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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – When Lies Crumble

A.F. BRANCO | on March 8, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-when-lies-crumble/

Schumer and the Democrats are in a panic over Tucker Carlson showing unseen exculpatory J6 videos.

Tucker Carlson J6 Video
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.

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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Texas Tech Suspends Head Basketball Coach for Quoting the Bible


BY: JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 06, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/06/texas-tech-suspends-head-basketball-coach-for-quoting-the-bible/

Texas Tech men's basketball coach Mark Adams

Less than one month after Texas Tech University was busted for using race-based ideology as a litmus test for hiring candidates in the school’s biology department, the four-year university suspended head men’s basketball coach Mark Adams for quoting the Bible to a student-athlete.

TTU Director of Athletics Kirby Hocutt suspended Adams on Sunday after learning that the coach encouraged one of his basketball players “to be more receptive to coaching and referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters.”

The comment, according to the university, was “inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive” and deserved a formal written reprimand from Hocutt, suspension, and an investigation into Adams’ previous “interactions with his players and staff.”

TTU claimed that when confronted with offense over the comments, Adams “immediately addressed this with the team and apologized.” Adams, however, said that was not the case.

“One of my coaches said it bothered the player,” Adams told Stadium. “I explained to them. I didn’t apologize.” 

The controversial exchange, Adams said, was supposed to be “a private conversation about coaching and when you have a job, and being coachable.”

“I said that in the Bible that Jesus talks about how we all have bosses, and we all are servants,” Adams added. “I was quoting the Bible about that.”

TTU first hired Adams as head coach in April of 2021 to replace Chris Beard. In Adams’ first year leading the team, he secured the most wins, 27, of any first-year head coach in TTU basketball history. He also led the Red Raiders to the Big 12 finals and the Sweet 16.

Adams’ impressive debut record, however, quickly dwindled earlier this year. One week before the 2023 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, TTU’s men’s team is only 5-13 in the Big 12 and 16-15 overall.


Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Tucker Carlson Calls Out ‘Professional Christians’ Who Don’t Speak Up For Religious Freedom


By: HAROLD HUTCHISON, REPORTER | March 02, 20239:45 PM ET

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/tucker-carlson-calls-out-professional-christians-who-dont-speak-up-for-religious-freedom-2659494812.html/

DCNF - Tucker Canada Christianity DOJ - Featured
Screenshot/Rumble/Fox News

Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out “professional Christians” Thursday, saying they did not speak up for religious freedom when “Christians are arrested for being Christians.”

“You have to wonder when you see a tape like that where are so-called Christian leaders?” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller and honorary board member of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said after discussing the legal ordeal of Mark Houck, who was charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 2022 before being acquitted in January. “Where is Russell Moore and all the other breastfeeding Christians as that happens, as the U.S. government cracks down on Christianity and prayer? Silent.” 

WATCH:

Carlson noted that the Biden administration dropped charges against some rioters in Portland, while others were sentenced to community service in contrast to the prosecutions of Houck and Paul Vaughn, who was one of 11 pro-life activists arrested over a March 2021 protest at an abortion clinic. Video showed heavily armed FBI agents taking Vaughn into custody in October.

Carlson also mocked Attorney General Merrick Garland over his explanation during a Wednesday hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee about why more pro-life protesters were arrested than alleged perpetrators of attacks on crisis pregnancy centers.

Carlson then discussed the ordeal of Canadian pastor Derek Reimer, who was arrested by Calgary police Thursday on charges of “mischief” and “causing a disturbance,” after he was forcibly removed while protesting an “all ages” drag show, the Post-Millennial reported.

“Where all the professional Christians? You have to wonder that again,” Carlson said. “Where’s David French and Beth Moore and Tim Keller and all these people who were defending Christianity when actual Christians are being arrested for being Christians? Not a word.”

Can we really trust the Bible?


By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor| Thursday, March 02, 2023

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/can-we-really-trust-the-bible.html/

(Photo: Unsplash/James Coleman)

On June 30, 2022, someone named Robert posted this comment on our ministry’s YouTube channel: “Why would anyone in the 21st century give a [expletive] what illiterate desert dwellers from 2,000 years ago thought about anything?”

In writing this, he reflected the views of many people today, especially the younger generation. Why on Earth should I care about what this old, outmoded, outdated book has to say? What does it have to do with me?

Of course, the authors of the Bible were anything but “illiterate desert dwellers.” To this day, scholars are still trying to understand all the nuances of the brilliant Hebrew of Job (let alone plumb the philosophical depths of the book), while theologians have written thousands of books and articles debating the meaning of single verses in the writings of Paul. But who cares about facts? It’s convenient to bash the Bible and dismiss it out of hand. “I’ve got better things to do than read the Bible!”

I want to give you a fresh perspective on God’s Word. I want to invite you to get reacquainted with the most wonderful book that has ever been written. Are you ready to come along?

In recent years, I’ve heard lots of people say, “You can’t trust the Bibles you read. They are translations of translations of translations.” Is there any truth to this? Absolutely not. Whether you’re reading an older English Bible (like the King James Version) or a modern English Bible (like the NIV or ESV or NASB), you’re reading a translation into English straight from biblical Hebrew, biblical Aramaic, or biblical Greek. That’s it.

You are not reading a translation from Hebrew into Greek into Latin into German into English (or something like that). You are reading a translation straight from the biblical languages (namely, Hebrew and a little Aramaic for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament) into English. Everyone who knows anything about Bible translations knows this to be true, and the translators have spent decades studying the original languages and then many years producing their translations. So, let’s bury that myth about “translations from translations” once and for all.

“But,” you say, “I’ve heard of ancient translations of the Bible like the Septuagint, translating the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, or the Vulgate, translating the whole Bible into Latin. And then scholars today use those versions, meaning, they use translations of translations. What about that?”

Well, you’re right and you’re wrong. It is true that such translations exist, dating as far back as 250 years before the time of Jesus. And it is true that scholars use them to see how ancient readers understood the original text. In other words, when a scholar is translating the Hebrew Scriptures into English today, he will see how the Septuagint translated those same verses more than 2,000 years ago, seeking to understand the Hebrew as best as possible. Why not use all the tools you have? But then — and this is the key point — that scholar will go directly from the original language into the target language, in this case, English.

“But hang on,” you protest. “I understand what you’re saying about these scholars going straight from the biblical languages into the modern language they’re working with. But you keep talking about ‘the original Hebrew’ or the ‘original Greek,’ yet we don’t have any original copies of the Bible. We only have copies of copies of copies. So that undermines your whole argument.”

Actually, it’s true that we only have copies of copies of copies. It’s the same with virtually all the major books from the ancient world. But we must remember that the people copying books and verses of the Bible did so with the utmost seriousness, believing these to be sacred texts, even the very Word of God. It’s true, of course, that with so much interest in these texts, not every scribe was professionally trained or thoroughly meticulous. But there’s good news here, too, since we have so many thousands of manuscripts to compare, sorting out the least accurate from the most accurate.

The more you dig into this, the more amazing it becomes. That’s why, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the late 1940s, scholars were amazed to see that among the Hebrew manuscripts found there, some of them dating back to as early as 150-100 years BC, some were identical to the text found in our Hebrew Bibles today virtually letter for letter.

But this should not surprise us. After all, if you look at a Hebrew Bible today, which is based on manuscripts that are roughly 1,000 years old, you’ll see a note like this at the end of the Torah (also known as the Pentateuch, referring to the first five books of the Bible). It lists the total number of verses in the Torah, then the middle verse. Then the total number of words in the Torah, then the middle word, then the total number of letters in the Torah — yes, letters.

This means that, upon finishing his work of copying out the Torah, the scribe would have to go back and count every verse, every word, and every letter. (How many times do you have to count something like that before you’re sure you counted correctly?) And what happens if your total deviates by one single letter? You cannot use the manuscript. It is considered defective. Talk about a painstaking job!

It is true that there are some verses in the Bible that we find troubling today, such as the command to drive out (or kill) the Canaanites, a subject I have addressed at length in other books. For the moment, let me just say that there are explanations that make good sense — and I mean good moral sense. But here, I want to focus on another subject. What kind of morality does the Bible put forth? How does God call us to live?

Let’s start with the Ten Commandments. If you’ve forgotten them or are not familiar with them, I’ll print them here in full:

And God spoke all these words:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

“You shall have no other gods before me.

“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in Heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

“You shall not murder.

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:1–17).

Now, ask yourself this question. If the whole world lived by these words, would the world be a better place? A safer place? A healthier place? A more moral place? Would it be easier for you to raise your kids in an environment like this? Would there be less crime? Would marriages be stronger? Would people be more at peace with themselves and one another? The answer is obviously yes — unless you think that more murder and more adultery and more theft and more lying and more dishonoring of parents and more covetousness and more workaholism and more worship of false gods would make the world a better place. Yet it is these Ten Commandments which lay the moral foundation of the rest of the Old Testament. Perhaps the Bible has some divine wisdom after all.


(This is a small section of the chapter “Why Should We Care About What the Bible Says?” from my new book Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith: Responding to the Deconstructionist Movement With Unshakable, Timeless Truth, used here with permission from the publisher.)

‘He Gets Us’ Ad Reactions Prove Changing The Gospel Doesn’t Change Hearts


BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/13/he-gets-us-ad-reactions-prove-changing-the-gospel-doesnt-change-hearts/

He Gets Us “Love Your Enemies” ad
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.

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“He Gets Us” is spending upwards of a billion dollars on an advertising campaign to expose millions of people, including those who tuned in to the 2023 Super Bowl, to Jesus. But its attempt to win over the world with a modernized version of Christ failed to endear some of those it sought to engage. The first commercial flipped through a series of black-and-white photos of children helping others in need. The 30-second clip ended with the tagline “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” a reference to Christ’s teaching about childlike faith in Matthew 18.

“If I could see the world through the eyes of a child, what a wonderful world this would be,” the song narrated.

The second ad featured a slideshow of black-and-white photos depicting heated arguments — most of them political in nature.

“Jesus loved the people we hate,” the video concluded before plugging the He Gets Us campaign website.

These commercials offer the vaguest and most inoffensive and uncontroversial picture of Jesus possible, even to people who already have a distaste for Christianity. In fact, they are part of a larger campaign known for making radical comparisons between Jesus and the U.S. border crisis, which is harnessed by corrupt cartels for profit, and bold conflations of Jesus and his disciples with groups who roam the streets today, “challeng[ing] authority” and “ma[king] a lot of people uneasy,” in an attempt to appeal to current culture.

“We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life,” the campaign’s website states.

The hope in running these eyebrow-raising ads, campaign representatives disclosed, is to use an updated portrayal of Christ to sympathize with the plights of people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical” of organized religion.

In other words, the ads were deliberately designed to look, walk, and talk like the social justice agenda that has found its way into every American institution in the last decade in a last-ditch effort to appeal to a worldly culture.

Yet the universal messages communicated by these videos were still broadly rejected and smeared.

“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” progressive darling and Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter shortly after the second “He Gets Us” ad aired, with her tweet garnering nearly 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 retweets as of this writing.

The people funding the campaign endured even more scrutiny from the corporate media, their mouthpieces, and outraged keyboard warriors than the ads themselves.

No matter how hard Christian campaigns — especially evangelical ones — like He Gets Us try to win over the world by twisting the Gospel to fit our culture’s standards, they will fail.

Jesus said, 19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:19-21 (NIV)

Do Not Conform to This World

It should come as no surprise that even the tamest of ads that barely mentions Jesus was doomed from the start. Christian campaigns like He Gets Us operate under the premise that repackaging the Gospel to make our society think Christians and Jesus are cool entices people to consider following Jesus. Oftentimes, they go to great lengths to trash their own — faithful Christians — to be viewed and accepted by the same world that despises Christ-followers who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life.

He Gets Us was born out of the idea that the Christians of today are not good enough at marketing Jesus. After all, an alarming number of Americans are abandoning church.

“How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” organizers ask on the campaign’s website. As a result, they claim “many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today.” They say:

Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.

Anyone who reads his Bible, however, knows our society will never welcome the Good News with open arms. That’s because the Gospel, in its truest form, is offensive to the world. It announces unequivocally that every person is a vile sinner who deserves death and that even the so-called good works we do are tainted by self-interest and are filthy in the eyes of a holy God. It tells of a loving Father who gave up his only Son Jesus to live a perfect life and die the most brutal death imaginable as a sacrifice for the same sort of people who murdered Him. It proclaims that this Jesus miraculously rose from the grave, and it demands that anyone who follows Him must lay down his own comfort and desires and even his very life every single day.

Nothing about this offensive message conforms to our culture. In fact, the written Word of God demands that we “do not conform to the pattern of this world.”

Dressing up the Word of God to appeal to the masses is the exact opposite of what Jesus and the apostles did and what Christians are commanded to do. We are told to sow the seed of the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, to preach Christ crucified — not water down the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God, who detests sin, into someone who perfectly embodies the modern culture.

Jesus Doesn’t Need Rebranding

There is nothing wrong with bringing Jesus to the masses — it’s what we’re commanded to do — but we have to do it well.

Jesus wasn’t “only human after all,” as the song in the first He Gets Us campaign suggested. He was fully human and fully God, and Scripture tells us it’s only because of this glorious truth that Jesus was qualified to be our Savior.

Jesus’ mission from God to die for the sins of the world cannot be reduced to a few choice words he said. We care about what Jesus said, but we can’t separate that from what He did. Jesus didn’t just preach love your neighbor or love your enemies or have childlike faith. He rebuked sin, cast out demons, and promised eternal life for those who repent.

That alone is great news that doesn’t need editorializing or tweaking or watering down. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”

He Gets Us sends a different message: that maybe the pure Gospel is something to be ashamed of because maybe the power of God, absent fresh aesthetics and modern social justice narratives, isn’t enough to save.

That doesn’t mean we stop sharing the Good News on whatever platforms we can. There’s certainly a space for Christians to share the love of God — and the gift of new life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ — to the millions watching the biggest sporting event of the year and everyone else. But let’s not squander that opportunity by peddling convenient narratives.

Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.


Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Micharl Brown Op-ed: Satan is beginning to show his hand more clearly


By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Thursday, February 09, 2023

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/satan-is-beginning-to-show-his-hand-more-clearly.html/

Sam Smith performs onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

This past Monday morning, I was teaching hundreds of ministry school students at Christ for the Nations in Dallas on the topic of demons and deliverance. During the class, I stated that in the days ahead, I believed that satanic manifestations would become much more open and overt in our society. Rather than hiding himself in the culture, the devil will reveal himself more clearly.

After teaching, I got back to my room and began to read headlines and receive emails that confirmed the very thing I was saying. (More on that in a moment.)

Of course, we’ve been seeing this trend for years now.

One prominent example would be the rise of Drag Queens in our culture, some of them in overtly satanic attire, reading to toddlers in libraries, and performing at churches.

Another prominent example would be the “Shout Your Abortion” movement and the celebration of radical, pro-abortion legislation. This is in stark contrast to the old Bill Clinton adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a radical feminist group with the acronym WITCH, standing for the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. (I kid you not.) They certainly got their message across!

