Below is the pastoral prayer I offered this morning in our worship service at Christ Covenant. Several members of the congregation asked for a copy of the prayer, so I thought I would post it here on my blog. Perhaps it will be edifying to others and can inform the prayers of God’s people.
Gracious heavenly Father, on this day where we celebrate the 245th anniversary of the independence of the United States of America, we come before you to pray for this country.
We give thanks for the many blessings and evidences of divine favor that belong to us in America. We live in what may be the most powerful and most prosperous nation ever on the face of the earth. For hundreds of years, for millions of people from all over the world, this has been a land of hope–the hope of religious freedom, the hope of self-government, the hope of liberty. In the Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers spoke of certain unalienable rights–rights not granted by the government, but given to us by you, our Creator, which our government is obliged to protect.
The United States of America began with the conviction that a nation should be founded upon truth. Not opinions or preferences or feelings, but upon truths. Self-evident truths that remain true no matter the time, the place, or the culture. And central among these truths is the Christian belief that all men are created equal. Made in your image, no one possesses more intrinsic worth for being born rich or poor, male or female, black or white, aristocrat or artisan, financier or farmer. We give thanks for the God-given rights and hard-fought freedoms we enjoy in this country.
And we repent as a people for all the times–past and present–where we have squandered your blessings, where we have not lived up to our national ideals, where we have treated persons equal in your eyes as unequal in ours. Forgive our country for the sins of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. Forgive us for the legalized killing of the unborn. Forgive us for rampant, brazen sexual immorality. Forgive us for poor memories and hard hearts. Forgive us for our ingratitude, for hardly any people at any time anywhere in the world has had access to as much biblical truth as we have.
We ask for your grace to be shed abroad in our land. We do not deserve your favor. You have made no promise that the United States of America will long endure. And yet, if it be for the good of your heavenly kingdom, would you see fit to deal kindly with this our earthly country.
Give wisdom and humility to the governing authorities. Grant to them the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. Protect those who protect us at home and abroad. Renew in us a desire to love one another and so fulfill the law of Christ. Make us a virtuous people, a courageous people, a reasonable and resolute people.
Frustrate the plans of all those who promote what is false and celebrate what is wicked. Defend the rights of the weak and the cause of those facing injustice.
Give us an appropriate patriotism–giving thanks for the blessings you have poured out on America–without ever trading the riches of the gospel for the thin gruel of mere civil religion.
Strengthen the church of Jesus Christ. Send your Spirit to descend with power upon every Bible-preaching pulpit. Bring true revival to our land–healing our divisions, leading us to repentance, teaching us the truth, and bringing us together to the cross.
For as many more years as you give us as a nation, may we be a land where the truth of Christ is known, the good news of Christ is sent out, and the body of Christ is made strong. We ask, then, in the deepest biblical sense possible, O God, that you would truly bless America.
We pray all this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the only King and Head of his church, Amen.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s practically part of the Christmas story itself.
The Romans celebrated their seven-day winter festival, Saturnalia, starting on December 17. It was a thoroughly pagan affair full of debauchery and the worship of the god Saturn. To mark the end of the winter solstice, the Roman emperor established December 25 as a feast to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Wanting to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans and more popular with the people, the church co-opted these pagan festivals and put the celebration of the birth of their Savior on December 25. For whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank.
That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true.
Except that it isn’t.
For starters, we should distinguish between roots that suggest a rip-off and roots that suggest a rebuke. The presence of some connection between a Christian celebration and a pagan celebration could imply a synchronistic copy-cat (“Hey, let’s Christianize this popular pagan holiday so as to make our celebration more palatable”), or it could mean a deliberate rejection (“Hey, this pagan holiday is horrible, so let’s put something distinctively Christian in its place”). After the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, Christians did sometimes adapt and Christianize pagan festivals. Whether they did so wisely and effectively is open to historical debate, but the motivation was to transform the paganism of the Roman world rather than raze it to the ground. Even if Christmas was plopped down on December 25 because of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, that by itself does not entail that the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth really began as a pagan festival.
But in the case of Christmas, there is good evidence that December 25 was not chosen because of any pagan winter holidays. This is the argument Andrew McGowan, of Yale Divinity School, makes in his article “How December 25 Became Christmas” (first published in Bible Review in 2002). Let me try to distill McGowan’s fine historical work by addressing three questions.
When did Christians first start celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25?
Unlike Easter, which developed as a Christian holiday much earlier, there is no mention of birth celebrations from the earliest church fathers. Christian writers like Irenaeus (130-200) and Tertullian (160-225) say nothing about a festival in honor of Christ’s birth, and Origen (165-264) even mocks Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries as pagan practices. This is a pretty good indication that Christmas was not yet on the ecclesiastical calendar (or at least not widespread), and that if it were, it would not have been tied to a similar Roman holiday.
This does not mean, however, that no one was interested in the date of Christ’s birth. By the late second century, there was considerable interest in dating the birth of Jesus, with Clement of Alexandria (150-215) noting several different proposals, none of which was December 25. The first mention of December 25 as Jesus’s birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century almanac called the Philocalian Calendar. A few decades later, around AD 400, Augustine would indicate that the Donatists kept Christmas festivals on December 25 but refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6 because they thought the latter date was a recent invention. Since the Donatists, who arose during the persecution under Diocletian in 312, were stubbornly opposed to any compromise with their Roman oppressors, we can be quite certain they did not consider the celebration of Christmas, or the date of December 25, to be pagan in origin. McGowan concludes that there must have been an older North African tradition that the Donatists were steeped in and, therefore, the earliest celebrations of Christmas (we know about) can be dated to the second half of the third century. This is well before Constantine and during a time period when Christians were trying to steadfastly avoid any connections to pagan religion.
When was it first suggested that Christmas grew out of pagan origins?
None of the church fathers in the first centuries of the church makes any reference to a supposed connection between Christmas and Saturnalia or Sol Invictus. You might think, Well of course they didn’t. That would have been embarrassing. But if the whole point of basing your Christian birth holiday on an existing pagan birth holiday is to make your religion more popular or more understandable, surely someone would say something. Besides, as McGowan points out, it’s not like future Christian leaders shied away from making these connections. Gregory the Great, writing in 601, urged Christian missionaries to turn pagan temples into churches and to repurpose pagan festivals into feast days for Christian martyrs.
There is no suggestion that the birth of Jesus was set at the time of pagan holidays until the 12th century, when Dionysius bar-Salibi stated that Christmas was moved from January 6 to December 25 to correspond with Sol Invictus. Centuries later, post-Enlightenment scholars of comparative religions began popularizing the idea that the early Christians retrofitted winter solstice festivals for their own purposes. For the first millennium of the church’s history, no one made that connection.
Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25?
The first answer to the question is that some Christians don’t. In the Eastern branch of the church, Christmas is celebrated on January 6, probably for the same reasons—according to a different calculation—that Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 in the West. Although we can’t be positive, there is good reason to think that December 25 became the date for Christmas because of its connection to the (presumed) date of Jesus’s death and to the date of Jesus’s conception.
There are three dates at play in this calculation. Let’s start with the date of Jesus’s death.
Around AD 200, Tertullian of Carthage noted that Jesus died on the 14th day of Nisan, which was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman solar calendar. In the East, they made their calculation using the 14th day of the first spring month in their local Greek calendar. In the Roman calendar, this was April 6. So depending on who you asked, Jesus died on either March 25 or April 6.
In both the West and the East, there developed the same tradition that Jesus died on the same date he was conceived. An anonymous Christian treatise from fourth-century North Africa stated that March 25 was “the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Augustine in On the Trinity mentioned that same calculation. Similarly, in the East, the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis maintained that on April 6 Christ took away the sins of the world and on the same date was “shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin.” The fact that this curious tradition existed in two different parts of the world suggests it may have been rooted in more than mere speculation. If nothing else, as McGowan observes, these early Christians were borrowing from an ancient Jewish tradition that said that the most important events of creation and redemption occurred at the same time of the year.
From the date of Christ’s death, to the (same) date of his conception, we can easily see where the date of Christmas could have come from. If Jesus was conceived on March 25, then the best date to celebrate his birth must be nine months later on December 25 (or, in the East, January 6). While we can’t know for certain that this is where December 25 came from—and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about the historicity of the date—there is much better ancient evidence to suggest that our date for Christmas is tied to Christ’s death and conception than tied to the pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

