Our enemies burn Israel’s flag. Our friends plant it.



Sometimes a symbol becomes more than a symbol.

A flag is a simple piece of fabric. But what it represents — a country, a people, a history — can inspire us deeply. And when that flag is planted by someone who has chosen to stand beside you in your darkest hour, it becomes something more: a message that you are not alone.

A flag planted by someone who has chosen to stand beside you in your darkest hour becomes a message: You are not alone.

That is what I think about when I see an Israeli flag planted by a church in America.

In 2024, we began Flags of Fellowship with a simple idea. Christians across America would plant Israeli flags at their churches and in their communities in memory of the innocent lives taken on October 7, 2023.

We could not have known how far that simple act of friendship would travel.

This year, more than 4,375 churches, synagogues, universities, and organizations around the world are participating in Flags of Fellowship. Together, they will plant more than 5.2 million Israeli flags. The movement now reaches 12 countries, with more than 1,775 participating churches and organizations outside the United States and Canada.

Every one of those flags tells a story.

It tells an Israeli family that we remember. It tells the Jewish community that someone sees what happened to us. And it tells the world that October 7 did not destroy the friendship between Christians and Jews. If anything, that friendship has grown stronger.

Last month, we gathered in Israel at Banias Church in Nazareth for the first Flags of Fellowship event of this year. Church volunteers and community members planted 1,200 Israeli flags before Christian and Jewish leaders spoke and prayed together. The Armenian Christian Association’s children’s and youth choir sang the Lord’s Prayer.

Israel is home to Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people from many countries and backgrounds. We do not always agree. We do not always see the world in the same way. But there is profound beauty when people who are different choose to stand together.

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When a church plants an Israeli flag, it is not making a political statement. It is making a spiritual one: a declaration of friendship, remembrance, and faithfulness to those who are hurting.

That is what I hope people see when they look at Flags of Fellowship: not simply flags, but friendship; not simply remembrance, but solidarity.

The world has changed since October 7. So much attention is given to division, hatred, and the people who tear things down. But another story is being written.

It is being written in churches across America and around the world. It is being written by pastors who stand before their congregations and say that Israel is a friend. It is being written by families who plant an Israeli flag outside their homes, by Christians who pray for Israel, and by Jews who are discovering, sometimes for the first time, how deeply many Christians care about them.

It is written one flag at a time.

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I have had the privilege of watching this friendship grow for years. I have sat with Christian leaders who opened their churches to Israeli flags. I have heard from pastors whose congregations embraced this initiative with extraordinary enthusiasm. And I have spoken with Israelis who are deeply moved to learn that, thousands of miles away, people they have never met are standing with them.

As we mark another anniversary of October 7, I am reminded that remembrance is not only about looking backward. It is also about deciding what kind of future we want to build.

Choosing courage over fear. Friendship over division. Love over hatred.

There is a phrase we often use at the Fellowship: Our enemies burn the flag; our friends plant it.

That is the choice behind Flags of Fellowship. Millions of flags, planted by thousands of congregations and organizations, say the same thing to the Jewish people: You are not alone.

I am deeply grateful for every one of them.

When the Pentagon cries ‘UFO,’ Christians should look to the Bible, not the skies



The Pentagon wants you to watch the skies ... again.

Last month, the War Department published a sixth release of declassified and historical files related to UAPs, while the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office continues to publish military footage of UAPs. Some cases have explanations. Others remain unresolved because of insufficient data.

Most of the people getting excited about 'aliens' have spent their entire lives being taught that nonhuman spiritual beings don't exist at all.

"Unresolved" does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial. It does mean, however, that Christians should stop laughing at the question.

This wheel's on fire

The Bible never says humanity is alone. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture speaks of intelligent beings who are not human. Some serve God; others rebel against Him. Today, though some may call them "aliens," changing the label does not change what they are.

Job 38:7 says that at creation, "the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy." These heavenly beings existed before humanity and were not originally from Earth.

Western art often depicts angels as harmless babies or ordinary humans with bird wings, but biblical angels look very different. The original Hebrew mal'akh and Greek angelos mean "messenger" and are used to describe what these beings do, not everything they are.

