Last month, at the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) in Baltimore, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, OP, accepted the society’s John Courtney Murray Award. The honor, bestowed annually upon a distinguished scholar for their contributions to Catholic theology, is akin to a lifetime-achievement award. For Catholic theologians, especially women, Cathy Hilkert is a legend. (If you need proof, just ask her current students, who debuted canvas tote bags with her face on them at this year’s conference.) She completed her doctorate and entered the academy among a cohort of scholars who would form the post-conciliar vanguard in Catholic feminist theology. Since then, she has educated and guided generations of women in the field—including many who, like me, were never even her students.

In her acceptance speech, Dr. Hilkert recalled how the CTSA, especially its early community of women in theology, quickly became a space that sustained her theological vocation. Her words have stuck with me. Vocational sustenance. Where do Catholic theologians seek vocational sustenance today?

By now, readers are likely familiar with the changes reshaping Catholic higher education. Small, regional colleges and universities are closing at an alarming rate. Others have sought solvency by radically consolidating or sacrificing their liberal-arts departments in favor of programs that imply promises of ready employment. Departments of theology and philosophy are typically first on the chopping block. Courses once taught by tenured professors are now fielded by adjuncts, whose part-time labor secures them neither benefits nor the guarantee of sustained employment. Many more institutions have taken the attrition approach, overworking and underpaying theology faculty until, one by one, they simply have no choice but to find another way to make a living. Students pursuing doctoral studies in theology today do so amid warnings about the rapidly constricting job market. Before they ever set foot in the classroom, they are advised to hedge their hopes for a sustainable future in their chosen field.

Over the past several years, many of the brightest lights in my field—friends, mentors, master teachers, intellectual heroes—have lost or left their jobs. Their work hasn’t stopped. In new and different ways, they continue to pursue knowledge and work for transformation in the Church, writing, teaching, and lecturing around the edges of the academy. But they are deprived of access to the terms of labor, tenure, compensation, and institutional support that sustained generations of academics. It should not go unnoticed that this professional contraction has coincided with the nominal opening of the field to scholars from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. As some of the most junior faculty in the academy, they are also some of the most precarious.

I write as a Catholic theologian employed in a United Methodist seminary nestled within a major research university. Though the landscape of Protestant theological education is shifting as rapidly and radically as the Catholic one, I have enjoyed what often feels, by present standards, like an astonishing level of institutional security. But none of us is immune to current trends in the academy, and we should not acquiesce to the neoliberal logic that merely separates the lucky from the unlucky and entreats the former to put their heads down and get back to work.

Like Dr. Hilkert, most theologians I know speak of their work as a vocation, a divine calling. It is a response to a movement from deep within, a lifelong working-out of a question posed by the realities and conditions of life itself. I once met a religious sister who framed the issue as a question: “What’s the work that’s mine to do?” What are the marrow-deep questions that haunt my memory, my body? What can it possibly mean to speak of God in light of what I’ve seen and heard, in light of the stories I’ve inherited, in light of what we in this world have done to one another? It is true that such responses need not be worked out within the academy. But it is also true that, at present, no alternative structure exists to support and sustain such work. Every theological vocation buried by the unforgiving market of corporatized higher education is another story not told, another song not sung.

Where, I wonder, will my generation of theologians seek vocational sustenance? It will take some imagining. But I also hope we might continue to find it in the same place Dr. Hilkert did: in professional organizations like the CTSA, the College Theology Society, the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, and the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States. To new scholars, conferences can feel like intimidating sites of performance, places to present papers and network and meet prospective publishers. Gradually, however, they begin to feel like reunions. Late spring is conference season in Catholic theology, and at the end of particularly trying academic years, these gatherings have felt like retreats. Projects that have flatlined are revived. Skeletal ideas are nourished. Collaborations blossom. The past year’s burdens and indignities are properly lamented. Joys are lauded. We pray and sing, eat and drink. We listen to colleagues forced out of their jobs and build the kind of power that can only come with an open-eyed assessment of reality.

I have begun, in other words, to think of academic societies less as sites of professional development and more as vocational nourishment. To attend a gathering like this is a profound privilege, and a costly one. In today’s academic context, it is also vocationally sustaining. Every professional organization has a fund to support members under financial constraint with the cost of attending an annual meeting. I suggest that every scholar with the means to do so contribute to such a fund as a gesture of material solidarity with those in our fields denied the benefits of institutional stability. Against the backdrop of institutional collapse, such contributions may feel like a Band-Aid. That may be true. But, as my colleague Ted Smith has argued, we are presently in “between times.” Old models of theological education are passing away; new models have yet to be born. In-between times call for in-between measures. Here in this valley, let us do what we can to sustain one another.

The existence of the world is a marvel to Marilynne Robinson. Our ability to apprehend even shards of that marvel fills her with gratitude and wonder—and faith. The world, in return, has given her stamina. The run of books she produced in her sixties and seventies was extraordinary: four interconnected novels (Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack) and four collections of essays orbiting themes of theology and science, national life and religious belief.

But Robinson, now eighty years old, is not simply a poet singing. In her essays, as she defends the philosophical frameworks that once made religious belief almost universal, she is impatient, even testy, with what she finds reductionistic in most descriptions of the world today. You get a sense that she just wants to write about grace but finds herself needing to argue for the idea that something like grace can even exist. Her defense of the grandeur not only of the world but of each human being, her defense of the testimony of “felt experience,” is everywhere in her essays. “I have felt for a long time,” she writes in When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), “that our idea of what a human being is has grown oppressively small and dull.”

To preserve grandeur, Robinson has engaged with a pantheon of older theological writers, especially John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. Her canon alone makes her a voice crying in the wilderness. Even more unexpectedly, Robinson has managed to be both politically progressive and theologically traditional. Her defense of the American experiment, like her praise for Calvin, seems to come from another era—or from someone far to her right. Angels at the edges of old paintings would bend far to behold this rare literary figure: a liberal, a Calvinist, a prize-winning novelist who was once interviewed by a sitting president, who still searches out the good in our troubled American inheritance, who found her stride at an age when most people are plotting their retirement, and who goes on insisting that the categories with which we frame the world, we modern, enlightened critics of our own traditions, are unnecessarily narrow. “Beware, the time approaches when human beings will no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human,” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spoke, “and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir.” Marilynne Robinson (no fan of Nietzsche) is our last best lyrical archer.

Now Robinson has presented us with one more affirmation, one more arrow whirring against cynicism and smallness, and one more meditation on religious experience. Her latest book’s title, Reading Genesis, suggests modesty: she will read an ancient text. But that reading is expansive. In one long, unbroken meditation (there are no chapters, only section breaks), Robinson shows us the text through alternate lenses of theology and art. She reads Genesis as both a believer and a novelist. She also reads generously. For all the primitive violence, including violence attributed to God, for all the atmosphere of myth (humans living for nine hundred years, a flood covering continents, a garden guarded by angels and a fiery sword), the book of Genesis remains a source of nourishment and wisdom for Robinson. For while Genesis is full of problematic ancestors, the real story, for Robinson, is that God has always been stubbornly invested in us. “We are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred,” she summarizes. “And God is mindful of us.” 

In the beginning were flawed human beings. The biblical writers do not sugarcoat their stories. The early chapters of Genesis give us the Fall of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel by Cain, and a flood that destroys a corrupt world. Following the restoration of the world after the flood, the mythical lens of Genesis narrows and becomes the story of a family. All the patriarchs and matriarchs are here, and all the figures who function as tributaries of this saga: Abraham and Sarah (and Hagar); Isaac and Rebekah (and Ishmael); Jacob (and Esau), Rachel, Leah and their sons, who will become tribes of Israel. Genesis ends with that family in saving exile in Egypt.

Before focusing on the story of Abraham’s family, Robinson spends a fair amount of time on the flood. The story is theologically difficult (what kind of God destroys what he has made?), but it is also textually problematic. There are other ancient accounts of a universal flood, including one in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which suggests that biblical writers used sources outside their own tradition. Robinson says this is obviously the case. She is untroubled by the implications: “The fact that certain Westerners have believed that Scripture should bear no relation to other ancient literatures has made its having borrowed a famous tale, though adapted to its own uses, a scandal of the kind that electrifies both fundamentalists and religion’s cultured despisers.” She is more interested in the ways the biblical writers used this common story than she is in defending its uniqueness. Surely few people who still consider themselves Calvinists, as Robinson does, would go along with her commentary here: “The text, so obviously borrowed, does not tell us that God once subjected the world to an all-obliterating flood. It gives us a parable.” But surely few members of the liberal mainline churches, like the one she belongs to, would take this story and its theological implications as seriously as Robinson does. She is deeply theological without being deeply dogmatic.

While Genesis, for Robinson, remains a work of theology throughout, as we move past the story of the flood, we move on to a “recognizable world where genealogy gives way to biography.” The scale becomes human: “We are introduced to a family on its way to Canaan,” Robinson notes, “but delayed in their travels at Haran, where Terah, Abram’s father, dies.” Soon, Abram becomes Abraham, to whom God promises descendants as plentiful as the stars in the sky.

Reading the characters and events now with a novelist’s eye, Robinson’s attention feels free and exploratory. Even God becomes observable in artistic terms. She notes the “very great tact,” for example, “with which God enters the human world through Abraham.” The eighty-page subject index at the back of my copy of Calvin’s Institutes lists “terror” and “temptation,” but not “tact.” Nor do theologians usually describe God “coaxing,” as Robinson does, injecting gentleness into Abraham’s call: “Abraham was coaxed along in the way that he should go.” The human frailties of the figures in Genesis reinforce a theological premise, yes, but Robinson doesn’t reduce them to theological symbols. They are human characters touched by divine encounters.

The humanness of these biblical figures is part of what intrigues Robinson, but she also admires that the text does not sanitize their choices. After the flood, Noah, the lone righteous man on earth, is caught drunk and naked by one of his sons, who is disproportionately cursed for his troubles. Abraham’s nephew Lot offers to give up his daughters to a rapacious mob. Jacob’s sons, most gruesome of all, slaughter the males of Shechem for violating their sister. Genesis is hard to read in these places. Troubled by the treachery, Robinson nonetheless finds the text’s candor compelling: “There is nothing for which the Hebrew writers were more remarkable than their willingness to record and to ponder the most painful passages in their history, even the desperate, brutal confusions of the early period in the promised land.”

