Page 1220 – Christianity Today (2024)

Years ago, before my current husband Jeff and I were married, I asked one of my daughters how she would feel if Jeff officially became one of the family. At first she responded enthusiastically, about how awesome it would be if he lived with us, about how we can watch all kinds of spooky movies and he'll make us laugh and feel safe, about the midnight chocolate cake quest on that night when no one could sleep.

But then she added somberly, "As long as I don't have to call Jeffrey 'Dad.'" I assured her no one would ever make her call him anything she wasn't comfortable with. She nodded and said, "Good. Because dads are bad." Dads are bad. Her father, during the decade we were married, sexually abused a beloved family member for at least three years. His victim bravely disclosed her abuse when she was 12.

Last month's controversy over a Leadership Journal article written by a convicted sex offender included the criticism that the author barely mentions his victim, except to implicate her in her own abuse. Plus, his wife and children are mentioned even less. This emphasis on a sex offender himself over his primary victims (those groomed and directly abused) and secondary victims, such as his wife and children (those groomed and impacted by the predator's betrayals and deception) is sadly common amid cases of abuse within evangelical culture. My non-evangelical friends, both Catholic and secular, did not seem to have this problem. But now, thankfully, this trend seems to be shifting with more evangelical Christians encouraging victims to share their experiences.

When people found out about my ex-husband's abuse, I usually heard one of two responses. Many evangelical friends from our church advocated for me to stay married to him, to forgive him. It felt like they meant for me to somehow forget the devastating harm he has caused. As if that was possible. Others wanted me to hate him, dehumanize him, and claim him a monster. But it isn't like I had a switch I could flip to turn off loving someone. Plus, he is not a monster, but a human being bearing the stamp of God's image. And this truth, that he images God, makes his betrayals so much worse.

What neither side understood was, like many family members in this unfortunate, heartbreaking situation, I felt both love and hate, empathy and anger, and so much more.

One of the legacies of being groomed and betrayed by a sex offender is a horrific ambivalence. We struggle with experiencing and processing more than one opposing emotion at one time. I would feel love and hate in the same moment or pleasure combined with disgust and aversion. I would feel empathy for my ex-husband punctuated by horror.

It is like being ripped in shreds. Betrayal rends. It is an attack on one's integrity. I felt no longer whole. I was fractured. I was shattered.

And, reality took on a surreal quality. It seemed as if everything I knew to be true was a mere veil upon a dark writhing reality that lay beneath… lurking, waiting like quicksand for me to step in the wrong place.

In short, I experienced the psychological and emotional effects of significant trauma. I resonate with Nancy Venable Raine's description of life after rape, "Sometimes, when I am working in my garden, I look around at its beauty and feel for a moment that it is no more than a beautiful egg out of which a predatory, reptilian creature…will emerge, head first and slimy. It feels like something I know, not something I imagine." My life that had once felt safe and beautiful suddenly became ominous and threatening.

Most people do not understand how sex offenders function and therefore do not realize the depth of their damage. For example, many people minimize sexual abuse—believing that recovery is only about dealing with individual episodes of sexual abuse. However, what makes recovery much more complex is that any occurrence of sexual abuse takes place in the context of power and control, gained through the manipulation of love and trust. Sexual offenders groom victims, as well as their communities. They establish control to twist and distort their victims' views of reality.

In the healing process, I've learned that the families of sex offenders, the secondary victims, just like primary victims, must learn to do basic things even when all our beliefs and emotions scream it is not safe. We must learn to risk trusting, loving, and empathizing, even though these were the very things the abuser used to betray and violate.

Healing may look like courage but feels like fear.

And, we have been healing in spite of well-intentioned Christians who have shamed us because we have not healed quickly enough in the way they think we should have. We have not "forgiven" in a way that allows my ex-husband to continue to violate our boundaries. We have not "reconciled" in a way that will allow our abuser to coerce us to feel sympathy for him. We have not forgotten the destruction he's done, and we pray for God to restrict any future destruction he may cause in his new family and his community.

Thankfully, this healing has been facilitated with the prayerful support of Christians who understand. Within our church and the churches we were connected with, we were blessed with individual Christians who offered wisdom and comfort.

Since the abusive wounds were inflicted within relationship they must be healed within relationships with those who image God correctly. God has placed trustworthy people in my path to guide our healing, to provide the safety needed to learn to trust again.

After a long period of separation, and after I attended much therapy, my ex-husband and I divorced. Instead of risking a trial, he pled guilty to the lesser charge of a misdemeanor. He received no jail time. He is remarried, and his new family lives less than 10 minutes from mine. Over the last decade we have seen no evidence of any significant change, or of any lasting repentance. I also remarried. (And for those who are interested, no, my daughter has never called Jeffrey "Dad" but I have heard her introduce him proudly as her "parent." Sometimes healing and trust are revealed in the use of a single word.)

The people we were and the people we were becoming are gone. There has been significant soul damage, long lasting effects that we are still, many years later, discovering. We are new creations, shattered beings journeying on a path towards wholeness. Yet, shattered as we are, damaged as we've been, we still manage to reflect light.

Maureen Farrell Garcia loves biblical narratives, books, and tea. She's a mother of three valiant daughters, wife of a New Testament scholar, and a writer that teaches at a Christian college. You can read about her sex offender experiences at Converge Magazine. She would love for you to connect with her on Twitter @mfarrellgarcia.

Here in Vermont, the better part of religious devotion is spent on the “local food” movement. When worship takes place at the farmer’s market, the peculiar ceremonies and vocabulary of that faith can be impenetrable to unbelievers. And it is up to the priests of this religion—the beleaguered farmers—to pronounce upon devotees the benedictions of the local soil.

Being a pastor is hard. But I’ve known enough market gardeners and small-scale farmers to know better than to envy them. They work staggering hours at the mercy of a thousand variables, their sliver of a profit margin always at risk from a parasite, a cold snap, a moment’s inattention.