Daniel described a heavenly being with a face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches, and limbs like burnished bronze. Ezekiel's cherubim came with wheels within wheels covered in eyes. And Isaiah's seraphim, the "burning ones," were adorned with six wings each. If someone who rejected Scripture saw such a spiritual being today, what would they call it? Likely an alien or a god.

As Paul says in Ephesians 6, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. The idea of the unseen realm is not a modern conspiracy theory. Rather, it has always been part of the biblical worldview.

Deities ... or demons?

Ancient archaeology provides another connection. Mesopotamian traditions from Eridu speak of the apkallu, sages associated with the age before the Flood. They were given the role of bringing knowledge to humanity. Centuries later, Assyrian palaces at Nimrud displayed human and eagle-headed winged figures connected with these sages. At Nimrud and Nineveh, enormous lamassu, which are human-headed winged bulls or lions, guarded royal thresholds. Ancient texts also speak of the Anunnaki, a group of powerful deities.

Now put these figures next to Ezekiel's description. He describes each cherub as having four faces at once: a human, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. The apkallu looked like a human body under an eagle's head and wings. The lamassu combined a human head with the winged body of a bull or lion. These same features keep showing up in Ezekiel's description of a similar being.

This doesn't prove the carvings are exact portraits of cherubim, but the resemblance is too striking to ignore. These cultures may have been deceived by real spiritual beings, represented them in their images, and worshiped the creation rather than the Creator. These artifacts show that early people were already telling stories about nonhuman beings, sacred knowledge, and contact between heaven and earth.

The biblical writers didn't treat these pagan gods as harmless myths. Both Deuteronomy 32:17 and 1 Corinthians 10:20 say the sacrifices pagan societies offered were made to demons. That's a different claim than what most people assume today, where the old gods get filed away as folklore.

But swinging too far the other direction causes its own problems, and Christians shouldn't assume every strange light is a demon. A UAP could be a balloon, a drone, an aircraft, classified technology, a natural event, a hoax, or a simple misperception. Some encounters may still involve spiritual deception too. Christians should test the evidence and test the spirits.

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The coming darkness

This connection between the pre-Flood world, ancient cities, and rebellious spiritual powers is one reason we wrote our biblical fantasy novel "Lightborn: Dawn of Darkness." This world is not separate from what we see happening today. The novel explores where this spiritual rebellion began and imagines the ancient world behind the biblical account.

Archaeology shows that ancient civilizations believed in powerful nonhuman beings and worshipped them as gods. Scripture reveals the darker spiritual reality at play. These fallen spirits did not simply disappear along with the ancient world. They continued to influence people and nations, and that spiritual deception will play an important role in the end times.

Most of the people getting excited about "aliens" have spent their entire lives being taught that nonhuman spiritual beings don't exist at all, and that's the actual danger. Paul warned of this in 2 Thessalonians 2, describing a lawless figure who comes cloaked in false signs, wonders, and deception.

We believe the modern alien narrative could help prepare people to receive dark powers as teachers or saviors. Scripture does not say the Antichrist will arrive in a spacecraft. It does warn that supernatural appearances do not automatically come from God and that people may encounter angels without recognizing them.

If a shining being offers secret knowledge, a new religion, or a savior other than Jesus Christ, the church should not first ask which planet it came from. We should ask who it serves. Good angels refuse worship. Fallen ones seek it. Jesus Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life. Whatever future disclosure may reveal, that truth will never change.

Where was God? Frank Turek asks the question after Charlie Kirk



Arizona State University’s Ratio Christi chapter hosted Christian apologist Frank Turek Monday night. The topic especially caught my attention as a philosophy professor: If God exists, why is there evil?

I call this the major objection to belief in God. Atheists may begin elsewhere, but once the other objections are answered, the problem of evil keeps returning. I have found that true whether I am talking with an atheist at a bar watching a ball game or an elite physicist at Cambridge.

What if the very problem of evil that you think disproves God actually points to God?