Robinson balances all this inscrutable, disturbing violence with novelistic noticings. Referring to Rachel’s sister Leah, who is “mother of most of Jacob’s children” but who isn’t the wife Jacob wanted, Robinson writes: “The Lord has compassion on an unloved wife, and great names enter history—Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah. This is a beautiful detail, the kind of thing that is to be found only in the Hebrew Scriptures.” In the account of Abraham’s son Isaac, she notes “repetition and parallelism” as “strikingly important elements, leading up to a scene of deep emotional complexity, as great a scene as any in the Hebrew Bible.” Of Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob, she writes: “He is, in literary terms, a great character.” Of Joseph’s brother Benjamin: “If all of this were explored as fiction, he would be a great point-of-view character.” Of the scene that brings those two brothers together: “A novel drawn from this brief account of a very freighted moment, their counting Joseph among their number after years of his absence, and pairing him with Benjamin, his full brother, would find guilt and deep regret.” My favorite of these passing literary notes is the observation of tenderness in the promise to Jacob that “Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.” 

Genesis is not a novel. It records the encounters between an ancient people and God, and Robinson takes that testimony seriously as theology. What her particular reading does, though, is thicken our understanding with a literary dimension. She honors humanness while affirming the divine. She reads novelistically but as one who believes.

The attention I’ve drawn to the literary dimension is the easier one. The only thing at stake in those observations of tenderness is our level of admiration. The theological dimension is more difficult. One of the most beautiful moments in Genesis, for me, is Joseph’s confession at the end of the book. He has been sold into slavery by his brothers, but that has resulted in their ultimate rescue. His reconciliation with those brothers is full of emotion, but his interpretation of what happened is a theological claim: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” A purely literary reading could praise Joseph’s generosity without worrying over the idea of providence, but Robinson won’t let us skim off the aesthetic from the theological. She won’t allow religion to be just about sincerity, or even feeling. In her essays, Robinson’s language about the way theology is watered down inside churches is more impatiently prophetic than tenderly pastoral: “I’m speaking here of the seminaries that make a sort of Esperanto of world religions and transient pieties, a non-language articulate in no vision that anyone can take seriously.”

What Robinson understands is that to have the song and the compassion and the grace that springs from religious faith, you have to have a world described by that faith. You need metaphysics. The version of rationalism we’ve inherited, she writes in Reading Genesis, defends “a simple model of causality, an explanation of everything so forthright as to displace all mystifications.” Religious believers, in her estimation, have ceded too much ground to a scientific worldview that seemed triumphant, inevitable, and seamless. She is heartened by more recent models in physics and cosmology—for example, hypotheses of dark matter and dark energy accounting for most of what the universe even is. If the old models are not adequate, then they cannot proclaim what is in or out of bounds. And if our human models always fall short of full understanding, why dismiss beliefs about what lies beyond that understanding, especially beliefs that have endured centuries, even millennia—beliefs that have been so central to our felt experience of the world?

Robinson’s unique contribution to this old debate has been not only to argue relentlessly in her essays, but also to enact belief—theological belief—in beautiful, compelling fiction. George Scialabba put it neatly: “Her essays have made a case for her Calvinist theological vision, while her novels have made a world out of it.” In this respect, she is in a category of one. Those peering angels can give her their undivided respect.

But there’s something else to be measured in this tandem project of Robinson’s. I’ve said she is theological without being dogmatic, but I think the key to her project involves making space for theology more than defending specific claims. It’s the realm of metaphysics she cares about, the idea that our experience suggests something grander about us and about our apprehensions than our scientific models can account for. For her, the Christian narrative gives that transcendent realm its coordinates, but it’s our experience as human beings—Christians or non-Christians—that tells us that we matter and that the universe has beauty. She wants to recover a place for that mattering.

The gift of Marilynne Robinson’s long shelf of late work, then, is its refusal of cynicism, its declaration of wonder and awe, and its affirmation that our little minds haven’t exhausted the meaning of the universe—and won’t. Long before Robinson picked up her pen, Simone Weil told us that we’d already “lost the whole poetry of the cosmos.” Robinson hasn’t given up on that poetry.

One of my favorite notes of gratitude and hope comes in her novel Gilead (2004). “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe,” her minister-hero declares, “and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” It’s a startling image. It reverses the sense that our lives are trivial details in an unimaginable vastness. In Robinson’s vision, the universe—and the God who wills the universe into existence at the beginning of the book of Genesis—has a deep interest in us, such that even our follies are part of some epic song. It’s elevating. Maybe it’s fanciful, or maybe it’s true and sublime. “It depends upon the universe,” as Saul Bellow’s Herzog decides, “what it is.”

Reading Genesis
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$20 | 352 pp.

“Who do you think will go first: the Catholics or the Orthodox?” a colleague asked me a few years ago in reference to the movements in both traditions to ordain women to the diaconate. Given that the possibilities in my own Orthodox community were just as opaque to me as my knowledge of the Catholic situation, I could not say. But bound up with that question was another question: Would the ordination of deaconesses in one apostolic lung of the Church make it easier for the other?

The Orthodox have now “gone first.” In Harare, Zimbabwe, Angelic Molen was ordained a deaconess on May 2, 2024, in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and all Africa. The Alexandrian Patriarchate is the autocephalous Orthodox Church in the continent of Africa, one of—depending on whom you ask—fourteen to sixteen autocephalous Orthodox Churches in the world. With the approval and support of the Alexandrian Synod and His Beatitude Patriarch Theodoros II, His Eminence Metropolitan Serafim of Zimbabwe (Kykotis) laid hands on Deaconess Angelic (pronounced “angelic”) in St. Nektarios Mission Parish at Waterfall. The ordination was attended by about two hundred people, more than half of whom were children.

This historic occasion, which my oldest daughter and I had the blessing to witness and celebrate, was years in the making. The order of deaconess languished in the Church for centuries, falling out of use in the late Byzantine era for a variety of reasons, though it was never banned or prohibited. (There was a concurrent decline of the order of deacons.) There are examples of ordinations of deaconesses sprinkled throughout the centuries, but there was no concerted effort to revive the order until recently. For the past century, various parts and peoples of the Orthodox world have advocated for the renewal of the ordained order of deaconess, including discussion in the 1917–1918 council of the Russian Orthodox Church; the late twentieth-century meetings convened by the World Council of Churches; the notable pan-Orthodox consultation in Rhodes, Greece, in 1988; various statements from Orthodox scholars and faithful; the founding of the nonprofit St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess (which I currently chair) in 2013; and recent statements from the Ecumenical Patriarchate (see paragraphs 29 and 82 of For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church). 

There is a common theme throughout these efforts: the Orthodox Church needs women serving in this capacity to best live out its mission. The ancient order of the diaconate was a service ministry of the Church, directly involved in the care of local Christians and of the larger community. Both deacons and deaconesses assisted with the philanthropic work of the Church, while other roles were segregated by gender; deacons took communion to sick and homebound men, deaconesses did the same for women, etc. Both deacons and deaconesses had (different) liturgical roles. The current movement to ordain deaconesses focuses on the need for women to be vetted, trained, supported, and given the authority of the Orthodox Church to minister in a diaconal spirit.

The Alexandrian Patriarchate began discussing the issue in 2016 in the wake of the Holy and Great Council of Crete—an ultimately unsuccessful effort to bring together all the Orthodox Churches in the world. That council affirmed the ability of the local church to minister to pastoral needs. Because there has never been a ban on deaconesses in the Christian East and because this is not a doctrinal issue (which would require a pan-Orthodox decision), the Holy Synod of Alexandria voted unanimously to restore the order. It began the process of restoration in 2017 by consecrating—or “tonsuring”—several women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

In the Orthodox tradition, consecration is notably different from ordination. Consecration is a blessing that takes place outside the altar and designates the consecrated to a “minor order,” such as reader, chanter, or subdeacon/deaconess. Ordination is for the “major orders” of the diaconate, presbytery, or episcopate, and takes place at the altar with specific liturgical actions and accoutrements tying the ordinand to the Eucharistic life of the Church. The order of deaconess was an ordained order in the ancient world, so it was a departure from tradition to consecrate rather than ordain these women, making them essentially subdeaconesses (though they were called “deaconesses”). But this concession was made because of financial threat to the Synod of Alexandria, which is heavily supported by the Orthodox Church of Greece. 

Now, in 2024, an ordination of a deaconess has finally taken place. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Theodoros II, blessed and gave permission for the ordination of Deaconess Angelic, just as he would for any other ordinand. Metropolitan Serafim, who is based in Harare, vetted, trained, prepared, and ordained her. It was clear to me that Deaconess Angelic is a respected and beloved member of her parish, and she has been engaged in diaconal work for more than a decade, including running a program that provides chickens and eggs for members of the community in need, overseeing and teaching catechesis, and representing the Zimbabwean Orthodox Church at ecological and ecumenical events. Through ordination her ministries are deeply connected with the Eucharist, and she is given the authority and support of the Church.

The significance of this ordination for the Orthodox world cannot be overstated. The other autocephalous Orthodox Churches around the world now have a contemporary precedent. This is very important for a community that values tradition and precedent and is generally averse to change—even when that change is really a restoration, not an innovation. I have been told there are plans to ordain more women in Africa in the near future. But will Orthodox Churches in other parts of the world follow suit? This is certainly my hope, and I applaud the Alexandrian Synod and Metropolitan Serafim for their courage in blazing the trail.

Courage was necessary because “going first” involves an enormous amount of scrutiny. Predictably, the naysayers have been apoplectic. Many of them wear their misogyny on their sleeves. It is striking to me that these people—mostly American men, many of them recent converts to Orthodoxy—feel comfortable quickly condemning the actions of a church a world away from theirs, different in race, culture, and socioeconomic status. 

Other naysayers are less vitriolic, but even they mischaracterize the ordination in Africa and spread misinformation about the movement for deaconesses in the Orthodox Church. They allege, for example, that this movement bears the banner of “Western feminism.” They typically rail against the infiltration of “Western” values in the Orthodox Church, seemingly unaware of the degree to which their ideas about women in the Church have been influenced by American political ideology. If the Catholics had “gone first,” it would have provided further ammunition to this crowd.

Of course, larger societal change has brought new questions to the Church. For example: If women have leadership positions in society, why not in the Church? Those of us working for deaconesses in the Orthodox Church are looking to our own tradition—not “Western feminism” or secularism—to answer these questions. And for us, the answer is obvious: we once had a fully realized order of the clergy dedicated to diakonia, to service, and we continue to need this order; it is not something the modern world has outgrown. 

