Bekah McNeel

The arrival of a child into a religious community usually sets off a flurry of activity. Someone usually organizes a meal delivery. A pastor might visit the hospital. Older parents often reach out with words of advice to the younger, sleep-deprived new parents. But when that child is born with a severe or chronic medical condition, families need more than the church can give, said Matt Steinhauer, a retired minister with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, former insurance broker, and the parent of a son with Down syndrome.

In the year 2050, when today’s 3-year-olds will be 30-year-olds, climate scientists expect the height of the slowly unfolding climate disaster to have arrived. The specifics vary slightly, but most experts warn that some regions will face extreme drought while others are entirely flooded with sea level rise. Dangerous heat and humidity — as some regions of the U.S. have faced this summer — combined with poor air quality will make it dangerous to be outside for a growing portion of the year in many places.

For the 49 years that Roe v. Wade protected legal abortion across the country, religious groups, including Catholic bishops and conservative evangelicals, became some of its loudest and best-known opponents. And when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many Christians claimed it as both a political and spiritual victory.

As congregations age and shrink across the U.S., churches find their sizable buildings often become underutilized. The solution might be found in addressing the child care crisis. 

After the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade,the landscape of abortion access in the U.S. shifted dramatically. In the past year, many Republican state governments have moved to further restrict or fully outlaw abortion, while some states with Democratic legislatures and/or governors have written abortion protections into law. In every state, pregnant people face difficult decisions and shifting barriers to receiving abortion care.

In a country with the weakest parental leave standards of all its economic peers, church policy to support new parents is rarely more generous than what one might get from a public school, an architecture firm, or a dentist’s office. In many cases there is no set policy, and ordained and lay staff are sometimes treated differently.

IT MEANS A LOT to Jack Teter that Christians are getting involved in the fight for better sex education. “A lot of folks in my generation got shame-based sex ed,” said Teter, the regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “So, it’s really cool to see these groups talking about the morals of consent, love, and communication.”

For Candace Woods, it’s a spiritual issue. Woods, who is in the ordination process with the United Church of Christ and a facilitator for the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum developed by the UCC and the Unitarian Universalist Association, was brought up in so-called purity culture, and the most guidance she had from her church and community growing up was “Don’t have sex.” As a consequence, when she married a man 14 years her senior, she said that she “was very unprepared for a sexual relationship.”

As that relationship was ending in divorce, Woods encountered the Our Whole Lives curriculum through a UCC congregation. That curriculum, which is written for secular as well as faith-based education for kindergarteners through adults, emphasizes self-worth, responsibility, sexual health, justice, and inclusivity—values Woods held spiritually but until then had never heard applied to sexuality. “I found myself being incredibly healed by this work,” Woods told Sojourners, and as a result she has felt called to advocate for more kids to have access to curricula such as Our Whole Lives.

Woods joined others in advocating for Colorado’s HB19-1032, which made a minor adjustment to an existing law: It added teaching of consent as an “affirmative, unambiguous, voluntary, continuous, knowing agreement between all participants in each physical act within the course of a sexual encounter or interpersonal relationship.” Among those advocating for the bill was the Denver-based racial justice nonprofit Soul 2 Soul Sisters. According to Briana Simmons, who coordinates the “Black Women’s Healing, Health, and Joy” program for the organization, comprehensive sex education provides information that is vital to bodily autonomy, an important value in Womanist faith traditions, Christian and otherwise. “We can only make the best decision for ourselves if we have the most accurate and comprehensive information,” Simmons said. “At that point, we can consult with whomever we trust, be that a faith leader or a higher power, as we make those decisions for ourselves.”

The bill ultimately passed, but Colorado, like many states, has felt the push and pull between progressive and conservative political movements in the past year. After the racial reckonings of 2020, when millions of Americans participated in Black Lives Matter marches and online campaigns, 2021 saw a profusion of legislation proposed and passed to prevent schools from teaching about systemic racism. In many cases, sex education follows the same rhythm. Teter has seen pushback in the form of “bad faith” bills used mostly by conservative lawmakers to voice opposition to recent progress. For instance, one bill called for high-definition footage of a human embryo to be shown during sex education classes, ostensibly to discourage abortion. But such footage doesn’t exist, Teter said, and such “off-the-cuff bills” have little chance of going anywhere. On the whole, Teter said, comprehensive sex education is “in a good spot” in Colorado.

That’s not the case everywhere.

“Obviously this order is actually going to cause more harm,” said Rev. Gavin Rogers, associate minister at Travis Park Church in San Antonio. Rogers said characterization gender-affirming care as “child abuse” flies in the face of research, which has shown its importance in the health and wellbeing of transgender youth, who already face many barriers to access.

While Tijuana and California received most of the remaining asylum seekers in the heavily publicized “caravan,” cities all along the U.S.-Mexico border have seen smaller eruptions in the ongoing immigration disaster. Advocates working in those cities do not, however, say that they are seeing waves of immigrants, floods of asylum seekers, or any other crisis-invoking metaphor. The U.S. is not, they say, being overrun.