Turek made the question as pointed as possible. He told the audience that when he and Charlie Kirk were approaching Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, Kirk asked him to pray. Turek prayed for the event to be effective and safe.

“God said no,” Turek told the audience. About 20 minutes later, Kirk was fatally shot. Turek has asked the same question publicly ever since: Where was God?

To some smug atheists, and a few conspiracy-minded people, the story invites a sneer: If Kirk was such a good Christian, why didn’t his God protect him? Why would anyone want to be a Christian if that is the outcome?

Turek answered with a challenge: What if the very problem of evil that seems to disprove God actually points toward him?

His argument came in two parts.

First, before we can say evil disproves God, we have to know what evil is. And to know what evil is, we need some account of the good. Invoking Augustine, Turek described evil as a corruption or privation of something good. Augustine’s formulation is simple: Evil depends on the good it damages.

Students are often confident that they can define the good until the examples get difficult. Happiness seems like an obvious candidate, but people can be happy about wicked things. Happiness alone therefore cannot tell us what is good.

That is where students often retreat into relativism: What is good for you is good for you, and what is good for me is good for me.

Turek’s answer was that human beings share a common human nature. If something is genuinely good for a human being as such, it cannot become bad merely because another person prefers something else.

Then he pushed the argument into explicitly Christian territory. If Christianity is true, what could be better than knowing God? He cited John 17:3, where eternal life is described as knowing God and Jesus Christ.

That brought him back to Kirk. Kirk’s murder was evil; Turek did not pretend otherwise. But he argued that God can bring good from evil. Turek says he still hears from people who encountered the gospel because of Kirk’s life and death. In his language, the ripple was not merely a ripple but a tsunami.

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That was Turek’s first point: The objection from evil assumes that some things are objectively wrong. His argument is that objective moral law requires a standard beyond individual preference and that the ultimate ground of that standard is God. The problem of evil therefore borrows the very moral categories it tries to use against him.

Turek then moved from philosopher to pastor.

In a philosophy class, people will debate the logical problem of evil. In the middle of intense suffering, nobody wants a philosopher to arrive with a chalkboard and draw syllogisms. They want to know why this happened: Why this child? Why this cancer? Why this death?

Turek answers with what he calls the ripple effect. We know very little of the past, only fragments of the present, and nothing of the future except what has been revealed to us. We cannot trace all the consequences flowing from a single event.

God, in the Christian account, is not only powerful and good but wise. He knows the whole of history and can order events toward ends we cannot see. Turek appealed to Romans 8:28: God works all things together for the good of those who love him.

That reminded me of an old pastoral illustration. A couple had grown cold in their faith. Their child died, and they asked their pastor why. He told them to imagine a shepherd trying to lead two stubborn sheep across a river from danger to safety. They refuse. So the shepherd picks up their lamb and carries it across. The sheep follow.

Was that for their good?

The point is not that suffering itself becomes good. It is that suffering can force us to confront questions comfort lets us avoid. It exposes our finitude and can make us consider our own sin. When we recognize how little we know and how much God would have to know, Paul’s question in Romans 9:20 becomes harder to brush aside: Who are we to correct God?

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With those two claims — objective goodness and divine wisdom — Turek took questions.

One student asked why God creates people who will be damned to hell. Turek answered that people who finally reject God receive what they insist upon: separation from Him. If that is what they choose, he asked, on what grounds do they complain about receiving it?

Another asked about animal suffering that no human being ever sees. How could that possibly help us?

Turek’s answer was essentially: How do you know it does not? Human knowledge is extraordinarily limited. The fact that we cannot identify a good purpose for some instance of suffering does not prove that no such purpose exists. He also noted that in the Christian account, the whole creation is affected by human sin.

So is Turek right? Does the problem of evil point toward God rather than away from him? Are atheists borrowing from an objective moral framework they cannot ultimately ground without God?

The audience was clearly intrigued. Skeptics had something substantial to push against, and Christians had to think more carefully about what they claim the Bible teaches concerning good, evil, suffering, and God’s wisdom.

