By Molly Worthen
Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes frequently about religion.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology and pastoral care at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, has an unusual approach to Lent.
Instead of giving up chocolate or fasting, “sometimes I’ll say I’m giving up self-neglect,” she told me. For Lent two years ago she began blogging through “40 Days of Self-Care.” She committed each day to healthier eating, more yoga, meditation and better time management — making do with what she had rather than buying new stuff, since “marketing experts are tapping into self-care,” she said. The reaction from others surprised her: “First friends and then strangers told me they were following the Lenten challenge. It floored me that people were taking it seriously. It connected to a hunger,” Dr. Walker-Barnes said. She published a book called “Sacred Self-Care” last year.
Dr. Walker-Barnes is one of many Christians who are reclaiming Lent, the 40 days of reflection, repentance and self-denial before Easter. What looks to outsiders like the biggest buzzkill of the church calendar has become a season that some younger Christians look forward to. They see it as a chance to rethink false promises about personal freedom and purpose — promises offered by churches that have let them down and by a mainstream culture in which podcast gurus push juice cleanses and meditation in the name of self-optimization, a crooked image of the Lenten fast.
The earliest Christians marked the lead-up to Easter with a short period of fasting and repentance. By the late fourth century, Christians in Rome observed a 40-day Lent, according to some historians; in the sixth century Pope Gregory I inaugurated Ash Wednesday, when Christians with especially grievous sins on their conscience were supposed to do public penance in sackcloth and ashes. In 1091 a church synod called for all believers to receive a sprinkling or a smudge of these biblical symbols of repentance to remind them that “you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Over the centuries, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and some Protestants have continued to observe Lent by abstaining from certain foods or skipping meals, with wide variations in severity. But to many evangelicals, Lent long smacked of Catholic ritualism and bad theology, a season of self-punishment that implies you can earn God’s grace through your own effort.
Evangelicals have their own traditions of fasting: Their Puritan ancestors fasted on days of humiliation after epidemics, poor harvests and other signs of God’s wrath. Today many evangelical churches encourage some kind of New Year’s fast during January, and there is a marketplace of fasting programs like the Daniel Fast, based on Daniel’s preference for vegetables and lentils instead of delicacies from the king’s table in the Book of Daniel. (There’s also a version to help adherents lose weight.)
Dr. Walker-Barnes wonders whether majority-white churches have leaned into a food-focused approach to self-denial that is more bounded by cultural context than they realize. “There are ways to reinterpret what we fast from. For me, grounded in my experience as a Black woman and the ways I have been taught to look at my body and myself as unworthy of care and love, fasting can teach me to suppress and repress my body even more,” she said. For Christians of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q. Christians, “what we need to work on is learning to see ourselves as made in God’s image,” she said.
All major world religions have some tradition of fasting. It is an almost universal practice across time and culture; our species has an impulse to deny bodily desires in order to connect with something transcendent. But that impulse takes on the shape of the society around it, for better and for worse. So how — if at all — should 21st-century Christians submit to ancient disciplines?
When I called up current students and recent graduates from Christian colleges, most of whom started taking Lent seriously only when they got to college, they described the surprising freedom they found in submitting to tradition. I asked about sin and the English Puritan John Owen’s command to “load your conscience; and leave it not until it be thoroughly affected with the guilt of your indwelling corruption, until it is sensible of its wound, and lie in the dust before the Lord.” They pointed out that the call to self-mortification is not an end in itself. Lent is a time to repent of worshiping false idols, yes — in order to reorient the impulse to worship. The aim of the hunger pangs is to drive home your dependence on God; the structure of tradition is a tool for that.
Tiffany Reed grew up in a biracial Pentecostal family that moved frequently and fasted off and on, according to the direction of her father. “He would read about church history, watch documentaries and then get excited and introduce a new family practice,” she told me. As an undergraduate at the King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, she watched some evangelical classmates become Anglicans or convert to Catholicism. She graduated in 2016; a few years later, she moved to Waco, Texas, to join Brazos Fellows, a program partnered with Baylor University that offers recent college graduates nine months of theological study. There she found herself drawn to the structure of the Anglican tradition and began investigating early Christians’ approaches to fasting.
While some evangelicals join Anglican churches to escape tight links with the religious right, “For me, politics had nothing to do with it,” Ms. Reed said. “It was more sensing a bit of D.I.Y.-ness to the way Christianity is practiced in the evangelical church. That can be a good thing, giving people room to be more expressive, putting the emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus. But for me, the motivation was needing less of that, because I started to see too much emphasis on your preferences and what feels good.”