Complicating the matter is the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) incursion into Africa. The Patriarchate of Alexandria is, along with the Coptic Church, the ancient Orthodox Christian presence in Africa, attributing its origins to St. Mark and claiming the fourth-century Nicene apologist St. Athanasius of Alexandria as its patron. And yet the contemporary ROC has entered Africa, luring away priests and parishes with financial incentives, solidifying the world’s perception of the Russian Church as heedlessly fractious and self-serving. ROC figures in Africa have criticized the ordination of Deaconess Angelic, which only deepens the division between it and the rest of the Orthodox world—to the great satisfaction of Russian ecclesia and governmental authorities. 

Another common refrain, even among bishops who might otherwise support the ordination of deaconesses is, “We must preserve the unity of the Church, and ordaining deaconesses might fracture the community.” My questions are: Do we actually care about unity? And, even if we do, should concerns about unity be the measure for whether to ordain deaconesses? My answer to both questions is a firm “No.”

To evaluate whether the Orthodox Church really cares about internal unity requires only a quick look at the status quo. The Orthodox Church could not convene a full council of autocephalous churches in 2016 despite decades of planning. In 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine despite questions of its authority to do so, and the ROC in turn broke communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and later aligned itself with the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine. In recent years the effort to unify the utter mess of Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States has come to a standstill. All the while, many of the faithful are abandoning the Orthodox Church, some because of its lamentable dearth of roles for women. This community does not have unity as a central concern.

Those who cite concerns about unity in their criticism of the ordination in Africa are really concerned about, and fearful of, change—even restorative change. The Orthodox community has always been slow to change, and this is an asset in many ways. But in the Orthodox world, stasis for the sake of stasis has become a kind of idol, a false god. 

Even if the Orthodox world did demonstrate a serious commitment to unity, should unity be the main measure of its decision-making? I don’t think so. The first question should always be how best to live out the Church’s mission of service for all, both inside and outside the church walls. One way to better live out our mission is to fully restore the order of the diaconate, for both men and women, since the central concern of this order is service and transfiguration. 

Louder and larger than the naysayers are the voices of joy from Orthodox around the world. One Russian scholar wrote to me, “Alleluia! Pascha came a few days earlier this year as far as I am concerned!” The St. Phoebe Center has been inundated with positive responses and requests for statements and interviews. The reaction on the ground in Zimbabwe was one of delight and enthusiasm. Personally, I came home from Africa more hopeful about the future of the Orthodox Church than I have been in a long time, because in Zimbabwe I saw what the Church can be in its fullness. 

I returned hopeful that the Orthodox Church will reorient itself to its mission of service and love. The fear mongering of those who cry “Division!” is not the path to transfiguring the world. The naysayers have it wrong. We ought to prioritize living our mission as Christians, seeing Christ in everyone and treating them accordingly. Unity is less important than mission—and more likely to follow mission than to precede it. 

Will the Orthodox ordination of a deaconess help our Catholic sisters and brothers who wish to do the same? I hope so, but, at the risk of disappointing the reader, I must answer that I really do not know. Clearly, there is interest in the Zimbabwean ordination on the part of Catholics; in fact, I have received more interview requests about it from Catholic publications than from Orthodox ones. Perhaps, as both apostolic churches move toward deaconesses, there will be new possibilities for unity between our churches through this expression of our shared mission. Imagine a world in which both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches have an active diaconate, which reaches out into the world with the Church’s mission of love and service. That would bring the Orthodox Churches closer to each other and closer to our Catholic sisters and brothers. This is the story I hope we will be able to tell. 

When I was growing up, I thought of faith and belief as synonymous. I never had the difference explained to me by a respected authority, and I’m not sure how much a religious education would have helped. When I was younger, I was usually sure of my beliefs, but I’ve had to mature quite a bit to comprehend what faith really means. In the process, I’ve found that the right image can ground me in a deeper understanding of the difference in these two words.

What we translate as “faith” in the New Testament comes from the Greek word pistis, meaning trust. “Belief,” originally referring to trust, had by the sixteenth century come to mean mental acceptance. Belief in something means our mind and imagination can make sense of it, while faith often goes beyond our ability to conceptualize. Faith is an experiential knowing, a sense of connectedness with one’s true nature.

The ineffable quality of faith reminds me of how art functions when it transports viewers beyond what it describes. If both belief and faith can be expressed visually, finding the right images could help us understand the meaning of each more powerfully. We might think of institutional propaganda as the classic example of asserting belief through images. But how exactly can one picture faith?

In John 20, Thomas the Apostle doubts Jesus’ resurrection until he can see and touch him in the flesh. This is the scene of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–02), a painting that, unlike others on the same subject, does more than merely illustrate a lesson or support religious doctrine. The artist’s unconventional approach to his subject matter depicts the way faith manifests itself in our own lives. It is a representation of the “unknowing” that is necessary to faith, unlike belief.

This difference lies in the fact that belief is an intellectual assent, where faith is an ongoing act of trust. Faith doesn’t exist outside of life as a framing device. Instead it is a daily commitment, often silent and unnoticed. It’s a fitting description for what we see occurring in the painting. Caravaggio’s version of the Doubting Thomas story is a modest interpretation: the holy nature of the event is not presented in a grandiose manner. Christ’s face is diminished in shadow and the three apostles (Thomas, Peter, and John) appear in a non-idealized way, with signs of age and poverty. Their status is not evident in the way they are dressed, nor do they possess any recognizable attributes. The scene becomes more real with their expressive faces and body language, and the lack of an identifiable setting adds to the feeling that this could be happening anywhere and at any time. As is typical of Caravaggio’s work, the religious figures are humanized, making them more accessible to viewers, and the overall scene is detached from anything that would appear supernatural. Thomas examines a wound rendered with tactile realism like a curious scientist searching for empirical evidence.

If we understand faith not as a proposition to be accepted or rejected but as an invitation, we may begin to participate in a dynamic process of unity. This movement deeper into self and presence becomes a relational experience with God. Caravaggio’s painting reproduces this dynamic in the arrangement of the figures as well as their relationship to us. We are brought into the scene by both our proximity to the figures and their life-size scale. Jesus makes himself vulnerable, answering Thomas’s need (as God answers ours in faith) by guiding the disciple’s hand into his wound as Peter and John are invited to look on. The figures are grouped in an arc and joined as one, their heads united to form a diamond at the top center of the picture plane. The intimacy of faith is heightened by the huddled bodies and attentive faces. The painting is an invitation to the viewer to step into transformation through surrender and love.

Each of us holds a set of beliefs and these color how we see life. Like lenses for different situations, our beliefs help us make sense of things. But faith lights our path with a living quality that guides us to our deepest selves. Once there, we must willingly surrender to what is. Similarly, when we enter the space of the painting, we are invited to participate in a unique moment of transformation. This is partly the result of the artist’s use of co-extensive space, which we stand in as a fourth observer of the wound. Free of distractions, we witness the singularity of the moment. Instead of the clear, even light of belief, Caravaggio employs his famous tenebroso technique to paint the illumination of consciousness as a mysterious light. Jesus and his wounded side seem to be its source, into which the disciples have just stepped. They are poised in mid-movement, emerging from the shadows of ignorance into awareness. When we practice this kind of faith, every moment has the potential for what the Greeks called ecstasis, a stepping out of oneself into the light of our true selves, illuminated by a higher consciousness.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas presents faith as an intimacy with the body of Christ. As Thomas’s finger enters the wound, the blunt physicality points to the human dimension of resurrection. Witnessing and participating in Thomas’s recognition, we return to our own experience inspired to touch the source of life through our own faith. Belief may sometimes be a necessary starting point. Yet only when we leave behind our limited mental constructs are we free enough to recognize the holy—as Caravaggio did in the messy lives of the people of his day—glowing in beautiful ways.

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In March 2022, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced a revision to its widely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The revised manual, known as DSM-5-TR, included a new diagnostic category: prolonged grief disorder (PGD). The announcement ignited a firestorm of controversy.

“Pathologising grief is an insult to the dignity of loving relationships—it proclaims grievers as mentally ill and will too often result in the careless prescription of antidepressants or other drugs to treat enduring symptoms, without consideration of the context.” So wrote the authors of a short and scathing article in the medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry, published not long after the DSM-5-TR was released.

The outrage and debate were not confined to psychiatrists and psychologists. The controversy over recognizing PGD as a mental disorder took many forms. Studies followed that questioned whether the empirical evidence justified introducing a new diagnostic category. An essay documenting the convoluted history and the competing research teams that argued over naming the new disorder appeared. Newspaper opinion columnists weighed in, countless podcasts were launched, and, in a tabloid-worthy moment, Prince Harry’s memoir was analyzed to show he was suffering from PGD.

As scholars collaborating on a volume about grief that brings together theoretical reflections on grief with the actual experiences of grieving individuals, we think it is useful to ask whether grief should be conceptualized as a mental disorder and what the likely consequences of treating it this way will be.

But our interest in how to conceptualize grief is not merely academic. We have both experienced intense and long-lasting grief. Lisa, Paul’s wife of more than three decades, died six years ago; Mathew’s eldest son, Isaiah, died fifteen years ago after a three-year journey with pediatric cancer. And for both of us, the loss changed the trajectory of our lives. We would both say that we have moved forward but not that we have moved on. We both continue to experience a profound sense of loss; we both continue to mourn our loss. So, the debate about whether grief should be considered a medical disorder feels personal. 

The controversy also offered the opportunity to review the literature on prolonged grief against the backdrop of our own experiences. That review began by asking Warren Kinghorn—Esther Colliflower Associate Research Professor of Pastoral and Moral Theology at Duke Divinity School and associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center—about the controversy. Kinghorn has written critically about how the DSM can be misused and urged psychiatrists to embrace an “epistemological humility” in diagnosing disorders using the DSM. But he believes the negative response to categorizing prolonged grief as a disorder has generally been too simplistic. It misses the fact that grief can be debilitating, can induce suicidal ideation, and may require specialized intervention.