As a philosophy professor deep in the heart of Sun Devil territory, I count that as a good thing.

It’s a big deal that the landmark new AI agreement is shockingly uneventful



Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

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Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

Christian influencer couple arrested after teen girl alleges sexual and physical abuse, police say



A popular Christian influencer couple was arrested for allegedly abusing a 14-year-old girl, according to Texas police.

39-year-old Seth Michael Day is accused of sexually and physically assaulting the girl after a high school teacher noticed injuries to her face and head.

The girl said she had suffered numerous instances of abuse and reported some of them but that Heather Day had lied to officials in order to cover it up.

The teacher reported the injuries to the Keene police, who interviewed the girl. She claimed to have suffered ongoing abuse by Day and said he injured her with a cell phone.

After receiving treatment at the Cook Children's Medical Center, she also said that Day had sexually assaulted her.

In the last incident of abuse on Sept. 22, the girl said Day assaulted her while his wife, Heather Marie Day, was in the home.

Police said they found evidence of the physical and sexual assaults at the Days' home after obtaining a search warrant.

The girl said she had suffered numerous instances of abuse and reported some of them but that Heather Day had lied to officials in order to cover it up.

She allegedly told the victim that she had an autoimmune disease called hereditary angioedema, which causes swelling. Police noted that swelling would not explain the the injuries the victim had.

Records show the Days were both booked into the Johnson County jail but were released on bail of $100,000.

Heather Day hosts a Christian podcast, and the couple have authored several books, including one titled "I'll See You Tomorrow."

Seth Day is also a professor at Southwestern Adventist University, but he was placed on administrative leave after his arrest.

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"We are fully cooperating with law enforcement," the university said in a statement that indicated the allegations did not involve its students, staff, or other members of the faculty.

"The safety of our University community remains our first priority. We will share additional details as appropriate," the university added.

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Landmark Lawsuit Pits The Sharia Regime Against The Constitution

A lawsuit alleges that the Muslim-majority suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, has systematically discriminated against Christians and Jews.

'Chivalry mode': Meet the new dating app that's for Christians only



After nearly two decades of convincing an entire generation that human connection works best as a door-to-door sales catalog, Silicon Valley has run into a small problem. Match Group, the digital giant that built an empire by turning romance into an endless loop of low-consequence choices, recently surveyed the cultural wreckage and decided it was time to sell us back the exact social structures it helped demolish.

The corporate headquarters in Dallas has relaunched Upward. Once a modest corner of the internet reserved for devout Christians, the platform is being repositioned as a refuge for anyone tired of standard app culture. Upward now features a "chivalry mode" that encourages men to send the first message, sets clear timelines for getting married, and includes explicit prompts for those willing to pay for dinner.

It's cynical. It's brilliant. It's America.

The executives at Match Group call these users "next-gen traditionalists." The Atlantic, observing the exact same shift with its usual mixture of mild anxiety and high-minded condescension, labeled the phenomenon a "regressive streak." Beyond the elite media commentary, the commercial calculation is far simpler. The industry spent far too long marketing infinite option value to young adults, only to discover that the modern romance industry mostly produces desperate souls sitting alone in apartments, eating takeout, and endlessly scrolling their phones.

The writers at the Atlantic seem genuinely perplexed that a 25-year-old woman might want a husband who can change a flat tire and feels no deep emotional turmoil about picking up the check. In the cultural ecosystem of coastal media institutions, traditional social scripts are routinely framed as oppressive remnants of a primitive past. To the editorial board, a man offering to pay for a meal looks like an act of subtle subjugation. To a young woman who has spent three straight years negotiating ambiguous coffee dates with men who view basic adult commitment as a boundary violation, it looks like basic common sense.

The sickness and the cure

This corporate about-face marks a classic cycle of modern commerce. Silicon Valley gained dominance by fostering a problem, extracting massive financial value from the resulting confusion, and then inventing a brand-new product line to fix the damage. Tinder and its corporate siblings taught young Americans to view potential partners as temporary inventory. The result was a dramatic decline in marriage rates, plummeting birth rates, and widespread romantic exhaustion. Having successfully monetized the dissolution of traditional dating, the industry is now monetizing its restoration. It's cynical. It's brilliant. It's America.

