying, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas was unmoved: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

Thomas was being rational — by every ordinary measure. He would soon learn, however, that faith is not irrational; it is simply not grounded in sight. It is grounded in truth.

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.John 20:26-29 ESV

The resurrection is not a subjective experience. It is an objective event. Rome crucified Jesus of Nazareth. The tomb was sealed. On the third day, God raised Him from the dead. That is a claim about history — not feeling, not religious sentiment, not spiritual metaphor.

Thomas did not conjure the risen Christ through faith. Christ appeared to Thomas in his unbelief — and that is precisely the point. The resurrection does not depend on our readiness to receive it. It happened. It is true. And because it is true, it is the axis on which all of history turns.

Jesus’ word to Thomas is also His word to us.

We are on the far side of the empty tomb. We did not walk to the garden that morning. We have not pressed our fingers into nail-scarred hands. But we have something Thomas did not have in that locked room — the full witness of Scripture, the testimony of the apostles, and the indwelling Spirit who seals the truth of Christ to our hearts.

Faith is not credulity. It is resting the full weight of your life on what is actually true.

Peter, who stood in that locked room and saw the risen Lord with his own eyes, would later write to believers who had not:

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. 1 Peter 1:8 ESV

The blessing Jesus pronounced over those who believe without seeing — Peter watched it come true in the lives of those he shepherded. Indeed, it is still coming true.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

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This article was first published at Truth in the Public Square.

Should homosexual couples be allowed to adopt?

That question is unavoidably charged—because it isn’t abstract. It’s a conversation about children, about families, and about what society and its government will bless and protect.

Laws can’t avoid moral judgments; they formalize them. The question is whose moral vision we will enshrine when children’s lives are at stake. For Christians, moral truth is not invented by society; it is given by God. Therefore, the state should legislate according to God’s moral order, prioritizing what is good and fitting—including the welfare and dignity of adopted children—because God is the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty. Thus, the government exists to uphold justice rather than ratify private desires.

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As such, this article seeks to answer this question in two ways: Biblically and sociologically. First, we’ll address the question sociologically.

A Sociological Critique

You may have heard it said, “There is no difference between a child raised by homosexual parents and heterosexual parents.” In other words, the children derived from these two homes are indistinguishable. The intended consequence of this claim is that homosexual and heterosexual couples should be treated identically because their children are supposedly indistinguishable.

That conclusion is frequently tied to a 2015 review associated with Cornell’s “What We Know” project, which surveyed 79 case studies and reported that 75 of them concluded that children raised by gay or lesbian parents “fare no worse than other children.” Plainly stated, the headline takeaway is this: About 95% of the studies show no disadvantage. It’s a bold claim—but is it true, or at least as indisputable as it sounds?

Is Their Confidence Overstated?

Katy Faust, founder of the pro-child non-profit Them Before Us, says this claim is demonstrably false. Further, the data rely on methodological flaws that would disqualify the studies for use in standardized social science research. How can she say this? Her rebuttal is founded on four observations regarding Cornell’s data:

* Response Bias: Many participants knew the research was investigating same-sex parenting, which may have shaped answers toward socially desirable responses.

* Sampling Bias: Participants were often recruited through networks of friends or advocacy organizations, producing samples that were wealthier, more educated, and more socially stable than the broader population.

* Small Sample Sizes: Average sample sizes of fewer than 40 children made statistically significant differences unlikely to appear.

* Weak Outcome Measures: Few studies measured concrete child outcomes (e.g., medical records, report cards, or children’s own reports in adulthood). Most relied primarily on parental self-reporting.

A Reanalysis: Rechecking the Data

The data in the Cornell studies were manipulated to prove underlying assumptions. Consequently, their studies reveal themselves as propaganda, not scholarly research. That begs the question: What measurable outcomes differentiate children of homosexual and heterosexual couples? Are they as indistinguishable as Cornell (and others) claim?