But the worst part might be the attention that must be paid to their clientele. Those consumers have appetites that must be satisfied, preferences that must be considered, and questions that must be answered with a straight face. And advice, they have advice that must be endured with patience and grace.

Approaching advice

If you’re a market gardener you’re going to get lots of advice on tomatoes, for instance. “Stake them,” “prune them,” “let them ramble.” “Go heirloom.” “Go hybrid.” “Put down plastic,” “use cloches,” “use mulch,” “do companion planting.” “Whack them with a broom.” (That’s right: whack them with a broom.)

If you’re growing tomatoes right now, then everyone who’s ever grown them anywhere has advice for you.

The problem is that it can be awfully hard to tell the good advice from the bad, because all of it is offered with conviction and sincerity.

Of course it’s that way with pastors too. If you pastor a church you will certainly get lots of “you know what would make your church grow — ” The advice might be earnest or cynical. It might be wise. It might be shrewd. It might come from the voice of experience or the voice of authority. It might appeal to your vanity or play on your insecurity (or both at the same time). It might be solicited and expensive, or unwanted and free.

But it’s definitely coming.

That’s okay. We all need advice. But the problem is that it can be awfully hard to tell the good advice from the bad, because all of it is offered with conviction and sincerity.

The anecdotal evidence might be only anecdotal, but such are anecdotes! Advocates of certain approaches to ministry or outreach love to make their arguments in the language of social science, but these disciplines are terribly resistant to hard scientific quantification. And the advice a pastor receives always has a barbed tip. At least it feels that way. While no one would suggest that perhaps the market gardener prefers producing small crops of tasteless tomatoes just because he turned down their advice, that is the sort of veiled accusation that a pastor faces when he or she rejects advice about growing the church. Sometimes the accusation is implicit, but very often it is made abundantly clear. If you were really sincere about growing this church, this is something you would be doing.

How are we to weed through all of that?

Cause or effect?

It can be hard to tell the difference between a program that works at a church, and a program at a church that works. Sometimes a church is just in the right place at the right time. Generations-worth of prayers get answered, God pours out his blessing, and everything goes right. The pastor could start a roller-skating outreach to senior citizens and it could work.

When everything’s clicking we can get away with ideas that aren’t transferable to other contexts.

Except that it wouldn’t. The church would work, and that would be as much despite its foolish programs as because of any of them. When everything’s clicking we can get away with ideas that aren’t transferable to other contexts. We could buy a whole fleet of metaphorical red sports cars, to no apparent ill effect. That’s great news for the used car salesmen of the church growth movement, but it’s bad news for pastors of small or struggling churches who are sweating, demonstrating that they love lost people too, and will do anything to bring them to Jesus.

Have a “boy’s toys” Sunday, start a food pantry, march in the parade, chuck the pews, put all your energy into small groups, move the church to a local tavern, put a coffee shop in the foyer, use ancient liturgy, use drums and a smoke machine, dress down, dress up, turn the lawn into a community garden, pave it for more parking. The list goes on and on.

Every suggestion has a compelling testimony for how well it worked somewhere. Each has the potential to work well here. But we can’t expect those who’ve developed these programs to be objective about them. It’s up to us to be clear eyed, to ask the hard questions, to try to distinguish the cause from the effect.

It’s up to us to be clear eyed, to ask the hard questions, to try to distinguish the cause from the effect.

The best local farmers I know will happily try new things, being dismayed when those things fail and surprised when they succeed. Some seeds they plant, laughing at their own folly. They take risks and make mistakes, but they don’t feel obliged to make every mistake that comes with a ringing endorsem*nt. They take the long view. They know that this season’s vogue veggie might be next year’s obnoxious weed. They know that no new device will take the place of hard work and dirt under the nails. They also know that even if they mess up, the crops themselves will still do their best to grow. They know that the seasons deserve to be trusted—even when they need to be resisted. They know that some animals are expensive hobbies dressed up as livestock, and that it takes a wise and disciplined farmer to say “I’m sorry, but not in my pasture.”

And the best pastors I know have a lot in common with the best farmers.

Joel Tom Tate is pastor of Furnace Brook Wesleyan Church in Pittsford, Vermont

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I still remember the excitement I felt when that first sermon series from Chuck Swindoll landed in my mailbox. I was in college and, having some rare cash in my pocket, I ordered his biographical teaching on Moses. Over the next few years I continued to purchase more cassette series. The tapes were perfect for my half-hour commute to work.

when you walk up to the pulpit or lectern, you are not merely speaking to the room. You are speaking the outside world as well.

Cassettes soon gave way to CD's which eventually gave way to podcasts. Today we live in a world where pastors of churches large and small post their content online almost immediately. Many live-stream and some churches even offer sophisticated viewing experiences allowing viewers to provide feedback. What's more, the advent of smart phones and social media has made Sunday sermons an interactive experience. Social media on Sunday is filled with comments and quotes drawn from the church service. Christian conferences are chronicled live on Twitter with special hash tags, Instagram pictures, and commentary.

Some lament this new reality. They say we are eroding the value of the incarnational experience of hearing a message. This is a valid concern, but pastors and church leaders must deal with the world that is: a digital conversation that is here to stay. So preachers must reckon with reality: when you walk up to the pulpit or lectern, you are not merely speaking to the room. You are speaking the outside world as well.

This reality shouldn't change the substance of the old-time gospel story. But it should cause us to think through the content we deliver, knowing we are often speaking simultaneously to both the choir and to outsiders, some of whom are ready to pounce on every stray word.

Here are three rules to guide our public speech in this digital age:

Toss throwaway lines

There are things you might say in the context of a sermon that are designed to provoke, or to make people in the room laugh, but which sound offensive or wrong when ripped out of context and quoted in 140 characters on twitter.

