Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”

Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness. The list is so widely accepted within these subcultures that it is hardly ever questioned.

The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues—some of which, including abortion, I have written about and take seriously—but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.

Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. And he would insist that the Bible defines his politics, not the other way around. But is that actually true?

In addition to the issues on which he chooses to focus, there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?

According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?

[Peter Wehner: American Christians face a choice]

Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”

The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.

Why the silence?

One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out. The ceiling for fiscal year 2027 remains 17,500, and has the same priority. In 2024, by contrast, the United States resettled more than 100,000 refugees.

The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.

Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America. Many of those grants were eventually reinstated, but massive harm was done. Some trials can’t be completed, because of the loss of follow-up data; many research groups that come apart can’t be reassembled.

Now, ask yourself this: Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering.

I don’t claim that these three issues exhaust the concerns Christians should bring to public life, or that mine is the only faithful way to rank them. Thoughtful Christians will weigh things differently. But measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.

That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people. The question is not whether the Bible speaks to matters of justice and healing. “Nothing about Jesus is more certain historically than that he healed,” the novelist and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner wrote. It is whether Christians will let Jesus’s ethic define our politics.

So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat.

Another factor is an entire media and institutional ecosystem that has every worldly incentive to focus relentlessly on cultural flashpoints, because doing so raises money and drives viewership, clicks, and engagement. Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.

Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.

The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.

All of us, to varying degrees, are guilty of this. No one has ever read the Bible unfiltered; everyone interprets it. How we do so is shaped by the traditions we embrace—Southern Baptist, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, nondenominationalism, Calvinism, Arminianism, fundamentalism, progressivism—and by much else besides.

Our family’s origins; the era in which we live; and our nationality, temperament, education, social circles, and psychological makeup shape what we are able to see and not see, and how we process the world. We bring our life experiences and our mental maps to the biblical text, as we do to everything else. The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew.

In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun. Virtually no Christian reads it that way today. The text did not change; our knowledge of the world did.

The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history.

Every reading of the Bible, and every conception of God, is to some significant degree culturally conditioned. This is a basic reality, and it was true even of the biblical writers, who wrote in the languages, genres, and assumptions of their own times. “If we are to speak of God giving the Scriptures to people,” the eminent Bible scholar John Barton has written, “it can only be in and through the human process.” None of this diminishes Scripture. God’s choice to collaborate with human beings dignifies them in a way that treating them as stenographers would not. The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.

This unwillingness comes from an understandable place. Many Christians fear that conceding the existence of cultural conditioning invites subjectivity into interpretation. But subjectivity is already there; the only question is whether we admit it. Pretending otherwise doesn’t eliminate our biases. It simply hides them, and in doing so makes interpretive mistakes much harder to correct.

Part of what makes our own subjectivity so hard to see is a belief, common in many Christian communities, that the Bible is almost entirely self-evident. A friend who attended a respected evangelical seminary once told me that 95 percent or more of scripture is clear—not difficult, not complicated, plain on its face to anyone who reads it. If that is true, then most disagreements are not good-faith differences over interpretation; they are matters of willful blindness or disobedience. If one’s own reading is simply what the Bible says, then anyone who reads it differently is rejecting God’s word.

This mindset has done enormous damage, turning honest disagreements into loyalty tests, dividing churches, and telling believers who have difficult questions that they must choose between them and their faith. And at times, it has led to far worse.

When people are certain that their reading is simply God’s truth, dissent becomes more than a mistake. It can be seen as a grave error that needs to be punished. As great a figure as Augustine defended the state’s coercion of the Donatists, a schismatic sect, and used verses from the Gospel of Luke to justify it. Thomas Aquinas went further, holding that heretics who persisted after receiving repeated warnings could rightly be handed over to the state “to be exterminated from the world by death.”

Centuries later, Voltaire fiercely criticized the intolerance and cruelty that this outlook had produced. In 1766, a 20-year-old French nobleman, the Chevalier de La Barre, was accused of failing to remove his hat as a religious procession passed, singing impious songs, and damaging a wooden crucifix. He was tortured and beheaded, and his body was burned at the stake along with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique nailed to his chest.

The claim that the Bible’s teachings on important matters are clear and obvious is belied by the fact that, as the Bible scholar Kenton Sparks and the sociologist Christian Smith have documented, nearly every significant interpretive question yields a variety of readings. Devout Christians have reached different conclusions on baptism, church governance, the Lord’s Supper, and whether the miraculous spiritual gifts have ceased. There are disagreements about the end-times, the nature of the atonement, the role of women in ministry, the balance between works and grace, and whether Genesis offers a literal or figurative account of creation. There are differences over pacifism and just war, how to understand predestination and free will, whether a person can lose their salvation, the age of the Earth, and the nature of heaven and hell. There are thousands of Christian denominations, many of them born of disputes over what scripture teaches. As William Blake put it, “Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”

[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as a virtue]

The apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, said that “now we see through a glass, darkly.” If that was true of Paul, it is surely true of the rest of us.