One frequently cited challenge comes from sociologist D. Paul Sullins, who reanalyzed the data and argued that the “indistinguishable” conclusion is overstated. In his reanalysis, he reports the following:

* Compared to opposite-sex households, adolescents with same-sex couple households show higher anxiety and lower autonomy, but better school performance.

* Within same-sex couple households (unmarried vs self-identifying as “married”), he reports worse outcomes in the “married” subgroup:

* Above-average depressive symptoms: 50% → 88%

* Daily fearfulness/crying: 5% → 32%

* GPA: 3.6 → 3.4

* Child sexual abuse by parent: 0% → 38%

What’s the bottom line? Sullins concludes that the longer a child has been in a same-sex couple household, “the greater the harm.”

Why This Shouldn’t Surprise Us

Now, we should ask ourselves: Should this come as a surprise to us? Should these findings be shocking? If we stop to think for a moment, they shouldn’t be. At the level of basic human experience, much of this is predictable.

In an adoption placement with two men or two women, a child is necessarily raised without either a mother or a father in the home. That means the child is missing a dimension of maternal or paternal presence that, in ordinary life, contributes something distinct to a child’s development. And because a child cannot be biologically related to two men or two women, at least one—and often both—adults in the home will be unrelated to the child. That is not a moral indictment of every non-biological caregiver; many adoptive parents love sacrificially.

But child-welfare research has repeatedly found that households with unrelated adults present a higher risk for abuse, especially for young children. Studies of step-parent households show similar patterns: abuse rates are higher when a child is living with a non-biological parental figure. Further, when a home is built on assumptions about gender and sexuality that contradict moral and biological realities, that framework can shape a child’s self-understanding—and may introduce confusion, especially as questions of identity emerge.

The sociological discussion matters because children are not abstractions, but Christians do not build ethics on sociology alone. We build them on revelation—both natural and special revelation. Scripture gives us categories the modern debate often tries to erase–male and female, mother and father, marriage and sexual purity. With those categories in place, we can finally answer the adoption question without guessing. So, we begin with Genesis 1-2, where God calls his design “good.”

A Biblical Critique

When God instituted the family, he did so through a complementary pair—male and female. Genesis 2:18, 21-22 says, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ …So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”

The familiar phrase “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” can sound crude. Nevertheless, it points toward a true theological instinct: Scripture begins by presenting marriage and family as the union of man and woman. If we want to know what is “good and proper,” we start where God starts. The biblical pattern is not interchangeable or endlessly adaptable; it is grounded in creation itself. And because adoption places children within a household, the question is whether we are being asked to affirm a family structure that departs from the created design.

God introduces what is “good and proper” in marriage—namely, the union between a man and woman—but He also intensely condemns homosexual unions in both word and deed. The most notable physical condemnation is that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Two angels came to Sodom to rescue Lot from the impending judgment, whom Scripture calls “righteous” (Genesis 18:32; 2 Peter 2:7). Upon their arrival, Lot showed hospitality by welcoming them into his home. Then, Genesis 19:4-5 says, “But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’”

What was the primary sin of the men? Many wrongly state that their primary sin was their desire to molest the angels. While this is undoubtedly a sin, it is not the primary sin. Jude 7 brings more clarity: “…just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.” Jude, in the previous verse, sets up a comparison of Sodom’s sin to the angels’ sin in Genesis 6, where they slept with human women. What’s wrong with that? It’s an unnatural desire. The primary sin of Sodom is that their desire was unnatural (i.e., men desiring to sleep with men) and, for their sin, they were destroyed with great magnitude.

Why Scripture Treats Sexual Sin as Uniquely Serious

You may still be thinking, “Why is this sin being treated as far worse than others?” While it is true that all have fallen short of the glory of God, and all sins separate us from God, and Christ is the only remedy for our sin, not all sins are equally sinful. If you chew on this for a while, it becomes obvious. Jesus says that tempting his children (or “little ones”) to sin deserves the penalty of “a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Sins do not have equal consequences.