Kinghorn has written about the “hegemony of the symptom” that can lead psychiatrists or primary-care physicians to diagnose a disorder without sufficient attention to the context in which the symptoms are present. This does not mean, however, that the indices for diagnosis offered by the DSM are mistaken or unhelpful. The criteria for categorizing PGD, for example, are very clear. For an adult who has had someone close to them die, PGD can be diagnosed if, after a year, they exhibit intense yearning and/or longing for the deceased or a preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased. In addition, diagnosis requires that at least three of the following symptoms be frequently present since the death of the deceased and every day for the month prior to diagnosis: identity disruption, a sense of disbelief about the death, avoidance of reminders of the death, intense emotional pain, difficulty reintegrating into everyday life, emotional numbness, a feeling that life is meaningless, and intense loneliness.

While these symptoms are used for diagnostic purposes, the DSM makes clear that many more symptoms may be experienced by those suffering from PGD, including guilt, decreased self-care, loss of appetite, hallucinations, bitterness, anger, sleep disruptions, and suicidal ideation. Kinghorn’s caution about too quickly dismissing prolonged grief as a disorder is clearly important. As he told us, no clinician views grief itself as an abnormal human response to loss. Labeling some kinds of grief as a disorder is simply a recognition that grief can take on an unhealthy form that may require psychiatric intervention. The DSM revision does not designate all grief as a disorder; rather, it sets the criteria for disordered grief.

We do not have the medical or scientific background to assess all the criteria set out in the DSM, but one criterion stood out to both of us—namely, that PGD is only appropriately diagnosed if symptoms persist for longer than a year after the death of a loved one. Our sense that it is arbitrary to set a time limit on appropriate grief has been borne out by the fact that the time limit was controversial when the APA considered recognizing PGD as a disorder. The original proposal was that the time limit would be set at six months, but there was strong opposition to such a short time limit for acceptable grief. The one-year time frame was arrived at not solely on the basis of clinical data, but in recognition of expected public opposition to a shorter threshold. As Holly Prigerson, the leader of one of the two research groups that pushed for the recognition of PGD as a mental disorder, put it, the APA “begged and pleaded” to define the syndrome more conservatively—with a one-year threshold—to avoid a public backlash.

The fact that an important criterion for this new medical disorder was partly based on public opinion is one reason that we are not as sanguine as Kinghorn about designating prolonged grief as a disorder. Another is that even when identifying criteria is more of a science than an art, there remains disagreement about both the facts that diagnostic categories seek to capture and what the consequences of introducing new disorders will be.

For example, there is notable debate in the supporting literature about the prevalence of prolonged grief. It is estimated that between four and ten percent of those who experience the loss of a loved one will suffer from PGD. It may well be that popular magazines rely too heavily on a caricature of the DSM when critiquing PGD, but criticisms come from within the field of psychiatry and other scholarly disciplines as well. Allen Frances, who was chair of the taskforce that put together the DSM-4, has complained that the DSM-5 has dramatically expanded diagnostic categories without due caution or warnings, led to overdiagnosis, and directly facilitated the marketing of psychotropic drugs to patients with these newly diagnosed disorders.

The numbers Frances cites in his book Saving Normal (2013) are stunning, and the rates of prescription-drug use show no sign of waning. According to the 2020 National Health Interview Survey used by the CDC, 16.5 percent (one in six) Americans have taken prescription medication for their mental health within a year of the survey. And that was a survey from before the Covid pandemic. By all accounts, the use of prescription medication for mental-health issues skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic.

Peter Conrad, author of the book The Medicalization of Society (2007), notes the proliferation of disorders over the past thirty years. There’s a veritable alphabet soup of new diagnostic categories: ADD, ADHD, BED, CFS, DMDD, MAD, MDD, MND, PTSD, and many others. Clearly, the number of psychiatric illnesses has increased dramatically, but as Conrad notes, this increase can be understood in very different ways. “Does this [increase],” he asks, “mean that there is a new epidemic of medical problems or that medicine is better able to identify and treat already existing problems? Or does it mean that a whole range of life’s problems have [sic] now received medical diagnoses and are subject to medical treatment, despite dubious evidence of their medical nature?”

There is value in asking whether the increase in diagnostic categories comes from an epidemic of new medical problems—perhaps occasioned by modern social structures that erode communal support for basic human flourishing—or from a misguided effort to pathologize normal human behavior, but that is not our task. We find it more useful to ask what the consequences are likely to be of defining prolonged grief as a medical disorder.

To answer that question, it is important to understand the dynamic by which an experience like grief gets labeled as a medical problem, defined in medical terms (as a disorder with symptoms), and treated with medication or other kinds of therapy. Sociological studies like Conrad’s are helpful for understanding this process, but we want instead to draw upon the work of the late distinguished Canadian philosopher of science, Ian Hacking. In a series of books and journal articles spanning decades, Hacking systematically explored what, with apologies to Kant, might be called science’s categorical imperative. That is, scientists appear almost unconditionally obligated to impose categories on phenomena to control the world. Nowhere is this truer, says Hacking, than in medicine. Hacking’s work is helpful in thinking about grief because he shows how the classifications we assign to people are not neutral labels. Classifications affect the people classified and over time those who are labeled often work to change the characteristics assigned to those classifications, creating a kind of feedback loop. He gives a provocative name to the process: “Making up people.” 

In his book, Rewriting the Soul, Hacking sets out the basic dynamics of how “kinds” of people are “made.” His case study is multiple-personality disorder. First, people who are unhappy in certain ways get classified medically, in this case as suffering from multiple personality disorders (MPD). A certain type of person that was not previously recognized thus comes into existence, and then psychiatrists, journalists, talk-show hosts, and others begin to identify common features of those suffering from the disorder.

One way to understand the claim that diagnostic categories can create people is in relation to MPD. Hacking writes, “In 1955 this [being someone with MPD] was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counselors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.”

For our purposes, the idea that a diagnostic category can lead “patients” to see themselves in novel ways, just as it leads friends, families, coworkers, and others to see them in new ways, helps us understand that a new diagnosis like PGD is unlikely to be applied simply to those experiencing extreme and debilitating grief. Once such a disorder enters the zeitgeist as a way of being in the world, it will often be discussed in the popular press, debated in social media, displayed in characters on television and in movies, etc. We can then expect individuals to experience their own grief accordingly and diagnose themselves as suffering from a grief disorder.

Consider two problems that are likely to follow, reshaping how many will grieve: the pathologizing of loving bonds at the heart of grief and, in turn, a medicalized goal of weakening or severing these bonds instead of integrating them into a better future for those grieving. The first has to do with the fact that one important strand of thinking about grief embedded in the APA diagnosis is that grief is a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder related to an unhealthy attachment to a deceased loved one. The emphasis on the symptom of “yearning,” for example, highlights the conceptualization of grief as a disordered attachment. The difficulty with this way of thinking about grief can be seen in how Prigerson explained the condition in a podcast created for health-care professionals. When asked whether grief is an expression of love, Prigerson downplayed the connection. She noted that a lot of people think of grief as a manifestation of love because it “just feels right,” but she thinks it is best to conceive of grief as wanting or craving something that one cannot have.

Our own sense is that most people rightly think of grief as a form of love and that categorizing grief as a kind of attachment disorder will erode that connection. Carl Elliott has written extensively about the relationship between psychiatry and identity. We asked Elliott whether he thought diagnosing grief as a medical disorder would transform the understanding of grief in a way that affects identity.

In response, he drew on a thought experiment that Gilbert Meilaender once made to answer this question. Meilaender wondered what we would say about someone who had lost his spouse of twenty-five years, buried her, and went back to work the following week—not out of duty, nor as a distraction from the pain, nor out of numbness, but as someone who was “positively buoyant.” Elliott was so struck by the phrase “positively buoyant” that he remembered it decades after Meilaender first posed the case. It seemed to Elliott, as it did to Meilaender, that if the widower felt that way, most of us would find this unsettling and question his love for his wife. The thought experiment has an important point: there can be goodness in the sorrow of grief, in all its obvious and not-so-obvious expressions, as fitting for a life of shared love that has come to an end. Medicating that sorrow away, instead of integrating the reality of the loss into one’s life (perhaps through psychotherapy, community support, etc.), misses the way grief flows from, and can be partly constitutive of, one’s identity.

The second problem with a new diagnostic category coming to shape identity is what Hacking referred to as a “looping effect.” In addition to the way individuals come to see themselves as suffering from a condition that must be treated, physicians begin to search for treatments to address new disorders. Elliott has noted how this happens when pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat new conditions and then work to persuade patients and physicians of the need for the newly developed “treatments.” Elliott writes, “People diagnosed as sufferers of the condition in question begin to think of themselves differently, interpreting problems such as shyness or distractibility as symptoms of an illness that can be treated by the drug being marketed. In turn, the behavior and self-image of those patients is studied by pharmaceutical marketers, who use that knowledge to reinforce their marketing messages. In this way, a new medical condition takes shape and grows.” The United States is nearly unique in allowing direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing, and such marketing exacerbates the looping effect.

That we are likely to see the dynamic Elliott describes take hold in relation to grief is suggested by the fact that, monthsbefore PGD was recognized in the DSM-5-TR, a drug study was already underway to test the use of naltrexone in PGD patients. If naltrexone proves to be effective in ameliorating some of the “symptoms” of prolonged grief, it is a near certainty that it will be marketed directly to those who have lost a loved one.

In fact, the two problems we just identified are joined in this study. Naltrexone is an anti-addiction medication with a clear rationale for the clinical trial in the study protocol, which reads: “PGD can be conceptualized as a disorder of addiction and therefore could benefit from being treated with medications that are currently used to treat such disorders. One such medication is naltrexone, which is currently used to treat alcohol and opioid dependence.” In other words, the hope is that naltrexone will block an attachment to the deceased in the way that it blocks an addict’s yearning for alcohol or drugs.

It is worth noting here that conceptualizing common experiences in medical terms that open the door to treatment is not intrinsically negative. Before alcohol abuse was categorized as an addiction that might be helped through medication, it was conceived as a moral failing and a source of shame and humiliation. Or consider the shift in conceptualizing suicide as frequently the result of mental illness, which led to better suicide-prevention measures and eased the burdens on the family and friends who survived a loved one’s suicide. Categorizing alcohol abuse and suicidal ideation as mental-health issues is arguably a moral as well as a medical advance.