But most groups are not that overt (even if tongue in cheek), and gay activists learned decades ago that the in-your-face, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” approach was not working. Instead, gay strategists adopted a policy of presenting themselves to be exactly the same as the couple next door, just like you in every way, except gay. (This was laid out in the watershed 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer It’s Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)

So, from a strategic viewpoint, most groups wanting to bring about radical change to society do so in more covert, incremental ways rather than announcing, “We’re a terrorist conspiracy from Hell!”

In the same way, Satan doesn’t march around as a huge, horned dragon carrying a pitchfork.

As a senior demon counseled a younger demon in C. S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, “The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.” 

These days, however, it’s as if Satan is coming out in full force, red tights and all — if not literally, then metaphorically. What else can be said of the performance of “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards this past Sunday night? As the Breitbart headline announced, “Non-Binary Pop Star Sam Smith Performs BDSM, Devil-Themed ‘Unholy’ at the Grammys.” How lovely!

But even that only told part of the story.

As explained in more detail by the American Family Association, “During the annual Grammy Awards ceremony on Feb. 5, originally designed to recognize outstanding artists in the music industry, Pfizer pharmaceutical company felt it fitting to sponsor performers Sam Smith, who claims to be non-binary, and Kim Petras, who claims to be transgender. These two gave the nation a Satan-themed performance of their song ‘Unholy,’ in which Petras performed inside a cage with drag queens dressed in devil costumes, while Smith gyrated in a costume with devil horns sticking out from a top hat.

“The entire ‘performance’ depicted a hellish scene with lots of darkness, blood red colors and flames.”

So, you have: 1. the name of the song, “Unholy”; 2. both lead performers denying their biological realities, one of them wearing devil’s horns; 3. drag queens in devil costumes; 4. BDSM-related themes; 5. and the fires of Hell. I would say that is pretty clear!

No wonder podcaster Liz Wheeler tweeted, “Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”

Compared to some other past hits (whose lyrics are virtually unrepeatable in moral circles), the lyrics to “Unholy” are relatively tame. It is the overall message of the Grammy performance that shouts out its depravity loudly and clearly.

Similar to this is the announcement from The Satanic Temple that it is raising funds to provide “free religious [meaning Satanic] telehealth medication abortion care in New Mexico.”

But this could be good news for us as followers of Jesus. The greater the darkness, the clearer our light is seen. May it shine brightly in front of the whole world! And may we shine as lights without shame, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.

And don’t be surprised if, in the days ahead, in front of your very eyes, you witness scenes as if taken straight out of the Bible where, in broad daylight, visibly demonized people get set free in Jesus’ name — dramatically, gloriously, and in full public view.

Things are heating up.

(For a great “holy” version of “Unholy” by a contemporary Gospel artist, go here. It’s titled, “If Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ ‘Unholy’ were a Christian song by Beckah Shae.”)

Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on FacebookTwitter, or YouTube.

In A Culture Full of Sam Smiths, Christianity Is the Real Subversion


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/07/in-a-culture-full-of-sam-smiths-christianity-is-the-real-subversion/

Sam Smith and other dancers in "Unholy" music video

Hollywood is in desperate need of new ideas. Take Sunday’s Grammy Awards, for example. If there were ever a spectacle that could simultaneously be described as demonic and trite, it would be Sam Smith’s performance of “Unholy,” which rang the final death knell for the satanic-ritual-as-art trope.

As Federalist contributor Isabelle Rosini wrote, it was as boring as it was unoriginal. Stiletto-clad devils? Latex pants? Whips? Women in cages? Bursts of flame to signify — in case it wasn’t clear enough — that Smith was singing from the pit of hell? “Been there, done that,” artists ranging from Lil Nas X to Lady Gaga would say.

And it all fell flat. Despite the media’s attempts at running interference — with all the typical Republicanspounce framing — the awards show was decidedly uninteresting, and this points to a broader crisis within the arts world itself. There is nothing it can produce that will shock the American public, quasi-satanic orgies and all.

Modern American culture has become a willing collaborator to the arts world — from Hollywood to the Oval Office, from TikTok to the public school classroom — thanks to the ascendancy of leftist orthodoxy in cultural and political institutions. Art can no longer be subversive once the political and broader media establishments espouse its values, whether those be sexual perversion or anti-religious bigotry.

Thus art has ceased to be interesting or subversive. Instead, the arts world and the establishment have merged — First Lady Jill Biden presented at the award show after all — producing mediocre content according to its tastes. If art wants to become subversive again, it must reject the values most prized by our modern culture. It must discard the idols of the left, from sexual deviancy to bitter racism. It must trash wokeness. Until it comes up with a fresh message, expect a continued mass exodus.

Reactionaries who really want to buck establishment tastes are congregating not in an art museum or mosh pit — but, ironically, at church. As Julia Yost described last summer in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” pandemic-weary Manhattanites have rebelled against leftist orthodoxy by embracing traditional morality and the Catholic Church:

By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church — and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.

Comedian Tim Dillon has noticed the same phenomenon. “All the cool kids now are unwoke and some of them are going back to Christianity because it’s the only way to be rebellious — because everybody’s blue-haired, non-binary, talking about piss orgies,” Dillon said in a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.

@limitlessbrotherhood

Being woke is not cool anymore. Religious kids are now considered the rebellious ones

♬ Joe Rogan X Tim Dillion – The Limitless Brotherhood™

That to be “transgressive” in this day and age means attending church and rediscovering religious orthodoxy is quite the plot twist, but it’s encouraging for the West’s prospects. Let’s hope this trend continues, and that so-called artists like Sam Smith and his tired satanism shtick get the red, latex boot.


Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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Catholic school suspends teen for remainder of year for believing God created 2 genders, protesting transgender students using girls’ bathrooms


By: PAUL SACCA | February 05, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/catholic-school-suspends-teen-for-remainder-of-year-for-believing-god-created-2-genders-protesting-transgender-students-using-girls-bathrooms-2659374644.html/

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A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.

Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males. Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.

Alexander informed The Epoch Times that St. Joseph’s Catholic High School told him that his attendance at the school would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students. Alexander said the school labeled his beliefs as “offensive” and “bullying” because there was a transgender student in his class. Alexander insists that he has no plans to be violent in defending his ideology, and doesn’t feel as though he is bullying anyone.

“Offense is obviously defined by the offended. I expressed my religious beliefs in class and it spiraled out of control,” Alexander explained. “Not everybody’s going to like that. That doesn’t make me a bully. It doesn’t mean I’m harassing anybody. They express their beliefs and I express mine. Mine obviously don’t fit the narrative.”

He said, “This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”

Alexander told The Post Millennial, “They’re using it as a technicality to say that they’re not disciplining me, and it’s just a form of exclusion to protect the other students.”

However, Alexander is already enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, which reportedly bars him from enrolling at any other education programs.

Alexander said, “I am unable to do any other form of education because as long as I’m enrolled in the Catholic board, I’m not allowed to take an alternative route of education. So I’m enrolled, but I’m not allowed to attend school. So right now I actually have no form of education.”

Alexander stated that he plans to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.

Alexander is appealing his suspension. However, his appeal is reportedly being held up because Alexander previously asked for parental independence so as not to drag his parents into this quandary.

Alexander’s lawyer James Kitchen said, “He does live with his parents and they have an excellent relationship. He seeks guidance from them and they gladly give it to him. But he runs his own life. And that’s actually by design, because that’s how his parents raised him to be.”

St. Joseph’s Catholic High School principal Derek Lennox and Mark Searson, the director of education for the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board, both said they could not comment on the situation.

Christians face harassment in more countries than any other religious group, Pew study finds


By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | February 6, 2023

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-face-harassment-in-155-countries-study-finds.html/

Indian Catholic devotees offer the way of the cross prayers after an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Mary’s Basilica in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on March 5, 2014. | AFP via Getty Images/Noah Seelam

Christians faced harassment in more countries than any other religious group amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to a recent Pew Research study finding an increase in 45 countries where followers of Christ face social or government abuse or violence since 2012. 

The data on restrictions to religion around the globe, released last November, was featured in a Jan. 27 report showing that Christians face harassment in over 155 countries in 2020, an increase from 110 in 2012. The organization’s definition of “harassment” can include a wide range of actions, including verbal abuse to physical violence and killings committed by governments, social groups or individuals. The study captured “cases where individuals or groups feel singled out or unable to express their religious belief or nonbelief.” The study rated 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion using the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.

Pew’s Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices, while its Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. Researchers sifted through over a dozen publicly available data sources for the report, including the U.S. Department of State’s annual peports on international religious freedom and annual reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Overall, physical harassment related to religion occurred in more than two-thirds of countries in 2020, the research shows. Muslims faced harassment in 145 countries, an increase from 109 in 2012. Jews, who make up 0.2% of the global population, face harassment in 94 countries, up from 71 in 2012. 

The study found that Christian groups were “targeted by private individuals and organizations in nine countries” as Christians were often blamed for the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“In Turkey, an Armenian Orthodox church’s door was set on fire, and news reports said the man told police that he acted because “they [Armenian Christians] brought the coronavirus” to Turkey,” the Nov. 27 Pew report states.

“In Egypt, conspiracy theories blamed the pandemic on the Coptic Orthodox Christian minority, which international Christian observers said exacerbated the discrimination the minority group already faced.”

In India, two Christians were beaten and killed while in police custody for violating COVID-19 curfews in Tamil Nadu, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual international religious freedom report. 

The study also found a nine-fold increase in countries where non-religious people face harassment. Pew named the United States among 27 countries where “religiously unaffiliated people” were harassed in 2020.

“Restrictions on religion don’t just affect those who are religious. Religiously unaffiliated people also are harassed because of what they believe,” states the Jan. 27 report by research analysts Sarah Crawford and Virginia Villa, which focuses on harassment against the religious unaffiliated.

Pew study says religiously unaffiliated face harassment in the US | Screenshot/Pew Research

The report also found that the religiously unaffiliated faced harassment in 12 majority-Muslim nations and six majority-Christian countries. 

Forms of government harassment for atheists, according to Pew, included atheist groups in Croatia — a majority-Catholic country — who alleged the presence of the cross and other Roman Catholic symbolism in public buildings like hospitals and courtrooms were unconstitutional. 

And in countries like Pakistan, where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion, atheists are not given a “no religion” option for their identification cards, although the “government requires people to state their religious affiliation.”

Examples of social harassment cited by Pew included a political satirist in Lebanon who called atheism the “religion of donkeys” during a program on a TV channel backed by that nation’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement political party.

While the rise of the religious “nones” isn’t new, Pew predicts the trend could result in the number of Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to as low as 35% of all Americans by 2070.

The Pew findings come as the global persecution watchdog organization Open Doors reported last year that over 360 million Christians experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination across the globe. 

But even as more people shy away from identifying with any religion, many of those who report no religious affiliation still partake in a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices and beliefs. 

According to a 202 Baylor University study, many “nones” still attend religious services, pray, meditate, believe in God or a higher power, have religious experiences, and believe in Heaven, Hell and miracles.

Catholic students kicked out of the Smithsonian ​for wearing pro-life hats


By: CARLOS GARCIA | January 31, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/catholic-students-kicked-out-of-the-smithsonian-for-wearing-pro-life-hats-2659337484.html/

Image Source: WYFF-TV YouTube video screenshot

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A dozen Catholic school students were kicked out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., because they were wearing beanies with a pro-life message.

The American Center of Law and Justice is representing the parents of the students from Our Lady of the Rosary School in Greenville County, South Carolina. An attorney for the ACLJ told WYFF-TV that the teenagers tried to attend the museum after attending the annual March for Life on Jan. 20.

A mother of one of the students posted to Twitter about the incident. She wrote that her daughter told the man they were wearing the hats in order to identify each other in the crowd attending the museum. They said that a security guard approached them and told them to either take off the beanies or leave the museum. When they asked why they were being asked to leave, the guard reportedly told them that the museum was a “neutral zone.”

Nora Luz Kriegel, a parent of students at the Catholic school, joined a group that wrote the museum to petition for a change in its policies.

“They should be allowed to wear the hats that they were wearing and to be able to express themselves,” said Kriegel to WYFF. “And I felt it was very wrong that this person harassed them.”

A spokesperson for the air and space museum released a statement about the incident.

“Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident, and have determine steps to ensure this does not happen again,” said Alison Wood, the museum’s deputy director of communications.

Here’s a local news report about the incident:

Greenville students removed from National Air and Space Museum for wearing pro-life hats www.youtube.com

Wokeness Is Coming for Classical Christian Education


BY: DAVID GOODWIN | JANUARY 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/20/wokeness-is-coming-for-classical-christian-education/

classical christian school
Classical Christian education is not ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist.’ Its texts address the universal truths about the human condition.

Author David Goodwin profile

DAVID GOODWIN

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It’s been a good year for classical Christian education. New school starts are up threefold, a book on classical education became No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and on Jan. 26, Fox Nation will release season two of a popular series on classical Christian education, “The Miseducation of America.” Of course, with growth comes attention. What is unusual this time is that someone with ties to our movement — one of our own — draws focus to a growing divide.

On Jan. 12, in the online journal Current, Jessica Hooten Wilson asked, “Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education? It should come as no surprise that, within her mainstream academic ecosphere as a scholar at Pepperdine University, she gets pressure. “I experience regular pushback from those who perceive [classical Christian education] as white, Western-only, and male-dominated.” She proceeds to cast aspersions on a few people and organizations — including, indirectly, mine. Her accusations become a pretext for her thesis: “If the classical Christian school movement is to survive — let alone flourish — we must oppose all forms of racism and misogyny and stand with the beauty, goodness, and truth that we hold up for our students.” I’ll take her up on that charge.

Hooten Wilson is a staccato note at the end of a new tune within our circles. Her article praises those groups she believes are taking the right steps. So far, I’ve heard no one publicly state the thesis so clearly as she does: “We should peruse the authors of the works and, if applicable, the editors or introductory writers to ensure an assortment of voices … as well as an equality of both sexes. If we look at the table of contents of a textbook or a reading list for a semester and find not a single woman or person of color in that list, then that curriculum is misrepresenting the classical Christian tradition.”

Choosing the Classical Canon

For the better part of three millennia, philosophical, theological, and literary authors labored to create the classical canon, representing countless cultural influences. Over much of this same time period, learned scholars have made lists of those that deserve “canon” status. It is unclear if there are minorities or women in Cassiodorus’ list of authors (400 A.D.), or Leonardo Bruni or Battista Guarino’s lists (humanists from the 1400s) — they don’t use those categories. Mortimer Adler and his team of about 40 renowned scholars chose the most widely recognized list of books in our time based upon their contribution to “the great conversation.” Adler’s merit-based criteria required a work to have changed the course of history and to have developed the collective Western mind. What Adler’s team did not do is look to race or sex as criteria.

The Western classical tradition has long included people of every race and sex in a particular way: The tradition deals with a body of texts that address the universal truths about the human condition, rising above our culture’s current quest to silo everyone into an intersection of identity.

Whatever your identity may be, the long journey toward Aeneus’ destiny amplifies the tension between duty and desire. The hilarity of twins unknown to each other, living in the same city, begets “A Comedy of Errors,” no matter your race or sex. Would Hooten Wilson tell the young women and minorities in our schools that they cannot fully converse with these texts because their voices are not represented in them? Shall our schools sacrifice universal human dignity on the altar of token inclusion? Hooten Wilson limits her criteria to women and minorities. Some, like Kimberle Crenshaw, will not be satisfied with this attempt to diversify our reading lists — there will always be one more disaffected group.