None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order. The political theology of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, which sees the Church as a witness within a plural society rather than a power over it, reflects the way of Jesus more faithfully than does that of Doug Wilson, a leading proponent of Christian nationalism who calls for “mere Christendom.” No one can begin to remotely comprehend the ways and words of a God who created the heavens and the Earth and a reality beyond time. But some come closer than others.

One of the things that I see more clearly now than I did when I was younger is that discernment matters at least as much as familiarity with Bible verses. It is an immensely important virtue, and an underrated one. Discernment encompasses wisdom, and it protects us from distorting scripture, which is what Satan did in the wilderness when he quoted the Psalms to tempt Jesus, getting the words right and the meaning wrong. Discernment allows us to look beneath the words to grasp their purpose. It is not primarily an intellectual skill, though intellect is involved; it is formed by practice and character, as the writer of Hebrews says of those whose powers of discernment have been “trained by constant practice.” It helps us perceive reality and understand what the moment requires of a faithful person.

Discernment also requires humility, a willingness to learn from others rather than merely argue with them, in the conviction that “iron sharpens iron” and that no one sees the whole truth alone. Humility keeps our views open to refinement. But it rarely comes easily, especially for those raised in faith communities that prize certainty.

“When you grow up believing that your religious worldview contains the key to absolute truth and provides an answer to every question,” the Christian author Rachel Held Evans wrote, “you never really get over the disappointment of learning that it doesn’t.”

The philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, in his book Atheist Delusions, writes about the extraordinary revision of the moral and conceptual categories brought about by early Christianity. According to Hart, there emerged from darkness into full visibility “the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of infinite value.”

A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.

Our sense that life is meaningful depends, perhaps more than we realize, on our confidence that humanity will go on after we die. If we came to believe that humanity had no future, the philosopher Samuel Scheffler argues, much of what we value would lose its meaning or motivating force. What would follow would be widespread “apathy, anomie and despair.”

That is one reason why the threat of artificial intelligence feels so different and disorienting. When some of the most knowledgeable people within an industry suggest that their work could, within a matter of years, lead to global catastrophe and even human extinction, it’s decidedly unnerving. AI-driven anxiety is now showing up in therapy offices across the country. Much of what has given people succor in the past—faith that there are good things and good people who will outlive us, and that the story will go on—feels like it might be suddenly removed.

Consider the dread, even the paralyzing fear, you might feel if you were told as you prepared to fly that your plane has a 1-in-100 chance of crashing, or perhaps even a 1-in-10 chance. You probably wouldn’t board the aircraft. With AI, though, there’s no opting out. Even worse, if the plane you boarded did crash, it would be a terrible, localized tragedy. But the world would go on; your children would outlive you. Some of the primary architects of AI, though, are talking about the permanent end of the human species. Perhaps they are wrong; other experts are less concerned with AI destroying humanity than with it being unreliable, misused, or recklessly deployed. Their warnings, though, are hard to ignore.

[Juliette Kayyem: Destroying humanity is against the law]

It is better that we name the fear honestly rather than avoid it: All of us may soon perish, and everything we have made may go with us. Then we need to separate the urgent practical questions—what do we do to prevent the worst from happening?—from the existential. How should we live in light of the possibility, however remote, of the end of all that we have known and loved and has ever been?

As the focus on the existential threats posed by AI increases, people will exhibit a range of responses. Robert Jay Lifton coined the term psychic numbing to describe what he saw among survivors of Hiroshima: a protective shutdown of emotional responses in the face of catastrophic events or potentially overwhelming trauma. It allows us to keep functioning. There can also be denial—a sense that the prospects are so awful that they can’t be true, and even if they are, there’s nothing we can individually do about it.

Still others are tempted toward “information avoidance,” in which we ignore information because we’re afraid of an unpleasant outcome. Some set the threat aside as best as they can, a bit like avoiding a visit to a doctor out of fear that the physician will confirm a serious, even life-threatening illness. Still others drift toward a nihilism that ends in despair. Our time horizons will also shift. When the future itself seems in doubt, the long-term commitments that sustain a meaningful life can start to seem pointless.

My own reaction has been to search for footholds of reasonable hope. I’ve looked to knowledgeable voices for reassurance. I don’t have certainty that things will turn out just fine, but I want to believe that there are promising paths forward and what we do still matters. I should acknowledge, too, that the idea of an extinction-level threat doesn’t yet fully register with me. Because nothing like this has ever happened before, my instinctive assumption is that it never will. And, of course, it may not. But it would be foolhardy not to contemplate the possibility.