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The cultural gatekeepers spent decades telling young people that structure was the enemy of authentic living. Every traditional expectation regarding how men and women interact was systematically dismantled in favor of complete, unscripted autonomy. But people do not thrive in spaces devoid of rules. When every social interaction requires a fresh, ground-up negotiation over roles, expectations, and intentions, the result is less freedom than total paralysis.

Young men were hit particularly hard by this rather perverse social experiment. For years, they received explicit instructions that traditional masculine initiative was predatory, overbearing, outdated, and dangerously toxic. Then they logged onto mainstream dating apps and found that women still overwhelmingly preferred men who took charge, planned dates, and made their intentions known. The culture demanded passive neutrality, while reality demanded action. By explicitly asking men to step up and pursue with clear purpose, Upward is merely acknowledging a reality that elite institutions spent decades trying to educate out of the population.

Normal is no mystery

The media class often treats traditional marriage as an ancient artifact that survived by accident. They view old-fashioned courtship as something that must be constantly explained away or neutralized with appropriate progressive caveats. What they fail to grasp is that traditional structures survived for centuries because they align perfectly with fundamental human desires. People want permanence. They want clear expectations. They want to build families with partners who consider commitment a virtue rather than a compromise.

When a massive tech company changes its business strategy to cater to old-fashioned rituals, it’s not running an ideological crusade. Silicon Valley responds strictly to consumer demand and revenue metrics. Match Group is shifting strategy because the infinite-choice model has run out of runway. The revolution promised endless novelty, but delivered misery on a massive scale.

Some young Americans are perhaps adopting traditional dating habits out of nostalgia for a time they never lived through. But most are adopting them because the alternative failed. The counterculture in America is no longer found in rejecting traditional norms, but in building a stable household, raising children, and expecting a partner to be there in the good times and the bad. The boardrooms of Big Tech have finally read the room, even if the writers at the Atlantic are still trying to understand why anyone would want a husband who not only books the dinner reservation but doesn’t insist on going Dutch.

Christians are missing the opportunity next door



Christians need not wait for Washington to settle the immigration debate before sharing the gospel with the people who have already arrived.

Whatever happens next — tighter restrictions or a return to the influxes Democrats encouraged — Hindus and Muslims have made their homes here and established temples and mosques. They are our neighbors. Christians have a duty to evangelize them.

The religions of the world have come to our neighborhoods. We have the honor of sharing Christ with the people who practice them. We should get to work.

We should debate whether a society without a shared foundation can hold together through the modern left’s thin materialistic secularism or resurgent occultism. Obviously, it cannot. We should also challenge what the left proposes to put in place of the Christianity that helped form this country.

But those arguments do not suspend the Christian obligation to share Christ. Hindu and Muslim immigrants have come to a country with a long Christian heritage. They should expect to encounter Christianity here, just as a Christian moving to India would encounter Hinduism or one moving to Saudi Arabia would encounter Islam.

Hindu statues and Islamic calls to prayer now confront Americans with religions they may once have known only from books. What a great opportunity to share Christ!

Evangelism can begin in a conversation at work or school. Christians can visit religious centers, get to know their neighbors, and preach publicly. Whatever the setting, we must understand what the other person believes and explain where Christianity differs.

Hindu traditions include worship of many deities, although Hindu schools understand those deities differently. For some American Christians, a Hindu temple may provide their first encounter with statues used in religious worship rather than displayed in a museum.

We have learned the commandment against making and worshipping idols. Yet our sermons often emphasize spiritual idolatry because bowing before a physical image seems so remote from our lives. Our Hindu neighbors may give us occasion to discuss that commandment in its most literal application.

Some influential Hindu philosophical traditions teach monism: that reality is ultimately one. Advaita Vedanta identifies the true self, Atman, with Brahman, the ultimate reality. The formulation “This Self is Brahman” appears in the Mandukya Upanishad.