Duped into Old-Fashioned Racism and Sexism

By Hooten Wilson’s standard, we must scrape and scrape until we find a “fair” representation of “diverse” contributors. “I am especially excited about the number of women that we added to the Middle Ages list. … Classical schools should look through their reading lists to make sure women and persons of color are not excluded from their curriculum.” Classical Christian education should not be duped by the spirit of our age into old-fashioned racism or sexism. This spirit was cultivated not by our tradition, as Hooten Wilson claims, but rather by the Frankfurt School.

During the 1930s, a group of cultural Marxist scholars set up shop at Columbia University. The Frankfurt School set out on a mission to end the influence of Christianity in our culture. Their thickly veiled product called critical theory deliberately divides us by whispering one small lie, presented in two axioms: For a person to relate to anything, or gain from anything — in this case an intellectual tradition — it must have elements that “look like them” and match their “identity.” And, a second axiom follows: Thus, if something does not contain “diverse and inclusive” elements, it is racist or misogynist. These fruits of critical theory travel down a circuitous path from the Frankfurt School, to Hooten Wilson’s proposal, to a few classical educators who take incremental steps toward critical theory — all of this under the trendy label of “inclusiveness.”

True Liberation Through Classical Christian Education

Classical education was created to, and has, liberated the minds of countless people groups in history, and it is capable of doing the same in America today — and beyond. It has been at the forefront of the march for freedom and education; for individual rights apart from race or class or sex. If we let the very toxin that infects progressive education get into our classrooms, we’re doomed. This toxin was created and propagated by those who hate our tradition. Should we voluntarily drink it?

My daughter recently graduated from New Saint Andrews College. This is one of the institutions that those in Hooten Wilson’s camp label “misogynist.” The college seeks to uphold and respect traditional Christian femininity, which displeases feminists who seem to hate femininity. Misogyny? When my daughter brought her friends to our home over Thanksgiving, I remember listening to the conversation and thinking, “Where do these women come from? They’re strong, bright, extremely well-read, fluent in ancient languages, and honoring of Christian truth — including their God-given womanhood.” None were weak women. All seemed faithful, happy, and confident. I don’t think any of them would want Hooten Wilson’s prescription for their reading list.

Is Racism a Bug or a Feature in Classical Christian Education?

The Frankfurt School’s purpose was to deconstruct. To do so, they inserted a “bug” in our educational system: critical theory, and all of its descendent forms. Some in our movement now offer a batch of code that has this bug embedded deeply within it — in the form of reading lists. By Hooten Wilson’s reckoning, these groups are heading in the right direction. The rest of us are not. Will our institutions continue to follow her lead by adopting coded terms like “Kingdom Diversity”? Or will we recognize the code as a virus and say, “No thank you. The classical Christian tradition is above all that nonsense — and the nonsense of white nationalists, by the way. May a plague be on all your racist houses.”

If classical Christian education is to survive, it has to reject the foolishness of our age and embrace Christ’s way alone. Christ’s church favors neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.

The humanities are great because they unite. They are universal. Women and non-Europeans are now, in our present time, contributing to classical Christian education in spades. I work so that all children can rise up and join the great conversation without barriers.

“Identity,” however, won’t fit here. Check it at the door. We are Christ’s. We are classical. Those who want to be loved by the spirit of our age will become intoxicated by it, and slowly die of its poison.


David Goodwin is the editor of The Classical Difference magazine, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and the co-author of The New York Times no. 1 best seller “Battle for the American Mind.” You can find him at Substack.

Christian charity worker faces potential jail time, fine after speaking about leaving LGBT lifestyle


By Jon Brown | Fox News | January 20, 2023

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/world/christian-charity-worker-faces-potential-jail-time-fine-speaking-leaving-lgbt-lifestyle

A Christian charity worker in Malta could face jail time after he claimed that his faith enabled him to turn away from a homosexual lifestyle he no longer wanted.

Matthew Grech, 33, faces potential fines and imprisonment for allegedly falling afoul of his country’s ban on “conversion practices” when he explained to a local media outlet last year how he left homosexuality behind because he came to believe it was wrong.

“I was invited by this new emerging platform in Malta called PMnews to share my story and to discuss sexuality in general,” Grech told Fox News Digital, noting that he was “surprised” when police later called him early on a Sunday morning and ultimately served him with a prosecution order summoning him to court on Feb. 3.

Legal counsel for Grech maintains that his case is the first of its kind and threatens to set in motion a legal “domino effect” that could endanger freedom of speech and religious liberty throughout the Western world.

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Matthew Grech, 33, faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly advertising "conversion practices" when he gave an interview about his life.
Matthew Grech, 33, faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly advertising “conversion practices” when he gave an interview about his life. (Christian Concern)

‘Domino effect’

According to a transcript of his interview with PMnews Malta, at no point did Grech invite anyone to attend therapy to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, though he was critical of the Maltese law and explained how he came to believe that homosexuality is not an identity, but rather a practice that was incompatible with his Christian faith.

“They knew my stance around homosexuality and sexuality in general, so they wanted to hear a little bit more about it because many shun the other side of the story,” Grech said. “But these guys wanted to explore it because they’re for freedom of speech, and they don’t like it when viewpoints are shut down simply because they are unpopular.”

Grech said that after LGBT activists with ties to the Maltese government and the Malta Gay Rights Movement (MGRM) reported him to police for the interview, he now faces up to €5,000 in fines or up to five months in prison if convicted of violating Article 3, Section 3 of Malta’s Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender and Gender Expression Act, which makes it “unlawful for any person” to “advertise conversion practices.” The journalists who interviewed him also have upcoming court dates and face potential criminal sanctions for their part in conducting the interview.

MGRM did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment by time of publication.

Grech faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly running afoul of the country's ban on advertising "conversion practices."
Grech faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly running afoul of the country’s ban on advertising “conversion practices.” (Sylvain Sonnet via Getty Images)

Grech is slated to appear before the Court of Magistrates in Valletta on Feb. 3, where he will be assisted in legal defense by the Christian Legal Centre (CLC), a London-based nonprofit that focuses on cases of religious discrimination against Christians.

Andrea Williams, chief executive of the CLC, said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital that Grech’s treatment by Maltese authorities is discriminatory and violates “his Christian freedoms and fundamental right to free speech.”

Grech’s lawyers plan to argue that his prosecution is a violation of his right to freedom of expression guaranteed under both the Constitution of Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

“The domino effect of ‘conversion therapy’ bans began in Malta,” said Williams, who warned that the case threatens to set a precedent that could spread to other Western countries “unless robust action is taken.”

European Commission headquarters lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag in support of the LGBT community in Brussels, Belgium, on May 16, 2020.
European Commission headquarters lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag in support of the LGBT community in Brussels, Belgium, on May 16, 2020. (NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images)

Malta, an island nation between Sicily and the coast of North Africa, was the first country in the European Union to criminalize practices that would seek to “change, repress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity and/or gender expression.”

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The legislation, which passed unanimously in 2016, resembles conversion therapy bans throughout the world, including in 20 states and more than 100 municipalities in the U.S.

Many such bans in the U.S. apply only to minors and carve out exemptions for religious counseling, though some in other countries prohibit consenting adults from seeking help from anyone for unwanted sexual attractions and behaviors.

“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion. They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else.” — Matthew Grech

In Canada, therapists who provide any form of counseling to repress or reduce “non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behavior” or “non-cisgender identity” could face up to five years in prison, according to a law put in place last year that prompted protests from thousands of churches throughout North America because of its scope.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in the annual Pride Parade in Toronto, Ontario, in 2016.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in the annual Pride Parade in Toronto, Ontario, in 2016. (Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

The Conservative Party-led U.K. government announced this week a plan to debate legislation to add transgender identity to Britain’s conversion therapy ban, which before applied only to sexual orientation.

The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy as tantamount to torture, and U.N. Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz called for a global ban on it in 2020.

‘Simply barbaric’

During a 2020 interview similar to that which led to his prosecution, Grech recalled how his gentle personality and boyhood musical interests made him a target growing up among other boys, who bullied him and mocked him as gay. He said he would assume that label as an identity and go on to become involved in sexual relationships with other men in an attempt to find male acceptance, but that he began to desire a new lifestyle upon becoming a Christian.

Grech became involved with the U.K.-based International Federation for Therapeutic and Counseling Choice (IFTCC), an organization that aims “to promote a caring, nonjudgmental environment where people who choose to move away from their unwanted feelings and behaviors can find the support they’re seeking,” according to its website.

He is also a trustee of Core Issues Trust, a group that works closely with IFTCC and supports “men and women with homosexual issues who voluntarily seek change in sexual preference and expression.”

Grech believes activists worldwide are using conversion therapy bans to silence dissenting opinions.
Grech believes activists worldwide are using conversion therapy bans to silence dissenting opinions. (Christian Concern)

Grech says there many others like him who have “very valid reasons” for seeking to move away from unwanted sexual feelings, but fears such individuals are increasingly being marginalized and driven underground by the effects of overbroad conversion therapy bans.

“To deny people access to spiritual or secular support in any context is barbaric,” he said. “It’s simply barbaric.”

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Grech believes the activists propelling the sort of conversion therapy ban enforcement he is facing “don’t just want to ban forced help or support, they want to ban our views altogether.”

“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion,” he said. “They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else. They do have a belief system, they do have a very specific vision.”

LGBT campaigners join Gay Liberation Front veterans marking the 50th anniversary of the first U.K. Pride march in 1972 on July 1, 2022, in London.
LGBT campaigners join Gay Liberation Front veterans marking the 50th anniversary of the first U.K. Pride march in 1972 on July 1, 2022, in London. (Mark Kerrison/Contributor via Getty Images)

Despite its small size, Grech noted that Maltese culture is seen as a “forerunner” and “pioneer” in Europe, consistently ranking at the top of ILGA-Europe’s list of most progressive countries.

Parliamentary Secretary Rebecca Buttigieg announced last week that Malta is strengthening its conversion therapy law by adding an amendment to redefine the advertising clause “to include the publishing, advertising, displaying, distributing, referral and circulation of any material promoting the practice,” according to the Times of Malta.

“So it is concerning the other countries will follow suit, but we need to alert other nations and to show them what the real face of a conversion therapy ban is,” Grech said. “It’s just a foothold for these LGBT lobbies to get into churches and to get the pastors and get the gospel ministers to shut up and conform, and it’s just simply not sustainable.”

‘The idol of our generation’

Grech noted the irony that the first case of his kind should be in Malta, which has a notable position in the history of his faith. One of the first Roman colonies to convert to Christianity, the island featured in the New Testament as the place where the apostle Paul was shipwrecked and left unharmed from the bite of a venomous snake that emerged from a fire.

“That story speaks to us to this day, because when Paul arrived in Malta, a fire was set because it was cold, and a snake fastened itself against his arm,” Grech said, referencing the story in Acts 28. “He shook it off, told it where it needs to go, and it went back to the fire.”

“People at first thought he was being judged by the gods because that snake fastened itself around his arm, but when they saw that nothing happened to him, they changed their minds,” he said.

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The apostle Paul shakes a viper off of his arm into the fire, as recounted in Acts 28.
The apostle Paul shakes a viper off of his arm into the fire, as recounted in Acts 28. (ZU_09 via Getty Images)

Grech likened the biblical story to his legal battle and the spiritual struggles of people like him who fight to maintain their faith despite their feelings amid what he sees as the tightening grip of opposition from government and the culture.

“I believe that as we survive this snake that is trying to poison us and harm us, as we look toward God, who is able to save us and redeem us, people will shift their perspective,” he said.

“We believe in the best for our nation, but there has been an idol that has been set up, and it needs to come down,” Grech added. “We are facing the idol of our generation, and we’re saying, ‘We’re not going to bow down to you, no matter what the cost.'”

Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.

The dangers of theological liberalism


By William Wolfe, Op-ed contributor | Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-dangers-of-theological-liberalism.html/

Getty Images

We live in an age of great compromise and confusion, especially regarding the Christian faith. In some ways, that means we live in the same sort of day and age that every Christian has lived in since Christ ascended to Heaven approximately 2,000 years ago.

The New Testament authors, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the immediate decades following the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, were acutely aware of the need to defend the pure teaching of the faith against those who would undermine its doctrine and application.

In 1 Timothy 4:1, Paul writes that “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”

God knew what He was doing when He gave the Church such strong warnings.

But while there is no doubt that false teaching and heresies have always plagued the Christian Church, each era has its own battles to fight. In the early Church period, they had to deal with Gnosticism, Christological errors, and confusion about the Holy Spirit.

Thankfully, in our day and age, we have creeds and confessions, like the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, which set forward the clear, uncompromised principles of historical, orthodox Christianity. Or, if you are a Baptist, we have the Baptist Faith & Message 2000.

Still, even though we have these statements, false teaching abounds. One particularly pernicious strain of corrupted Christianity is what’s known as “theological liberalism.” The late R.C. Sproul warned that “We are living in a day when liberal theology has made deep inroads in the church.”

Even if you don’t know its name, I’m confident you’ve encountered some of its teachings — like those who deny the reality of the resurrection of Christ. So, to better equip you to spot and counter theological liberalism, let me explain what it is and why it’s dangerous.

What is theological liberalism?

In his book The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900, Gary Dorrien explains,

“The idea of liberal theology is nearly three centuries old. In essence, it is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the 18th century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience.”

In other words, the starting point of theological liberalism is that it trades the external, objective, God-given standard of the Bible in matters of faith for an individual’s personal, subjective opinion and experience.

This is an exact inversion of the Christian faith. We know who God is and what He wants from mankind because God speaks — and speaks first. Theological liberalism trades “Thus saith the Lord” for “So saith man.”

Summarizing Dorrien’s book, pastor and theologian Kevin DeYoung provides six other characteristics of theological liberalism along with the rejection of external authority (in addition to the one above). He says it argues that:

  1. “Christianity is a movement of social reconstruction.”
  2. “Christianity must be credible and relevant.”
  3. “Truth can be known only through changing symbols and forms.”
  4. “Theological controversy is about language, not about truth.”
  5. “The historical accuracies of biblical facts and events are not crucial, so long as we meet Jesus in the pages of Scripture.”
  6. “The true religion is the way of Christ, not any particular doctrines about Christ.”

DeYoung concludes that “Liberals believe they are making Christianity relevant, credible, beneficial, and humane. Evangelicals in the line of J. Gresham Machen believe they are making something other than Christianity. That was the dividing line a century ago, and the division persists.”

What does this look like in practice? Theological liberalism denies key doctrines like the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. They deny that the Bible is, in the words of Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, “to be received as the authoritative Word of God” and that “Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” and serves as the final rule of faith and practice.

Because it denies the truthfulness and reliability of Scripture, it denies the historical creation account, events like the flood, the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, and often the resurrection of Jesus itself.

In other words, theological liberalism largely rejects the supernatural and miraculous events recorded in the Bible as fact, calling them fiction instead. Furthermore, it denies essential doctrines like original sin and the indwelling sin in all mankind, which makes the sacrifice of Christ on the cross unnecessary.