First off, my usual disclaimer and explanation.
This list is not meant to assess the thousands of good books published in 2020. There are plenty of worthy titles that I am not able to read (and lots I never hear of). This is simply a list of the books (Christian and non-Christian, but all non-fiction) that I thought were the best in the past year. “Best” doesn’t mean I agreed with everything in them; it means I found these books—all published in 2020 (or the very end of 2019)—a strong combination of thoughtful, useful, interesting, helpful, insightful, and challenging. For more discussion on some of these books, check out my podcast Life and Books and Everything with Collin Hansen and Justin Taylor.
Instead of trying to rank the books 1-10 (always a somewhat arbitrary task), I’ll simply list them in alphabetical order by the author’s last name.
Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition (Library of America)
For many people “conservative” is whatever Fox News says or the Republican Party does. For others “conservative” is the easy reason another person’s views can be quickly dismissed. Across the spectrum—whether you are for it or against it—Americans would do well (and American Christians in particular) to understand that conservatism is its own political tradition. As is always the case in a book like this, some chapters are better than others (the first chapter from Russell Kirk is very good), some chapters don’t agree with each other (e.g., the hawkish and the non-interventionists strands of conservative thought), and some probably don’t belong in this volume (like the one from Teddy Roosevelt, who was not a conservative). But taken as a whole, this collection of essays, drawn from the past hundred years, is a good place to start in understanding the conservative intellectual tradition.
 
Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute)
A fascinating look at the state of the world and why things are much, much better than you think. Want to know about trends in work, in population, in violence, in farming, in technology, in health, and in natural resources? This book has the graphs you need. The big knock on the book, however, is that it is not nearly big enough. The trim size and font should have been twice as big to make a proper coffee table read.
 
James Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic)
A lecturer in Reformed theology at the University of Edinburgh, Eglinton proves with this book that he is an excellent historian as well as a superb systematician. Eglinton demonstrates a mastery of Dutch sources and Bavinck’s Dutch context. The result is an astute and readable biography of a man who not only excelled as a theologian but also made his name as an ethicist, an educational reformer, a politician, a journalist, a Bible translator, a campaigner for women’s education, and the progenitor of heroes and martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance movement.
 
Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press)
With admirable self-awareness and an obvious love for literature and learning, Hitz has written a book that celebrates the intellectual life without coming across as snobbish or elitist. Quite the opposite, Hitz argues that the joy of being “lost in thought” is a pleasure available not for the few but for the many.

Philip Jenkins, Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press)
The most important things happening in the world are not always the things that make for breaking news. Case in point: the falling fertility rates across the globe. “For the foreseeable future—for several decades at least—most of the non-African world does face the prospect of a contracting and steeply aging population” (185). Surely, this is big news, and Jenkins writes about the phenomenon with scholarly precision and clarity.
 

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Pitchstone Publishing)
This is not a Christian book, which means there are elements of the analysis that cannot be accepted (e.g., the approval of homosexuality). On the other hand, it also means that the critique of postmodernism and its many attendant theories comes from insiders (academics, classic liberals) rather than from outsiders. If you want to know where Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and intersectionality come from—and why they are massively problematic—this a book to answer many of your questions.
 
Mark Regnerus, The Future of Christian Marriage (Oxford University Press)
“This is a book about how modern Christians around the world look for a mate within a religious faith that esteems marriage but a world that increasingly yawns at it” (2). Regnerus argues that marriage is a public matter affecting all of society and that for Christianity the importance of faith and family usually rise and fall together. His suggestions for revitalizing Christian marriage provide good advice for parents, pastors, and Christian leaders.
 
Amity Schlaes, Great Society: A New History (Harper)
Part politics, part economics, and part cultural history—Shlaes covers the key ideas and personalities behind the programs meant to alleviate poverty in America. The book ends in 1976 with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, a metaphor for Shlaes’s largely negative assessment of what the Great Society accomplished.
 
Scott Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Crossway)
There may be doctrines as important as the doctrine of Trinity for the existence and wellbeing of the Christian faith, but surely there are none more important. In less than 140 pages, Swain introduces (or reminds) us of the grammar of Trinitarian theology: relations of origin, personal properties, divine simplicity, person, essence, paternity, filiation, and spiration. This book is a great read for the Christian who knows that God is three-in-one and is eager to learn how systematic theology defends and explains this precious truth.
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway)
First, the self was psychologized, then psychology was sexualized, and finally, sex was politicized. This is the history Trueman tells with great verve and sophistication. Tracing the rise of the modern self from Rousseau to the romantic poets, to Marx and Darwin, to Freud and Nietzsche, to the triumph of the erotic and the therapeutic in our own day, Trueman has produced a dense (400 pages), but well-written and remarkably insightful, book that helps us understand why “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” came to be seen as coherent and meaningful.
 
Honorable Mentions:
Conrad Mbewe, God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders (Crossway).
Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Biblical Impurity within First Century Judaism (Baker Academic).
Paul Tripp, Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church (Crossway).
Paul W. Wood, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter Books).

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.