Richard Land, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said it well, “You should never want the state to be deciding what is the correct understanding of religion. The last thing any devout follower of Jesus should want is government control of religion. The government will always get it wrong and pious followers of Christ will have their consciences violated.” It is the job of the Church and parents to teach Christian doctrine, not the job of the state or its agencies.

The usual suspects are up in arms over a proposed public school curriculum in Texas. “Bible-infused curriculum sparks Texas-sized controversy over Christianity in the classroom” reads the breathless headline from one education publication. From the ominous reports, one would think that classrooms in the Lone Star State were being converted into Sunday schools. One Democratic state representative called it “egregious.” But the reality is different.
The Texas Education Agency posted the educational curriculum in May. It’s still subject to approval by the Texas Board of Education. The materials are not mandatory, but there are incentives for school districts that opt in.
A cursory reading of the materials shows that while the curriculum features many stories rooted in the Bible, they are also joined by lessons from other religions. What’s more, there are connections between history and Christianity, such as Esther’s heroic advocacy for the Jewish people in Persia and contemporary anti-Semitism, analysis of the religious content in Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” and an explanation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told The Washington Post, “There is content, where relevant, that provides information on various religious traditions.
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America has a manhood crisis that only Christianity can solve. So while we warn of the dangers of faux masculinity models, let’s not shy away from boldly presenting to our boys the goodness, and the responsibilities, of being men.

A recent column in the Guardian explored the rise of self-described “Sigma males.” The columnist opens with this description:
You are a lone wolf. You are an independent thinker who makes his own rules. You are confident and competent. Women are drawn to you, but you don’t really care about them. Your day begins at 4:30 a.m. with a cold shower, followed by a punishing workout and an even more punishing skincare routine. You shun conventional career paths and run your own business, probably in crypto or real estate or vigilante crime fighting. You are that rarest of males—you are a sigma.
Social media platforms are full of content targeting young men who aspire to this kind of life. YouTube features videos with instructions, steps, and guides.
The so-called “Sigma” life is just another model of masculinity in a culture where young men, many without positive male role models in their own lives, search for the meaning of life. Some of the content in these spaces is helpful, such as tips on exercise, diet, and finance.
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Why might secularism be waning among Generation Z? Perhaps this is a move of the Spirit to turn the hearts of people toward Christ in a time of trouble and tumult. History shows that God often moves in a powerful way during the most troubling times in the world. We should be thankful for the many churches and campus ministries who labor faithfully to share the hope of the gospel with students at institutions around the country.

In his recent analysis of fresh survey data from the General Social Survey, respected American political scientist and sociologist Ryan Burge noticed that the steady rise in non-religious Americans has plateaued. This cluster includes “nones,” who claim no religious affiliation, combined with atheists and agnostics. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of non-religious Americans rose nine percent, from 21 percent to 30 percent, and in 2019 rose to 35 percent. But in the last half-decade, this number has remained steady.
Burge then digs into the generational cohorts and discovers something interesting. Among baby boomers, the rise in non-religious activity continues to rise, but among Generation X, it remained steady and among millennials and Generation Z, there was a significant decline. The drop among the youngest group here, mostly high school and college students, was the most significant.
Though we should be careful not to read too much into one year’s survey data, we can be encouraged that perhaps the march of secularism in American culture seems to have hit a wall and, it seems, has receded among the youngest generations.
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In a new book, Get Married, and in countless op-eds, white papers, and columns, Wilcox makes the case that traditional marriage and family are the lynchpin to a flourishing life, economically, socially, and spiritually. Consider one stunning fact: “The best community predictor of poor children remaining stuck in poverty as adults was the share of kids in their communities living in a single-parent family. Not income inequality. Not race. Not school quality.”

