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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'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.

What Jesus would say to the Senate according to James Talarico: ‘I was sick and you kicked me off Medicaid’



Democrat Texas Senate nominee James Talarico is once again attempting to rewrite the gospel, and this time it was while sitting down with Jimmy Kimmel — who claimed that they could only air it on YouTube “because of Trump.”

In the interview, he explained to Kimmel that Scripture “tells us that you can’t love God and hate other people.”

“You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast,” he began.

“Matthew 25 tells us Christians exactly how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger,” he said. “I often wonder: What would Jesus do if he visited the U.S. Senate?”


“I think he would tell the senators on the floor, ‘Depart from me, for I was hungry and you cut my food assistance. I was sick and you kicked me off Medicaid. I was a stranger and you deported me and my family,” he added.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray “can’t” with Talarico’s bizarre interpretation of God’s word.

“No more,” he says.

“Because Jesus was advocating for all of those government programs. Really?”

“That is so unbelievably stupid and wrongheaded and not the gospel. This guy is an antichrist. Again, he may not be the antichrist, but is an antichrist,” he continues.

“He is continually preaching the opposite of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is unbelievable. Wow,” he adds.

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A Christian guide to trolling without sinning



Donald Trump did not invent political trolling, but he may be its most gifted modern practitioner. His opponents still do not understand the tactic, which is why he runs circles around them. To understand trolling, we must see the larger ideological conflict of our time.

For Christians, trolling poses a serious moral question. It can seem cruel: a digital version of poking someone until he explodes, then laughing at the explosion. It also often involves deception. Does that violate the Ninth Commandment? How can deliberate provocation be reconciled with Christ’s command to “love your neighbor”?

When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll.

The answer begins by defining the term carefully.

The internet term “trolling” appears to draw on fishing, not the monster under the bridge. A fisherman drags bait through the water and waits for a fish to bite. A political troll places rhetorical bait before an opponent and waits for an angry, thoughtless response. The Oxford English Dictionary defines trolling as “posting antagonistic or disingenuous messages to provoke a hostile or annoyed response” and more broadly as behavior “intended to provoke or deceive.”

Political trolling is public mockery meant to elicit a response that exposes a contradiction, wastes an opponent’s time, and strips an ideology of undeserved authority. Legitimate trolling therefore presupposes that some public figures and ideologies deserve public mockery.

An effective troll identifies a contradiction in a public figure or ideology, frames it provocatively, and waits. The target becomes flustered and responds thoughtlessly, confirming the original criticism. Rather than merely accusing an opponent of hypocrisy, the troll induces him to demonstrate it before an audience.

This is not the same as insulting strangers for entertainment. Nor is trolling a license to lie, defame, threaten, or mock private suffering. It is more like misdirection in war or sports, used to confuse an opponent and reveal his weaknesses. No one accuses a quarterback of lying when he fakes a handoff, and no one expects a general to warn the enemy about a surprise attack.

Sun Tzu taught that warfare depends on knowing both your enemy and yourself. Schopenhauer cataloged the rhetorical tricks people use to appear right. The troll draws on both insights, arranging the contest so the opponent reveals his weaknesses to the public and loses respect.

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Christians recognize the distinction between just and unjust wars. Not every use of force is murder, and refusing to defend the innocent is not an act of love.

Rhetorical warfare is also real. Words can deceive, intimidate, indoctrinate, and destroy reputations. Institutions use language to disguise coercion as compassion and discrimination as inclusion.

Not every Christian is called to fight a kinetic war, and not every Christian is called to fight a rhetorical one. Some lack the temperament, position, or skill for public confrontation. That is no disgrace. A soldier without discipline endangers his own side, and so does a would-be internet warrior with a social media account and three cups of coffee.

But Christians cannot pretend that no conflict exists. Christian and anti-Christian visions of God, humanity, sexuality, justice, freedom, and authority compete for control of our institutions. They cannot both prevail. The question is not whether society will be governed by a moral vision, but which moral vision will govern it.

The Bible does not condemn every use of ridicule. Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, suggesting that their god might be occupied or asleep. Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees “whitewashed tombs.” Public teachers promoting public falsehoods were exposed so their teaching and authority would lose the audience’s respect.