We should not flinch from speaking countercultural truth, even if it means social marginalization. However, we should make sure it is truth that is causing us trouble, not careless statements

Typically it is those comments you make after you've made your point. It's easy to get so comfortable in the pulpit that you sort of "work the crowd" and offer up red meat to a friendly audience. The phrases apt to start a brushfire online are usually the ones we could edit out of our sermons and not lose rhetorical thrust.

Speaking gospel truth will always invite opposition and controversy. We should not flinch from speaking countercultural truth, even if it means social marginalization. However, we should make sure it is truth that is causing us trouble, not careless statements designed to get a few laughs. Frankly, we shouldn't be using careless, throwaway lines, regardless of whether anyone is listening. The Scripture calls us to speak with both truth and love (Eph. 4:15) and to demonstrate both courage and civility (1 Pet. 3:15).

Give context

Social media is the enemy of context. This makes the proclamation of truth difficult and the shaping of narratives seemingly impossible. It's very easy for a mob mentality to take over on Twitter and before you know it, the world has adopted a completely different view of your message.

Being wise with our words and mindful that outsiders might be listening, we can protect our reputations and advance the gospel in our digital age.

Ironically, I think the way to prevent this from happening is to offer people the entire picture. This is why offering a live-stream and then immediately posting content online is perhaps the best antidote to a kind of context-less criticism. You can easily point people to the entirety of a sermon or at least encourage them to listen to the whole message before adopting a negative view.

I believe the days of restricting access and not offering a live-stream are in the past. Churches of any size or reputation will have folks tweeting about its sermons and services. If you withhold the video or don't offer live-stream, you only enable a context-less view of your events and make it easier for critics to hijack your message.

Protect privacy

Beyond the pulpit, pastors and church leaders need to think through meetings they intend to keep private in order to protect confidentialities. In the last few years we've seen repeated instances of leaked conversations from public figures. Even though Christians are commanded to speak with grace at all times (Colossians 4:6), we should use utmost discretion when presiding over private meetings.

A simple request of "We ask that nobody record this meeting in order to keep this private" is entirely appropriate in meetings you don't want broadcast to the public. Every organization and leader has to think through what this looks like for board meetings, trustee meetings, private counseling sessions, etc.

Being wise with our words and mindful that outsiders might be listening, we can protect our reputations and advance the gospel in our digital age.

Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Streaming Picks

Amazon Prime members can now watch The Spectacular Now for free. Last August, we reviewed it, calling it one of the best films of the summer. Read our review of the coming of age tale that explores what maturity really means here.

Can't get enough of X-Men's Michael Fassbender? See a different side of the actor alongside Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre, which gives viewers a different look at the woman in the misty moors. (Our review.)

This week Netflix began streaming every 80s kid's favorite movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Be sure to share this one with your own little ones!

If you're looking forward to the newest addition to the Planet of the Apes franchise, be sure to check out the 1968 original Planet of the Apes, now streaming free for Amazon Prime members.

Critics Roundup

Funnywoman Melissa McCarthy's newest comedy Tammy was released this week. PluggedIn's Bob Hoose believes McCarthy is a talented actress, who "can be something of a gift onscreen if given the right material to work with," but Tammy is not that. Hoose callsTammy "a one-dimensional sludge-fest of a film that once again sets up a big, sloppy, foulmouthed and sometimes cruel stereotype (with a soft spot down deep!) for McCarthy to wade into with gregarious middle-finger-flipping glee." And The New York Times' Manohla Dargis agrees. Although Tammy's quick foul-mouthed humor "makes you root for Ms. McCarthy and this movie from the start," it's also her least funny film thus far. As Dargis suggests towards the end of the review, "The jokes about Tammy's eating habits, her appetite for burgers, pies and doughnuts, aren't especially funny and, after a while, register as both tedious and borderline desperate."

"There are films that separate the moviegoers from the cinephiles," begins Crosswalk's Jeffrey Huston, "and The Rover is certainly one of them." Of the post-apocalyptic film from writer/director David Michôd, Huston says, "it's a thrill to watch a film directed with such precise intension and control, and such a gift for genre ambiance." He believes the director's only fault is the emotional distance he keeps between the audience and two main characters portrayed by Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, admitting that "there's actually very little for us to invest in." A.O. Scott of The New York Times believes there is more than one flaw in the film, stating that Pattison's character "situates The Rover awkwardly between fable and buddy picture," rather than the post-apocalyptic thriller it claims to be. Scott also seems to agree with Huston in regard to the audience's distance from the narrative. Michôd's "minimalism serves as an excuse for an irritating lack of narrative clarity, so that much of what happens seems arbitrary rather than haunting."

Movie News

ABC's Once Upon a Time is hopping on the bandwagon and adding Frozen characters to their storyline. To find out about who's been cast as Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff, read here.

This Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of everybody's favorite New York sitcom about nothing, Seinfeld. For a fun look at the show, read Variety's article on the comedian's famous flings.

Director Bennett Miller teamed up with 22 Jump Street's Channing Tatum to make Foxcatcher. The film received rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival; you can watch the newest trailer and read a bit more about the film here.

Sherlock fans: this week the BBC announced that they will begin filming season 4 of the series next year! Read more about the exciting news on Indiewire.

Larisa Kline is a summer intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King's College in New York City.

Today's interview is with Barnabas Piper. Barnabas is the Content Marketing Strategist for Lifeway Christian Resources, and an author, his latest book being The Pastor's Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity. Today, we talk with Barnabas about being a pastor's kid, rebel PKs, and creating a haven at home.

1) There are a lot of pastors' kids out there, but few who have grown up in the home of such a prominent pastor as your dad, John Piper. Is the fishbowl bigger when your father is so well-known?