Still, it is hard to see how defining prolonged grief as a kind of addiction is an improvement over understanding it as an expression of love that may sometimes be unhealthy and call for psychiatric intervention. One problem with medicalizing even prolonged grief in this way is that what passes for common knowledge about grief may harden into a set of facts that are thought to be invariably true for all or most who grieve. We “know,” for example, that alcoholics must not take even a single drink if they don’t want to relapse. When applied to alcohol abuse, this perspective might lead to a positive identity marker within the sober community, but applied to grief the implications are more troubling. Will those who grieve come to be told that they must never think of their loved one, lest a powerful pining for the beloved return?

That this is not merely a theoretical concern was confirmed to us by Patrick O’Malley, author of Getting Grief Right. O’Malley is a psychotherapist in Fort Worth, Texas, who specializes in grief counseling and has counseled individuals, couples, and families in his private practice for more than forty years. When we spoke to O’Malley, he noted that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model of grief had been the prevailing psychological model of grief for many years and that patients would routinely self-diagnose themselves as in need of therapy because they couldn’t seem to manifest one of the five stages. As he memorably put it, “Patients would come to me and say ‘Doc, I’m just not angry, can you help me be angry?’”

Indeed, O’Malley confirmed that the kind of effects discussed by Hacking are already very much in evidence in response to recent efforts to conceptualize grief as a mental disorder. Even before the APA recognized prolonged grief as a disorder, patients were pushing back against the whole idea. Without mentioning Hacking, O’Malley described exactly the looping dynamic that medicalizing normal behavior would bring. On the one hand, he said he would not be surprised if patients began seeking treatment thirteen months after a loved one died because the criteria for diagnosing PGD require a year of ongoing intense grief. On the other hand, some grieving individuals may not seek help because they resist being labeled as having a mental disorder.

In the end, there are both benefits and harms of conceptualizing grief as a medical problem. Thinking of grief as a psychiatric disorder will almost certainly promote a view of bereavement as an individual problem, not a communal one. But not recognizing debilitating long-term grief as a disorder may place obstacles in the path of those who do indeed need medical help. Our judgment, however, is that there is more harm than benefit in thinking of even prolonged grief as a mental disorder. The gravitational force exerted by a medical model of prolonged grief is likely to pull other forms of grief into its orbit, where pharmaceutical treatment and brain chemistry are emphasized. But such reductionist thinking may impede a richer understanding of a profound human experience. Medicalizing grief is likely to decontextualize bereavement and isolate the individual in his or her pain. Communal resources, including cultural and religious rituals and practices, may well be eroded. In short, a neurobiological view of grief that understands it as an attachment disorder may leave little room for the existential engagement with the meaning of life, death, and loss that grief work requires.

This point has been made passionately by Alan Wolfelt, author of Companioning the Bereaved: A Soulful Guide for Caregivers. We do not endorse his use of the language of “contamination” to describe how the medical model has come to shape the experience of grief for many, but he is insightful about how contemporary models of grief seek to curtail mourning as quickly as possible and leave little room for religious or cultural rituals in caring for the bereaved. As Wolfelt puts it, “Death and grief are spiritual journeys of the heart and soul,” not just chemical imbalances of the brain.

We asked Fr. Richard Rutherford, CSC, a liturgical theologian whose book The Death of a Christian: The Order of Christian Funerals has long been taught in Catholic seminaries, whether he shared Wolfelt’s concern that treating grief as a medical disorder will leave little room for religious responses to the loss of a loved one. His response was both balanced and perceptive. “There is nothing intrinsically problematic about thinking of grief in medical terms,” he said. “Responding to grief requires a holistic approach. Medicine offers one set of tools; spiritual practices another.” Nevertheless, Rutherford cautioned that a medical approach is easily “monetized,” and that a medical approach to grief may tempt one to think of loss as something to get over. “We do not get over the loss of someone we love. We just get used to it.”

Rutherford believes that grieving Christians may find the Biblical tradition of lament helpful. They, too, can cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and know that neither the existence nor the intensity of their grief will be judged. They can be confident that the ecclesial community will be with them in their loss, just as those who support the bereaved know that they will be comforted when their time of grief inevitably comes.

We know from direct experience the pain of losing someone we loved intensely. We also know that the pain and grief to which such a loss gives rise can be debilitating. But we have also experienced the way in which intense grief can be the occasion for growth. Grief invites—and sometimes requires—those who mourn to take stock of their lives. When grief is conceptualized as only loosely related to love, the experience is unlikely to lead the bereaved to ask whether he or she has lived or loved well. It is unlikely to lead those in mourning to examine the trajectory of their lives. Properly understood, grief can be a gift. This is not to say that anyone would or should choose the kind of loss that occasions grief, but dealing with the loss of a loved one is potentially a transformative human experience and one that, in our view, should not be short-circuited by treating grief as a mental disorder.

On April 5, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would be streaming the Palm Sunday service at Harvest Christian Fellowship, an Evangelical megachurch in Riverside, California, run by Pastor Greg Laurie.

Laurie’s biography is a large part of his appeal. Imagine a member of the Beach Boys getting saved and forming a megachurch. Now seventy years old, he still exudes California cool: always tan and usually clad in blue jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses, and sneakers. Born in Long Beach, Laurie was raised by a single mother—a “raging alcoholic,” in Laurie’s words—who married seven times. At the age of seventeen, Laurie found God through the ministry of charismatic “hippie” preacher Lonnie Frisbee and the Jesus People Movement, which turned California hippies away from acid and sex and, during mass baptisms in the Pacific Ocean, toward Christ. Influenced deeply by the Jesus People Movement, Laurie pursued a dual calling as a pastor and an evangelist. Soon he was holding Billy Graham–style crusades in Anaheim’s Angel Stadium. Today, Laurie’s Harvest Fellowship reaches more than fifteen thousand people at four different campuses, including one in Maui.

Trump was already familiar with Laurie, who had earlier visited the White House to offer a “history” lesson to the president, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, and more than a hundred Evangelical leaders gathered for a thank-you dinner for their support during the 2016 campaign. Along with a number of Evangelical leaders and “historians,” Laurie has seized on a dubious, decades-old thesis that posits a close connection between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution. This history is central to MAGA Evangelicalism, which sees in the former president’s movement signs of a new Great Awakening that will set the stage for another political transformation and solve the country’s countless problems.

On this pandemic Palm Sunday there was no audience at Harvest Christian Fellowship. Laurie and his team appeared before the cameras on a carefully constructed set that included a faux-brick façade covered with Laurie family photos and the Pine Tree Flag, a Revolution-era flag inscribed with the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” The flag recently generated controversy when it was reported that it flew outside Justice Alito’s house in 2023. To the uninitiated, it would be unclear what the flag has to do with Palm Sunday. Laurie sat front and center behind a fancy music stand surrounded by a worship band parked on couches and comfortable chairs. Everyone was socially distanced in an appropriate fashion. The set designers seemed to be going for a look somewhere between a white suburban middle-class living room and a hip urban coffeehouse.

After a prayer and several songs, Laurie opened up the Bible and started preaching. He quoted 2 Chronicles 7:14, a recent favorite of the Christian Right: “If my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” Vice President Mike Pence often ended his coronavirus press briefings with the phrase “heal our land.” He also sometimes fused the words of this Old Testament passage with the Pledge of Allegiance. On the National Day of Prayer in May 2020, for example, he asked Americans to pray that God would “heal our land, this one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” In the summer of 2023, Evangelical presidential candidate E. W. Jackson held a “2nd Chronicles 7:14 Patriotic Rally to Secure America’s Future” in Richmond, Virginia. 

In 2016, Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore (now editor of Christianity Today) addressed the Christian Right’s misuse of this verse. “2 Chronicles 7:14 isn’t talking about America or national identity or some generic sense of ‘revival,’” Moore wrote. “To apply the verse this way, is, whatever one’s political ideology, theological liberalism.” For Moore, Evangelicals’ use of this verse is less about New Testament Christianity and more about American civil religion.

Laurie and Pence seem to believe that God works through modern nation-states in much the same way that he worked through ancient Israel. In 1776, God poured out his blessing on spiritually revived colonists in the form of a new and exceptional nation. The “Creator” referenced in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence endowed those praying British colonials with unalienable rights. And God is still working his miracles in America. Many Evangelicals expect that a soon-to-come revival will bring another “new birth of freedom” to the country. If Americans will pray and seek the face of God—if they will “appeal to heaven” like the American revolutionaries did—God will foster a spiritual revival that will save individual souls from eternal damnation and reconnect the country to its Christian roots. When this happens, it will send a signal to the world that the United States is on the verge of becoming a revitalized nation, a “city upon a hill” forged in liberty and built on biblical faith. This is the Evangelical version of “Make America Great Again.”

The Pine Tree Flag hanging from the wall of Laurie’s sanctuary was, therefore, the perfect backdrop. Some historians suggest that the flag pays homage to the New Hampshire “Pine Tree Riot,” a 1772 protest against a royal law prohibiting the colony’s inhabitants from harvesting white pine trees, which the British navy needed for masts. The pine tree eventually found its way onto a banner, and in 1776, the Massachusetts General Court made it the official flag of the state navy. The words on the flag came from chapter fourteen of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690): “And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven” (italics mine). The flag appeared at Harvest Christian Fellowship as a reminder to Laurie’s audience, including the president of the United States, that America’s revolutionary patriots would not have succeeded in overthrowing the powerful British empire without God’s help.

Later in the service, Laurie lectured explicitly on revival and revolution, invoking one of the most popular preachers of the first Great Awakening:

One of our founding fathers named George—not Washington but Whitefield, an evangelist from England—preached the Gospel and thousands of colonists came to faith in Christ and it brought about moral change in a culture as a revival always does…. We were able to sow the seeds of this new nation in that receptive soil of morality based on a faith in God. I don’t think we could have done it without it…. [N]ot only are we founded with revival, we need to have another revival.

Laurie is not the only Evangelical these days making connections between the First Great Awakening and the Revolution. Texas senator Ted Cruz says that a Great Awakening is coming, and it will propel Christians into “cultural prominence.” Missouri senator Josh Hawley told activist Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition that “in every hour of this country’s danger...Christians have risen to help lead this country.... We did it in the First Great Awakening, that helped move this country toward revolution and independence.” Veteran Christian Right activist James Robison summed it up with this 2021 tweet: “In light of our current national economic crisis, political chaos and military inferiority, I can safely say our only hope of survival is revival, leading to the next Great Awakening.” And when a revival broke out earlier this year at tiny Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, MAGA evangelists, prophets, and politicians told their followers that the “outpouring” was the beginning of the long-awaited awakening that God was sending to save America. 