Yoga and meditation are practices aimed at realizing the self is God. Reincarnation teaches that our soul has existed from eternity and is on a journey to be freed from the body and reach enlightenment as God.

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The Christian answer to identifying the self with God is direct: God created us. We are not God. Creation had a beginning; only God has existed from eternity. The temptation in Genesis 3:5 promised, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The distinction between Creator and creation also explains Christianity’s rejection of idols. Paul condemns those who “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” in Romans 1:23.

Idolatry calls for repentance. Salvation from that sin comes only through Christ.

Islam presents a different challenge. It has a violent history with Hinduism. It also strongly condemns idolatry. It arose after the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and claims continuity with earlier revelation. Yet it rejects the atonement at the center of the Christian gospel.

Biblical revelation teaches the need for vicarious atonement — a sacrifice on behalf of sinners. In the books of Moses, the Day of Atonement gives this teaching a central place. Passover likewise involves the death of a lamb and the application of its blood so that a household escapes judgment. Christians understand these as signs pointing to Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Islam rejects Christ’s sacrificial death as the means of salvation. The Quran states in 6:164 that no bearer of burdens will bear another’s burden. Muslims emphasize obedience, repentance, and God’s mercy; Islamic teaching also denies that deeds alone secure entry into paradise. The Christian disagreement concerns how God reconciles sinners to himself: through the atoning death of Christ.

The biblical response is that none of our works can ever save us. Even if we became perfectly obedient today — and most of us can admit we cannot — we would still owe a debt for our past sins. Thinking future obedience can erase those sins is like thinking cutting up your credit cards pays off the balance.

God’s perfect justice and perfect mercy must both hold. Simply overlooking sin would leave justice unsatisfied. At the cross, Christ bears the penalty for sin and offers salvation to sinners who cannot save themselves. God remains just while showing mercy.

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Christianity explains our problem and provides the solution God has given. We need reconciliation with our Creator, and we receive it through Jesus Christ.

Our Hindu and Muslim neighbors may know Christianity chiefly through what their own religious traditions say about it. They may never have read the Bible or heard the gospel explained clearly from Scripture. American Christians can open the Bible with them and make that introduction.

We must prepare for those conversations. Evangelists on social media can make the work look easy, but years of study and practice may stand behind a short video. Read Scripture, understand its teaching, and learn to speak kindly with people who disagree.

Pray for the people you hope to reach. Our duty to share the gospel should lead us to prayer, with fasting when appropriate.

Live the Christian life yourself. You are introducing someone to the true and living God, who offers reconciliation through Jesus Christ. Know that salvation yourself before presuming to explain it to someone else.

Finally, ask questions and listen to the answers. You are speaking with a person. Learn what he believes, what he doubts, and what he understands about Christianity. A religious label cannot tell you all of that.

The religions of the world have come to our neighborhoods. We have the honor of sharing Christ with the people who practice them. We should get to work.

The Christian counterculture is already here



There’s a clip going around of Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick, saying she has never apologized or asked forgiveness for killing their three children.

Given the growing arrogance of her defense, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. It also cuts against the portrait her defenders have painted of a loving mother temporarily overtaken by postpartum depression or psychosis. If that were the whole story, you might expect some sign of remorse toward the grieving husband who lost all three of his children.

What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

Instead, nothing. Because she’s a monster.

But the culture’s numbed reaction to the Clancy mistrial raises another question about the 11 jurors who were prepared to absolve her of criminal responsibility for those ghastly killings.

How do you persuade people still coasting on the fumes of a once-great Christian culture that they are now the counterculture — and must learn to think and fight accordingly?

Between the positive Christian world of the American founding and today’s negative world came the so-called neutral world that produced the counterculture of the 1960s. For my entire lifetime, we have run an experiment based on the assumption that Americans shared enough fundamental values to sustain multiple competing cultures at once.

At 53, I think that experiment is over. It probably never had much of a chance.

Listen to the nice things Clancy’s jurors keep saying about her, then confront the horror of what she did. No neutral conversation is possible here. So it is with good and evil generally. There is no neutral boulevard called tolerance. Every time Christians travel down it, they eventually discover that tolerance runs in one direction.