Even still, Holy Scripture treats sexual sin as uniquely serious because it directly violates the one-flesh design and dishonors the body. In 1 Corinthians 6:18, Paul says, “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”

So why should we oppose same-sex adoption?

Because adoption exists for the good of the child, not the fulfillment of adult desires. The question is not whether a same-sex couple may be loving, stable, or sincere. The question is what kind of home the state should privilege when placing a vulnerable child.

Wherever possible, children should receive a mother and a father. Men and women are not interchangeable, and mothers and fathers do not offer identical gifts. A same-sex adoption, therefore, places a child in a home where either the mother or father is permanently absent from the beginning.

That absence matters. It is not a tragic circumstance that the law is merely forced to manage. It is a deprivation that the state intentionally builds into the placement itself. In that sense, same-sex adoption asks society to call a loss a good. Rather than restoring what has been broken, it formalizes the child’s deprivation in law.

The harm is not only private, but public. We are social creatures maintaining a common culture. When the state treats same-sex households as equivalent to mother-father homes for adoption, it teaches that mothers and fathers are interchangeable and that family structure is morally irrelevant. Over time, that weakens the public meaning of marriage, parenthood, and the family itself. It tells society that the desires of adults may define the home, rather than the needs of children.

Adoption law should do the opposite. It should reinforce the norm that children deserve a mother and a father whenever possible. For that reason, Christians should oppose same-sex adoption, not out of animus, but out of love for children, fidelity to creation, and concern for the common good.

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Southern Baptists are generous people.

Through the Cooperative Program, ordinary church members fund seminaries, missionaries, and institutions that carry the Convention’s convictions and gospel message into the world. This generosity is not transactional; it is a significant act of trust. And trust, to be well placed, requires the institutions that receive it to remain trustworthy.

This is not an argument against giving. Christians give cheerfully because God delights in it, not because institutions always deserve it. But faithful giving and watchful membership are not opposites.

Because, as history shows, when conservative Christian institutions drift into liberalism of any form, the people who trust them and fund them are always the last to know—but the first to suffer from it.

The First Conservative Resurgence (1979-2000s)

It’s important to remember that, before the first Conservative Resurgence, the Southern Baptist Convention did not drift by accident, nor did it recover by accident.

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By the 1960s and 1970s, theological liberalism had quietly taken root in SBC seminaries. Most notably, professors were questioning the historicity of Scripture. The Baptist Faith and Message 1963 was the doctrinal statement of all Southern Baptist churches at the time. While it was more thorough than the BF&M 1925, it left enough ambiguity on inerrancy that liberal scholars could work within it.

Rank-and-file Southern Baptists were growing alarmed over liberal scholarship in SBC seminaries and entities. In 1961, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Ralph Elliott published The Message of Genesis, which denied the historicity of biblical events and aligned with broader trends in biblical criticism that eroded confidence in Scripture’s full truthfulness.

The stakes were not merely academic. Seminaries do not exist in isolation; they exist to train pastors. And pastors shape congregations. When a seminary professor denies the historicity of Genesis, he is not merely publishing a controversial monograph. He is forming the men who will stand behind Southern Baptist pulpits for the next forty years. Southern Baptist tithes went to Midwestern during those dark times and helped develop pastors with similar theology.

Theological liberalism in the classroom becomes theological confusion in the church. The ordinary Baptist in the pew may never read Ralph Elliott, but he will sit under the pastor whom Elliott’s institution trained.

The response to this liberalism was nothing less than a full-blown “battle for the Bible” in the SBC. The conservatives who led the charge devised a plan that was deliberate, time-consuming, and costly. Paige Patterson and others set forth a multi-step strategy to leverage the SBC’s existing governance structure to take control of the drifting institutions. It went broadly as follows: The SBC president appointed the Committee on Committees, which nominated the Committee on Boards, which nominated trustees of SBC entities.

A ten-year string of conservative presidents would eventually produce trustee boards controlled by proponents of inerrancy, thereby resulting in healthier, doctrinally sound institutions, pastors, and churches.