Did the First Great Awakening have anything to do with the Revolution? Evangelicals are not the first to think so. The thesis comes from Alan Heimert’s 1966 book Religion and the American Mind. Heimert, a Harvard English professor at the time, suggested, by way of a literary reading of eighteenth-century sermons, that Evangelical Calvinists triggered the American Revolution by preaching an egalitarian “New Birth” that taught colonists to rebel against the established authority of local clergy. First Great Awakening sermons laid the intellectual groundwork and prepared the American “soil,” to use Laurie’s word, for a radical and democratic revolution. According to Heimert, eighteenth-century liberal Christians, the opponents of the Great Awakening, were too conservative in the way they fused their political ideas with Protestant Christianity to ever invoke a revolution. He described them as the “most reluctant of rebels.” 

The initial reviews of Religion and the American Mind were harsh. The esteemed Yale historian Edmund Morgan ripped Heimert for failing to understand Evangelical sermons in their larger intellectual and social contexts. “The world [Heimert] offers us,” Morgan wrote, “has been constructed by reading beyond the lines of what men said: and what he finds beyond the lines...is so wrenched from context, and so at odds with empirical evidence, that his world...partakes more of fantasy than history.” Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn did not deny the role religion played in the American Revolution but concluded that “it is a gross simplification to believe that religion as such, or any of its doctrinal elements, had a unique political role in the Revolutionary movement.” More than thirty years later Bailyn’s student, historian Gordon Wood, wrote that Heimert’s argument in Religion and the American Mind was “too detached from the concrete and complicated world of real people.”

Anyone who traces the academic literature on this debate will come away with the impression that it was definitively settled in 1981, when historian Jon Butler published an article in the Journal of American History titled “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction.” Butler wrote that the Awakening had nothing to do with the American Revolution (and, in fact, may never have happened in the first place). He concluded that the “link between the revivals and the American Revolution is virtually non-existent” and that, with a few local exceptions, the “relationship between pre-revolutionary political change and the revival is weak everywhere.” He pointed to the twenty-five-year gap between the First Great Awakening and the Revolutionary Era and chided decorated historian Richard Bushman for comparing the impact of the Awakening on colonial life to the nationwide “campus disturbances” and “urban riots” of the 1960s.

Butler’s thesis was groundbreaking and convincing. Scholars of my generation started putting the phrase “Great Awakening” in quotation marks and citing Butler’s work on the problematic linkage between Evangelical religion and political resistance. But for all its interpretive power, Butler’s article did not deliver a knockout blow to Heimert and his disciples. Though few historians today embrace Heimert’s thesis in its totality, his spirit still hovers over academic writing on the links between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution.

In Under the Cope of Heaven, an accessible 1986 survey of early American religion, Patricia Bonomi argued that the First Great Awakening’s spirit of “defiant” and “radical” individualism set the stage for the political events of 1776. In his Bancroft Prize–winning biography of revivalist Jonathan Edwards, George Marsden wrote that, though “in many respects…an eighteenth-century traditionalist,” Edwards was, “in American political and social terms,” “a pre-Revolutionary.” In a 1991 biography of George Whitefield, Butler’s Yale colleague Harry Stout interpreted Whitefield as the founder of American Evangelicalism and a catalyst of American liberty. Though cautious about making the connections between Evangelicalism and revolution in his 2002 book America’s God, Mark Noll nonetheless suggested that Whitefield made “the sharpest attack yet on inherited privilege in colonial America” and offered a “frank expression of popular democracy” that “probably had much to do with the rise of a similar spirit in politics later on.” Finally, Thomas Kidd’s 2014 biography of George Whitefield was subtitled “America’s Spiritual Founding Father.”

I doubt Greg Laurie has read any of these historians. The history that found its way into his sermon and White House speech came straight from “evangelical experts,” as Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson dub them in their book The Anointed. Some of these so-called “experts” dabble in academic writing, but they tend to gravitate to scholars outside the academic mainstream whose work can help them advance their agenda. Since Evangelicalism is an inherently populist and anti-intellectual movement, most born-again Christians do not trust academics and rely instead on such “experts.” When they need to know something about science, they turn to Ken Ham, host of the popular radio show Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. They get their psychology and social philosophy from James Dobson, the longtime culture warrior and founder of the lobbying organization Focus on the Family. Their political philosophy comes from sources like Fox News’s Sean Hannity, the Liberty University Standing for Freedom Center, or the Robertson School of Government at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

And for American history, conservative Evangelicals turn to David Barton, the founder and CEO of WallBuilders, an Evangelical organization in Aledo, Texas. Barton’s understanding of the American past stands behind virtually every Evangelical attempt to promote the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. There are few historians in the country, including those at Evangelical colleges and universities, who take Barton’s work seriously, yet he continues to maintain a large following in the Evangelical community. He has strong ties to the men and women who served on Donald Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Council and offers regular tutoring sessions—both formal and informal—to Washington lawmakers.

Barton fuses history and activism just as effectively, if not more effectively, than most of the historian-activists of the academic Left. He embraces a view of cultural engagement commonly called Seven Mountains Dominionism, whose “mandate” requires Christians to “take dominion over” the “seven mountains” of culture: religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Once these mountains are conquered, and the United States is restored to the Christian nation that the founding fathers envisioned, true believers can expect the imminent return of Jesus Christ to the earth. 

The latest “evangelical expert” to connect the First Great Awakening to the American Revolution is author and right-wing radio-show host Eric Metaxas. A former Yale English major, Metaxas gained fame in 2010 when he published a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that somehow managed, through a tortuous use of evidence, to transform the German Lutheran theologian into an Evangelical Christian. Bonhoeffer scholars panned the book, but it caught fire in the Evangelical world and spent time on the New York Times bestseller list.

With his platform established, Metaxas then chose to wade into American history with If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty (2016). Like Laurie, Metaxas describes Whitefield as a “spiritual founding father” of the United States. But he makes these claims without the nuance or caution of trained historians such as Thomas Kidd or the other scholars who give some credence to Heimert’s thesis. (Metaxas’s book has no citations related to his claims about the relationship between Whitefield, the Great Awakening, and the Revolution, making it difficult to track his historical and intellectual influences.) He argues that Whitefield’s eighteenth-century tours of the British American colonies united a “scattering of peoples into a single people, one that together saw the world differently than any had before and that was prepared to depart from history in a way none had ever done.” 

Metaxas argues that Whitefield preached a version of Evangelical Christianity that made political liberty and American independence possible. One almost gets the impression that the Great Awakening was less a movement of personal spiritual renewal than a political movement that birthed a nation. He spoon-feeds this stuff to his Christian Right followers every day on his radio show and through a weekly newsletter and rigorous speaking schedule. Metaxas claims he is on a mission to get a copy of If You Can Keep It into the hands of every schoolteacher in the United States.

 The belief that the First Great Awakening informed the American Revolution also undergirds the political philosophy of former Trump adviser, former Breitbart News editor, alt-right leader, and convicted criminal Steve Bannon (who was pardoned by Trump over federal fraud charges but is facing prison for defying subpoenas from Congress’s January 6 committee). Bannon is Catholic, but he often makes appearances at Evangelical events—for example, an Evangelical prayer call to petition God to reverse the results of the 2020 election and restore Trump to office. 

In virtually all his public appearances, Bannon references ideas stemming from a 1997 book by Ivy League–educated authors William Strauss and Neil Howe called The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. While this book would never get close to a university history seminar—Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called it fiction—it is celebrated in alt-right circles and some Evangelical camps. Strauss and Howe suggest that history moves through four periods of change: institutional stability, awakening, unraveling, and crisis. For example, the eighteenth-century American colonists attacked the moral complacency of their parents and grandparents through the “spiritual firestorm” of the First Great Awakening. The revival brought a transformation in personal values that enabled the “unraveling” of colonial ties with the British empire. This “Promethean burst of civic effort” then resulted in the “crisis,” the “fourth turning,” or what we call the American Revolution. Independence was followed by a period “when our institutional life” was “reconstructed from the ground up” and American culture was stabilized until the next unraveling—the Civil War. 

Neil Howe’s latest book, The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023), makes the case that the next such cycle has already arrived. Bannon often tells his audience that now is not a time for national reconciliation and bipartisanship, but a time to fight. The awakening of God’s people will lead to another “unraveling” of the culture which, in turn, will set off another major “crisis” in American life resulting, eventually, in a period of stability sustained by the Christian morality of those who ascend to political power in the midst of the crisis. Sometimes these “turnings” are explained by a mixture of Whig and providential teleology. But at other times, Strauss and Howe argue, they come about through human agency. If providence or progress does not bring about cultural unraveling and social crises, people “will invariably find a way to advance them.” Enter Steve Bannon.

Needless to say, the historiographical foundation of Strauss and Howe’s book is weak. Their understanding of the First Great Awakening and its connection to the Revolution is informed mostly by William McLoughlin’s 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform and the introduction to Bushman’s 1970 primary source collection The Great Awakening. McLoughlin and Bushman were Butler’s primary targets in his landmark Journal of American History essay, and even scholars sympathetic to Heimert stopped citing their works forty years ago.

Bannon has said on multiple occasions that Trump is “an instrument of divine providence.” Evangelical leaders work to advance his agenda because many of them believe that Trump, despite his moral failings, is anointed by God. A quick internet search reveals that a host of Christian Right political operatives believe Trump is a divine agent of spiritual renewal and national awakening. A case in point: Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, is on the road with Eric Trump and the former president’s friend Roger Stone (a new convert to MAGA Evangelicalism) preaching to large audiences on the ReAwaken America Tour. The local pastors who show up for these events are baptizing people—literally immersing them in tubs of water—in the name of God and country. 

About ten years ago, at a major historical conference, I presented a paper framed around this longstanding debate over the influence of the First Great Awakening on the American Revolution. The respondent to my paper that day was a historian of early America who taught at an Ivy League institution. This scholar had no real interest in addressing the argument of my presentation, but he did want to make sure that I, and the audience, knew that the historical profession had moved beyond these “tired” debates. I often think of that scholar when my research leads me to Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the WallBuilders website, or Eric Metaxas’s show on the Salem Radio Network. I think of him when radio personality Glenn Beck calls for a new Great Awakening rooted in American individualism that will upend the “communists” he believes are running the Democratic Party.