We live in a negative world now. The spirit of the age intends to show us what a real inquisition looks like, because the Christian worldview that once formed this country has been steadily forfeited in exchange for other gods.

Third-wave feminists inhabit the positive world now, whether they hold formal political power at a given moment or not. The Overton window governing our language, emotions, psychology, and public discourse is largely theirs. Spiritually, the enemy holds the high ground.

We are the rebels now, not the founders.

That means Christians can no longer rely on easy assumptions about shared values, shared definitions, or even shared moral fundamentals.

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We are not simply a nation of laws. Laws are downstream from political will, and political will is downstream from moral conviction. By that measure, the American church is not exactly operating from a position of strength.

My friend Chris Goble likes to say we must “exegete the times.” He’s right.

By what civilizational standard regularly enforced in America today should Lindsay Clancy be expected to ask forgiveness? Common sense?

This is precisely the problem. What we once called common sense grew out of a Christian moral culture that no longer commands the culture. What was once common no longer is.

A second American revolution took place, and we did not so much lose it as surrender.

Wake up, Dorothy. You ain’t in Kansas any more.

In Massachusetts, where the Sons of Liberty once helped set the course of American freedom, 11 jurors just concluded that Lindsay Clancy was not criminally responsible for killing her own children.

So what follows?

For starters, Christians need to stop assuming that people who reject Christianity are nevertheless entitled to every cultural inheritance Christianity produced, on precisely the same terms Christianity produced it.

That does not relieve me of Christ’s command to love my neighbor as myself. It does mean Christian love cannot be reduced to cultural surrender or a lazy suicide pact with people who reject the moral order that made our freedoms intelligible in the first place.

It’s Christ or chaos. Christians need to become comfortable saying that plainly.

You do not get the full inheritance of Christian civilization while discarding the faith and moral assumptions that built it. Those are the terms of the negative world. If we want the future to look different, we first have to acknowledge the world as it is.

Most people will not tell you this, because rebuilding will be hard.

We will have to lay cornerstones and plumb lines again. We will have to reclaim ground that was once considered sacred and is now treated as disposable. It will cost us comfort, status, friendships, and perhaps careers.

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It will hurt.

But the alternative is worse: leaving our children and grandchildren a country so morally fractured that political disagreement eventually becomes something much uglier.

Do not kid yourself about the cost. The Puritans who founded New England were fleeing Anglicans, not Muslims or even Catholics. Civilizational conflict can divide people who share a language, a history, and much of the same religion.

Brother will turn against brother.

If Tucker Carlson’s deconstruction has taught us anything, it is that these fractures are already running through the right itself.

But Christians still have an obligation to stand. Not for a party. Not for a personality. Not for nostalgia. For the only kingdom that lasts.

Here we stand. We can do no other.

The lion, the witch, and the worldview war



The internet already knows what to do with the news that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew”: Get angry. It fits the logic of rage-bait: All publicity is good publicity.

There has already been plenty of fury. It is as if the creative team opened its first meeting by asking, “There is a huge built-in Christian audience for Narnia. How can we alienate it as quickly as possible?” But I want to ask the prior question: What exactly is “The Magician’s Nephew” about, and why can’t a radical leftist understand it?

The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.

That question is vital because director Greta Gerwig is not merely illustrating a book. She is interpreting one. And there is no such thing as interpretation without a worldview.

Netflix has scheduled Gerwig’s film for theatrical release on February 12, 2027, and streaming on April 2. Meryl Streep has been confirmed as Aslan’s voice. Gerwig says she wanted someone capable of communicating profundity, gravitas, pathos, joy, and childlike wonder. But neither Gerwig nor Netflix has said that Aslan has been rewritten as a lioness, so the claim that she has created a “translan” gets ahead of the evidence.

The controversy gives us an opportunity to return to Lewis and ask how we find a text’s meaning. The answer applies well beyond Narnia to the current cultural conflict.