In one sense it is and in another it isn't. Clearly more people know my name and stories about me than the average pastor's kid. I have exacerbated that by serving with conservative evangelical publishers, also a world where my dad is well known. So yes, it is a bigger fishbowl in that way.

On the other hand, almost all pastors' kids feel the same sort of "on display" pressures in their own context. The fishbowl is sort of scalable to size—it doesn't really matter if your church has 50 people or 5,000, the pressures are of the same nature. In some ways, those from small churches have it harder because everyone knows everything about them; they can't hide. In some ways those on a bigger stage have it harder because of all the eyes on them.

2) There is a caricature of pastor's kids as rebels who get into all kinds of trouble. Is this the exception or the rule?

It's not the rule, but it happens far too often to be an exception. The term caricature is a good one because it takes a noticeable feature and blows it out of proportion. I think PKs rebel at a relatively similar rate to most church kids. It's just more visible because, gasp, it's the pastor's kid smoking weed or sleeping around. That visibility adds a level of intensity to the rebellion, though. It makes it harder to come back when you leave, and can stir up serious bitterness.

3) We've seen more than a few angst-ridden memoirs by pastor's kids and others who have grown up in evangelicalism. You've chosen not to do this, but still present an honest, realistic portrait of growing up in a pastor's home. Why?

I have plenty of things about the church at large and about being a PK that annoy and anger me, but holding on to that eats me up and only makes me resent the very entity God gave us to represent him.

Angst offers little that is constructive or productive, no matter how justified it is. In fact, it usually isn't all that justified. Not when you take the profound power of God's grace into account. I have plenty of things about the church at large and about being a PK that annoy and anger me, but holding on to that eats me up and only makes me resent the very entity God gave us to represent him. I love the church. I need the church. Sometimes I want to choke the church. But I believe the church is God's institution, so my responsibility is to figure out how to serve and help it.

On the personal side, I love my parents. They were good parents with flaws. Sometimes they fell into the traps so many pastors and their spouses do, but they loved my siblings and me and provided a godly, stable, generally happy upbringing. I wrote The Pastor's Kid with the phrase "honor your father and mother" echoing in my mind. No, I didn't pander to them, but neither did I want to disrespect or hurt them. That would be sinful and stupid.

4) Churches often don't know how to treat the pastor's kids. How would you counsel them?

PKs want the chance to be known as the unique individuals God made them to be, not as chips off the ol' block or the bearer of a great family name.

The fact that churches need to "figure out how to treat" a PK is a key part of the problem. PKs are kids, little sinful kids created in the image of God with all the potential for good and ill that any other kid has. They should be treated with the same grace as every other kid. If your church lacks grace for other kids then start there and work forward. If you wouldn't say something to an anonymous church kid, don't say it to the PK either. They feel the eyes on them; don't make it worse by being intrusive.

PKs want the chance to be known as the unique individuals God made them to be, not as chips off the ol' block or the bearer of a great family name. They don't likely want to "be a pastor like dad," and they definitely don't want to be held to different moral standard. PKs need normal, honest friends who care little for their last name and greatly for them as people.

5) If you could speak to a pastor or church leader, what would you say to them as they think through the impact their ministry will have on their kids?

Pastors, your kids need you as a dad, not a pastor.

Pastors, your kids need you as a dad, not a pastor. They don't need sermons; they've already heard more than any other kids. They don't need questions or counseling; save that for the church members who visit the office. Converse with them. Spend time with them doing what they enjoy and including them in what you enjoy (which means get a hobby if you don't have one, and reading doesn't count).

You cannot protect them fully from the pressures of being a PK, but you can create an environment at home that is a haven. You can listen and empathize. You can give them room as they grow up to question, doubt, and wander. Jesus is the only way of salvation, but their path to Jesus may not look much like yours. Be ok with that. Always reflect Jesus. Always point to Jesus. Then let them meet him for themselves so that they see him as their Savior, their Lord, their intercessor, their friend—not just as yours.

Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.

Ever bike? Now that’s something that makes life worth living! … Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you’re going to smash up. Well, now, that’s something! And then go home again after three hours of it … and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
—Jack London

As London delightedly suggests, bicycling has a long association with human flourishing, but what may be less well known by many Books & Culture readers is the delight that can be had simply watching others get down to it. Road bike racing, like cricket, golf, and tennis, is often confusing and even at times downright bizarre to the uninitiated. And to complicate matters, just as International Test matches, the Masters, and Wimbledon have even stranger customs then their sporting equivalents, so also the Tour de France, the pinnacle of cycle racing, has its share of oddities, intensifying a new viewer’s sense of disorientation. Still, having spent large segments of the last decade of Julys watching le Tour, I’d suggest there is not only hope, but delight for those who can persevere in their viewing.

It is unfortunate the Tour is too little watched and even less enjoyed in the U.S. (though viewership and interest appear to be growing, despite the Armstrong doping debacles of the last few year). I think the value of cycling races is more than aesthetic, even if the sustained and indisputable beauty of a race that courses past some of the most glorious scenery and monuments to human ingenuity is profound. But it’s also a lesson in character formation. To be sure, the Tour is beautiful: like a serpentine colorful river coursing across France, the Tour is a carnival, part spectacle, part sport, with upwards of 200 riders, 22 teams, hundreds of vehicles, before, after and around the riders, and literally millions of spectators lining the roads throughout France over the three weeks of the race. Helicopters follow and record every moment, as do a flotilla of motorcycle cameramen—indeed, at times they are just inches from the riders, even occasionally colliding with them. The race provides a spectacular visual tour of rural France and some lovely glimpses of Paris and its environs on the last stage, ending as it traditionally has on a route that passes the Palace of Versailles, along the Seine near Notre Dame, to the Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, onto the Place de Concorde up to the Arc de Triomphe before finishing on the cobbles facing again the Arc.