We can identify a pattern for legitimate trolling. Its proper target is a public figure advancing a destructive ideology. Its method is ridicule aimed at hypocrisy. Its immediate purpose is to provoke a revealing response. Its true audience is not the target but the people watching. The goal is to protect the vulnerable from harmful ideologies that lead souls to perdition.

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Publicly exposing the absurdities of ideologies such as critical theory or LGBTQ activism gives those who might be led astray an opportunity to reconsider. Stripping an ideology of its unearned authority can turn the audience toward truth and away from leaders and systems that lead to destruction.

I am not recommending that everyone take up trolling. But we should not treat an ideological war as less consequential than a sporting contest, where teams talk smack and use fake plays and misdirection to win.

When opponents of Christianity seek to censor biblical teaching and replace it with Marxist dialectics and LGBTQ sexual ethics, exposing their public leaders to laughter and ridicule is part of the conflict. Their panicked responses can display their folly. The purpose is to protect the vulnerable and persuade those who recognize the emptiness of the anti-Christian position.

Love of neighbor does not require helping a hypocrite preserve his disguise. Sometimes love requires argument, and argument requires confrontation. Trolling can protect your neighbor from wolves in sheep’s clothing. When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll — and the patience to let your opponent prove your point.

There is a place sin cannot molest



After a week like this one, many Americans arrive at Sunday carrying more than they can easily name.

This past week marked one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. The following day, our nation observed the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when 2,977 people were murdered in New York, at the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.

Though different in scale and circumstance, both remind us that evil never remains theoretical. Eventually, it enters a crowd, a cockpit, an office, a home, leaving behind blood, unanswered questions, and an empty chair.

Public trauma always becomes private sorrow, one household at a time.

We understandably respond with investigations, arguments, and demands for accountability. We should seek truth and justice. Evil should be named without apology. But grief should not have to pass an ideological examination before we treat it as grief.

In 1903, a Presbyterian minister named Cleland McAfee faced a brutal week of grief when his brother lost two young daughters to diphtheria within 24 hours. Because the disease was highly contagious, the family’s home was quarantined.

McAfee was a preacher, theologian, musician, and choir director. He stayed up late, considering what he could possibly say or sing the following Sunday.

From his own sorrow, he wrote the words and music to a hymn:

There is a place of quiet rest,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where sin cannot molest,
Near to the heart of God.

The modern ear catches on the word “molest.” Today, it almost always refers to sexual abuse. McAfee used the word in its older and broader sense: to harass, disturb, persecute, or injure with hostile intent.

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It is a jarring word, but it is the right one.

Sin does indeed molest. It does not knock politely before entering. It intrudes, violates, and corrupts. It turns passenger planes into weapons and political disagreement into bloodshed. Then it continues its work by tempting us to mock the dead, exploit the bereaved, turn suffering into content, and answer hatred with still more hatred.

McAfee did not write his hymn because sorrow had passed his family by. He wrote it because sorrow had come through the door. His nieces were dead, his brother’s home was darkened, and the family remained isolated by disease.

He did not attempt to explain why the children died. Instead, he pointed his brother toward the only refuge death could not breach:

O Jesus, blest Redeemer,
Sent from the heart of God,
Hold us who wait before Thee,
Near to the heart of God.

The choir learned the hymn at its Saturday evening rehearsal. Because the home remained quarantined, they could not go inside to embrace the family or sit beside them.

So they came as close as they could.

Standing on the lawn beneath the night sky, the choir sang through the walls. They did not repair the loss or answer the family’s questions. They simply placed themselves as near to the grieving family as the quarantine allowed, and they sang.

That image has stayed with me for years: a grieving family inside, the church outside, darkness surrounding them, and a hymn passing through the walls.

Twenty-five years after September 11, families still gather to read the names of those who died. One year after Charlie Kirk’s murder, his wife, children, friends, and colleagues continue living with the chair he no longer fills.

Their persistent grief is not weakness. It is the continuing cost of love.

McAfee’s hymn does not promise that sin cannot reach our bodies, families, or country. The circumstances that produced it would disprove such a claim. The place near to the heart of God is not where Christians become immune to suffering. It is where we find refuge when suffering comes and assurance that evil does not possess ultimate authority.

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Christ stepped into this broken world and took its worst. The cross shows us what sin does; the empty tomb shows us that sin does not get the last word.

Most of us will never address a grieving country, but nearly all of us know someone living inside a darkened house.

The lawn may be literal, or it may be a kitchen table, a church pew, a telephone call, or a quiet visit where very little is said.

