Praying for reconciliation between Bo and Bear Rinehart

Late last week, NEEDTOBREATHE’s co-founder and former guitarist Bo Rinehart accused his older brother Bear, the band’s lead singer, of “physical, emotional, and sexual abuse” in an Instagram post. Bo also alleged sexual abuse by a counselor at his father’s church camp, and admitted to struggles with alcoholism.

Bear responded Saturday, calling the accusation “deeply painful” and “wildly misleading,” and revealing that both he and Bo were sexually abused by a teenage counselor at their father’s church camp when they were eight and six years old. Bear had previously remained private about the abuse, but spoke up “to protect my family from claims that misrepresent the truth.”

Coming not long after former Newsboys frontman Michael Tait admitted to sexually assaulting several young men, these allegations are the latest scandal in the Christian music world and mark another heartbreaking chapter in the sexual abuse scandals that have shaken the American church in recent years. They also highlight the tragic role social media plays in disputes, and our desperate need for reconciliation with one another.

A tale of two brothers

Bo and Bear Rinehart were raised by a missionary family at a church camp in Possum Kingdom, South Carolina. In a 2017 Forbes interview, Bo recalled “competing at everything” with his older brother, with whom he shared a deep love for music.

The Rinehart brothers formed NEEDTOBREATHE in 1998 while attending Furman University in South Carolina. For many years, their rivalry was the driving force behind the band’s creative endeavors, with each brother trying to outdo the other.

However, by the time NEEDTOBREATHE was recording their fifth album, 2015’s Rivers in the Wasteland, the rivalry had become toxic, even leading to blows. The brothers considered dissolving the band, but ultimately reconciled, writing the song “Brother,” which would become one of NEEDTOBREATHE’s biggest hits. Bo remained with the band for five more years before departing in 2020.

After his departure, Bo began working through substance abuse issues, as well as trauma from childhood sexual abuse. In 2023, he told People Magazine that this abuse occurred between the ages of six and sixteen at the hands of three different people.

Prior to his statement Saturday, Bear had not shared publicly about the abuse he experienced, choosing to remain private about it in order to protect his three young sons.

Five years ago, Bear and Bo participated in an intensive counseling session related to the abuse and left “with an understanding that we were two young boys trying to cope with the unimaginable.” Last week’s controversy thrust both brothers’ history of sexual abuse into the spotlight, subjecting it to intense online speculation.

Trial by social media

One of the most tragic aspects of this controversy is that two men’s childhood trauma became fodder for an online gossip mill. Shortly after the initial post, many social media users took sides, targeting both men with hateful remarks before Bear ultimately disabled comments on his Instagram account.

It’s impossible for us to know what truly happened between the brothers, but when discussing other people’s struggles, Scripture warns us against “foolish talk” (Ephesians 5:4) and urges us only to speak that “which is good for building others up” (Ephesians 4:29). Gossip harms those we are supposed to love. In this case, it added to the pain of the Rinehart brothers’ estrangement, making the restoration of their relationship more challenging than ever.

In an age of trial by social media, where private disputes can easily become public feuds, Jesus encourages us to seek reconciliation privately if we can, both with those who have wronged us and those we have wronged. “If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you,” Jesus told his disciples, “leave your gift before the altar” and “be reconciled to your brother” (Matthew 5:23-24).

When people wrong us, Jesus commands us to seek restoration, first one-on-one, then with other church members, with public escalation within the church as a last resort (Matthew 18:15-17). Just as God sent Jesus to reconcile us to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18), so we too ought to seek peace with one another rather than repaying “evil for evil” (Romans 12:17).

Of course, healing may not always be possible on this side of heaven. We live in a broken world, and we are all broken people. Nevertheless, it is something we are always commanded to seek.

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all,” Paul wrote in Romans 12:18. As Christians, we must always hold our hands out to those we are estranged from, even if they do not share our desire to be reconciled.

“A reconciliation only God can provide”

Bear concluded his statement by saying, “Even after all of this, I am still hopeful for a reconciliation someday with my brother that I know only God can provide.”

We serve a God who is “able to do abundantly more than all we could ask or imagine,” including restoring the most broken relationships (Ephesians 3:20). Reconciliation is a powerful image of God’s transforming grace, and we should never stop hoping or praying for it.

Today, pray for the Rinehart brothers and for those in your life in need of reconciliation.

Ask God to show you whom he wants you to be reconciled to, and ask him to guide you as you seek “to live at peace with all.” And when you have done everything in your power to pursue healing, trust God to bring the redemption that only he can.

Denison Forum

President Trump privately told senior aides late yesterday that he has approved attack plans against Iran but is holding off in the hope that threatening to join Israel’s strikes will lead Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. At issue is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb (MOP) needed to blow up the Fordow nuclear facility, Iran’s fabled “nuclear mountain” buried half a mile deep. Fordow is believed to have some three thousand sophisticated centrifuges spinning constantly to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed to manufacture an atomic bomb. Israel does not possess weapons capable of penetrating the facility and destroying it.

But the US does.