Scholars do not usually write with the culture wars directly in mind (although that is changing of late). Nor do they have any control over how their work is or might be used in public discourse. But in the case of the apparent links between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution, the Christian Right has laid claim, whether intentionally or unwittingly, to a decades-old scholarly thesis on the subject.

Historians can learn two things from the way some conservative Evangelicals have appropriated Heimert and his followers. First, their toil in the archives and the scholarship they produce always have the potential to influence public discourse. No scholarly work is irrelevant. (Just ask the historians of Ukraine, whose research, which might have once seemed arcane, helped us better understand Putin’s invasion.) Second, when activists do seize on historical scholarship, they will always do so to serve the present. Everyone is in search of a usable past, but only historians are called to make sure the past is used responsibly.

As I have spoken with young people in the Church about their experiences of worship, inclusion, and synodality, I have come to understand the importance of attending to their wounds, many of which have been caused or worsened by the Church. These wounds come in many forms, but I’d like to focus on one that is discussed less often: the exclusion of young people from parish leadership and the leadership of other Catholic organizations that make up the life of the Church. As the Church works to embrace synodality as its modus vivendi et operandi and to have a “preferential option for young people,” we must urgently integrate young people into Church consultative bodies at all levels.

Healing the wounds of young people will require a pastoral conversion on the part of the Church. According to Synodality in the Mission and the Life of the Church (2018), pastoral conversion “involves renewing mentalities, attitudes, practices and structures, in order to be ever more faithful to [the Church’s] vocation.” We must come to recognize in our hearts that all the baptized belong to Christ’s body and to see each member as part of the same vineyard—a belonging granted in light of our baptism. According to Rafael Luciani, an appointed expert of the Theological Commission of the General Secretariat for the Synod of Bishops, the first step in engaging with young people is to recognize that a young person has the same baptismal dignity as her older counterparts, to “consider her a subject that has her own voice and that she represents a reality of her own that I do not know.” When people are recognized as subjects, we can value their contributions “not as participants but members.” A real recognition of their dignity is necessary if young people are to be included in pastoral initiatives at any level of the Church or Catholic organizations. 

It may come as no surprise that there are few dioceses and parishes in the United States that can count young people among their pastoral councils. The same is true of the consultative bodies of Catholic organizations and schools. Leaders of these councils and bodies often assume that including ministers to young people—paid or volunteer—is enough to address the needs of young people. But synodality requires us to examine who is missing from the table and intentionally and actively include them. As Luciani puts it, “It’s not just about listening but who I listen to…. How can one truly discern if there are missing people who represent something [a reality] I have to discern at that table of the pastoral council? Discernment involves integrating all those who bring me something for discernment.”

But incorporating young people into consultative bodies goes beyond filling up seats at the table or checking the required boxes. It means teaching and forming them to be capable and responsible leaders. Theresa O’Keefe, an expert in ministry with young people and professor at Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry, emphasizes the need to provide young people with the right skills, tools, and accompaniment when we incorporate them into pastoral councils. It’s imperative to “train them in the structure of the church and how it works” and to give them “a sense the governance of the church” so that they know what they’ll be able to affect or accomplish. Young people can inspire each other and remind each other of their agency as they learn “how to be part of a deliberative body.”

How do we achieve the necessary pastoral conversion that will recognize young people as full members of a synodal Church? Those in leadership positions need to heal their vision of young Catholics and their role in the Church. First, we need to recognize the diversity among young people and not be afraid of or threatened by it. In the United States, the Church is culturally and ethnically diverse, and Hispanic-Latine young people are the emerging majority. There are other types of diversity to keep in mind, such as different liturgical preferences and spiritual practices in and out of the structural Church. There is an unfortunate tendency to homogenize young people in pastoral communities—such as shutting down pastoral juvenil ministries (Hispanic-Latine ministry with young people) or merging them into mainstream ministry. But this homogenization denies young people their forms of prayer and cultural knowledge, which inform their way of being Church and make sense of their life experiences. The diversity of cultural, linguistic, and/or ethnically centered communities of young people is often perceived as divisive rather than enriching. It is indeed logistically challenging to engage a wide diversity of young people in one consultative body, but we can provide young members of consultative bodies with peers to consult with, “a larger group out of which they speak,” as O’Keefe puts it, to build their confidence and skills. Church leaders need to recognize these groups not merely as “youth groups” but, in O’Keefe’s words, “a deliberative body that thinks about the life of the church from the perspective of the youth.”

Second, Church leaders need to shift the way they talk about young people, to move from a “problem narrative” to an “assets narrative.” When we focus on the increasing disaffiliation of young people, we see them as a problem to be solved rather than people to be in relationship with. There is also a tendency for older people to see intergenerational differences as a sign of deficiency in young people. If we define young people by their struggles and questions, we won’t be able to see the richness of their life experiences. An assets-focused narrative, on the other hand, allows us to see young people first and foremost as children of God who are dignified, capable, and gifted. When we value young people’s baptism and God-given gifts, then we will want to remove logistical obstacles to listening to their voices and include them in consultative groups and decision-making processes. An asset narrative allows us to recognize young people’s strengths: their collaborative orientation to learning, resilience, bilingualism (in the case of most first, 1.5 and second generations), multicultural perspective, inclusivity, and inquisitive thinking. If we want to become a synodal Church, we need a pastoral conversion that helps us see young people as the assets they are.

Throughout her career working with young people, Christina Lamas, executive director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, has witnessed the capacity of young adults to do great things when they are trusted with leadership at the parish and diocesan levels. “I introduced a strategy to the board and to the membership that young people were going to be one of the pillars of our five-year strategy for the organization and that involved forming a youth advisory council,” Lamas says. “It was no longer [enough to say that] we serve young people and we minister to who accompany them, but young people had to be a part of our overall strategy.” She admits that there was a bit of “resistance” to this idea because some people “felt that we don’t need [young people] at that level.” But thanks to Lamas’s advocacy and the vision of the board, in 2022, the first national youth advisory council was established. It focuses on integrating young people into the work of NFCYM, modeling to other organizations and dioceses that it is worth having young people at the table.

While young people often experience tokenism in consultative bodies in and out of the Church, at NFCYM, “they’re not above, they’re not below, so they are given as much value and attention as we would give to the Diversity Inclusion Council as we give to the Partner Leader Council,” Lamas says. In the last four years, the advisory council has influenced the internal decisions made by NFCYM board including funding and programming. They have also taken a leading role at the largest national Catholic youth conference in our country, including advising on programming, leading workshops, and participating in panel discussions. Lamas celebrates the fact that their wisdom has spread beyond NFCYM through consultation with other national organizations.

It is clear that the support and vision of Catholic leaders are necessary for creating a synodal Church that recognizes young people as members of the Body of Christ. We have started to see a shift in organizational and parish narratives regarding young people, but, Lamas says, this may be due to “the decline that we’re seeing of our young people’s engagement in their faith.” But there is a danger in including more young people out of a sense of fear or loss rather than out of a sincere recognition of their value as members of the Body of Christ. We should integrate them because there is no Church without them, for they, too, are the Church. Acting in fear, we risk seeing them as objects rather than subjects.

Fear can be paralyzing, but it can also move us into conversion when we recognize it as a spiritual desolation and allow the Holy Spirit to move through our personal and institutional fears. Another fear that often prevents us from engaging youth in our consultative bodies is our wounding history with sexual abuse. However, Lamas insists:

If we’re doing our job right, whether you’re a pastor, a DRE, a youth minister, or any caring adult that’s invested in your parish to work with young people, and you’re training adults, you’re forming them, you’re bringing awareness, then you have nothing to fear. But if you’re fearing it, [it’s] because there’s a formative element that’s lacking that hasn’t been done.

Fear can also lead us to stay in safe, familiar Church spaces. The antidote to this is to recognize lo cotidiano, or ordinary life, as sacred. It is in these informal, diverse spaces that young people move as incubators of God’s grace and revelation. Synodality recognizes and values diversity and challenges ecclesiologies that foster monoculturalism. Why, then, do we desire to homogenize our thinking and only include those we already agree with in consultative bodies? Pope Francis says that the homogenization of young people “is just as serious as the disappearance of species of animals and plants.” By discarding or limiting voices in the margins in our consultative bodies, we are discarding people’s experiences of God, different ways of spiritual knowing. Young people have a predisposition to reach out to the margins. Pope Francis reminds us that young people evangelize young people, and they can question our motives when the fear of change paralyzes us.

To better include young people, we also have to reconsider what the most common Catholic consultative bodies—pastoral councils—are for. O’Keefe says that pastoral councils tend to focus on logistical matters rather than pastoral ones because pastors often do not know how to use their councils best. Pastors don’t ask questions like, “What does it mean to bring the gospel to this community and how do we live out the gospel in this community?... How do we build a community of faith?” These are relevant questions for young people, and they may get frustrated when the conversation does not address the things that really matter to them. Fr. George Evans, pastor of Holy Name Parish in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, insists that for a real integration of young people into pastoral councils, all members need “to remember not to talk too much about the past because teenagers don’t go back that far” and instead create a “welcoming and future-oriented approach…so that they don’t feel left out.” Like Lamas, Evans believes it is crucial to meet young people where they are, not overwhelm them with work, and accommodate their needs. Young people should be consulted about their own experiences—only they can explain what it’s like to be a high-school student today, for example.

Evans insists that pastors need to renew their vision of pastoral councils and use it for the nourishment of their community. “The real purpose of the council is to monitor the vision that’s been expressed after some reflection and then to see how we are carrying out that vision,” Evans says. Consultation and spiritual conversations tend to be less tangible than making cookies for fundraisers or choosing the color of a building, but they can lead to pastoral healing and communal transformation. When it comes to changing attitudes and behaviors to achieve synodality, we need to value more intangible assets such as dreaming and encountering reality through a process of spiritual listening and interiority. If pastoral councils are about bringing the life of the parish to the table, perhaps we need to start considering different ways of consulting within established bodies. Imagine how different our pastoral “business meetings” would be if they were to follow the Conversations in the Spirit method regularly.

Evans characterizes his style as “loose and conversational rather than [focusing on] agenda and minutes and parliamentary procedure.” At times this approach may frustrate some people who see pastoral councils as an opportunity to advance their agenda, gain influence, or lobby for a position. But Evans says that conversational spaces rather than parliamentary ones provide an opportunity for encounter and discernment and that young people are probably more comfortable with a conversational approach.