Ten years to undo the damage. And it all started with a key first step: electing the right man as the next President of the SBC.

On June 12, 1979, in Houston, Adrian Rogers was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention—and the battle for biblical fidelity had truly begun. He was not the last. Rogers and the conservative presidents who followed promised to use their nominating powers to name only those who believed in the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility. Over the next two decades, Southern Baptist seminaries and other entities underwent dramatic change, as conservative leaders and professors replaced moderates and liberals who had held those positions for years.

By 1993, conservative trustee appointments had produced the election of Al Mohler as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler promptly pushed out most of the moderate faculty and became a leading voice in the continued Conservative Resurgence. The capstone came in 2000. Rogers served as chairman of the committee that produced the revised Baptist Faith and Message—explicitly limiting the pastorate to men and clarifying Southern Baptists’ position on inerrancy. What the BFM 1963 left ambiguous, the 2000 refused to.

The lesson was clear and institutional: Doctrine must be guarded in the boardroom, not just the pulpit. The ordinary church member in the pew had no idea how close the SBC came to losing its theological soul. But courageous men, working through the convention’s own structures, pulled it back. The institutions were corrected. The seminaries were reformed. The confession was strengthened.

Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, it would not be the last time liberalism needed to be fought.

The Drift Returns: Three Case Studies from the 2010s

The Conservative Resurgence did not inoculate the SBC against liberal drift. It simply corrected the institutional compromise of that generation.

But institutions require constant tending, and the men who guard them are always one generation away from those who won them.

By the 2010s, new fault lines had opened—not on the inerrancy of the Bible, but on the authority of the Bible; over issues of what constitutes a biblical approach to matters of sexuality, race, and the sanctity of human life (to name a few). The drift was quieter this time. It came not through open denial of Scripture but through ambiguity, accommodation, and the slow normalization of categories that Scripture does not permit.

And as before, the chain held: What was accommodated by liberal leadership in our institutions eventually reached, and hurt, the Southern Baptists in the pew.

Case Study 1: Sexuality and the Nashville Statement / Revoice Fault Line

In August 2017, a coalition of evangelical leaders gathered in Nashville and drafted a statement on biblical sexuality. The Nashville Statement was not an act of theological creativity; it was a defensive response. It affirmed what Scripture had always taught: Marriage is between one man and one woman, that homosexual conduct is sinful, and that adoption of “a homosexual or transgender self-conception” is inconsistent with God’s purposes. The fact that such a statement needed drafting at all was itself a symptom of drift already underway.

The following year made the problem plain. In 2018, the Revoice Conference convened with the stated purpose of “supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, same-sex-attracted, and other LGBT Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic, Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.” The conference had direct SBC-adjacent roots. Founder Nate Collins earned his doctorate from Southern Seminary in 2017 and was employed there in various capacities—including as an instructor of New Testament—from 2014 until the spring of 2018.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is the entity that lobbies on behalf of Southern Baptists’ interests on Capitol Hill. Their response was telling. Karen Swallow Prior, an ERLC research fellow, endorsed the conference’s stated goals. Prior said, “Now more than ever, the church must love and support our Christian brothers and sisters who are same-sex attracted, yet desire to live biblically faithful lives, whether in singleness or marriage. I’m encouraged that Revoice is here to meet this great need in the church.”

When a messenger on the floor of the 2018 Annual Meeting in Dallas asked Russell Moore (the president of the ERLC from 2013 to 2021) whether the ERLC would disavow Revoice, Moore responded that he did not know about the Revoice Conference, then offered a lengthy defense of Prior. He said, “Karen Swallow Prior has committed herself to go anywhere and everywhere to stand up and tell the truth about God’s word [concerning] human sexuality,” adding that he knew no one “more committed to the biblical message that marriage is between a man and a woman and that sexual immorality leads not just to bad consequences but to hell.”