Finally, in our present moment, theological liberalism is often seen in the rejection of the creation order and biblical sexual morality.  Denominations that deny the truthfulness of God’s Word almost always end up rejecting what it teaches about sex and marriage when the world pressures it to compromise. This is why many of the major “mainline denominations,” like the Presbyterian Church of the United States (PCUSA), most United Methodist churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, American Baptists, and the Episcopal Church, are all LGBT-affirming.

Make no mistake about it: Once a denomination, church, pastor, or Christian leader adopts the core teachings of liberal theology, progressive (Bible-denying) political positions will be adopted as well.

Why theological liberalism is dangerous

The main reason theological liberalism is so dangerous is that it destroys the Gospel. What is the Gospel? It is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16), the message that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24), and that this salvation is found only in Jesus Christ, the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).

Liberal theology denies that man is so sinful he needs a savior. It tells us that we can’t trust the Bible as God’s Word and that Jesus might not have been anything more than a good teacher who set an example for moral living. Theological liberalism is a “religious system” that has been constructed to help sinful man feel better about himself, not show him that he is a rebel on the way to Hell and then reveal a gracious, God-sent, God-incarnate savior.

Thus, the danger of theological liberalism is that it sends people to Hell. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a biblical fact. This is why Paul warns that false teaching is, in fact, the teaching of demons — because it comes from Hell and damns man to Hell in the final judgment.

J. Gresham Machen was a faithful theologian in the 20th century. He wrote a best-selling theology book called Christianity and Liberalism that is still well-known and well-read today. In this book, Machen warned that liberal Christianity isn’t just a compromised form of Christianity, but really another religion altogether — and a false one at that. He argues that “despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”

In other words, it’s not Christianity — and it’s not even close to being Christian.

Sproul agreed with Machen, warning that “Liberalism stands in every generation as a flat rejection of the faith. It must not be viewed as a simple subset or denominational impulse of Christianity; it must be seen for what it is — the antithesis of Christianity based on a complete rejection of the biblical Christ and His Gospel.”

Jesus warned His followers to “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13).

Theological liberalism represents the “broad gate” that ultimately leads to destruction. Why? Because it follows in the footsteps of the serpent, who, in the garden planted the deathly seed of doubt in the form of “Did God really say?”

As faithful Christians, we reject this question and confidently claim, “Yes, God really did say” — He said we are fallen, Jesus Christ is the savior, the Bible is trustworthy, men are men and women are women, marriage is between a man and woman, Heaven and Hell are real, and the only way to eternal life is to repent of our sins and trust in the finished work of Christ on the cross.

That’s the narrow gate. It might sound fantastic — and it is. But it is the way that leads to life. So, reject theological liberalism, which is no Christianity at all, and, as the Apostle Paul admonishes us, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16).


Originally published at the Standing for Freedom Center. 

William Wolfe served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College, and is finishing his Masters of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Follow William on Twitter at @William_E_Wolfe

If Your Kids Are Unhappy, Take Them to Church


BY: MARY ROSE KULCZAK | DECEMBER 28, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/28/if-your-kids-are-unhappy-take-them-to-church/

Altar boy praying in church with his rosary
A huge burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them grace and refuge from anxiety.

Author Mary Rose Kulczak profile

MARY ROSE KULCZAK

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It seems like every time I turn around, an editor assigns me a story related to the mental health crises of our children. Most of the health experts I speak to correlate Covid lockdowns and our children’s fragile state. Closing schools played a major role in this phenomenon, but what if other crucial factors are being overlooked?

Another story, seemingly unrelated to the mental health crisis, is making the rounds in the corporate press. Church attendance is on a rapid decline. The “nones,” survey respondents who say they have no religious affiliation, are the fastest-growing group in the United States every year. We now have a generation of adults that grew up not attending worship services weekly, and they are raising their children in a similar fashion. 

The “nones” seem to prefer a parenting style that says: “We’re fine without church and worship and religious instruction and institutions, thank you very much.” But they are not fine. Their children are not coping and managing the day-to-day stresses and inconveniences thrown at them. They are fragile and increasingly so. 

The “nones” will tell you it is because we need to better embrace children’s differences and preferences (like their pronouns) while empowering them with positive affirmations and encouraging personal acceptance through self-esteem workshops. We clutter their calendars with sports, theater, STEM clubs, and dance classes. If none of that pans out, we allow our kids to self-medicate with hours spent on social media.

Parents will do all of this, but won’t take their families to church. Yet research shows that children who attend weekly worship services have higher GPAs, score higher on standardized tests, and are less likely to be held back a grade. They also are more likely to achieve a bachelor’s degree in college.

So why aren’t parents taking their children to weekly worship?

When surveyed, parents often respond that their children and teens do not want to attend worship. This democratic approach to family decision-making only seems to apply to church attendance, however. For other important decisions like wearing a seatbelt or vaccinations, parents balk at giving their children voting privileges. A child’s vote carries more weight when it aligns with a parent’s desire to stay home in pajamas on a Sunday morning.

Why should church attendance be considered a powerful tool for parents to boost their children’s mental health? We can look to the research for the answer.

In a 2018 study, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found some surprising benefits to children and adolescents who attend weekly worship. It turns out that children and teens who attend church grow up to be young adults with higher rates of reported happiness and life satisfaction. They were less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, less likely to use illicit drugs, and less likely to engage in early sex and contract sexually transmitted infections.

In addition, these same young adults were more likely to embrace volunteering and reported feeling a sense of mission and purpose than their non-church-attending counterparts.

With all of these positive outcomes for children who attend weekly worship, should we be surprised that children who do not have a similar structure in their lives experience an inverse phenomenon? Is it any wonder that anxiety and depression among children and teens are on the rise when every day, their still-forming brains are bombarded with information about doom and destruction while they drown in a sea of gender confusion and racial animus?

We think we can combat all the negativity by telling children: “You are perfect! You are awesome! You keep being you!” We put these pithy platitudes on T-shirts and backpacks and stickers with unicorns and rainbows. At the end of a bad day, our kids know that this is no substitute for the real deal.

Each of us knows these sentiments are superficial. We are poor, miserable sinners in need of forgiveness. Where do we go with all our baggage when the church is not an option? We go to therapists and pharmacists, but trends show that the last place parents want to go is the place actually offering a solution.

What could families find at church that they won’t find anywhere else? Hopefully, something that is woefully lacking in the world around them: the truth.

Newsflash, kids! You are not perfect! You know that mean thing you did to your classmate in the cafeteria? That was a sin. And that nasty thought you had about that person? That was a sin. And the snide comment you made to your mom when you were hangry? Yep. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Good news: you’ve come to the right place! Jesus came for sinners. As a matter of fact, the church is filled with them. Each week, they come to hear the message that even though we are sinful human beings, Jesus died for those sins. When we confess those nasty thoughts and horrible things we did, we can receive forgiveness — a clean slate! 

Will we mess up again on Monday? Of course. But that’s why we can look forward to church. Can we try harder to be better people? Kinder people? Yes, we can. Does our forgiveness depend upon what we do and how we perform each week? Nope. You are forgiven because God loves you that much, so much that he sent his son to take the punishment that should have been yours and mine.

Imagine what a burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them that grace. How much better could they cope with a bad day, knowing that each moment offers a fresh start? How much more resilient could our children become?

Parents, we put our children at a disadvantage when we do not give them the very thing they need for their mental and spiritual health. It is time to put a new priority on the family calendar every Sunday. If we won’t do it for ourselves (and we should), let’s do it for our children. The next generation depends on it.


Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.

Vatican kicks pro-life activist priest out of clergy, alleges ‘blasphemous communications’


By Anders Hagstrom | Fox News | December 18, 2022

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/world/vatican-kicks-pro-life-activist-priest-clergy-alleges-blasphemous-communications

Father Frank Pavone, a firebrand pro-life activist who has stirred controversy over the issue within the Church, was removed from the Roman Catholic priesthood this fall. Pavone was officially removed from the clergy on November 9 following receipt of a letter from Pope Francis’ representative in the U.S., according to the New York Times. The letter ordered that Pavone was to be removed with no possibility of appeal.

“This action was taken after Father Pavone was found guilty in canonical proceedings of blasphemous communications on social media, and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop,” the letter reportedly reads, without specifying the communications.

Pavone claimed he had received no communication from the Vatican in an interview with the Catholic News Agency Saturday. Nevertheless, he said his removal comes as little surprise.

“I’ve been persecuted in the church for decades, decades. This is nothing new for me,” he told CNA. “They just don’t like the work I’m doing for these babies.”

HILLARY CLINTON SAYS OVERTURNING ROE V. WADE PUTS US IN COMPANY OF AFGHANISTAN, SUDAN

Father Frank Pavone, left, celebrates Catholic Mass for attendees at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 27, 2021.
Father Frank Pavone, left, celebrates Catholic Mass for attendees at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 27, 2021. (SOPA Images / Contributor via Getty Images)
VATICAN - 2021/12/19: Pope Francis greets and blesses the children assisted by the Vatican's Santa Marta Pediatric Dispensary at the Paul VI Hall. (Photo by Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) 
VATICAN – 2021/12/19: Pope Francis greets and blesses the children assisted by the Vatican’s Santa Marta Pediatric Dispensary at the Paul VI Hall. (Photo by Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)  ((Photo by Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images))

He went on to mention the circumstances of his “blasphemous communication,” saying that he had typed the world “goddamn” in a Tweet in 2020.

“I used the word G-D in a response to somebody in a tweet and for that they want to throw me out of the priesthood,” he said.

PRO-LIFERS OUTRAGED AS ASSOCIATED PRESS REJECTS ‘FETAL HEARTBEAT,’ ‘LATE-TERM ABORTION’ AS VALID TERMS

Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Pope’s representative to the United States, alerted U.S. bishops of the decision on Dec. 13, according to the Times. 

“As you will know, Father Pavone was a very public and high profile figure associated with the Right to Life Movement in the U.S.,” Archbishop Pierre told the bishops. “His dismissal from the clerical state may, therefore, be a matter of interest among the faithful. In anticipation of that potential interest, the attached statement regarding Father Pavone is provided for your information.”

Demonstrators march and gather near the state capitol following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Austin, Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is being sued by health care providers over allegedly threatening ot prosecute abortion providers.
Demonstrators march and gather near the state capitol following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Austin, Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is being sued by health care providers over allegedly threatening ot prosecute abortion providers. (AP)

Pavone’s defrocking comes months after the U.S. pro-life movement achieved a landmark victory when the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

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The ruling thrust abortion into the limelight for the 2022 midterm election cycle, something many commentators believed actually helped Democrats.

Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.

LGBTQ ‘rights’ and the First Amendment cannot co-exist


By Ryan Bomberger, Exclusive Columnist | Thursday, December 15, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/lgbtq-rights-and-the-first-amendment-cannot-co-exist.html

Unsplash/Sharon McCutcheon

There are just some things in life that cannot occupy the same space.

Old Twitter and free speech.

Hillary Clinton and honesty.

BLM and ethical accounting.

LGBTQ+++ “rights” and the First Amendment.

We’ve seen all of these play out before our very eyes. The last example now seems to be a daily occurrence as Americans face dire consequence for choosing not to bow to LGBTQ activists’ social, political and legal demands. If you’re an artist, they will force you to create against your will (herehere, and here). If you’re a florist, you must participate in a wedding ceremony against your will. If you want to keep your job, you must use wrong or fake pronouns against your will. If you’re a faith-based adoption agency, you must deprive vulnerable children of a married mother and father against your will.

Farewell free speech. Adios religious liberty. So long rights of conscience. Buh bye common sense.

A handful of House and Senate Republicans have handed the Left a dangerous victory — the redefinition of the bedrock of every civilization: marriage. The entirety of the Democratic Party voted to redefine what God designed. The Republicans who voted against their own Party platform, their constituents, the Constitution, and the institution of marriage helped to pass the (zero) Respect for Marriage Act. This bill sues those who won’t comply with a lie.

The legislation’s text starts off declaring: “No union is more profound than marriage.” This is true. Marriage between one man and one woman — and the family (whether biological or adopted) created by that union — is the foundation of every society. Sadly, this didn’t stop Congress and a self-identifying “Catholic” President Biden, who blatantly defies Catholic teachings on human sexuality and our fundamental right to life, from disrespecting and dismantling marriage.

Section 6 of the bill (which acknowledges the First Amendment’s individual religious freedom and conscience protections) contradicts the entire purpose of the law which forces persons “acting under color of State” to comply or be sued. Americans who work for the government, such as public school teachers, don’t lose their Constitutional rights. There is such painful and predictable irony that a “progressive” bill which claims to provide equal protection under the law proudly treats millions of Americans unequally.

The (zero) Respect for Marriage Act and the First Amendment cannot co-exist. They will always be at odds. This is evidenced by widespread Leftist efforts to force religious organizations and people of faith to bow to LGBTQ+ dogma or be fined, fired, deplatformed, sued and/or bankrupted.

Hollywood, news and social media platforms have been relentless in swaying 71% of Americans to support same-sex marriage. According to Gallup, the only “holdouts” are those who attend church weekly. Yet even that resistance has dramatically waned. In the last 20 years, support for same-sex “marriage” in that demographic increased from 20% in 2004 to 40% in 2022. Pew Research, unsurprisingly, shows a similar startling trend where 61% of Americans polled say same-sex “marriage” is “good for society.”

What changed? Biblical morality? Nope. Biblical fidelity? Yup.

In a 2020 study done by Dr. George Barna for Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center findings revealed that only 6% of American adults have a biblical worldview. Tragically, a majority of evangelicals — 52% — reject absolute moral truth. That percentage is even higher with Mainline Protestants (60%) and Pentecostals and Charismatics (69%). Well, that explains a whole lot! If you don’t see things through a biblical lens, your vision is dangerously distorted. This is why, on every moral issue, the remnant that is faithful to enduring truths dwindles with each year.

The latest polling on Americans’ attitudes toward redefining marriage reminds me of a prominent poll back in 2013 by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. When respondents were asked if they wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned, a massive 70% said ‘No.’ Leftist news media, Planned Parenthood and their pro-abortion allies touted the “7 out of 10” stat for years to justify the violence of abortion.

Yet, there was a stat that every mainstream news outlet ignored. It was the first question of that same survey (therefore really hard for so-called journalists to miss) which asked: “Do you approve or disapprove the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision?” Thirty-nine percent approved. Eighteen percent disapproved. But a whopping forty-one percent responded: “Don’t know enough to have an opinion.” So, in a poll that claimed 70% of Americans don’t want Roe overturned, 41% of those surveyed had no idea what the Roe decision was.

Once upon a time, the gay rights movement claimed it was merely seeking tolerance of homosexuality. Today, the LGBTQ+++ movement demands conformity and the politically-enforced confusion and coercion of language. The same activism that claims men can be pregnant, that sex is assigned at birth, and children know their gender identity “from the womb” understand that legalizing gay “marriage” legitimizes their entire LGBTQ+++ worldview.

Feelings and facts often tend to go their separate ways. This is, of course, to our own detriment because uninformed feelings become public policy. Public policy shapes behavior. And behaviors (mis) shape a society.

Policies have consequences. Bad policies have casualties. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughter is in a homosexual union, proclaimed: “No matter who you are or who you love, you too deserve dignity and equal treatment under the law.” Really? Then why didn’t Congress legalize bigamy, polygamy, incestual unions, objectophilia, or marriages between children and adults in the legislation?