The kind of renewal of vision that Evans recommends would also help pastors see their committee members as contributors and producers of knowledge rather than mere recipients of ministry. O’Keefe suggests that pastors ask themselves, “How do I bring [parishioners] into this? How do I share with them the questions that are in my mind? And then how do I hear what’s on theirs?” instead of coming in with an agenda and asking the people to help him make it happen. After forty-seven years of priesthood, including eighteen years at St. John’s Seminary, Evans observes that pastoral councils have been treated more like corporate boards than representative groups for consultation on pastoral matters. Parishioners are not used to being asked and may even prefer to focus on logistical matters rather than pastoral ones, since, as Evans says, “those concerns sometimes come more easily to people than the concerns about how [to] meet Christ and share Christ. Most of us feel [like] newcomers to being church leaders.” More worrisome is that “priests haven’t always been good at pastoral visioning either, so we’re not inclined to get the group moving in that direction.” Evans adds that seminarians aren’t receiving much education on how to interact with councils. Nonetheless, he believes that bishops with pastoral vision can model to priests what it means to consult with the faithful as one body in Christ; that is how he learned to consult with his own community.

In all his years as pastor, Evans has tried to be intentional in including youth and young adults in pastoral councils. In his experience, the young people who are best integrated into a council are those who are already active in the life of the parish, otherwise they “have nothing to say, even if they aren’t shy.” It’s important to choose young people who “don’t feel overwhelmed, pressured or overshadowed by adults.” It is crucial to recognize their valuable contributions and affirm their presence without “putting them on the spot too much.” Similarly to O’Keefe, Evans believes young people need to be provided with an orientation about the life of the Church and accompaniment from the ministers who walk with them, like a youth minister or an adult from the council.

Young people, for their part, must embrace their baptismal calling in prophecy, kingship, and priesthood to build a synodal Church. If young people want rights, they must accept the responsibility to be stewards building God’s kingdom. Wyatt Olivas, a twenty-year-old student at the University of Wyoming and the youngest member of the Synod on Synodality, believes that young people have unique charisms, such as finding beauty in diversity even amid political polarization and modeling how to resist the temptation to control. Young people are used to having everything planned out, Wyatt says, but when they overcome the need to control, they have the right spiritual disposition for approaching difficult questions. When a problem comes up, “I surrender it and I give it up—‘God, it is in your hands’—that’s step one for young people.” Olivas believes that for Americans to learn to live synodally, we need to learn to slow down and surrender our expectations and goals to God, to “focus on the big picture.” But we need to do “the small things” too: “Remind little kids that Jesus loves you, he died for you…plant positive seeds.” He also insists that we should start including young people early in their lives on parish councils—he became a member at sixteen. Moreover, if we do not see young people ready to take on leadership roles, it is not because they are deficient or incapable, but because we haven’t prepared and formed them well. Church leaders need to take responsibility to shape them as contributors to the life of the Church.

When we allow young people to be at the core of consultative processes, we not only benefit from their experience, but we also facilitate vocational discernment. We help them to see beyond their personal interests and care for the whole Body of Christ. For Olivas, the synodal process has been an opportunity to embrace his faith in a way that hadn’t been possible before. When he was “figuring life out” during his transition between high school and college, Pope Francis’s message to walk together as a synodal Church spoke deeply to him. Wyatt is now sure that “for the rest of my life I want to live like this…seeing our brothers and sisters and talking to them—talking with them and not talking for them.” He was inspired by Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s invitation to “let yourself be emptied and be filled by other people and by the Holy Spirit.” The experience of Church leaders listening attentively to everyone at the synod, including a young layperson like him, helped him to be centered in Christ. In other words, being part of a consultative process that respected his agency as a baptized disciple regardless of his age brought Olivas to pastoral conversion and a commitment to being light in the world.

Olivas’s experience shows how important it is to see pastoral councils and consultative bodies as spaces where relationships and vocations can be strengthened. Showing up to meetings and discussing business as usual can no longer be the norm. Pastoral-council and committee members need to focus on knowing each other deeply to appreciate what each one brings to the table. Thus, if we truly aim for a preferential option for young people, if we recognize them as key agents of synodality, it is imperative to form them in the spiritual disciplines of listening and discernment and give them ample opportunity to practice them. To fail to do so means stifling young people’s experiences and knowledge, using young people as promotional tokens, or homogenizing their dreams and challenges. Without the full participation of young people, we are worse equipped to discern how to live as one Church and to continue building God’s kingdom.

Recent months brought two developments that could (and should) give influential voices within conservative Catholicism the opportunity to distance themselves from Donald Trump as the Republican party’s candidate for president.

The first was Trump’s statement in April that he would not support a nationwide abortion ban, thus putting him at odds with, among others, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has continued to characterize abortion as the “pre-eminent” issue for voters. The second was Trump’s felony conviction, in May, on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in relation to paying off porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. (His sentencing is set for July 11, just days before the Republican convention in Milwaukee.)

Indeed, there are already signs of that distancing. While Trump-supporting Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress remain firm in their backing, Catholic voices on the Right appear to be seeking a different dynamic. Though there’s been criticism about the alleged political motives behind Trump’s criminal trial and conviction, Catholic conservatives don’t seem to be quite as enthusiastic about him or his movement as their white Evangelical counterparts. In a recent First Things podcast, Sohrab Ahmari—though calling the New York trial politically motivated—talked about the need “to forge a new American center.” In a May 14 article in First Things, Jonathon Van Maren wrote that “it would be shortsighted to dismiss the pro-choice rhetoric of Donald Trump and other MAGA figures as mere electioneering.... There are indications that the Trump campaign now sees pro-lifers as a political inconvenience.” In April, Carl Trueman characterized Trump as “a candidate for the presidency who treats Christians as nothing more than promising marks for his hucksterism.” These seem a departure from the manifesto “against the dead consensus” that First Things published in March 2019. (“We embrace the new nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny. Whatever else might be said about it, the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew. We will guard that space jealously.”)

Trump’s amorality has always been evident, but now that he has dropped the pretenses that were necessary in appealing to religious voters in 2016 and 2020, it seems to have some conservative Catholics recalculating their relationship to him. It isn’t explicitly an anti-Trump or “never Trump” response. It’s more like a purposeful “non-Trump” posture. Disavowing Trump and Trumpism now is perhaps a way to avoid being associated with the developments of recent months, or of being seen as complicit with what a second Trump term could bring. It may also be a way to get positioned for a possible post-Trump era. Either way, it could accelerate recent ideological shifts among right-of-center Catholics and neo-Catholic intellectuals looking for a new collective cultural and theological identity.

There is a historical precedent. Near the end of World War II, some twenty years after its endorsement of Mussolini in the 1920s, the Vatican understood that its deal with the devil was endangering the moral and institutional survival of the Catholic Church (it was even putting the personal safety of Pius XII at risk, given the Allied bombings of occupied Rome and the real risk of the pope being kidnapped by the Nazis). The years after World War II saw the creation—with the blessing of the Vatican—of Europe’s centrist Christian-Democratic parties. There’s also the example of the 1970s: sensing the corruption that was creeping into those Christian-Democratic parties, some European Catholic post–Vatican II political movements declared a “religious option” that reframed the relationship between Catholic identity and political action. That meant greater autonomy for the Catholic laity from the party that religious voters were supposed to support; the Church (the Vatican and bishops) then also pulled back on political messaging and rhetoric to voters during the campaigns.

Of course, a Catholic party has never been in the cards for the United States, and it’s even less likely now, given the diminishing role of religion and religious institutions. But there is still something to take from this example. Perhaps, for instance, conservative Catholics will embark on a new path when it comes to politics—not electorally, but in how they position themselves vis-à-vis Trump and the GOP.  Unsurprisingly, the USCCB did not acknowledge the evolving political climate at its June meeting in Louisville, making no mention of how its declaration of abortion as the “pre-eminent” issue for voters will be affected. The emphasis for now seems to be on the National Eucharistic Revival, which is in part a response to the Vatican’s rebuke in 2021 over attempts to deny communion to President Biden and Nancy Pelosi. But in a welcome statement a few days after the meeting, Archbishop Borys Gudziak, chairman of the USCCB Committee for Domestic Justice and Human Development, urged all Christians and people of good will to avoid political violence and instead pursue peace through dialogue and justice: “People in public office are receiving more death threats than ever before, some of which turn into physical attacks. About half of Americans expect there will be violence in response to future presidential elections results.”

The fact is that there is no moral, intellectual, and theological center of gravity anymore, in either our political or our ecclesial system. Many Catholics seem to be reconsidering their relationship with the pivotal figure of the last three election cycles. This is especially true for those who clearly do not identify with or support Joe Biden and the Democratic party. Trump’s continued grip on the GOP is more and more of a problem for conservative religious leaders who have realized that any hope of domesticating or “baptizing” him is futile.

With the way the campaign is unfolding, and with the very real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Catholic conservatism may not have a natural party affiliation in the United States. The transformation of the GOP under Trump makes it a bad fit, and the Democrats are clearly not an option. The feeling of political homelessness may only add to the sense of cultural displacement in a country that continues to grow more secular. Perhaps the perceived risk of moral contamination from Trumpism will prompt a new focus on theology and doctrine—a “religious option” that functions as an off-ramp from the focus on politics. That might lead to an alternative (not a mirror-like opposition) to the predominance of identity politics and social-justice theological sensibilities on the Catholic Left. It remains to be seen how post-Trump Catholic conservatism will view the relationship between church and state, especially if, as some believe, integralism has waned since 2016 and 2020. But it is scarcely conceivable that it will follow the example of centrist, anti-Fascist political Catholicism in Italy, which accepted and contributed to a non-hostile, collaborative, and Church-friendly regime of laïcité.

None of this is likely to change American politics at large. But it might change the intra-ecclesial conversation, fostering new input and insights from the Right. As to the Left: it will be interesting to see what happens as the generation of Catholic Democrats symbolized by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and John Kerry passes. In a political system that is ideologically centrifugal and tends to push away from the center, the reactions to a second Trump presidency might have a paradoxically stabilizing effect on American Catholicism. In any case, preparations for a post-Trump era should begin now, because the call to political violence and damage to the credibility of the Christian faith done in his name will continue, whatever the result of the next presidential election.