The following year, Karen Prior co-edited Cultural Engagement (Zondervan, 2019) with Joshua D. Chatraw, which was published during her ERLC fellowship. It included a chapter by Matthew Vines arguing that Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality in Romans 1 reflected an outdated patriarchal logic rather than timeless moral truth. She was subsequently removed from her ERLC fellowship.

The ERLC eventually posted a cautionary article, of which a spokesman said, “This represents the entire organization’s concerns with the Revoice Conference.” The piece was thoughtful. The timing was not. An institution that employs a research fellow who endorses a conference ought not need public pressure to respond to it.

The ordinary Southern Baptist sitting in the pew on Sunday morning knew none of this. He assumed the convention’s ethics entity was holding the line on human sexuality. He had no reason to think otherwise. What he could not see was that the institution his church helped fund employed fellows who endorsed conferences built on categories the Nashville Statement had just rejected—and its president was defending them from the floor of the annual meeting.

What enters the institution does not stay there. It trains the pastors. It shapes the counseling. It forms the categories that eventually arrive, quietly and without announcement, in the local church.

Case Study 2: Social Justice and the CRT Fault Line

The Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, released in September 2018, was the second defensive response in as many years. Signed by hundreds of evangelical leaders, it rejected the intrusion of social justice frameworks—including critical race theory and intersectionality—into evangelical churches and institutions. Once again, the statement did not emerge from a healthy institution. It emerged from one already showing symptoms.

The clearest institutional proof came the following year. At the 2019 Annual Meeting in Birmingham, Pastor Stephen Feinstein of California submitted a resolution with a straightforward purpose: To denounce critical race theory and intersectionality as ideologies incompatible with the gospel. His original resolution explicitly denounced intersectionality and critical race theory as typically understood, warning Christians against them. The Resolutions Committee accepted it but rewrote it entirely. The resolution was “edited.” The committee turned it into a document stating that critical race theory and intersectionality “should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture” — a subtle change that gave tacit institutional approval to CRT’s use in SBC life.

The messengers, delegates from cooperating churches, voted for it. But most of the messengers likely did not understand what they were voting on—the vast majority of Southern Baptists had probably never heard of CRT or intersectionality, much less understood those terms well enough to make an informed decision on which way to vote. It was brought to a vote near the end of the conference, so the time for discussion was limited. The resolution submitted to protect the convention became, through institutional maneuvering, a document that granted legitimacy to the very ideology it was meant to reject.

The seminary dimension compounded the damage. CRT language had not merely appeared in public discourse—it had seeped into Bible colleges and some seminaries. Pastor Feinstein himself said he submitted the resolution after becoming alarmed by stories from his own parishioners, whose children had returned home from Bible college speaking the language of white privilege and critical theory. The Council of Seminary Presidents eventually issued a joint statement in 2020 declaring CRT incompatible with the BFM 2000, but by then, confusion had already spread, and the institutional damage was done.

The chain held again: What entered the institution entered the seminary. What entered the seminary entered the pastor. What entered the pastor entered the pew. Ordinary Southern Baptist families sitting in Sunday school classes had no idea that the categories fracturing their conversations about race had been quietly legitimized at the annual meeting by a rewritten resolution many messengers did not understand. They just felt the confusion—and wondered why their church suddenly felt different.

Case Study 3: Abortion and the ERLC’s Betrayal

In June 2021, the Southern Baptist Convention met in Nashville. The Resolutions Committee had declined to bring an abortion abolition resolution to the floor. The messengers overruled them. A day after overruling the Resolutions Committee, messengers adopted a resolution calling for “abolishing abortion immediately, without exception or compromise.” It was a remarkable moment—ordinary Southern Baptists had to fight their own institutional machinery to speak. And when they finally did, they spoke with unmistakable clarity: Abortion is murder, and they rejected any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of preborn neighbors.

The ERLC responded by doing the opposite.