And yet even with the clear visual power of the race, I’ve found many friends and family somewhat baffled by it. I can’t say I blame them: I spent quite a few hours with the broadcast before it became clear to me just what was going on. One difficulty is that this is both a team sport (9 to a side) and an individual competition for the coveted “Yellow Jersey” worn by the overall leader each day (the “Maillot jaune” in French or the “Golden Fleece” in the slang of NBC Sports’ British commentators). The overall winner is the rider with the lowest time at the conclusion of the final stage in Paris (although traditionally the Yellow Jersey is not contested on the last day, and the first half of the stage is a semi-parade complete with champagne toasts and innumerable photo ops along the race route before it reaches Parisian streets and the final circuits speed things up).

Covering 2200 miles in the quickest time requires not only a strong rider but also an equally strong team, thanks both to the laws of physics and the dynamics of the race. Crudely a bicycle’s speed is determined by the power input matched against the wind and rolling resistance it meets. Of the two, wind resistance is by far the biggest obstacle for a cyclist, and so aerodynamics is important to the race. Here is where a Yellow Jersey contender’s team becomes essential: a contender’s team works to shield him from the wind throughout as much of the race as they can (this is why the teams are often together, especially at key moments of the race such as during climbs or near the finale each day). Teams aid a Yellow Jersey defense by shielding the leaders from the wind while unprotected riders do the work of the peloton (the term for the large group of riders in the race) and they also chase back the nearly daily small group of riders (the “break away”) who roll off the front each stage. Thus while the Yellow Jersey winner is always a very strong rider, no individual rider could ever win the Tour de France without an impressively strong team.

And yet, confusing things a bit more, it is seldom the Yellow Jersey winner’s team who wins the team classification of the Tour. This classification is awarded to the team with three lowest combined times and is demarked by yellow rider numbers in the daily stages and a presentation at the end of the race. Recently this competition has also featured some teams wearing yellow helmets while leading the competition, just as the leader of the individual competition is often resplendent in a yellow team kit, including a custom yellow bike, with matching yellow accouterments (sunglasses, shoes, gloves, and so on). At the Tour, yellow is the color of status!

Unless, that is, you are one of the sprinters, the riders whose skill and strength is covering the last 100 yards of the race at the highest speeds: for these sprinters, green is the coveted color and the rider who is winning this points-based classification wears the Green Jersey. Sprinters in the Tour are not like track sprinters. They must cover 120 miles before they sprint, carrying their heavier bodies over hills and through the wind, and then come out and charge down the final yards of a stage for victory. They are more like runners who sprint in the final yards of a marathon than pure sprinters like Usain Bolt. The jersey’s points are awarded throughout daily intermediate sprints and at the conclusion of flatter stages, where the sprinters are expected to feature. Sometimes, though, the pesky breakaway manages to hold off the sprinters’ teams; indeed, some of the most exciting stages are those in which the sprinters’ teams wait to reel in the breakaway until the final kilometers, as there is always the chance that the punished riders who have been off the front of the group for hours will make it to the end and deny the charging sprinters.

The Polka Dot and White Jersey competitions round out the Tour’s classifications, awarded, respectively, to the rider who earns the most climbing points by reaching the tops of hills and mountains (“King of the Mountain” or “KOM” is common parlance for this competition) and to the rider with the lowest time who is under 26 years of age. It is rare but possible to hold the Yellow Jersey and the White Jersey at the same time, as Andy Schleck of Luxemburg has done in recent tours. Actually it is possible to have all four jerseys at the same time, but in those instances where a rider leads more than one competition, the second place rider in the competition wears the jersey.

While the presence of these competitions within what seems like a single race may confuse new viewers, the sublime suffering of the strings of riders pounding across the roads, shown in the brilliant high-definition images of the cameras, keep many returning. And there is also the spectacle of the inevitable crashes of the Tour, as when one of the eldest and most loved riders in the peloton, a German named Jens Voigt, crashed spectacularly descending the Col du Petit-Saint-Bernard in the 2009 Tour. The first week of the race, before the classifications start to really take shape, is especially crash-ridden, with pile ups at roundabouts, at the finishes, even at times during the push up small climbs as teams contest for coveted space at the front of the race and get their Yellow Jersey contender in position.

Violent and injury-producing spectacle is not, however, what sets the race apart from other sporting events. Instead, in many ways it’s the race’s amazing duration and, perhaps paradoxically, general lack of action that makes the Tour (and the other cycling “Grand Tours,” the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España) unique. While the World Cup continues this month, complaints about the lack of action in international football matches will persist, but, if soccer is mildly boring to the untrained eye, a Tour stage can easily seem like three to four televised hours of colorful, spandex-matched cycling with five to ten minutes of excitement tacked on at the end—the kind of thing best watched in a recap on YouTube, if at all. Of course I could explain all the action that is happening in the various competitions of the race in the seeming inaction of a stage, but I won’t, because it is this very tedium I find so delightful. For so much of the time in the race, nothing is happening—riders chat, smile, eat, even stop (off camera, usually) to go to the bathroom, and the race continues. But at any moment a crash or an attack can disrupt the tranquility, riders who were chatting amiably become enemies as they fight for position for their leader, or a mechanical problem to a bike can leave a contender stranded waiting for their team car and mechanic to come and get them up and running as the race cruises away before them.