Love is love, right?

Nope. God is love. When we understand that and how love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13, we can’t pretend that our culture’s brokenness is something to celebrate. Anytime a word, like marriage, means everything, it becomes nothing.

“Well, that ship has sailed,” we’re told by politicians, pastors and propagandists who want us to capitulate to the latest trends. Those who love people enough to speak and live the truth know the ship is sinking.

Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.

Most Americans favor religious liberty protections for medical professionals: survey


By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | December 7, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/americans-favor-religious-liberty-for-medical-professionals-poll.html

Getty Images/Science Photo Library

WASHINGTON — A new survey reveals that most Americans support religious liberty protections for medical professionals and institutions opposed to participating in procedures that violate their beliefs and commitment to “do no harm,” even as younger Americans express more skepticism about religious liberty protections.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty unveiled the top findings of its 2022 Religious Freedom Index at its headquarters Tuesday. The fourth annual survey, conducted in conjunction with Heart and Minds Strategies, is based on responses collected from 1,004 adults in the United States from Sept. 28 to Oct. 5.  The full report is slated for release Wednesday.

As Becket Fund for Religious Liberty President and CEO Mark Rienzi explained, the Religious Freedom Index asks “the same questions year after year [to] a big number people to get a sense of how the American people are feeling about religious liberty for themselves, for other people, for people of minority faiths, [and] people of faiths that they don’t necessarily share.”

One question on the survey asked respondents to react to statements related to religious objections to assisted suicide, abortion and sex change procedures within the medical community. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed agreed that “individual physicians should be allowed to opt out of assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures” if performing such procedures goes against their religious beliefs or their commitment to “do no harm.”

When asked if they believed that “hospitals and healthcare systems which have ethical objections or are run by religious organizations should be allowed to refuse to perform elective abortions,” 62% answered in the affirmative. Additionally, a majority (59%) of those surveyed believed that “medical students should be able to opt out of instruction regarding physician-assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures during training.”

Only half of respondents expressed support for allowing “hospitals and healthcare systems with religious objections to assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures” to “only employ medical professionals who agree with that position.” 

Achieving 74% support, the most popular idea introduced in the Religious Freedom Index states that “Patients and families should have access to healthcare facilities that share their beliefs about controversial procedures such as assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures.”

The release of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index comes after the Biden administration has found itself in court over a mandate it issued forcing medical organizations to perform gender transition surgeries. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the mandate and the Biden administration did not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving the decision in place.

Last year’s survey included a question measuring support for “freedom for healthcare workers with religious objections to abortion to not participate in abortion procedures.” Seventy-five percent of respondents either completely or mostly accepted allowing healthcare workers to opt out of performing abortions if they could not do so in good conscience.

At the same time, 44% of those surveyed believed that hospitals and healthcare systems run by religious organizations should have the ability to “set policies and standards that reflect the organization’s religious beliefs.”

The questions about the conscience rights of hospitals and healthcare workers constitute a small fraction of the inquiries posed to Americans in this year’s Religious Freedom Index. As in previous years, the survey asked Americans for their views on religion and policy, religion in action, religion in society, religious pluralism, church and state and religion sharing.

Based on responses to a series of questions, Becket calculated a dimension score on a scale of 0 to 100 for each of the subcategories examined, with 0 indicating “complete opposition for the principle of religious freedom at issue” and a score of 100 demonstrating “robust support for the same principle.” The Religious Freedom Index is a composite score calculated after combining the dimension scores.

Heart and Mind Strategies CEO Dee Allsop elaborated on the dimensions examined in the Religious Freedom Index at the event Tuesday. According to Allsop, questions about religious pluralism examine respondents’ views about “freedoms to choose your religion, and to be able to pray and pursue your beliefs.” The religious sharing dimension measures Americans’ beliefs pertaining to the ability to “talk about and preach about your faith.”

Questions about church and state survey public opinion about “government being involved in religion and religion in government.” The religion in society dimension seeks to determine “whether or not religion is part of the problem or part of the solution” to societal problems.

The religion and policy dimension queries respondents for their views about marriage and whether or not religious beliefs “should be guiding the way that we vote.” The religion in action dimension is based on responses to questions about whether or not there should be “freedom for people of faith to follow their own religious beliefs when they’re at work and in their profession.”

As panelists explained at the press conference, the overall Religious Freedom Index stood at 68 this year, showing no change from 2021. However, the changes in the index dimension scores from 2021 varied widely.  

As in previous surveys, respondents demonstrated the highest level of support for religious pluralism. The dimension score for religious pluralism came in at 84 in 2022, an increase from 80 in 2021. The dimension scores for religious sharing and religion in action barely budged from 71 to 72 and 67 to 68, respectively.

On the other hand, support for religion in society, religion and policy, church and state and religion in action declined compared to last year. The dimension score for religion and policy dropped by three points from 68 to 65 between 2021 and 2022. The religion in society dimension score also decreased by three points, from 65 to 62.

Mirroring the results of previous surveys, the dimension dealing with church and state received the lowest score in 2022, dropping from 58 to 56 over the past year. 

A group of panelists, moderated by Becket Law Executive Director Montse Alvarado, discussed the findings from the Religious Freedom Index and their implications for American society as a whole at the event Tuesday. With the U.S. Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case in the news, Americans indicated that they “overwhelmingly support” the right of a photographer not to participate in a same-sex wedding if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs, regardless of what those beliefs are.

The 303 Creative case centers on Colorado-based website designer Lorie Smith, who is challenging Colorado anti-discrimination law out of concern that it would force her to create websites for same-sex marriages in violation of her religious convictions about marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Oral arguments in the 303 Creative case took place Monday.

One panelist, Nick Tomaino of The Wall Street Journal, expressed gratitude for “the durable support for people like Lorie,” noting that the Religious Freedom Index found “about seven in 10 people thinking that Lorie Smith and others like her should be able to practice their faith.” At the same time, he highlighted a trend from the survey revealing that “Gen Z women aren’t registering their support.”

Other panelists also cited Gen Zers’ beliefs about religious freedom issues as a cause for concern going forward. Stephanie Slade of Reason Magazine pointed to statistics illustrating “abstract” support for religious liberty among the youngest Americans that fades when respondents are presented with a specific example: “Among Gen Z, you have a very high number (86%) who say … they support freedom of people or groups to choose not to participate in actions or work that violate their sincere religious beliefs and conscience.”

“When you put a specific example to them and you ask ‘should an individual physician, for example, be able to opt out of providing, say, being involved in abortion or physician-assisted suicide’ or something like that, support drops 50% among the Gen Z cohort,” she said.

Another panelist, Josh Good, director of the Faith Angle Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, attributed the hostility toward religious liberty among younger Americans to a “blind spot when it comes to religion” in American newsrooms. Tomaino suggested that having “religious practitioners in newsrooms” could help address this “blind spot.”

Tomaino contended that “there might be a caricature that newsrooms treat religion as something of a strange species.” Alvarado lamented the Religious Freedom Index’s finding that “37% of Americans had never heard of pregnancy centers being in any way being affected by post-Roe reality,” such as vandalism and bombings, as a consequence of media bias.

Alvarado and Slade suggested that had these people known about the targeting of pro-life pregnancy centers following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which determined that the U.S. Constitution did not contain a right to abortion, they would have become more sympathetic to arguments in favor of religious liberty.

“Story selection is a form of bias,” Slade asserted. “These stories are not getting the coverage that they deserve and they are not getting the coverage they would get if … when there are, in some cases, violence or any kind of harassment or attacks on an abortion provider, for example, these same journalists would know that this is a story and it deserves coverage and it’s a big deal.”

According to Slade, “In a healthy media ecosystem, we need people who are going out and just reporting the facts that are true.” She portrayed the current state of American media as focused on “the pure outrage-inducing opinion cable news-style journalism as opposed to reporting the facts,” where journalists see themselves on an “existential mission to represent the good against the evil.”

Slade also acknowledged that the irreligiosity of Gen Z compared to other generations might also play a role in their apparent hostility toward religious liberty: “Gen Z is much less religious themselves, they’re much less likely to think that religion’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”

“They’re much less supportive of freedom for people to run their businesses the way they want, for religious nonprofits to make employment decisions based on the tenets of their faith, which is a really important part of being a faith-based nonprofit, they’re much less likely to … support freedom to believe that certain behaviors are sinful.”  

After Slade reiterated that Gen Z has “less sympathy and understanding of the value of religion in society,” Tomaino pointed to academic influence as a reason why. “The water they swim in universities tends to be overtly hostile to the faith,” he concluded. He circled back to the role the media plays in shaping public opinion: “Having news coverage of the positive contributions that faith organizations make is especially important.”

When Tomaino clarified that “males registered slightly more sympathy to religious causes” than females, Alvarado responded, “they’re more religious themselves.” Alvarado and the other panelists repeatedly stressed the importance of religious liberty in a pluralistic society, with the Becket Fund Executive Director sharing a quote from noted theologian Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “The Tree of Liberty has religious roots and don’t think that you can sever those roots and have the Tree of Liberty survive.”

For his part, Good offered up his opinion that “People being more religious, not less religious, is the key to understanding pluralism better.”

Discussing other takeaways of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index, Allsop noted that when asked if “religion is part of the solution to the problems we face in our society or part of the problem,” respondents were split down the middle. This constituted a dramatic drop from the 61% who saw religion as a solution to societal problems in 2021.

“Catholics in particular and non-Catholic Christians overwhelmingly say that they feel completely or a good amount accepted in our society,” he said. Stressing that feelings of acceptance were “not quite the same for those that are religious, non-Christians,” he reported that “less than half of them are feeling that high level of acceptance in our society.” Additionally, 89% of Americans agree that “sacred sites and religious practices of Native American Indians ought to be protected.”

When asked about the First Amendment, “Less than half of Americans recognize that freedom of religion is one of the protected rights in the First Amendment,” Allsop added. “Most Americans, even though they can’t find it in the First Amendment, they nevertheless feel that religious freedom plays a really important role and provides an important good in our society.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

If Marriage Can Mean Anything, It Will Soon Mean Nothing


BY: STELLA MORABITO | NOVEMBER 29, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/29/if-marriage-can-mean-anything-it-will-soon-mean-nothing/

Sen. Cynthia Lummis speaking on the Senatea floor prior to voting on the Respect for Marriage Act
The Respect for Marriage Act lets the government establish a permanent presence in your personal life while redefining your relationships.

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No matter how you define “marriage,” there is zero respect for it in the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. You may believe it serves to federally codify the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision that rejected marriage as a male-female union. Maybe it would do so temporarily. But that’s not the endgame.

If you’re paying attention, you can see that the Senate’s recent 62-37 vote for cloture on HR 8404 puts us one step closer to abolishing state recognition of marriage entirely. That’s where this train is headed.

This will happen the same way such things always happen — through a demonization campaign that frames skeptics as bigots who are guilty of discrimination. That’s how you get Democrat-pliable Republicans such as Mitt Romney and craven Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy to sign on. That’s how you manufacture a public opinion cascade, warning average Americans that they’ll be pummeled with lawsuits and ostracism if they dare think out loud.

And that’s how Democrats in Congress are likely in the not-too-distant future — via HR 8404 — to make the case that marriage actually comes with privileges that discriminate against the unmarried. Disagree? You’re a bigot who deserves to be socially ostracized! Self-censorship in the face of such accusations will pave the way, as always

Collectivists Hope to Destroy Private Life and Regulate Relationships

Once they’ve gotten to that point via HR 8404 and Republicans who supported the measure, congressional Democrats will doubtless push us to agree that marriage is a discriminatory institution. We’ll start seeing more anti-marriage initiatives supported by singles, millennials, Julias, and gen Z, all well-groomed for the moment by teacher’s unions, academia, and media.

They’ll fall for the pitch that we can all just write up domestic partnership contracts instead. “Marriage” would then become nothing but a legal relationship (a contract) between two (or more) people for any purpose at all. Bureaucrats would broker those contracts. This proposal is all mapped out in Sunstein and Thaler’s 2008 book “Nudge.” It’s also been promoted for decades by internationally acclaimed feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman who writes that a system of contracts replacing marriage will help the state “regulate all social interactions.”

Under a system that abolishes state recognition of marriage, the family could no longer exist autonomously or unmolested by the state. How could it if the state no longer recognizes marriage as the foundation of the family unit? The government would have no requirement to recognize religious rites of marriage as valid. Thus, it would meddle more deeply in religion and religious communities that recognize bonds of kinship through blood ties.

We Become Atomized Individuals in the State’s Eyes

The atomization resulting from this will have repercussions that go beyond the bill’s guarantee to treat any difference of opinion as a federal crime. If we continue on this path, the government will no longer have to recognize any biological relationships. It need not recognize any legal right you might have as the parent of your biological child. Why should it? It would have already abolished its recognition of the union that produced the child. 

Some of this process has already been completed through gender-neutral language in documents like passports, birth certificates, or the rules of the 117th Congress that do not recognize the words “mother,” “father,” “son,” or “daughter.”

Much groundwork has also been laid by surrogacy and abortion laws that treat children as chattel to buy, sell, and dispose of at will. And why would the state have to recognize any other relationships resulting from marriage if it no longer recognizes marriage? It could ignore your blood relationships to brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or any familial bond. In this scenario, you’d likely need a license to raise your own child, an old communist goal that the so-called Respect for Marriage Act conjures up.

When all there is are bureaucratized domestic partnership arrangements, the government would no longer need to recognize spousal privilege and thereby could legally coerce spouses to testify against one another in court. It could also abolish the default path of survivorship through which your inheritance goes to your spouse or next of kin. Instead, the state would be free to redistribute your nest egg at will in its great bureaucratic wisdom.

Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that the Respect for Marriage Act serves as a midwife to the radical left’s long-held goal of abolishing state recognition of marriage. It will allow the government to regulate our relationships, rendering each of us naked before its power. 

We are each being set up for a pre-arranged marriage with Big Government operating as our abusive spouse. 

Such Atomization Is a Totalitarian Necessity

The path to human atomization is the natural arc of all totalitarian systems in the making. They must always first isolate people in order to control them through terror, as Hannah Arendt noted in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Tyrants always mask their intentions by borrowing from tradition, using words like “respect for marriage,” “love,” or “equality” as they march us all into virtual solitary confinement

There’s nothing new about this trajectory. It’s a long-standing vision of all totalitarian systems, which first came into the open with the Communist Manifesto’s proclamation, “Abolish the family!” Communists referred to traditional religion as “the opiate of the people” while setting up communism as a pseudo-religion that demanded unquestioning loyalty. The resulting dependency then truly becomes the fentanyl of the people.

Such deceptions are why Schumer and company talk about marriage as though the government has some sort of litmus test for “love.” But anyone with half a brain knows that love’s got nothing to do with a functioning state’s interest in marriage. Marriage is an institution that exists to allow for a structured society and for the protection of children. 

Of course, we easily forget such facts while living in a nation that increasingly promotes infanticide, assisted suicide, recreational drug use, child pornography, and other ways to torture and kill our children. In fact, virtually all of their policy positions are tailor-made for family breakdown, community breakdown, and for hostility toward religious communities.