In May 2022, Brent Leatherwood—then Acting President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—signed an open letter to state legislators alongside National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony List, March for Life, and other major pro-life organizations. The letter declared unequivocally that the signatories opposed any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women and stood firmly against including such penalties in legislation. The timing was not incidental. The letter was published on May 12, 2022—the day the Louisiana legislature was voting on the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act, the first abortion abolition bill in the nation ever to be voted out of committee and brought to a floor vote.

This same letter was used repeatedly as evidence that pro-life organizations opposed equal protection legislation in states like Missouri, Kentucky, and North Dakota. This letter, which contradicts the messengers’ resolution at the 2021 annual meeting, has been used to defeat abolition bills for years now.

The institution funded by ordinary Southern Baptist church members had published a letter opposing equal protection on the day of the most significant abortion abolition vote in American history. The bill did not pass.

The confrontation came one month later. On June 15, 2022, during the SBC annual meeting’s ERLC report, Brian Gunter—pastor of First Baptist Church of Livingston, Louisiana, and the man primarily responsible for helping to bring the Louisiana abolition bill to the floor—stood and asked Leatherwood directly, “Is it really your position that the mother who willfully kills her own child by abortion is never guilty before God and she should never face any consequences under the law?” Leatherwood’s reply was unambiguous: “You’re not going to get me to say that I want to throw mothers behind bars. That is not the view of this entity. That is not the view of this Convention.”

Gunter previously said publicly what the present exchange made plain: “When I saw that the same organization from the Southern Baptist Convention, that my church funds, had signed on to a letter to kill the very bill that I had been working so hard to pass in my state legislature and end abortion in Louisiana, I felt betrayed. My church members faithfully give their dollars. And then the Southern Baptist Convention’s ERLC worked to kill the bill that their pastor had worked so hard to pass.”

Leatherwood spoke as if the convention were behind him. It was not. The messengers had said so the previous year in Nashville.

The chain held one more time—and this time, the cost was measured not in theological confusion, but in legislation that failed, in children who were not protected, and in pastors who returned home from state capitols having lost bills their own convention’s ethics arm had helped defeat. The ordinary church member giving faithfully on Sunday morning had no idea. He assumed the ERLC shared what the messengers had just resolved. He had no reason to think otherwise.

That is the cost of institutional drift. It is always paid downstream.

A Second Conservative Resurgence? — Hopeful, Not Certain

Thankfully, as the drift has begun again in the SBC over the last decade, the messengers have not been silent.

The pattern of response has been building for years. Motions to defund or abolish the ERLC moved from fringe concern to serious floor business. In 2025, nearly half (42.84%) of the messengers voted, on record, to abolish the ERLC entirely—numbers that revealed not merely dissatisfaction with one individual, but profound opposition to the entity’s direction. On July 31, 2025, Brent Leatherwood resigned as ERLC president, ending nearly nine years of service to the organization. The Moore-Leatherwood era was over.

At the 2024 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, the messengers elected Clint Pressley as SBC president—and reelected him overwhelmingly in Dallas in 2025, with 92.64% of the vote. Pressley has emphasized Southern Baptists’ confession of faith and cooperative ministry model throughout his presidency, calling the convention to “Hold Fast” to the faith. The mood is different. The signals are real.

This looks, in some respects, like the beginning of a second Conservative Resurgence. The language of confession, cooperation, and doctrinal fidelity is returning to the convention’s center. The institutions most associated with drift are under pressure or in transition. The men who fought hardest for faithful reform are gaining ground.

But the word “looks” is doing important work in that sentence.

The first Conservative Resurgence was not won in a single annual meeting. It took decades of sustained effort, carefully executed strategy, and men willing to bear the cost of faithfulness over years, not cycles. The current moment is promising. It is not yet proven. New leadership at the ERLC does not automatically mean a new direction. A conservative convention president does not automatically produce conservative entity trustees. And the next generation of seminary graduates—trained in the institutions of the drift years—is already entering pulpits across the country.