In short, in the midst of the ordinary and long passage of the race something extraordinary inevitably occurs. Here the Tour differs from the formalized and routinized space and time of so much of contemporary sport: the very things that most sporting events are designed to constrain in space (through fields, courts, touch lines, end zones, 6-yard boxes, creases, pitches, infields, etc.) and in time (quarters, halves, injury time, etc.), the Tour blows apart. As a reader and film viewer I have long been intrigued by the power of stories and movies to organize and compress human life, often by leaving out the very things that we spend most of our time doing—there’s little sleeping or working in novels or films, even fewer diaper, oil, or furnace-filter changes. But the Tour is different: here time passes and not much happens, at least not much that seems to change the race, but just as the epiphany or disaster ever lurks in the next moment of the novel or film, so in the ordinariness of the Tour—its long-telling and thick description—something is always just about to happen. Such faithfulness to the task in the absence of any obvious gain or consequence—pedaling with an intent to have it matter even as experience has taught you that most of moments haven’t in the past—is both inspiring and unusual in sports’ immanent teleologies. I have found this eschatological approach to the Tour—this waiting expectantly—transformative as it mirrors so much of my own life experience: pedaling through life in moments that often seem unimportant but hold the pregnant possibility of an event breaking out at any second changing everything.

Thus as sports have become increasingly central and the warrants for viewing or participating in them have become increasingly unnecessary, we should remember that the identity and dispositions created by not only our participation but also our viewing may not be the same. Entering into the complexity, confusion, spectacle, suffering, and hope built into multi-stage cycle racing may help us to become the kind of flourishing persons who wait patiently for something significant to happen, participating with the full expectation that the idle minutes passing by in a beautiful spectacle may just be enough, even if nothing else happens. Vive le Tour!

Caleb D. Spencer is assistant professor of English at Azusa Pacific University.

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To be a movie critic writing about Life Itself is to feel a ghost looking over your shoulder—but then, writers are a haunted bunch. You can pretend they're the friendly spirits of those whom you admire and want to emulate. But really, they're the specters you're terrified of disappointing.

So it's a double whammy to write about this movie, a documentary about the life of Roger Ebert and based on his memoir by the same name. There's not a movie critic working today in English (and, I'd guess, a few other languages) who doesn't owe Ebert some debt. Ebert wrote about movies for the Chicago Sun-Times and then his blog for nearly fifty years, and along with Gene Siskel on their show At the Movies, his way of thinking and talking about movies profoundly influenced what Americans went to see at the theater for decades. (They quite literally invented the legendary "two thumbs up!" movie poster tagline.)

Directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams), the film traces the contours of Ebert's life, from his youth in working-class Chicago through his years as a swaggering college newspaper editor turned storytelling tavern-goer into his career with the Sun-Times and on television and, finally, his personal life, including his marriage to his wife Chaz and relationship with her children and grandchildren. The filmmakers began making the movie while Ebert was in the hospital, and he appears in it throughout. They didn't know he'd pass away while they were still shooting.

That Ebert died on April 4, 2013 adds pathos and heft to the film, no doubt, but even without that element it's affecting—the sheer span of history it recounts boggles the mind. It's also funny and clever and witty. And further, Life Itself is an apologetic for film criticism as a vital act of cultural production, one that is in constant interplay with the movies themselves and the people who make them.

Life Itself treats Ebert's life as one of two intertwined narrative strands. Anecdotes from his past (taken from the memoir) are worked in between remembrances from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances: Siskel's widow, the bartender from the tavern he frequented as a young man, Martin Scorsese, A.O. Scott, Werner Herzog.

All speak of him tenderly, in awe of his talent and stature—but they never lionize the man. Ebert was no saint, and often very prickly, with a considerable ego. He and Siskel bicker bitterly onscreen. And in the film itself, though he had lost speech when he lost his lower jaw and tongue to cancer, he's still feisty and occasionally petulant, in between his moments of sheer gratitude and love for Chaz, and for the life he's had.

Ebert pushed American film criticism (and, by extension, American filmmaking) like no one else, and that's the other narrative strand of the film: as the story is told, we can see the development of both an art form and a genre of writing right before our eyes. Ebert had a populist's taste—he famously liked Benji more than Full Metal Jacket—while sustaining a connoisseur's eye, recognizing great film for what it was. And he wrote about films accessibly, eschewing a more academic, highbrow form of criticism being practiced by critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris at the same time.

One of the most important things about Ebert's writing, by my lights, is that his film criticism was always deeply and unapologetically personal. He had strongly-held opinions about what he liked and what he didn't, and he had good reasons for them (something the film clearly shows in B-roll from At the Movies). But when you read his writing—which you can do at his website, where his archives live on—you can see, especially as he matured as a writer, how much his personal life, background, beliefs, emotions, fears, and passions drove what he wrote about and why he wrote about it.

This is important for any critic and, indeed, any good watcher to know: who you are affects what you write. The experiences you have shape how you watch. There's little about art that is black and white; your emotional experience matters when you write about a work.

That's the fun part of criticism, though. We have a regular ragtag band of critics here at Christianity Today. But though we work together, I find that our tastes rarely intersect. I have often watched a movie recommended by a friend and found it dull or lacking—and it goes both ways. I can passionately defend my opinion, but that's just it: it's my opinion. And that's the fun of it.

Only bad art allows for a single interpretation (that's what we call propaganda, actually). Good art opens space for us to have a multitude of experiences, depending on what the viewer brings to the table. Good art isn't complete until the viewer completes it.

In his work, Ebert helped us see movies that way: vibrant, vital parts of our communal experience, made fuller by each of us who watches it and then discusses it with others. Movies help us think about who we are and how we live together. And as a movie, Life Itself is a heartfelt, clear-eyed tribute to a master.

Caveat Spectator

The film is rated R; there's some nudity in some of the clips, though nothing excessive, and there's some suggestive talk. Profanities include f-bombs, especially when Siskel and Ebert get going at each other's throats. Also, Ebert's cancer meant he lost his lower jaw, which means the lower half of his face hung loose. The film treats this frankly and there's plenty of footage, but it's possible that a few sensitive viewers such as children may find this difficult to watch. (I'd challenge adults who are interested in the film to watch anyhow, though, if at all possible.)

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today's chief film critic and assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. She tweets @alissamarie.