But maybe you like feeling lonely and alienated, like the idea of a childless and hopeless future, and are all for the state regulating your personal relationships and conversations. Well, then, you’ll like the “Respect” for Marriage Act.

But the destruction of bonds of affection and loyalty in the private spheres of life makes sense from the point of view of statists. Those loyalties get in the way of their ambitions for power and social engineering. They are invested in isolating us so that we become dependent upon them.


Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.

Wisconsin Children’s Hospital Is Stacking Its Bench of Chaplains with Trans Activists


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/wisconsin-childrens-hospital-is-stacking-its-bench-of-chaplains-with-trans-activists-2658789720.html/

chaplain holding an open bible with hospitals and doctors in the background
Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.

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Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”

Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”

Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!

The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.

Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.

Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”

Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.

Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:

But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”

People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”

In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”

Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.

If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.

[READ: In Wisconsin, Hospital Shortages Aren’t From Covid, They’re From Vaccine Mandates]

As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”

“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.

Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”

Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”

“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”

TRANSFORMING

Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.

While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:

Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.

If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”

Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.

Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”

But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.

“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”

How indeed.


Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

COMMENTARY: Walmart Mass Shooter Left Behind Suicide Note – Includes 4 Words Media Doesn’t Want to Talk About


 By C. Douglas Golden | November 26, 2022

Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/walmart-mass-shooter-left-behind-suicide-note-includes-4-words-media-doesnt-want-talk/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=aa-breaking&utm_campaign=can&utm_content=firefly

The way you can tell the media is going to move on from the shooting at a Chesapeake, Virginia, Walmart that claimed the lives of six people is that there’s absolutely no handle for them.

Race? Not a factor — accused shooter Andre Bing, who later killed himself, was black. The gun? Not an AR-15 or an associated long rifle — the handgun he used was legally purchased. His victims weren’t chosen for any other reason than that they were his coworkers at the store.

And there are four words you definitely won’t hear them talk about from the alleged shooter’s suicide note: “led by the Satan.”

The note, which Chesapeake police say they found on the phone of the 31-year-old Bing, was released in a series of tweets on Friday.

In the rambling screed, Bing said he was offended because his coworkers compared him to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Trending: Watch: CNN Anchor Watches Narrative Collapse, Left Stunned When She Finds out Colorado Shooting Suspect is ‘Non-Binary’

“I would never have killed anyone that entered my home,” he said, calling his fellow employees “idiots with low intelligence” who tormented him with what he described as “evil twisted grins.”

“Sorry God I’ve failed you, this was not your fault but my own,” he wrote. “I failed to listen to the groans of the holy spirit which made me a poor representation of You.”

“My only wish would have been to start over from scratch and that my parents would have paid closer attention to my social deficits,” he continued.

“Sorry everyone but I did not plan this, I promise things just fell in place like I was led by the Satan.”

So, guess how many times Satan was mentioned in CNN’s write-up of the suicide note? Zero.

Instead, we got this: “The note — found on his phone — talks about God, the holy spirit, and how the author felt his ‘associates’ were mocking him.”

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned how he was addressing God or talking about the Holy Spirit. One is left with the distinct impression he was inspired by God, not by the embodiment of sin and evil.

Related: Watch: CNN Anchor Watches Narrative Collapse, Left Stunned When She Finds out Colorado Shooting Suspect is ‘Non-Binary’

By ignoring Satan, the media ignores the fact very real spiritual evil exists. “We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one,” 1 John 5:19 reads. Even a CNN reporter can look at the outlet’s own homepage and realize how true the last part of that equation is.

Focusing on that, however, would lead too many readers to ruminate on the state of our fallen world and to blame individuals — not guns, politicians or religion — for the shooting.

With the shooting at a Colorado Springs, Colorado, gay nightclub, those scapegoats were too easy. It was the fault of religion. Of Tucker Carlson and Lauren Boebert. Of the so-called “assault weapon.”

This time, four disgusting words spell out what motivated this and so many other mass murderers: “led by the Satan.”

Expect the media to do everything to avoid talking about the inconvenient fact that good and evil are real, objective things. They’re going to avoid it because they want to exist in a godless bubble where good and evil are determined by manmade standards.

Tragically, shootings like the one in Chesapeake show exactly what happens when those concepts are left to human arbiters.

C. Douglas Golden

Contributor, Commentary

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.

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Michael Brown Op-ed: The Left is also guilty of marrying politics with the Gospel


By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor| Thursday, October 27, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-left-is-also-guilty-of-marrying-politics-with-the-gospel.html/

Senator Raphael G. Warnock attends the 2022 King Holiday Observance Beloved Community Commemorative Service at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Jan. 17, 2022, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Getty Images/Paras Griffin

As we approach the 2022 midterms, and even more as we approach the 2024 presidential elections, Christian conservatives who are politically active will be accused of marrying the Gospel with politics. “Have you not heard of the separation of Church and State?” our critics will ask.

But that sword cuts both ways. the Left is also guilty of this very thing, to the point of celebrating the marriage of politics with the Gospel.

To be clear, I believe that it is very dangerous to conflate the Gospel with politics as if the goals of both were identical.

I have addressed this concern in many relevant articles as well as in my recent book The Political Seduction of the Church.

Of course, I believe that our faith should inform our politics and we should be politically involved. I consider this part of our sacred stewardship in a country like America, as long as we don’t confuse the Gospel with politics.

But, to repeat, it is just not the Right that is guilty of blurring these lines. The Left most certainly is, and even more blatantly.

Here’s an example from the past and an example from the present that underscores my point.

In 1988, both Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson ran for president.

Speaking about Robertson, the Britannica.com website noted that in the 1980s he “became increasingly involved in politics, and he subsequently resigned as minister in order to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.”

So, he was no longer “Rev. Pat Robertson,” but just Pat Robertson. This way, there would be no blurring of the lines between his beliefs as a minister of the Gospel and his political agenda. He was here to serve all Americans as a potential president, not simply preach the Gospel as a minister.

In stark contrast, to this day, Jesse Jackson is known as “the Rev. Jesse Jackson.” The Left has no problem with blurring the lines between Church and State, as long as it’s for their causes. Being a reverend and a politician is great, as long as you are on the Left.

Consequently, when a Republican candidate who is also a Christian speaks up for the unborn or points back to some of our founding, Christian values, he or she is accused of being a dangerous Christian nationalist. “You are a Christian dominionistic trying to take over our country! How dare you try to impose a theocracy on us.”

But when a gay clergyman supports a Democratic candidate or cause, he or she is hailed as a pioneer, a reformer, someone who exemplifies the true American spirit.

The double standard is glaring.

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider the current Senate race in Georgia.

The Republican candidate is Herschel Walker, a football legend and a Christian conservative.

As stated on the TeamHerschel.com website,

“As a Christian, a father, and a husband, Herschel knows that strong families are the bedrock of our country. Herschel’s upbringing in rural Georgia instilled a personal faith in God, which he carries with him to this day. He prays every day for this country, and with God’s help will bring those values with him to Washington. Herschel is a compassionate conservative who is pro-life and pro-family.”

Not surprisingly, critics group Walker with dangerous Christian nationalists.

Walker is running to unseat Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, whose Twitter handle is @ReverendWarnock. (His full name is listed on Twitter as Reverend Raphael Warnock.)

Yet Rev. Warnock is proudly pro-abortion to the point of claiming that his pro-choice views are “consistent with my view as a minister.”

And Rev. Warnock, who is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, said this in an editorial posted on the flagship gay website Advocate.com in October 2020: 

“Some might find it strange that a pastor would submit himself to the business of politics, and I would agree. But this fight, this campaign, is a continuation of my lifelong commitment to service. Our votes are sacred, living prayers of action for the kind of world we want to live in. In November, it’s on all of us to make it known that we support the protection of LGBTQ people and to help build a better nation where all Americans can without fear of retribution be themselves authentically.”

So, not only does Warnock link together his calling to be a pastor and his calling to be a politician, but he also champions LGBTQ+ causes in the name of being a pastor.

Yet it is Walker who is maligned by the Left as blurring the lines between Church and State and Warnock who is hailed as both a political and spiritual hero.

To drive the point home a little more, can you imagine how hysterical the reaction from the Left would be if a conservative Christian pastor ran for national office, as a pastor? He would be branded as one of the most dangerous men in the country, surely an insurrectionist and white supremacist (whatever the color of his own skin) with plans to establish a theocracy.

But a “progressive,” left-leaning pastor? He should be celebrated.

This looks like a classic example of “rules for thee but not for me.”

In this case, the Left says to the Right, “Keep your religion out of your politics!”

Then the Left says to its own, “We celebrate the union of religion and politics, as long as it’s our kind of religion.”

Jesus addressed this long ago, telling His disciples, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” (John 15:19)

No wonder the world is threatened by our faith but embraces the faith of the Left.

That’s because it is only a biblically based Gospel that poses a threat to the world system. A compromised Gospel is warmly welcomed by the world for the very reason that it is no longer the Gospel at all.

Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on FacebookTwitter, or YouTube.

‘We are done tolerating the … sexualization of our children’: Armed protests arise outside ‘all ages’ drag bingo event hosted by Texas church


By CORTNEY WEIL | September 27, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/we-are-done-tolerating-the-sexualization-of-our-children-armed-protests-arise-outside-all-ages-drag-bingo-event-hosted-by-texas-church-2658349262.html/

Over the weekend, a church in Texas became a lightning rod for protesters and counter-protesters alike when it invited members of “all ages” to a drag event to support so-called “trans and exploring” minors.

On Saturday evening, the First Christian Church of Katy, Texas, an affiliate of the Disciples of Christ denomination, held a bingo event featuring drag queens that was billed as fun for the whole family.

“We create a place for people to feel welcomed and understand that there will always be people who disagree with us,” said Reverend Heather Tolleson, the pastor of the church.

The purpose of the bingo event — and the adults-only drag show later that night — was to raise funds for the church’s “Transparent Closet,” a resource where “trans and exploring teens, youth and young adults” can find cross-sex clothing, shoes, and accessories such as makeup.

The church itself claims to be “a place where all are welcome,” and nearly all of the events and ministries listed on its website refer to LGBTQ issues in some way.

However, the all-ages drag event outraged many others in the community, including parents and members of other churches, who claim that drag queens and those who sponsor them have no business marketing such entertainment to children.

Rebecca Clark, a member of the Fort Bend-based County Citizens Defending Freedom, denounced the drag bingo event.

“We are done tolerating the exploitation and sexualization of our children in this country,” Clark told the Epoch Times.

“Drag queens and children don’t mix,” added Sarah Feigleson of CCDF. “These events are happening in your back yard. Stand up and raise a respectful ruckus.”

Along with CCDF, members of the Proud Boys protested the event, as did other churches. Several Catholics prayed the rosary.

On the other side of the street stood supporters of the family drag bingo day. Members of Antifa wore all black and obscured their faces. Others who were not associated with Antifa proudly showed their identities and their support for exposing kids to LGBTQ-themed entertainment.

“Drag in itself is just a costume,” said one unnamed man wearing a face mask and holding a pride flag. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”

Both sides were heavily armed, and a steady police presence remained in the middle of the road to help keep the peace during drag bingo night. There were no reports of violence or arrests, and only church members were allowed to enter the property.

Though the event itself was controversial, there was yet another aspect of it that drew further ire from critics. The event was originally supposed to feature drag queen Tisha Flowers, aka Jaysen Kettl. Not only does Kettl now don a macabre persona when dressed as Flowers, but he also has a troubling past. Back in 2004, Kettl, then 17, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit capital murder after administrators at his school learned that he and at least one other student had plotted to commit a mass school shooting. Thankfully, the plot was foiled before anyone could carry it out.

However, once Kettl’s criminal history was made known, the church quietly removed him from event promotions. It is unclear whether Kettl attended the event.

Despite the controversy, the event sold out and was deemed a success, Rev. Tolleson claimed.

The Left’s War On History Is Really A War On The God Of The Bible


BY: JOSH HAWLEY | SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/15/the-lefts-war-on-history-is-really-a-war-on-the-god-of-the-bible/

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The following remarks were given at the National Conservative Conference on Sept. 12, 2022.

It is a pleasure to be with you once again.

At the first National Conservatism conference, I spoke about the left’s goal of unmaking American culture and community. Last year, I spoke about their goal of unmaking manhood.

This year, I want to talk about their efforts to unmake history. Specifically, the history of our country and our founding — and the revolution on which both were based.

I take as my point of departure the words of John F. Kennedy at his inaugural address in 1961, when he famously reminded his generation: “We dare not forget that we are the heirs of that first revolution.” He meant, of course, the Revolution of 1776, which he described as grounded in the “the belief – that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”

Now, that is an interesting contention. And Kennedy was not alone in making it. But where did it come from? Where did the idea that the rights of man come from God, not the generosity of the state, originate?

The answer is clear, if often and deliberately overlooked in our day: that idea came from the Bible. And that brings me to my contention to you today. We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.

This was a revolution that began with the founding of the nation of Israel at Sinai; that gathered pace with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the days of ancient Rome. This was a revolution of ideas and culture, of society and government and faith – it was truly, to quote the Bible itself, a revolution that turned the world upside down.

Let me be more specific. To a world composed of clans and tribes, the Bible introduced the very idea of the individual. To a world that valued the wealthy and well-born before all others, the Bible taught the dignity of the common man. To a world that prized order and control, the Bible spoke of liberty.

Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America. And now our biblical inheritance is again at the center of our politics. It is the question of the age. 

The woke left that controls today’s Democrat Party is on a campaign to remake this nation. They want us to believe this country is irredeemably racist and oppressive. They tell us our true founding came with the advent of the slave trade on this continent.

They reject our history and our traditions. They say sex is merely a social construct. That men can get pregnant. That women can be men. That the nuclear family is a repressive institution.

And their real target in all this is the inheritance of the Bible. What they particularly dislike about America is our dependence on biblical teaching and tradition. What they particularly dislike about our culture is the Bible’s influence on it. And now they want to break that influence for good. 

My argument is simple: They’re wrong.

Whatever your own beliefs, whatever your background, the revolution of the Bible is worth defending. It is worth preserving. It is the true source of the rights of man and the liberties we cherish. It has taught us what we know of dignity and equality.

The Bible has made us who we are. And it is critical to our future.

Individual Agents of God’s Purpose

Let me start with what is perhaps our most cherished ideal as Americans, the ideal of the individual.

There is a myth long loved by certain leftists that the ancient world was a free, secular place where people believed as they wanted and lived lives of their own making. We know from historians that nothing could be further from the truth. In the ancient world, the individual as such hardly existed. There was no such thing as individualism.

The ancient world was a place of hierarchy. Every thing, every person, had a place, fixed and unchanging, bound to where it was by the order of the cosmos. Some were born to rule, most were born to follow, many were born to be slaves — that was the belief.

Every family had its ancestral gods, and the family head alone had the right to rule the household in the gods’ name. Every city had its patron deity, which every citizen was bound to worship. In fact, to be a citizen was to be a member of a particular city and a worshiper of a particular god or gods.

There was no such thing as freedom of conscience in this world, no such thing as individual decision. As the nineteenth-century historian Fustel de Coulanges put it, “The human person counted for very little against that holy and almost divine authority which was called country or state.”

As for history — well, history was made by those few the “order of nature” designated to rule. Always men of social standing. Usually wealthy. The natural elite.