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine you are a young Christian burdened by the state of the world. You want to make a difference.
Let’s get more specific.
You see documented in headline after headline, rising crime, addiction, and deaths of despair. You believe God has called you to be a small part of what He wants to do to redeem the communities most left behind.
What issue would you make your priority in this desire to engage in genuine social justice? One scholar suggests an issue that would probably not be the first, for you, to come to mind: marriage.
Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology and director of The National Marriage Project at The University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. For the last decade and a half, Brad has been studying marriage and family in America and he’s come to one conclusion:
So many of the biggest problems across America are rooted in the collapse of marriage and family life in all too many communities and homes across the country.
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Both the cosmic and personal nature of Christmas both motivates and tempers our politics. Empowered by the Spirit, we love our neighbors by upholding the creational truths Jesus’ birth affirms. Yet our activism is tempered by the reality of what we can actually accomplish in a cosmos still groaning for redemption. Only Jesus can bless “far as the curse is found.”

It’s the time of year when Washington, D.C., sits largely quiet and empty, its inhabitants emptied out and headed home to their families. The politicians head home and even the most rabid partisans seek to escape the messiness of politics.
Yet the real story of Christmas is inescapably political. The young virgin who bore Jesus understood what her miraculous conception meant. She listened to the words of Simeon in the temple as he cradled the newborn in his arms. Jesus would, “be a sign that will be opposed—and a sword will pierce your own soul—that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed (Luke 2:34-35).” The incarnation, then, is more than mere sentimental Hallmark vibes, but a cosmic disruption, an intervention by God into His creation.
Even as Christmas is inescapably political, our politics should be inescapably oriented around Christmas. If what Christians believe about the incarnation is true, then that truth must necessarily shape our public theology. The ethicist Oliver O’Donovan rightly asserts that “the whole created order is taken up into the fate of this particular representative man at this particular moment of history, on whose one fate turns the redemption of all…the sign that God has stood by his created order.”
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Losing my mom has made me recognize afresh that I am a child of weakness. My strength indeed is small. The loss of a loved one removes our veneer of self-confidence, our masks of self-sufficiency. C. S. Lewis said that the death of a loved one is like an amputation. So, until we meet again in that heavenly city, I’m a son without a mother—walking with a limp and leaning on Jesus.

When my mother passed away last winter, I discovered the gift of grief.
In the span of a single year, my mother went from a vibrant, constant presence in my life—through phone calls, texts, and when we could, in-person visits—to a swift decline in mental and physical health.
The first sign, for me, was an unexpected call at 5 a.m. one morning. Mom had many skills but being active at 5 a.m. was not one of them. Calls at 10 a.m., lunchtime, or late in the evening were much more likely. I immediately answered, thinking something had to be urgent.
“Mom, is everything okay?” I asked, pretending I had been up for hours while clearing the cobwebs from my mind and the frog from my throat.
“Oh, I’m just calling to see how you are doing,” she said, “but I hope I’m not interrupting dinner for you guys.”
Maybe she’s just confused. Maybe she had a bad night’s sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to believe this was what my sister, Laura, had been gently warning me about. My sister and her husband had recently moved back to Illinois to live near my parents. And in recent weeks, they had told me that Mom had forgotten how to write a check. Well, that’s not that crazy. Who writes checks anymore? I had rationalized at the time.
“Mom, you do know that it’s five o’clock in the morning, right?” I offered.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You know, I keep getting my times mixed up, with daylight savings and all,” she replied, though we were nowhere near a time change. After talking a bit more, we ended the call. When I told my sister about it, she said these sorts of incidents were becoming more common.
A few days later, I got another call from Mom—this time more bizarre. She insisted that men were in her house, that my father had let them in, and that she’d called the police. My heart sank as a realization began to set in: I think we are losing her.
We clung to one last desperate possibility that it could be Mom’s iron deficiency, something she’d struggled with for much of her life. We were hoping against hope that with a few doctor visits and medical adjustments, Mom might return to her normal self. My sister dutifully begged, cajoled, and shepherded her to doctors and specialists, updating me every time.
My dad quit his job so he could take care of Mom as she slowly lost her memory, until we learned the hard, final, difficult news: The results of her MRI revealed significant dementia.
Dementia is still a mystery, even to the most learned minds. In the season after her diagnosis, we talked with experts and with friends who had endured this journey with their own loved ones. There was no way to predict which course Mom’s health would take. Would she, like the sweet wife of a friend in my small group, slowly decline over nearly a decade? Or would she, like my late mother-in-law, decline quickly?
When you lose a loved one to dementia, you grieve twice—once when they lose their mind, and again when they lose their life.
The early grief is like a weight on the soul. I can’t explain the heaviness you feel in realizing that the one who birthed you, raised you, consoled you when you came home crushed after a bad day at school—the one who stood on the sidelines and cheered at your basketball games, who said everything you wrote was amazing even when it wasn’t; the one who introduced you to Jesus—is slipping away.
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Pastors and parents must be intentional about the formation of the young men in our homes and congregations. Lost boys don’t have to stay lost. They can be found, ultimately, by a Heavenly Father who loves them and can redeem their lives for His glory.

A recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life shows that, to the surprise of many, high school boys are trending conservative. Scholar Jean Twenge, author of the new book Generations, which examines the various instincts and trends among America’s generational cohorts, remarks, “Among liberals, the future is female and among conservatives, the future is male.”
For conservative Christians, the data about our young men seems encouraging. And it’s not surprising that high school boys, having surveyed the confusing messages about gender and sexuality they hear from pop culture and other influences, cast about for an alternative. At a time when over 18 million children, one out of every four, live in a fatherless home, too many boys lack for male role models.
This has resulted in a crisis of masculinity. Christine Emba writes about her own observations:
They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys—including ones I once knew—just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn.
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Cynics aren’t interested in salvation or transformation. They’re only interested in an endless self-loathing ministry of doom. A prophet speaks to people he loves with tears. A cynic disdains the people he is called to confront. A prophet’s desire is to see transformation. A cynic’s desire is to bring attention to himself.

One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is a bit of an odd one. James, writing about prayer and dependence on God, makes this statement: Elijah was a man like us (James 5:17).
Now, I’ve gone to church my whole life and have learned a lot about Elijah. He’s the wild wilderness dude who called out a wicked king in Israel, Ahab, and his equally wicked wife, Jezebel. Think about this. To this day, in 2023, Jezebel is a euphemism for wickedness. There is even a trashy magazine with this name!
Not only did Elijah have the courage to call out wicked rulers—at a time when doing so usually meant you would die—but he challenged the false religious leaders of his day to a special kind of duel. He called down fire from heaven on Mount Carmel in an epic display of God’s power. As a kid this was always a favorite story in Sunday school and vacation Bible school and summer camp. Elijah was an example of boldness and courage, almost like a Bible superhero. He even made flannel graph exciting.1
So, when James says, “Yeah, Elijah was like us,” I do a double take. I’ve built a nice bonfire in my back yard, but I’ve never called down fire from heaven. I’ve written some pretty snarky social media posts, but I’ve never stood in the court of a king who could cut my head off and told him he was wrong. I had to walk half a mile to the showers at camp, but I never lived in the wilderness like Elijah. I’ve prayed that it wouldn’t rain, especially when we lived in Nashville, where rain is its own season, but I’ve never prayed a prayer that stopped all precipitation for three and a half years. So how is Elijah like me?
Well, to see the humanity of this superhero, we have to go to a passage of 1 Kings that is usually left off the flannel graph. Here, Elijah kind of does look like us. He’s burned out. He’s tired. And he’s pretty cynical about the people of God.
You might say that if he had social media, he’d be complaining about being the one person standing for truth. Or he might be the person who stays home on Sunday because “no church is preaching the gospel right.” Or he might be the guy at the office who grew up in church and now says that Christians are a bunch of hypocrites.
Elijah, in one chapter, has turned from prophet to cynic. Fresh off an epic battle where he called out the false prophets and God sent rain again after a famine, Elijah fled to the wilderness because Jezebel still wouldn’t repent.
God’s messenger is discouraged and defeated. He’s weak and vulnerable. His heart is crusted over with layers of suspicion and contempt. “I’m the only one,” Elijah complains to God. “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too” (1 Kings 19:14).
What’s strange about Elijah here is that he has just come off a spiritual victory where he witnessed the power of God to move the hearts of Israel from idolatry to true worship. And yet all he can see is the one person in Israel who refuses to worship God: Jezebel.
Elijah was a prophet of God. Prophets are often called to do hard things, to stir up the people of God away from sin and toward righteousness. It’s often a lonely task to say hard things. We need prophets in our day, gifted and godly men and women willing to say things that are hard to be said, to call out wickedness.
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