Viktor Frankl found meaning in life amid the horror of Auschwitz. Though we cannot control external events, he believed, we can retain control over our interior world. We choose how we respond to circumstances we did not create, to cups we would prefer to let pass. This “tragic optimism” is the capacity to say yes to life despite enormous suffering. Meaning can be chiseled even out of anguish. The impermanence of things is no reason for despair; instead, it increases the urgency to make meaning of the time we have, the moments in which we live, and the things we choose to love. The question is always what life is asking of us in every situation we face. And the answer is that life asks us to live lives of integrity, honor, and devotion to things and people outside of ourselves, to celebrate truth and beauty even in dark times.

“A thought transfixed me,” Frankl wrote, in Man’s Search for Meaning. “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

He added, “For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’” Meaning is found not only in what we accomplish but also in beholding what we love.

ALBERT CAMUS’ 1947 NOVEL, THE PLAGUE, is a tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The story’s protagonist, Bernard Rieux, is a dedicated, resolute physician in the Algerian city of Oran. He embodies what Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organizes volunteer sanitary squads, calls a “true healer.” Rieux fights the plague day after day, with no expectation of winning. He does so not because of heroism or religious faith but out of common decency. He believes that the only honest response to suffering is to do what one can to relieve it. That is what gives meaning to his life. The goal of Rieux and others was, in the words of David Bellos, a scholar of French fiction, “to preserve human dignity and to last the course, and in so doing to develop and to promote those virtues which misfortune can call forth: co-operation, solidarity, and the art of small kindness.”

Rieux names the threat posed by the epidemic early and honestly, when others are in denial, and then he acts. Camus, an agnostic, didn’t look to God or a higher power for meaning; he believed that the universe is inherently indifferent. Meaning, he argued, is found in human solidarity and the alleviation of suffering. Those remain intrinsic goods even if the world were to end tomorrow.

Living under the shadow of a grave threat shouldn’t be paralyzing; it should inspire resistance to injustice, despite the knowledge that such a struggle can never be fully won. C. S. Lewis, in his 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” said that if the atomic bomb comes, it should find us doing sensible, human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, chatting with our friends, and “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

Perhaps that quiet courage came because for Lewis, a Christian, the end of the world did not represent the end of everything that matters. We are inhabiting an irrational universe, he believed, but we aren’t derived from it. Nature is alienated from its Creator too, he wrote—“though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain.”

HOW, THEN, SHOULD WE LIVE in light of the threat posed by AI? We should name rather than ignore the danger and do everything within our power to contain it. Experts are actively debating the right way to do that. Their suggestions include a laissez-faire, do-nothing approach; voluntary compliance within the industry; bilateral and international agreements; and state and federal regulations in America. But there’s clearly an urgency to act before we lose control of events—and our future.

Beyond that, it seems to me that we should acknowledge the fear that death, especially the prospect of mass death, brings up in all of us. Frankl and Camus had their approaches; we should answer what each moment asks of us. Decency and kindness don’t require external validation, whether a catastrophe is avoided or not. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, expressed the hope that an “awakening experience” might inspire us to rearrange our priorities, find compassionate connections, and love others and beauty more deeply.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

Yalom invoked Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which the protagonist, hours from death, having experienced horrifying pain, recognizes the shallowness and emptiness of what appears to have been, on the surface, a successful life. Because of his connection with his young son, who presses Ivan’s hands to his lips and weeps, Ivan “fell through and saw a light, and it was revealed to him that his life had been wrong but that it was still possible to mend things.” In the end, he does.

He searched for his old habitual fear of death and didn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death. Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “Such joy!”

Ivan Ilyich’s final thoughts are “Death is finished. It is no more.”

T

olstoy, through Ivan Ilyich, was echoing a verse from the New Testament Book of Revelation. Written at the end of the first century, Revelation is an apocalyptic work filled with symbolism, vivid imagery, and coded references to the Roman Empire, which was oppressing Christians.

Revelation is hardly a favorite book of mine except for this: In the 21st chapter, we read that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” And God promises, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I have cited those words to others, and to myself, more times than I can count. It is not a promise that the current world won’t end—after all, many New Testament writers believed that they were living in the end times—but rather that the world will then be renewed. The old order will give way to a new one, where creation is healed and justice is restored and God will ultimately reconcile every creature to himself.

Skeptics of Christianity will say this is wishful thinking, and perhaps it is. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Wishful thinking, tethered to reality, is another name for hope. Sometimes hope is all we have, and sometimes hope is enough.