After such a solemn week, and as battles rage within and beyond our borders, may we enter the coming days looking for the brokenhearted. May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.

And when words fail, perhaps we too can stand on the lawn and sing.

The ‘Godballers’ are coming for the rainbow



In the book of Genesis, the rainbow symbolizes God’s covenant never again to destroy all living creatures in a global flood.

Then came the 1970s, when artist Gilbert Baker created the rainbow flag that became an enduring symbol of gay rights and, eventually, the broader LGBTQ movement.

Athletes reach audiences traditional religious institutions often struggle to reach, particularly young men.

Now some Christian athletes are beginning to reclaim the symbol — and something larger along with it.

A recent episode of A.J. Rice’s “Dangerous Laughter” podcast featured sports journalist Steve Eubanks discussing his new book, “Godball: How Athletes Are Saving Christianity.” Eubanks’ central argument is that professional and college athletes are increasingly using their platforms to express Christian faith openly and that this may reflect a broader religious revival, particularly among young men.

Athletes pray publicly, talk about Jesus in interviews, and use social media to communicate directly with fans. They no longer depend entirely on sportswriters or television networks to interpret what they believe.

That matters because athletes who embrace fashionable political causes are often celebrated, while those who express traditional Christian beliefs can encounter a different response.

Chicago Bulls guard Jaden Ivey learned that lesson this year. The Bulls waived him for “conduct detrimental to the team” after he criticized the NBA’s embrace of Pride Month and described LGBTQ celebration as “unrighteous.”

Jonathan Isaac drew criticism in 2020 when, citing his Christian faith, he stood for the national anthem and declined to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt. Tim Tebow became one of the most polarizing athletes in America more than a decade ago, largely because of how conspicuously he displayed his Christianity.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker faced enormous backlash after a 2024 commencement speech at Benedictine College defending traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, family, and gender roles.

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Yet Eubanks argues that the cultural resistance may actually strengthen the phenomenon. Athletes reach audiences traditional religious institutions often struggle to reach, particularly young men. Sports reward discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, perseverance, delayed gratification, and submission to something larger than oneself — virtues naturally compatible with Christian teaching.

The most literal example of Christians reclaiming the rainbow came earlier this summer in San Francisco.

During the Giants’ Pride Night, pitchers Landen Roupp, J.T. Brubaker, and Ryan Walker wrote Bible verses on their rainbow-themed caps. Roupp cited Genesis 9:12-16 — the passage describing God’s covenant with Noah and the rainbow as its sign. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, declined to wear the Pride cap altogether. MLB issued formal warnings to the three players who altered their caps.

The episode contained an irony almost too perfect to invent. The rainbow began in Scripture as a sign of God’s covenant. Christian ballplayers invoked that meaning and found themselves in trouble for altering a rainbow symbol adopted by the modern gay-rights movement.

Commissioner Rob Manfred later acknowledged another wrinkle: Giants players had not been properly informed that wearing the Pride caps was optional.

Eubanks sees these episodes as part of something larger.

There is evidence for at least part of his thesis. Gallup reported this year that the share of young American men who say religion is “very important” in their lives rose from 28% in 2022-23 to 42% in 2024-25. Young men also reached roughly the same level of religious service attendance as young women.

Sports may be one conduit for that renewed interest.

Consider Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever. Cunningham has described herself as a “woman of God” and this summer publicly opposed transgender women competing in women’s sports, saying young girls “shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The comments brought predictable backlash, but Cunningham refused to retreat.

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That willingness to speak plainly is central to what Rice and Eubanks describe.

Young athletes do not need to become theologians. They need only refuse the increasingly strange proposition that Christianity belongs safely in private while every other moral and political creed may be displayed at center court, midfield, or home plate.

This is where “Godball” becomes more interesting than another collection of inspirational sports stories.

Athletes occupy an unusual position in American culture. They embody physical excellence, discipline, competition, loyalty, and sacrifice. Millions of young people watch them, imitate them, and listen when they speak.

If even a fraction of those athletes begin speaking openly about Christ, marriage, family, sex, sacrifice, and moral order, they create a cultural influence far beyond the stadium.

And perhaps the rainbow is the perfect place to begin.

Christians never needed permission to remember what it meant first.

Let the Godballers become the new heretics — and reclaim the rainbow.