This may be a second Conservative Resurgence, but it is too early to crown it as one. While Pressley has been a reprieve, there is more to be done. Much more. Now, Florida pastor Willy Rice is running to succeed Pressley on a more robust platform of “Baptist renewal.” Willy’s vision, if implemented, could be the catalyst needed to spark a true second “resurgence.”

But what Southern Baptists owe this moment is not triumphalism but watchfulness—the same watchfulness that ordinary church members should have been exercising all along.

Christ Doesn’t Drift

The history traced in this article is not primarily a story about institutions. It is a story about people—ordinary Southern Baptists who gave faithfully, trusted genuinely, and bore costs they never knew were being incurred on their behalf. The seminary drift of the 1970s shaped the pastors of the 1980s. The ERLC’s accommodation of homosexuality shaped the counseling of the 2010s. The open letter of 2022 helped kill legislation that ordinary pro-life Baptists assumed their convention was fighting to pass. The chain is long. The cost is real. And it is always paid in the pew.

This is not a reason for despair, nor a reason for cynicism. It is an opportunity for a clearer future—one that’s aware of our recent drift.

Southern Baptists should support the current reform efforts. They should give cheerfully through the Cooperative Program. They should pray for their convention’s leaders, engage their annual meetings, and hold their institutions accountable—not with suspicion, but with the kind of informed, expectant watchfulness that faithful stewardship requires.

The messengers who overruled their own Resolutions Committee in Nashville to pass an abolition resolution were not radicals. They were members doing what members are supposed to do: Refusing to let the institution speak for them when it would not speak faithfully.

But the deepest anchor cannot be the SBC’s ability to correct itself. Institutions are instruments. Resurgences are mercies. Conservative presidents are servants and occasionally insurgents, but never saviors. The Southern Baptist Convention has drifted before, and without vigilance, it will drift again. No confession, however carefully worded, no resolution, however clearly passed, no president, however faithful once elected—none of these is sufficient foundation for the ordinary church member’s confidence.

Only Christ is. He does not drift with the culture. He does not accommodate the spirit of the age. He does not sign open letters that undermine what His people have resolved. His lordship over the church is not subject to the vote of a Resolutions Committee, the signature of an entity president, or the slow institutional drift of a generation that forgot what it was guarding.

Support the Second Conservative Resurgence. Pray for it. Work for it. Come to Orlando and vote for it.

But place your hope in the One whose kingdom cannot be compromised by institutional cowardice, and whose church will stand long after every denomination has run its course.

The institutions must be held. But Christ alone holds us.

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That’s a lot of legal jargon, so what does it mean? In this case, Judge Klineman ruled that the State could not enforce its abortion ban upon a particular group of religious Jews after appealing to their religious freedoms. In other words, they claimed that they had the religious freedom to acquire an abortion, which is protected under the RFRA.

Before SEA 1 was accepted in 2022, there was another bill—one that would codify into law equal protection for those inside and outside the womb. This law never passed, in part, because of the exceptions pro-life Republicans insisted were necessary for it to move forward.

Abolitionists have been warning about this for years. To understand why, you need to understand the difference between the pro-life movement and the abolitionist one.

The Difference Between Pro-Lifers and Abolitionists

Both groups affirm that life begins at conception. Both hold to the imago Dei—that human beings are made in the image of God and are therefore worthy of dignity and protection.

The difference is what they do with that premise.

The Pro-Life Establishment[1] seeks to reduce and restrict abortion incrementally—with exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother, and, in some cases, when there are fetal abnormalities. This has been the dominant strategy for decades, and it has produced real restrictions in many states.

Abolitionists press the premise to its conclusion. If the unborn child is a person—made in the image of God, possessing inherent dignity—then he is entitled to the same legal protection as any other person. No exceptions. Equal protection under the law means equal protection for every child, regardless of the circumstances of his conception.

That distinction is now at the center of what happened in Indiana.

What Happened in Indiana

The plaintiffs: Two anonymous women, the advocacy organization Hoosier Jews for Choice, and a certified class who argued that SEA 1 cannot be enforced consistently with Indiana’s RFRA.