At least 30 people were killed last weekend after gunmen attacked worshippers and torched at least three churches in villages near Chibok in northern Nigeria, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian reported.

Local residents blamed the terrorist organization Boko Haram, known for its attacks in the region, though the group didn't claim responsibility. More than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram are still missing.

The attackers destroyed Protestant Church of Christ in Nigeria, the Pentecostal Deeper Life Bible Church, and Ekklesiyar Yan'uwa (Church of the Brethren), among others, according to the Associated Press. In at least one case, the gunmen locked worshippers inside a church and opened fire on it. The BBC reported that six militants and nearly 40 civilians died in the attacks.

Boko Haram, which the U.S. State Department labeled a terrorist organization last fall, has claimed responsibility for almost daily attacks in the northeastern region of Nigeria. The AP reported the group killed more than 2,000 people this year alone and is responsible for 3,600 deaths in the last four years. The group's mission is to create an Islamic state ruled by Shari'ah law.

Nine people died on June 1 after Boko Haram gunned them down during a morning church service in Gwoza, a village two hours from Chibok, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Reuters reported that more than 10 gunmen rode motorcycles into the remote village in the nearby hills. After they left, villagers killed four of the attackers and captured three.

Whether the attacks are religiously or politically motivated is up for debate. However, Christian Solidarity Worldwide quoted a 2012 video in which Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said, "This war is not political. It is religious. It is between Muslims and unbelievers (arna) [sic]. It will stop when Islamic religion is the determinant in governance in Nigeria or, in the alternative, when all fighters are annihilated and no one is left to continue the fight."

Boko Haram isn't the only group terrorizing Christians in Nigeria. A Nigerian news source reported that more than 100 people were killed by unknown gunmen thought to be a group of renegade Fulani herdsmen in Kaduna State.

Sunday Ibrahim of the Christian Association of Nigeria called on the government to step up security and on local Christians to not take the law into their own hands, noting, "There was a time some of us did not believe that the killings in southern Kaduna have any religious connotation, but from the chanting, it has taken a religious dimension."

CT has monitored the terrorist activities of Boko Haram since 2010, when the group attacked churches over Christmas and killed six people. Since then, the group became one of the five most lethal terrorist groups in the world, responsible for the deaths of more than 3,000 people. Although Boko Haram repeatedly targeted Christians in church attacks, bombings, and school shootings, CT also reported that Boko Haram also murdered scores of Muslims.

Some Nigerian Christian leaders urged Christians to "turn the other cheek" in response to Boko Haram, even as the group made a concerted effort to convert Christians to Islam, or else they would "not know peace again." CT also explored how Boko Haram may have influenced the tactics of other terrorist groups, including al-Shabaab in East Africa. The International Criminal Court has investigated Boko Haram for its "crimes against humanity," while Christians also debated amnesty for the group.

[Image courtesy of talatu-carmen – Flickr]

Katy Perry's hit single "Dark Horse" has sparked an unusual lawsuit from Christian artists who claim she stole part of the song from them.

A group of four Christian hip-hop singers, including popular rappers Lecrae (Moore) and Flame (Marcus Gray), filed a lawsuit against Perry, Capitol Records, and others, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. She is accused of stealing riffs from "Joyful Noise," a song from Flame's 2008 Grammy-nominated album Our World: Redeemed.

The music video for "Dark Horse" portrays Perry as Cleopatra-like Egyptian royalty, performing magic in a stylized palace. The song, which Perry said was inspired by the 1996 movie The Craft, warns, "So you wanna play with magic / Boy, you should know what you're falling for."

Lecrae and Flame's lawsuit claims that the religious message of their song "Joyful Noise" has been "irreparably tarnished by its association with the witchcraft, paganism, black magic, and Illuminati imagery evoked by the same music in 'Dark Horse,'" wrote Christian hip-hop blogger Sketch the Journalist, for the Houston Chronicle.

Fans of both songs noted their similar intros after "Dark Horse" hit the radio, he reports, linking to a mix of the two songs. When "Dark Horse" became popular earlier this year, fans of Flame reacted on Twitter, saying the track stole from "Joyful Noise."

Additionally, the symbols in Perry's video, including a pendant Perry wore in the shape of the Arabic word Allah, sparked an online petition accusing Perry of blasphemy.

"Dark Horse" was released in September 2013 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in January. Six years earlier, Flame's album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock or Rap Gospel Album, and "Joyful Noise" also received a Dove Award nomination.

Along with Lecrae and Flame, fellow artists Da T.R.U.T.H. (Emanuel Lambert) and Chike Ojukwu are also listed on the lawsuit. Lecrae and Flame have enjoyed explosive popularity amid the emerging movement of reformed hip-hop in Christian music. CT has covered Lecrae's approach to father absence in America, and interviewed him about the unconventional tension of gospel-centered lyrics and southern style hip-hop in his music.

A pastor's daughter, Katy Perry began her career as a Christian artist and said she kept the faith during her early years as a pop icon, even with the bad-girl image from her first single "I Kissed a Girl." She has since spoken out to say she is no longer a Christian.

CT has previously reported on Christian lawsuits, including how baseball star Josh Hamilton relinquished his right to use the slogan "Play Hard Pray Harder" to a Christian clothing company.

Did the American Revolution give birth to a republic founded on religion or on reason? Were the Founders Christian statesmen who cherished religion as the pillar of a free society? Or were they freethinking sons of the Enlightenment fashioning a secular public square?

Since 1776, Americans have debated these questions repeatedly, but not out of interest in the past per se. The late British historian Catherine Wedgwood once observed that what most people want from history "is not the truth about the past . . . but ideas and directives for conduct in the present." And so it is with our fascination with the Revolution. We are a pluralistic nation divided over the proper place of religion in public life, and so we turn to the Revolutionary generation for either answers or ammunition. Sometimes our goal is to learn from the Founders. At least as often our goal is to use them, as we mine their writings for proof texts to support positions we already hold. The political stakes are high, and the debate is contentious.