Modern secular culture tends to frame personal freedom in terms of negative liberty, in the phrase made famous by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: the absence of constraints, the ability to do what you like as long as you don’t impinge on the liberties of others. But Ms. Reed, who now works as a freelance writer in Waco, explained the paradox of feeling freer during the rule-bound Lenten season: The rules rescue you from the pressure to pretend you are a totally autonomous being. “We live in a culture where you can have every comfort and an extremely high level of self-determination relative to history. You can do what you want with your time and money,” she said. “In that context, taking on Lent is a powerful reminder that you’re a finite, weak creature who has to eat multiple times a day to stay alive. The true nature of our presence in this world is extreme dependence.”
Fasting, she said, is one of the “patterns God has given us for human flourishing. If we trust the patterns, they work, wherever you come from, whatever your background. They might, on the surface, seem like too much or too oppressive or ‘that doesn’t fit my personal story.’ But trust that this pattern is a living thing and can work with you. It is not a rigid, dead burden.”
Julie Canlis, who has a doctorate in theology and works at an Anglican church in Washington State, loves talking about the strictures of Lent with secular friends. “If there is anything that secular society does acknowledge, it’s that we limit freedom the most for ourselves,” she told me. “We know that just removing external barriers does not automatically open the path for internal freedom.” Her four teenagers “love fasting and love Lent,” she said. “They do it because no one is challenging them to do hard things.”
In 2024, most traditional Lenten practices are not in themselves countercultural. Tune into Joe Rogan’s podcast to hear about fasting to ketosis or solitude in a sensory deprivation tank that would make a medieval anchorite jealous. Poke around Goop’s website for Gwyneth Paltrow’s tips on “intuitive fasting” and meditation. The former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink sells dietary supplements, protein shakes and other products to complement his best-selling manifesto on asceticism, hard-core fitness and mental training, “Discipline equals freedom.” “Impose what you want on your brain: Discipline. Power, positivity. Will,” Mr. Willink writes. This is self-mortification as a path to self-rule, optimized performance and playacting control over the chaos of life and inevitability of death.
“Being a guy, looking at a lot of these disciplines for self-denial, staying regimented — their goal is to cultivate masculinity in a lot of cases, whatever that means to a given podcaster or influencer, as opposed to becoming more attentive to your dependence and mortality,” Owen Rittgers, a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, told me. What is outrageous about Lent is not the fasting; it’s the call to come to terms with our dependence on powers beyond our control and to let ancient traditions make choices for us.
Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and fending off the devil’s temptations before he began his ministry. The story is such a familiar part of the Gospels that it can be easy to overlook how strange and counterintuitive it is: Abstaining from food and the company of other humans does not weaken Jesus’ resolve but makes him stronger. This is not because he becomes tougher or more independent but because the experience sharpens his awareness that “man shall not live on bread alone.” Even Jesus depends entirely on God.
This is never an easy lesson, even for lifelong Christians. During Rosemary Surdyke’s Catholic childhood in Missouri, Lent was about “giving up chocolate or your favorite snack or movies, not really emphasizing the spiritual aspects,” she told me. When she began her first year at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan, she was startled by her classmates’ interest in Lent and Holy Week — including many evangelical Protestants who had never observed Lent. She came to see fasting as a type of prayer. Lent, then, is not about groveling in repentance for one’s sins but understanding sin in the context of “hope in the Resurrection and Christ’s mercy” — which Ms. Surdyke sees as a powerful response to the clichéd college quest for personal identity. “Identity is such a prominent theme in our culture. Everyone is so desperate to know who they are,” she said. “I believe you cannot know who you are unless it’s in relationship with Christ, because he made you, he defines you.”
The college students rediscovering Lent are also oftentimes the American Christians most interested in learning from Christians outside the West and those from marginalized backgrounds. “I know plenty of evangelical students who are frustrated with the way evangelicalism has become more of a voting bloc than a religious faith community,” Noelle Worley, another student at Wheaton, told me. “A lot of the people I interact with are really connected to the idea of global Christianity through the ages and reflecting that in their worship.”
Too often in the West, Christians in the majority culture turn a blind eye to the way in which sin — the forces that alienate us from God — is not just personal but also structural: baked into the institutions and relationships that organize our lives. Soong-Chan Rah, a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., contrasted Korean immigrant churches’ more holistic understanding of sin against the individualism he has encountered in other Christian institutions. “In revival meetings in Korean communities, there’s this crying out in suffering. It’s not purely ‘I did all these bad things and therefore I need to repent of them’ but ‘I’m in the midst of this suffering, broken reality, and part of it is my fault, but part of it is the world I live in,’” he told me. Lent calls Christians to live in that brokenness. When affluent Christians fast, their prayers should dwell on the more than 800 million people worldwide whose daily hunger is not an optional act of devotion.
It’s always tempting for Christians, like humans in general, to leave these hard lessons aside and opt for pseudo-freedom. The world offers plenty of ways to pretend you are in control and paddling in the general direction of grander meaning. Whether we practice Lent or not, we all need a tool for confronting the frailty that makes us human and spotting a false promise when we see one.
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