The Bible challenged all of this, and right from the very beginning. In Genesis 12, God calls Abraham, a nobody from nowhere — no social standing, no claim to power or rule — God calls this man to leave his father’s house and his father’s gods, to leave the markers of meaning and identity in the ancient world, and to serve him — the one true God, Scripture claims.

God calls Abraham to stand before him as an individual. God’s gaze rests on him personally.

Or as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes, Abraham “could not find solace in the silent companionship of God whose image was reflected in the boundless stretches of the cosmos. Only when he met God … as Father, Brother, and Friend … did he feel redeemed.”

God tells Abraham that as an individual he — he personally — will be God’s agent of blessing and renewal for all the world. We see the same pattern repeated in the New Testament. Jesus says salvation is available to all who will come to him, and that those who follow him will be called “sons of God.”

Meaning: shapers of history. World changers. People through whom God himself will act.

And with this, the idea of the individual is born. One need not be a member of this family or that to be significant. One need not have wealth or social standing. One need only heed the call of God.

In the words of historian Larry Siedentop, “Christ reveals a God who is potentially present in every believer…. Through an act of faith in Christ, human agency can become the medium for God’s love.” Or to say it another way, every person can become an agent of God’s purpose—as an individual.

Where does this leave the old idea of fate and controlling destiny? Done away with. Where does leave the notion that one’s place in the world is fixed and cannot be changed? Abolished.

Now the individual person becomes an agent of change. Now he or she becomes a maker of history.

The Bible invents this kind of individual. And the Bible reveals the dignity of the common man.

Read the Bible through and you will find across its pages a decided preference for the common, the ordinary, the overlooked—as opposed to the elite, the wealthy, and the socially powerful. God chooses Abraham from nowhere. He famously prioritizes Jacob, who was the second son. King David, before he was king, was the least of his brothers and the least likely to rule.

This same theme finds equally pointed expression in the New Testament. The Apostle Peter preaches in his first sermon that God’s spirit — his very presence — is now available for all people, as the ancient prophets had foretold — men and women, old and young.

Then there is the Apostle Paul, who said, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

To a society that privileged wealth and status, a society that disdained workers and mothers and children and common folk, the Bible says: each has dignity. The common things of life have dignity. Motherhood. Home. Labor.

It has hard to overstate the disdain the world of Greece and Rome held for common laborers, people who worked with their hands. Not in the Bible. The patriarchs raised livestock. Jesus was a carpenter and his disciples fishermen. Paul made tents.

And the Bible emphasizes over and again the power of labor that is offered to God. Work unto God, Scripture says, and God will use that work to further his good purposes in the world. He will make the work matter. He will make it last, however common or mundane.

The ancient world honored the high and mighty. The Bible, to paraphrase the Canadian theorist Charles Taylor, affirmed the significance of ordinary life.

I have two small boys at home and I love to read to them. Among their favorites is Tolkien, who captures this theme beautifully in “The Lord of the Rings.” “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

There is no ideal more central to American life than the dignity of the common man. And it is an ideal given to us by the Bible. The biblical tradition also gave us a new concept of liberty.

It’s interesting: in the ancient near east, Mesopotamia, the creation stories often involved the gods founding primordial cities, and then when humans came along designating human kings to rule the cities on the gods’ behalf.

Not in the Bible. Oh God does indeed designate someone to exercise his authority and carry forward his purposes. Genesis makes much of that. But it’s not a king. It’s Adam and Eve, on behalf of all humanity. From the first, the Bible pictures individuals as capable of self-rule.

For the early Christian philosopher Tertullian, Jesus’s maxim to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” had clear political implications: offer to Caesar your money, Tertullian said, but offer “to God your self.”

The point was, individuals, as God’s image-bearers, belonged to God and to him alone, not to the emperor or some far-away king. God and God alone had the right to claim the individual’s obedience: no one else. No government. No king.

The individual deserved liberty to respond to God’s call on his or her life. It’s right there in the Exodus, the story of God calling a people to follow him by liberating them from oppression. It’s there in the Apostle Paul, who wrote that it is for liberty that we have been set free.

This is a concept of liberty virtually unknown to the ancient world. The Greeks spoke of liberty from time to time, but for them and their philosophers, liberty meant mainly life in accordance with the order of nature. Which meant hierarchy.

Plato and Aristotle, for example, both assumed “freedom” for most individuals meant obeying their moral and social betters. The Romans famously valued self-government, at least for part of their history. But they too saw the right to self-rule as confined to the small class of individuals fit by nature to be citizens. Everybody else was a dependent.

And neither Romans nor Greek recognized significant limits on government power.

But if God’s spirit can be poured out on all people, if God has called each person to be his delegate and exercise his authority, surely that has political implications. Surely that means citizenship cannot be confined to the elite. Surely it means even the common man has the right to self-rule. Surely it says even the common man has the right to liberty.

And as I once heard the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks say, surely God’s call to the individual sets a limit on the state. It draws a boundary on the exercise of government power and says, “No further.” And there we have it: Individualism, the dignity of the common person, liberty. This is our biblical inheritance.

I could go on. The Bible gave us also the idea of a state ruled by men, not by gods. It gave us the distinction between church and state. It gave us equality between men and women. And more, much more. But you get the idea.

These were revolutionary notions that upended the ancient world. And they found their purest political expression in the United States of America.

The biblical revolution is right there in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that “all men are created equal,” that we are endowed by our Creator with “unalienable” rights. These confessions would take centuries to realize in this country, but we recognized them as true from the first.

The biblical revolution is there in our Constitution, which separates powers among offices and stations to ensure the common person can rule, and no clique or elite.

It is there in the Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom to worship, to speak, to assemble, and to exercise one’s faith free from government interference.

The biblical tradition echoes in the great tent revivals of the frontier, where hardscrabble folks with little to their name heard from the itinerant preachers that they too were called by God. They too could be God’s servants. You didn’t need a fancy education or a landed estate to be God’s child. And those revivals helped spawn a populist political movement that reverberates to this day.

America as we know it, America as we love it, is the product of the revolution of the Bible. But now that biblical inheritance is under siege.

A Cultural Revolution

Today’s woke left is frantically engaged in a campaign of political nihilism. This is the sum and substance of their program. They want to level the institutions of American society—the family, schools, church and synagogue, our judicial system. They say the country is structurally warped and must be remade top to bottom. But what they reject, at bottom, is our biblical inheritance.

I mentioned in my remarks last year the mid-century thinker Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a great advocate of the `60s-era student radicalism and of the nihilist attitude toward American society that dominates the left today. In a word, he was woke.

He was also honest. Marcuse was an atheist and a Marxist and he spent a good deal of time wondering why Marx’s long-looked-for end of history had never arrived. He decided one major reason was Christianity.

Like Marx, Marcuse believed biblical faith was an opiate, a form of false consciousness. And he worried that it saturated American society. So in a break with Marx’s economic determinism, Marcuse decided culture was king. And America’s Christian culture was preventing the Marxist revolution the world needed.

Even worse, the working class, the proletariat, embraced that culture more than anyone. 

For that reason, Marcuse concluded revolution wouldn’t come from working people. The Christian hold was too strong. Instead, he placed his faith elsewhere—and this is key. He placed his faith in the educated elite.

America needed a cultural revolution to rid itself of the Bible’s taint. And the elite were just the people to deliver it. Sound familiar? That’s today’s politics in a nutshell.

Today’s woke left is carrying out a Marcuse-style kulturkampf. They increasingly insist that individuals don’t matter. They say society isn’t composed of equal individuals standing before a sovereign God, but of warring racial and economic groups vying for power.

The woke theorists at the Smithsonian tell us that “individualism” itself is racist, nothing more than an artifact of “white culture.” In the last few years, two separate woke theorists have argued—in The Nation and The Washington Post—that Americans’ votes should be weighted on the basis of race. In the name of democracy, “one person, one vote” is out.

The woke left dislikes the notion of the common man. They reject the biblical idea that all men and women are equally valuable and equally worthy of participating in political life. They call working people “deplorables,” and they regard working culture as uncouth and backward—characterized by the sort of people who cling to “guns and religion,” as someone once said.

No, the woke think the educated elite know best. By which they mean, naturally, themselves. And they are not afraid to use power.

If the Big Tech oligarchs decide that reporting on Hunter Biden is too dangerous to their interests, they simply erase the story from the public square. If they decide questioning Anthony Fauci is too threatening to their priorities, they prevent it by their own fiat.

That’s only the beginning.

If the reigning political class decides a former president poses too much trouble to their plans, they order a raid on his house and threaten to jail him. If they conclude too many Americans are complaining online, they create a Disinformation Board to shut them down. Any disagreement is called “violence” and any dissent “insurrection.”

Marcuse pioneered the concept of “repressive tolerance”—that is, free speech for me but not for thee. He would be proud of today’s liberals.

Finally, the left rejects the biblical idea of conscience and the liberty that comes with it. Attacks on religious freedom and intellectual inquiry are commonplace now. The woke insist on targeting citizens engaged in works of mercy, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, because they have the audacity to disregard elite preferences and serve a God beyond the state.

The woke insist that nobody, and especially not parents, may ask questions about what children are being taught in schools. To do otherwise is to be a “domestic terrorist.”

To them, liberty means falling in line with the norms they prescribe. It means following the social rules they had down.

They will decide what speech is acceptable.

They will decide which religious beliefs may be acted upon, and how.

They will determine what is true and what is not, what is fact and what is “disinformation.”

They will run the country.

The left say they want to lead us to a new era. But where they would take us is no age of enlightenment. It is not someplace new at all. It is backwards, to an old age of darkness and hierarchy and repression.

And that brings us to the task before us.

The Truth Is Their Stumbling Block

The woke left now controls the commanding heights of American culture: the media, the entertainment industry, the corporations, academia, and government. They seek to marshal their combined cultural power against those who disagree.

They seek to shame us, to isolate us—to silence us, if they can. They seek to protect their power. And they can succeed—but only if we allow them.

In truth, their vision is bleak and their ideology is brittle. They do not understand the deep strength of the American people, because they do not understand the deep goodness of their character. They see only deplorables who must be re-educated.

They do not understand our history and our ideals because they do not appreciate the truths on which this nation is based. They do not realize these truths have made us good and made us strong. And truth is their problem. The woke ideology, this warmed-over cultural Marxism, is not true.

Race and class do not define all that we are. Society is not an unending struggle for power and domination. And America is not structurally defective. America is the best and freest nation in the history of the world. And it is so largely because of the biblical revolution that made us what we are.

And now we need that inheritance again. In this time of fear and despair, we need to hear again that our lives matter—that we are loved by God—that we are called by God to great purpose—and that eternity beckons. What we do now can last. What we do here can matter.

We need to hear again of the dignity of ordinary life, of work and hearth and home, of the joys of marriage and family, and the power of these things to shape the future.

I slightly misspoke earlier, in this connection, when I said God called Abraham as an individual. That much is true, but God said it was Abraham’s family he would use to change the world. Abraham became a blessing to mankind when he became a husband and father. The same is true for us and true for today. 

In the final analysis, the woke ideology has more in common with the ancient world than it does with America. And it will not prevail in the end.

Whether it prevails in our time is up to us. That will depend on our courage.

To Strike a Blow for Truth

I close with this.

In A.D. 390, a crowd of Christians gathered at a pagan temple known as the Serapeum, in the city of Alexandria. It was a shrine to the god Serapis.

A few years before, the virulently anti-Christian emperor Julian had attempted to throttle Christianity and purge Rome of Christian influence. Among other measures, he seized control of the education system and barred Christians from teaching. He demanded all students study in ways he approved. He commanded worship of the Roman gods. 

One of those gods was Serapis. And now on this day in 390, in the shadow of the state’s recent persecution, a group of Christians gathered at the temple to take a stand.

In the center of the temple was a statue of the god, clutching in his hands a three-headed serpent. The legend went that “if any impious hand should dare to violate the majesty of the god, the heavens and earth would instantly return to their original chaos.”

One soldier stepped forward, carrying an axe. His name is lost to history. All we know of him is what the historian Rufinus tells us, that he was “better protected by faith than by his weapon.”

And there, in that moment, this one man made a choice. He made a choice to live free from the powers and principalities of his age. A choice to reject the dictates of emperors. A choice to strike a blow for truth. 

The lone soldier climbed a ladder to the top of the statue and raised his battle-axe. Then, with all his might, he drove it home.

Onlookers reported that as the blow fell, the god’s jaw broke away. And as it did, thousands of rats came surging out of its rotten inside.

The woke left may seem powerful. And indeed they are.

Opposing them may cost us much. But the truth is worth any cost. And that’s what courage is, in the end. It is paying the cost, no matter how high, for the truth.

And remember the teaching of scripture, the one that runs from first to end: that though the God of the universe could have accomplished his purposes entirely on his own, he chose instead to call us. He invites us to do his work and to follow him.

And so let us count the cost, and take our stand. For when we do, we shall turn the tide.


Josh Hawley is a U.S. senator from Missouri and former Missouri attorney general.

    Christians could lose majority status in America by 2045: study


    By Leonardo Blair, Senior Features Reporter | Thursday, September 15, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-could-no-longer-be-the-majority-in-america-by-2045.html/

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    Barring any limiting event such as war or economic depression, if the pace at which Christians abandon their faith before the age of 30 were to accelerate beyond its current pace, America could no longer be a majority Christian nation by as early as 2045. And Christians wouldn’t just lose their majority status in America in this scenario. They would also be outnumbered by the religiously unaffiliated, also known as “nones,” according to the findings of a new analysis by the Pew Research Center. The findings are based on work from the Pew Research Center which projects religious composition in the United States under multiple switching scenarios for the first time, as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project. The project analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

    In the study, Pew highlights four hypothetical scenarios out of several possibilities to demonstrate how the U.S. religious landscape might change over the next half century. The impact of younger Christian adults abandoning their faith without limitation was modeled in one of those scenarios. While the other three scenarios reflect varying degrees of religious disaffiliation, “they all show Christians continuing to shrink as a share of the U.S. population, even under the counterfactual assumption that all switching came to a complete stop in 2020.” The ranks of the unaffiliated, however, are projected to grow under all four scenarios.

    “Of course, it is possible that events outside the study’s model — such as war, economic depression, climate crisis, changing immigration patterns or religious innovations — could reverse current religious switching trends, leading to a revival of Christianity in the United States,” the researchers noted. “But there are no current switching patterns in the U.S. that can be factored into the mathematical models to project such a result.”

    Data highlighted in the research show that while Christianity remains the “stickier” religious affiliation for older Americans, among younger adults it is the religiously unaffiliated identity that is enduring. If that trend is sped up with nothing to stop it, according to projections of the third of the four main models, the number of Christian adherents in the U.S. is likely to decline at a much faster rate.

    “If the pace of switching before the age of 30 were to speed up throughout the projection period without any brakes, Christians would no longer be a majority by 2045,” Pew researchers said.

    In this model, the religiously unaffiliated would be America’s most dominant faith expression by 2055, with about 46% of the population claiming that identify. Christians would represent just a 43% share of the population. By 2070, 52% of Americans would be unaffiliated, while only 35% would be Christian.