Israel could disable Fordow by striking access points, ventilation shafts, and power supplies that would heavily impact the use of the facility. However, these could be repaired more quickly than direct damage to the facility. Israel could insert troops to invade Fordow and destroy it from within, but this would bring significant risks.

Or the US could join the conflict by using MOPs to destroy the facility. In response, however, Iran could attack our bases and Arab oil fields in the region, strangle oil shipping by closing the Strait of Hormuz, launch cyber attacks, and employ the Houthis to attack Red Sea shipping.

We are already sharing intelligence and helping intercept Iranian missiles and drones. However, there is something else we also need to share with Israel, a factor vital to our flourishing and future as a people.

They are the land, and the land is them

In his latest New York Times column, Thomas Friedman writes that Iran was delusional in thinking it could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Deceived by the Marxist ideology that framed Israel as the “oppressors” and Iranians and Palestinians as the “oppressed,” they “kept referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise with no indigenous connection to the land.”

As a result, Iran’s leaders apparently believed the Jews would not risk war that could lead to significant loss of Israeli lives. If continually menaced by local proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, they could eventually be forced off the land, removing the chief obstacle to Iran’s dominance of the Middle East.

On one level, I understand this reasoning. Across my many trips to the Holy Land, every Israeli I met spoke English, and many spoke several other languages as well. All could easily thrive elsewhere. This was part of Hamas’s October 7 strategy: to make life so intolerable in Israel that the people would abandon the nation. The issue was less that Israel’s enemies could defeat them in battle than that they could cause millions of Israelis to move away for the sake of their families and their futures.

Such a “war of attrition” was the only way Iran and its proxies could defeat a nuclear power with the military might of the Jewish state. But, as Friedman notes, they completely misunderstood Israel’s commitment to its biblical land.

I can attest to the depth and passion of this commitment even among Israel’s secular Jewish citizens. They care for the land in ways that surprise many Americans upon arrival. I have never seen a piece of trash on the ground in a Jewish neighborhood there. Every parcel of land that can be cultivated is cultivated. There is a pride of place that goes to their missional identity.

In many ways, they are the land, and the land is them.

“The insoluble problem of our national makeup”

In his First Things article, “Is America a Creedal Nation?”, author and strategist David P. Goldman compares Israel’s self-identity with the “national spirit” that led to America’s founding: “The vision of a new City on a Hill and a new Mission in the Wilderness, a manifestation of religious faith, inspired the personal sacrifice of the Founders. No other group of property-owners, free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion, ever took up arms in this way.”

In so doing, the Pilgrims and pioneers who first came to our shores appropriated biblical Israel’s self-identity as God’s chosen people on pilgrimage to their Promised Land. Like the Jews who first settled the Holy Land and those who recreated the modern State of Israel, theirs was a spiritual mission to forge a nation in which they would be free to worship God as they wished.

The 1734 First Great Awakening was essential to that founding, forging a national identity that was united in God’s providential purpose for their lives and future. After America won her independence, the 1792 Second Great Awakening helped preserve and advance this ethos.

That was then, this is now.

By imbibing and embracing the secularism of our day, our culture has abandoned the biblical orientation that empowered and impassioned our nation at its founding. As a result, Goldman says of our national culture: “It is obsessed with the individual’s journey to redemption, but that is a journey that can never be completed.”

He explains why:

No path leads to the Heavenly City from our present circumstances, and in our impatience and petulance, we confuse the mechanics of civil society with the plan of the Heavenly City. That is our chronic weakness and susceptibility, the insoluble problem of our national makeup.

If a wheel loses its hub

Despite deep political and cultural divisions, Israelis are united in confronting Iran’s existential threat to their land and future. By contrast, because secular Americans have largely abandoned any unifying commitment to a providential purpose for our nation, we have no transcendent mission. We are therefore fragmenting on every level, from abortion and sexual morality to partisan politics to healthcare to immigration.

If a bicycle wheel loses its hub, the longer it spins, the more its spokes will fragment and disintegrate.

Here we find another reason the gospel is so vital to our society. Early Christians came from fifteen different cultural groups (Acts 2:9–11), but they soon discovered that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

Christianity was once the most unifying movement in human history. It can be again: the more we are “in Christ Jesus,” the more we are “one.”

If you put a chair in the center of a room, the closer everyone draws to the chair, the closer they draw to each other.

Now make that chair a throne. Who is on yours today?

Quote for the day:

“The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.” —Dallas Willard

Our latest website resources:

• An update from Israel: Let my people sleep
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• “Our country’s second independence day”: Three steps toward racial justice and “enormous joy”
• What does the Bible say about transgenderism?
• What does science tell us about God?

Denison Forum

Six ways Iran threatens Americans today

President Donald Trump called yesterday for Iran’s unconditional surrender, though the end of its war with Israel does not appear to be in sight. If you’re wondering about Israel’s state of mind as the conflict enters a sixth day, consider this story: After an Israeli emerged from a shelter to find that an Iranian missile had destroyed his apartment, he urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv to keep up the attacks on Iran.