Their claim: The abortion ban substantially burdens their sincere religious exercise, because their religious beliefs direct them to seek abortions in circumstances the law does not permit.

Under RFRA, once a plaintiff establishes that a law substantially burdens sincere religious exercise, the burden shifts to the government. The state must then demonstrate a compelling interest—and prove the law is the least restrictive means of achieving it.

Indiana argued its compelling interest was “protecting prenatal life.”

The court rejected that argument. The reason is worth reading carefully.

How the Exceptions Destroyed the Argument

Judge Klineman found that Indiana’s own law contradicts its claim of a compelling interest in protecting prenatal life from fertilization under all circumstances.

SEA 1 permits abortion in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal anomaly, and serious health risk to the mother. The court pointed out that the state has not explained why its interest in the same prenatal life changes depending on the reason for terminating the pregnancy. If the interest in protecting life is truly compelling, why does that interest yield when the pregnancy results from rape, but not when termination is directed by sincere religious belief?

The court also noted that Indiana’s law exempts in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures—a process that routinely results in the destruction of embryos, which are human children at the earliest stages of development. The General Assembly has not defined human beings to include zygotes or embryos, and the IVF exemption, the court concluded, further undermines any claim of a compelling interest from the moment of fertilization.

In short, Indiana could not demonstrate a consistent, compelling interest in protecting all prenatal life, because its own statute treats some prenatal lives as expendable. The exceptions handed the court the evidence it needed.

It is worth noting that the injunction is narrowly applied, meaning it covers only the certified class and named plaintiffs and not Indiana’s abortion ban as a whole. The ban remains in effect for everyone outside that class. However, the legal reasoning that produced this injunction is not narrow. It is a crack in the foundation, and it was opened by the law’s own inconsistencies.

As a parenthetical note, it should be recognized that the Jewish plaintiffs were not required to show in the religious texts from which this freedom comes. The alleged freedom does not come from the Tanakh (the Old Testament), though some portions of the Talmud can be misinterpreted to allow elective abortions (Mishnah Oholot 7:6; Sanhedrin 72b:14). My point is that I don’t believe Jewish texts—when properly understood—allow for elective abortions, but the plaintiffs were allowed to appeal to religious liberty under RFRA, nevertheless. In other words, the appeal doesn’t have to be rooted in true, religious doctrine; it can just be claimed and asserted.

The Irony Is Impossible to Miss

Pro-life Republicans insisted for years that exceptions were politically necessary—that an equal protection bill would never survive. They told abolitionists to be realistic.

Those same exceptions are now part of the reason the law is being torn open.

As Equal Protection Indiana stated in their response to the ruling: “A statute that denies equal protection to some unborn children should not surprise us when it fails to secure protection for any of them.”

When a state writes into law that some unborn children may be killed—because their conception was violent, or because they carry a disability—it has already conceded the abortionist’s most fundamental premise: The unborn child’s right to life is conditional.

Even a wicked judge can follow that logic to its destination.

A Word to the Pro-Life Christian

If you have given money, voted, and prayed alongside the pro-life movement in good faith, this ruling is not a reason for despair. It is an opportunity for clarity.

The incremental, pragmatic strategy of the Pro-Life Establishment was always built on a concession: Some children could be sacrificed for political viability. That concession has never been theologically defensible. The Indiana ruling makes plain that it is not legally durable either.

The imago Dei is not a conditional dignity. It does not disappear when the circumstances of conception are violent or when the political cost of protection is high.

The abolitionist position is not extreme. It is simply the pro-life premise followed to its legal and moral conclusion: Every child made in the image of God deserves equal protection under the law.

Anything less is not a compromise, but a surrender dressed in pro-life language.

Equal Protection Indiana’s Press Release can be seen here.

The Marion Court’s order is available here.

[1] The uppercase in “Pro-Life Establishment” distinguishes the idea that one is “pro-life” from the lobbying groups and bureaucracy in Pro-Life Organizations.

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