“The Magician’s Nephew” begins with Digory and Polly discovering that Digory’s ridiculous Uncle Andrew has developed magical rings that can transport people between worlds. They arrive in the wonderfully strange Wood Between the Worlds, a quiet forest filled with pools. Each pool opens into another world.

Lewis was far ahead of Marvel’s multiverse.

Digory makes a spectacularly bad decision. In the dead world of Charn, he rings a forbidden bell and awakens Queen Jadis. We eventually learn that Jadis destroyed everyone in her world rather than surrender power. She used the “Deplorable Word,” annihilating Charn’s population and leaving herself as its solitary ruler.

That detail is important.

Jadis’ defining characteristic is not that she is a strong woman. Lewis gives us plenty of admirable women in his books. Her defining characteristic is autonomous will. She would rather destroy a world than acknowledge a limit on herself. In modern terms, Lewis wrote a third-wave feminist before the term existed.

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Digory and Polly accidentally bring her to Earth. When they try to remove her, they end up transporting Jadis, Uncle Andrew, a cab driver, and his horse into another world.

They arrive at the beginning of Narnia, as Aslan creates it.

Lewis is hardly being subtle.

And this is where the current controversy becomes interesting.

Aslan is not simply a powerful lion who happens to be the good guy. Lewis explicitly rejected that reduction. He described Narnia as a “supposal”: What might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and Christ entered that world to save it?

Lewis went farther: “The whole Narnian story is about Christ.”

That means an interpreter who approaches Narnia primarily through contemporary categories of gender, power, oppression, and liberation will see a different story from the one Lewis wrote.

This does not require sinister motives. It is simply how worldviews work. Culpability begins when an interpreter treats her worldview as a license to overwrite the text. Gerwig’s film has not yet been released, so its faithfulness to Lewis remains a question, not a verdict.

Show the same story to a Marxist, a Freudian, a Christian, and a postmodernist, and each will notice different things. The Marxist sees class. The Freudian sees repression. The postmodernist sees power. Lewis sees creation, fall, temptation, sin, judgment, grace, and redemption.

The danger comes when the interpreter stops interpreting the author and starts rewriting him. For the radical leftist, words no longer disclose an objective meaning; they become material to rearrange in service of a political goal. On Lewis’ terms, that is sinful autonomy: Reality itself becomes an obstacle to the will.

Apply the same interpretive habit to the Constitution, marriage, or gender. Fixed meaning and objective reality become obstacles to the desired result. As a colleague of mine argues, the impulse is to “burn it down” and impose one’s will on the rest of us.

And “The Magician’s Nephew” may be the worst possible Narnia book in which to make that mistake, because it rebukes autonomous power wielded by the creature against the Creator. It shows the barrenness of Jadis’ feminism: autonomous will severed from the Creator and therefore incapable of creating anything.

Consider Jadis again. A modern interpretation might reduce the conflict to rival forms of power. Here is the imposing lion claiming authority over a new world, and here is the formidable woman who refuses to submit.

But that completely misses Lewis.

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Aslan and Jadis are not rival politicians competing to run Narnia. Aslan creates. Jadis consumes.

Aslan gives creatures their being. Jadis destroys creatures who interfere with her will.

Aslan establishes an order to which creatures belong. Jadis believes reality ought to bend to her desires.

That is why the Christian distinction between Creator and creature matters so much. The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.

Which brings us back to Meryl Streep.

I understand why Christians object to giving the voice of Lewis’ male Christ figure to a woman. Aslan’s identity is not arbitrary. Lewis chose a male lion, called him “he,” and made him a king as his imaginative answer to the question of Christ entering another world.

But I am even more interested in what Aslan will say than in what Aslan will sound like.

The proper test of the adaptation is straightforward: Will Gerwig allow Lewis’ world to remain Lewis’ world?

Every artist interprets through a worldview. Faithfulness does not require pretending to have none. It requires humility: the willingness to enter another writer’s world without claiming the right to recreate its moral order.

I have seen the same conflict as a professor among radical activists. A teacher who denies the basic structure of reality cannot teach students to become wise or find meaning.

The same humility is required of us. We do not enter God’s world as its creators.