“It’s totally worth it,” he said. “This is for the sake of our children and grandchildren.” Other Israelis whose homes have been destroyed by Iranian missiles agreed. One said, “If we have a nuclear Iran, Israel can’t exist.”

Mr. Netanyahu told ABC News that what his country is doing is also in America’s interest:

Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. Look, I understand “America First.” I don’t understand “America Dead.” That’s what these people want. They chant “Death to America.” So we’re doing something that is in the service of mankind, of humanity, and it’s a battle of good against evil.

However, this “battle” doesn’t start with Israel. For multitudes of Iranians, it begins much closer to home.

 “I might not be alive to write these words”

Masih Alinejad is an Iranian-American journalist, author, and women’s rights activist. Time named her among its 2023 honorees for Women of the Year.

Her recent article for the Free Press begins:

I’ve spent four years of my life being hunted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They sent agents to kidnap me from my home in New York. They hired assassins to kill me on American soil. They even followed me to Davos, Switzerland, where I had to be helicoptered out of my hotel.

If not for the FBI’s protection—and the more than twenty-one safe houses I have shuttled between over the past few years—I might not be alive to write these words.

She says of Iranian leaders killed so far, “For me and for the people of Iran, they are monsters who have impoverished and tyrannized our families. They are the ones who have made millions of people’s lives miserable, not just in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.”

In response to nationwide protests against the regime in 2022, the New York Times reported that more than three hundred Iranians were killed and thousands were injured. Hundreds suffered severe eye injuries inflicted by Iranian security forces. Two teenage girls were killed—one girl’s skull was smashed, the other’s head cracked by baton blows. They were given back to their families bruised and disfigured. They were both sixteen years old.

According to Alinejad, “The Islamic Republic built its empire of tyranny on blood: of protesters, dissidents, women, children. That empire is now cracking. The people of Iran are watching to see what will come next and hoping that the world is watching, too.”

“Tehran’s most dangerous option”

The way Iran’s dictators treat their own people and others in the region is indicative of the way they would treat Americans if given the opportunity. We are mistaken if we think this conflict cannot involve us directly. Consider six scenarios, in escalating order of geopolitical impact.

One: Iran could disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes, or target energy facilities in neighboring Gulf states.

Two: They could retaliate against US support for Israel by targeting the forty thousand American troops stationed across the Middle East. In addition, some 280,000 Americans live in Israel and could become victims of Iranian aggression. Iran has already reportedly prepared missiles for strikes on American bases if the US joins Israel’s war.

Three: Iran already possesses large stockpiles of highly enriched uranium that could be dispersed in “dirty bombs” to cause widespread contamination. Such bombs could be used against Israel and Americans in the region.

Four: They could attack us at home. Andrew Roberts is the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny (one of my favorite biographies of Mr. Churchill) and a Conservative member of the British House of Lords. In the Free Press, he warns:

Iranian terrorist sleeper cells will probably be activated in the West, such as the one plotting kidnappings and assassinations recently uncovered in London. The mullahs’ penchant for attacking soft civilian targets such as synagogues and cultural centers is well known, and indicative of their frustration and rage at their failure to devastate Israel due to the technical genius of her Iron Dome defenses.

Five: In what Foreign Affairs calls “Tehran’s most dangerous option,” the regime could try to make a “run to nuclear breakout,” using what resources it has left to create nuclear weapons. Since many of Iran’s nuclear facilities cannot be destroyed except by America’s Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which requires our B2 stealth bomber, the US would then have to decide whether to intervene, a step the Trump administration is reportedly considering.

Six: Nuclear powers Russia, China, and North Korea are already aligned with Iran in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and have been supporting each other with military resources; China has also provided Iran with rocket fuel and aerospace components. If they join this growing conflict on Iran’s side, a regional battle could quickly escalate into a world war the US is in a precarious position to fight.

“God shows no partiality”

It is therefore vital that America’s Christians intercede as though this conflict directly involves us, because it soon could. Because “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34), he grieves every life lost in this conflict and all that preceded it. So should we.

Consequently, let’s pray urgently for:

• Iran’s leaders to repent of their murderous ideology and seek true peace for their people and the world (2 Thessalonians 3:16).
• Leaders in Israel and the West to respond in ways that do not exacerbate the conflict but bring lasting resolution (James 1:5).
• Protection for noncombatants on both sides (2 Samuel 22:2–4).
• God to redeem this crisis by using it to turn millions to the true Messiah in a spiritual awakening that would transform the Middle East (Ezekiel 36:26–28).

Francis of Assisi famously prayed,

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

Let’s join him on our knees today, to the glory of God.

Quote for the day:

“Christ alone can bring lasting peace—peace with God, peace among men and nations, and peace within our hearts.” —Billy Graham

Our latest website resources:

• “Our country’s second independence day”: Three steps toward racial justice and “enormous joy”
• What does science tell us about God?
• What does the Bible say about transgenderism?
• Newsboys frontman Michael Tait steps down: Sin, consequences, and repentance
• A single survivor of the Air India plane crash found: Choosing faith when faith is hard to choose

Denison Forum