Justice. Mercy. Faith.
Through The Christian Citizen, we seek to shape a mind among American Baptists and others on matters of public concern by providing a forum for diverse voices living and working at the intersection of faith and politics, discipleship and citizenship.
Our collective failure to truly honor the victims of the Holocaust
The shadow of the Holocaust, a genocide that happened in the middle of a supposedly civilized world, while that so-called civilized world refused to believe in the barbarism despite repeated reports and pleas, is never far for me as someone who grew up in Poland, even though I was born forty years after it happened and its memorialization was neatly limited to official places with plaques. These memories are everywhere, it just takes a bit of unearthing.
Beautiful, you speak!
I invite us to open our eyes and the eyes of our hearts not only to humanity’s beauty, but how God gently nudges us every day to be Christ-like in our neighborhoods.
Learning to dance
If the Incarnation teaches us anything, it teaches that God blesses and uses the body. Today, some churches incorporate dance and movement of the body into worship itself.
Nostalgia and the Church
There is a healthy kind of nostalgia that can show us that our place is a room of remembrance, but we dare not allow unhealthy nostalgia to turn that room into an idolatrous space that will never grow, change, or adapt.
King’s vision was never meant to comfort the comfortable
Recovering King’s legacy also means confronting our own complicity in systems of injustice. King’s critique of the “white moderate”— those more devoted to order than justice — remains painfully relevant.
Ultimate allegiance
So, Church—what shall we do next? The we is imperative because if we are to truly be one nation under God, if we are to truly be incorporated in the body of Christ, if we are to truly embody our ultimate allegiance to the empire of eternity, our next moves must be different.
Featured Series
Faith and Politics
Today I ask you to choose faith
What we really need is faith. Faith in that arc and its bending, faith that what we do counts for something, faith that we can be the friends that God needs now.
Our church signs need work
Planet Fitness, the real-life Average Joe’s, come-as-you-are establishment, beat every church sign I knew with its slogan, The World Judges, We Don’t.
What then shall we say? A Christian response to election anxiety
In this moment, all eyes rest on this moment in our history. It’s my hope that we are both worthy of that weight and can show the rest of the country that we can hold all this in tension for the sake of something better.
We must deal with our public grief
When loss occurs, grief inevitably follows. Yet in public life, grief from our collective losses seems to routinely get short-circuited. We seem incapable of allowing it into our lives. But that stymies our shared project of creating communities that thrive, because it causes so many of us to pretend or wish our losses never happened. For others, it means a retreat from public life entirely.
From the editor: Across the US political spectrum, contempt, acceptance of violence on the rise
Across the U.S. political spectrum, contempt is on the rise. So too is acceptance of violence as a political tool.
Can an exhausted majority find hope in a campaign for dignity?
Change has to start with us,” Shriver believes. “We all have some responsibility for our division. It didn’t just happen to us. We’re doing this to ourselves, and we can undo it.”
Separation of church and state does not mean the church is politically innocent
We must disabuse ourselves of the false notion that the church is apolitical. We must overcome the concept, so commonly taught among us, that we might somehow, in separating church from an influence over the state or the state having influence to keep us from being church in certain ways, arrive at some spiritual state of political innocence in which spirituality or religious life is not political.
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Christian Citizen AmbassadorsAt The Christian Citizen, we’re passionate about justice, mercy, and faith. We produce award-winning content that is provocative, timely, and relevant. What started more than 25 years ago as a print publication is now a digital-first publication that maintains a commitment to print. More recently, we’ve added a weekly e-newsletter, podcast, and a growing presence on social media. Now, for the first time, we’re adding a member support program—Christian Citizen Ambassadors!
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We feature thought-provoking articles and action-inspiring essays that intersect faith, politics, discipleship