Joining the controversy just in time for the Fourth of July is Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. The book's thesis—like its subtitle—is hardly subtle: America's key founders were the most radical of skeptics. Their philosophy, boiled down to its essence, was indistinguishable from atheism. Their atheism, though artfully disguised to make it palatable, infused the political principles that gave form to the new United States. All this means that "in 1776 America declared independence not from one imperial monarch but from the tyranny that the human mind imposes on itself through the artifice of supernatural religion." For Stewart, One Nation Without God would be a historically accurate motto.

Secularism, Period

Apart from the hyperbole, what precisely is new about Stewart's reading of the founding? It's not his assertion that the religious views of the most prominent Founders were unorthodox. With apologies to David Barton, there is little evidence that the leading Founders were devout Christians who based their political philosophy primarily on Scripture. Whether we label them "deists" or "theistic rationalists" or "Enlightenment Christians," no historically sound argument can transform them into card-carrying evangelicals. Nor is Stewart being innovative in claiming that the Founders drew extensively from Enlightenment sources in thinking about the proper structure and function of government. Scholars of the Revolution almost unanimously agree with this, and that includes Christian historians who take religion's role with great seriousness.

But the predominant view within the academy would complicate each of these conclusions. Scholars typically argue that the leading Founders were unorthodox, but not irreligious. Yes, they found much of value in Enlightenment philosophy, but they gravitated toward the Enlightenment's more moderate expressions, especially Scottish "Common Sense" writings that could be reconciled with Christianity. And to the degree that they embraced deism or something close to it, they adopted a worldview confined largely to elite intellectuals. They were thus hardly representative of the rank and file of Americans, many of whom had been swept up in the religious enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. In sum, the intellectual influences on the Revolutionary generation were numerous and diverse. Orthodox Christian belief was hardly determinative, but neither was it insignificant.

What distinguishes Nature's God is that it rejects all such nuance. The essence of the American founding was an ardent secularism, period. Whatever the Founders said for public consumption about freedom of religion, what they really wanted was freedom from religion. In this they were joined by a considerable cross-section of independent-minded patriots. Stewart insists that atheism was widespread in Revolutionary America, and the only reason we don't remember it is that religious zealots in later years would cover up a historical fact they found embarrassing.

Two realizations are crucial to making sense of this book. First, it is important to keep in mind that Stewart is a philosopher, not a historian. He is at his best in describing and tracing ideas across time. Readers expecting a book primarily about the American Revolution will be surprised how far afield the narrative wanders. By Stewart's reckoning, the Spirit of 1776 can be traced to "the most famous atheist in history," Epicurus. This ancient Greek philosopher posited an infinite and eternal universe and dismissed the possibility of a transcendent deity. Centuries later, radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke applied these heretical axioms to politics. In the process, they bequeathed their "impiously anti-transcendental" understandings of the origins of civil government to the "ungodly founders of the American republic."

I'll leave it to the philosophers to evaluate whether Stewart has exaggerated the underlying atheism of this cast of characters. (His portrayal of Locke, at least, is sure to arouse controversy.) As a historian, I am more concerned by his utter failure to establish the influence of atheistic belief on America's founding. Historians believe that our most important task is to explain what we see, basing our statements of cause and effect on evidence. Stewart takes a different approach. He concludes that radical philosophy was widespread among common Americans after discovering it in the writings of two individuals, Vermont's backwoods leader Ethan Allen and a Boston physician named Thomas Young. In like manner, he finds that atheistic presuppositions determined the political philosophy of the most prominent Founders by ruthlessly disregarding all competing influences. This is pronouncement, not demonstration.

Stewart is sometimes aware that his argument is weak. He concedes that a variety of other traditions and belief systems "would rank higher in any popularity contest among America's revolutionary generation." But no matter. His job "is not to catalogue influences," Stewart explains disdainfully—after 300 pages in which he has labored to demonstrate the influence of atheistic philosophy on the American founding. His concern is rather "to explain the ideas that mattered in the creation of the modern world." And the ideas that "mattered," as it so happens, are the ones that Stewart agrees with.

Angry Parody

This leads to the second realization that is key to understanding Nature's God. It is first and foremost a partisan work by a devout atheist. It is necessary to make this point because Stewart himself is coy in the way that he introduces his polemic. He conceals his own dogmatic skepticism and presents himself as a mere seeker of truth who was repeatedly surprised by his own findings.

And yet the pages that follow drip with condescending contempt for Christianity. The Protestant Christianity that, in his view, the Founders wisely rejected was defined by "strikingly cruel doctrines" that foment hate. At its heart lay the "idea of an angry God who demands absolute humiliation upon pain of eternal damnation." Utterly irrational, utterly anti-intellectual, this "pathology" fed "the world's relentless demands for unquestioning obedience." It was a form of "madness" fueled by "the false certainty of ignorance," and "thinking people" could not abide it.

This is angry parody more than serious scholarship. Stewart caricatures the Protestant Christianity of Revolutionary America, and he does so without substantively engaging a single Christian historian or theologian in more than 400 pages of text. He excludes Christian beliefs from the "ideas that mattered" not because the evidence shows that they lacked influence among Revolutionary patriots but because he deems them to be false.

In his conclusion, Stewart reminds the reader that "the ideas that matter in history" are not the ones "that receive the loudest affirmations from the largest number of people." Instead, "ideas derive their power from their truth." Stewart was thinking of atheism when he wrote those final words. Let us hope that the maxim holds true for his contentious interpretation of the American founding.

Robert Tracy McKenzie is professor of history at Wheaton College, and the author of The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History (IVP Academic). He blogs at Faith and History: Thinking Christianly About the American Past.