    In 2020, the Pew Research Center estimated that about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. The religiously unaffiliated accounted for 30% of the U.S. population, while all other religions — including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists — totaled about 6%.

    While rising disaffiliation among younger adults “assumes there is a kind of ever-increasing momentum behind religious switching” among that cohort under 30, researchers suggested that trend isn’t plausible as “highly religious parents tend to raise highly religious children who are less likely than children of less religious parents to disaffiliate in young adulthood.”

    “As a result, there may continue to be a self-perpetuating core of committed Christians who retain their religion and raise new generations of Christians,” researchers said.

    Of the four models presented, researchers selected the second which projects that rising disaffiliation from Christianity with limits could lead to “nones” becoming the largest religious identity in America by 2070 but not the majority identity.

    The projected outcome for that model suggests that if the pace of disaffiliation before the age of 30 were to speed up initially but then hold steady, Christians would lose their majority status by 2050, when they would be 47% of the U.S. population compared to 42% for the unaffiliated. In 2070, “nones” would constitute a plurality of 48%, in this scenario while Christians would account for 39% of Americans.

    Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost

    ‘Raw, horrific evil’: Journalist sounds alarm on ‘one of the most grotesque medical scandals the world has ever seen’


    By Billy Hallowell, Op-ed Contributor | Wednesday, September 14, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/journalist-sounds-alarm-on-grotesque-medical-scandal.html/

    A hand holds up a small transgender pride flag. The blue and pink stripes represent the colors for a boy and girl, while the white stripe represents self-declared gender identities, such as transitioning, intersex, neutral and undefined gender. | Getty Images

    A journalist who has extensively covered the transgender debate recently revealed why the topic has so resonated, explaining “something inside … snapped” when he learned about what was happening to children, and the “horror” immediately motivated him to action.

    READ ALSO: ‘Functional Atheism’: Popular Pastor Delivers Gut-Check on Worry, Breaks Down Biblical Moment That Could Transform How We Tackle It

    Brandon Showalter, a reporter for The Christian Post, is among the most well-versed and unrelenting journalists to tackle the transgender movement, exploring the impact of puberty blockers, “disfiguring surgeries,” and the moral chaos he believes is shielding so many from the truth.

    “Something inside me snapped, and I just thought, ‘Well, I’ve just got to dig into this and scrutinize this more deeply, because this is absolutely insane,'” Showalter said ona recent episode of “The Inside Story” podcast. “I just remember thinking to myself, ‘They’re doing what to children?!'”

    He continued, “I just realized the extent of the horror, and I realized someone needed to step up and tell the truth about it.”

    Listen to Showalter share his story on “The Inside Story” (subscribe to the show here):

    https://player.edifi.app/embed/index.html#/episodes/’Something-Inside-Me-Just-Kind-of-Snapped’:-Journalist-Reveals-Moment-He-Was-Compelled-to-Investigate-Trans-‘Cult-of-Confusion’/5305562

    Showalter believes the happenings surrounding the transgender movement constitute “one of the most grotesque health scenarios” in America, which is why he continues to lend his voice to the discussion.

    He’s just one of the voices in Tucker Carlson’s new, two-part Fox Nation series, “Transgressive: The Cult of Confusion.”

    For Showalter, covering the transgender movement began after he started exploring the issue and realized many journalists simply weren’t covering it from a place of truth.

    Watch him join CBN’s Faithwire to explain:

    “I realized that within journalism … mainstream legacy publications were using false pronouns to refer to people as the opposite sex and it was so confusing even reading news articles that I couldn’t even keep the story straight,” he said. “But then … I realized that children were being given puberty-blocking drugs.”

    With the reality of what was unfolding — including the prescribing of drugs to kids he believes have no basis for being prescribed — Showalter was stunned.

    “I just realized the extent of the horror, and I knew that someone had to stand up and tell the truth about it because very few people in the legacy media were,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

    Showalter also began to explore stories of detransitioners — people who started or fully underwent attempts to change their sex but who came to regret their life-altering decisions. The media often shield or ignore these stories, but Showalter hasn’t backed away from delving into the tragic details.

    READ ALSO: ‘Only Jesus Can Save America’: Michael Brown’s Pressing Message to Christians Across the Nation

    “Theologically, I just see it as we need to stand up for the integrity of the human body. This is so horrible,” he said. “You just don’t do this to the human person … this is a medical scandal. This is one of the most grotesque, horrible medical scandals the world has ever seen.”

    Showalter said even non-Christians are beginning to read his investigative reports as they deal with these issues in their own lives and families.

    “The truth is true, no matter who says it,” he said.

    Showalter hopes his work — and, in particular, his appearance in “Transgressive: The Cult of Confusion” — helps people see the truth.

    “I hope that it pulls back the curtain. I hope that people see that this is some of the most wretched, sadistic, monstrously terrible child abuse and that it’s one of the worst medical scandals that the world has ever seen,” he said. “I hope that people are punched in the gut — that they are confronted with the raw, horrific evil that this is.”

    Beyond knowledge, Showalter said he hopes people are encouraged to stand up against what’s unfolding.

    “Once you see this, you can’t unsee it,” he said.

    Chinese Christians hunted internationally by communist regime


    By JOSEPH MACKINNON | September 07, 2022

    Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/chinese-christians-internationally-stalked-by-communist-regime/

    Throughout its history, but with renewed vigor in recent years, the atheistic communist Chinese regime has sought to crush or at the very least control Christianity within Chinese borders. Christianity is regarded by the communist leadership as a foreign threat to its control and well-being — one that Mao Zedong endeavored to eliminate altogether. Although Chinese Christians of all denominations have routinely been subject to harassment, torturedetentions, and executions inside China’s borders, the CCP has recently taken more brazenly to hounding those who have fled abroad.

    Exodus

    Pastor Pan Yongguang and 61 congregants belonging to the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church fled China to the South Korean island of Jeju in 2019, seeking asylum. The CCP required that the SHRC and its members should join a registered church, one strictly regulated by the regime, or otherwise be disbanded and barred from assembling.

    Registered churches are required to display images of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and communist propaganda alongside or in lieu of religious images. Homilies are censored. Surveillance cameras installed on altars record all church happenings. Additionally, to ensure state atheism takes, people under the age of 18 are barred from participating in religious ceremonies.

    Pastor Pan had no intention of registering.

    Pressure mounted when the regime, responding to the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, sought to everywhere re-exert its dominance. Pastor Pan said that “quasi-martial law” was consequently imposed on Shenzhen and upon his parish. The SHRC mulled over what to do. The church put the matter to a vote, and the majority elected to leave.

    Though they successfully made it to South Korea, it was made abundantly clear both by local authorities and U.S. officials that Pastor Pan’s congregation would be unable to stay. Less than 1% of asylum seekers were permitted to stay in 2019.

    Bob Fu of the non-governmental Christian nonprofit China Aid warned, “If they get deported back to China by Korean officials, every member of this church will face extreme punishment.” Fu was not speaking hyperbolically.

    Within months of the SHRC’s exodus, Pastor Wang Yi, the founder of one of China’s largest unregistered churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison, denied all political rights, and fined. Yi’s fate is commonplace for Christians in the region.

    Spanish journalist Pablo M. Diez has elsewhere noted how Catholic Bishop James Su Zhimin, like others who refused to subordinate themselves to CCP religious regulators, was “disappeared” after “having spent most of his life deprived of his freedom.”

    Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong was similarly arrested May 11, 2022, for his religiosity, support of freedom, and criticism of the CCP.

    For fear of being returned by South Korea to China to suffer the kind of fate met by Zhimin, Yi, and Zen, the SHRC congregants migrated instead to Thailand, where they believe CCP agents are still stalking them.

    Repercussions

    Despite escaping China, Pastor Pan and his parish have nevertheless been subject to continued harassments, threats, and surveillance by the CCP. Those they left behind in China have also paid the price for their families’ Christianity, in the way of intimidation, interrogation, and other statist abuses, including the prohibition of a newborn child’s legal status.

    The pastor, whom CCP agents have accused of “treason,” “collusion with foreign forces,” and “subversion of state power,” learned that his siblings and mother have been penalized as a result of his actions.

    Another congregant’s relative in the mainland was told by communist officers, “Your descendants may suffer.”

    The presumed objective of the CCP’s mistreatment of the expat Christians’ relatives is to coerce Pastor Pan and his parish back to China, where if not executed, they may be placed in reeducation camps and forced to renounce their faith.

    China is home to tens of millions of Christians. Although the communist Chinese regime stated in 2018 that there were only 44 million Christians within its borders, this is regarded by many to be a gross undercount, as official figures only factor in members of registered Christian groups (in which the SHRC, house Christians, and the underground Catholic Church are not numbered).

    2011 Pew Forum report indicated the number of Christians, including Protestants and Catholics, exceeded 67 million. The Economist similarly indicated in 2020 that official numbers aren’t reflective of the reality; that Chinese Christians and Muslims together outnumber the membership of the communist party (92 million).

    A broader problem

    The CCP does not only send its agents abroad to stalk Christians who have fled. Freedom House issued a report last year indicating that China “conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” It targets religious and ethnic minorities (e.g., Christians, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners), political dissidents, human rights activists, and others.

    For instance, over 1,500 ethnic Muslim Uyghurs have been detained in the Middle East and North Africa, many of whom have been extradited back to China. Thousands more have been targeted, hit with cyber attacks, or have had their families back in China threatened.

    The CCP has also activated agents in the United States. Earlier this year, five CCP spies were charged with stalking, harassing, and spying on Chinese nationals in New York.

    In October 2020, eight illegal agents of the CCP were charged for surveilling, locating, and intimidating targets of the communist regime. These agents intended to coerce their targets back to China, where “they would face certain imprisonment or worse following illegitimate trials.”

    Is Christian nationalism dangerous?


    By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Wednesday, August 17, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/is-christian-nationalism-dangerous.html/

    Christian flag and American flag flying together | GettyImages/ sdgamez

    Is Christian nationalism dangerous? That all depends on what you mean by the term. On the one hand, there is no shortage of warnings today from the left about the alleged danger of Christian nationalism.

    As expressed by conservative author Jason Mattera: 

    “Over the last few years, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of ‘alarming’ stories in left-stream media outlets about the rise of this scary, menacing boogeyman. Christian Nationalism, as the hyperventilating goes, poses a danger to the well-being of the United States and is a betrayal of genuine Christianity.”

    In stark contrast, John Zmirak, a conservative Catholic scholar and cultural commentator, views the term as positive, referring it “to American civic religion circa 1960, where broadly Christian ideas about human nature, marriage, and life prevailed.” In his view, the more the left reviles the term “Christian nationalism,” the more we should embrace it.

    What about the perception of the general public? How do most Americans view the concept of Christian nationalism?

    I’m not aware of any scientific polls that have asked that question, but I did my own, totally unscientific, quite limited poll on my Twitter account, asking

    “How do you define ‘Christian nationalism,’ and in your view, is this a positive or negative term? (You can answer the first part of the question in the comments and the second part in the poll.)”

    Bear in mind that most of my Twitter followers are fellow conservatives and fellow believers, and a strong majority of them voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Still, of the 1,085 respondents to the poll, 66.3% viewed the term as negative, 18.9% as positive, 11.1% were not sure, and just 3.8% had not heard of the term.

    That poll reflects my sentiments as well: I do not like the term or see it as positive or helpful since, for many, it reflects the unhealthy marriage of the Gospel and politics, blurring the distinction between the kingdom of God and patriotism. As one Twitter user put it (quoting from another source), “Christian nationalism can be reasonably understood as a movement that seeks to preserve or promote a Christian national identity.”

    This definition also suggests that America has a special covenant with God, and so being a Christian nationalist means helping America fulfill its God-appointed, covenantal destiny. Consequently, it is no problem to wrap the gospel in the American flag, since America is a Christian nation with a Christian calling.

    In that same spirit, I have seen preachers standing behind pulpits with the American flag draped over their shoulders as they called for Christians to rise up in force and “stop the steal” (referring to the 2020 elections). The kingdom of God and the nation of America were now merged together as one.

    Again, there are solid Christians for whom “Christian nationalism” simply means, “I love Jesus, I love my country, and I honor our Christian foundations.” That is hardly a dangerous position, and there is nothing ominous about it.

    As I wrote in December 2020 in response to a controversial Beth Moore tweet,

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you love and appreciate America? No.

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you are patriotic and serve in the military? No.

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe Trump was better for America than Biden? No.

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe there was electoral fraud and are doing your best to fight for a free and fair election? No.

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe that America must protect our religious liberties? No.

    Are you a Christian nationalist simply because you believe that God raised up America for special purposes in order to bless and help the world? No.

    But you are a Christian nationalist if you confuse loyalty to your country with loyalty to the kingdom of God.

    You are a Christian nationalist if you wrap the gospel in an American flag.

    You are a Christian nationalist if you “merge Christian and American identities.”

    That’s why recent comments by GAB CEO Andrew Torba have raised eyebrows and confirmed the worst suspicions about Christian nationalism, being quoted by outlets such as the Jerusalem Post and further fueling the fires of far-left websites such as Right Wing Watch. As Torba said with reference to a Republican candidate he backed, 

    “We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates, at the state, local and federal levels and we’re going to take this country back for the glory of God.”

    And, what exactly, will this look like? What will it mean to “take the country back for the glory of God,” a sentiment that, in itself, can sound very positive to many Christians?

    Torba explained, 

    “We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish. We don’t want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country. We’re not saying we’re going to deport all these people or whatever. You’re free to stay here. You’re not going to be forced to convert or anything like this because that’s not biblical whatsoever. But you’re going to enjoy the fruits of living in a Christian society under Christian laws and under a Christian culture and you can thank us later.”

    He also said

    “You degenerate pagans and atheists and non-believers went way too far with the COVID nonsense, with shutting down our churches and forcing our kids to be masked, and forcing us to get vaccinated with some mystery goop in order to keep our jobs and provide for our families. You pushed us too far, and now we’re going to take dominion of this country, of our culture, of news, of entertainment, of technology, of education, of everything for the glory of Jesus Christ, our king. It’s just that simple.”

    In short, “Me loving my neighbor is wanting my neighbor to be ruled by wise biblical Christian men. Look at the fruits of what happens when we allow pagans, Jews, non-believers, atheists to run our country.”

    Note carefully those words “take dominion” and “rule.” Christian nationalists will literally take over.

    In Torba’s view, this will happen by winning elections and then making Christian values the law of the land. This, in turn, will benefit the whole society, as if Christians could change society by coercion rather than by sacrificial love and service and example.

    Some even take this one step further, telling Christians to prepare for battle by getting their guns and ammunition ready, in the name of Jesus at that. Get ready for holy war!

    This is irresponsible as it is dangerous, especially in today’s highly volatile, hyper-politicized, powder keg climate.

    In my new book, The Political Seduction of the Church: How Millions of American Christians Confused Politics with the Gospel, I get into these subjects in much more depth, documenting every position in detail, and doing my best to be fair in my presentation. (But let the reader beware: some of what I document in the book is quite shocking.)

    I believe those of you who are interested in delving deeper into the relationship between Church and State and who want to understand the Church’s calling to change the world will find The Political Seduction of the Church helpful. In fact, I wrote it for you.

    For the moment, though, let me say this plainly: Jesus alone deserves our total loyalty and absolute, undivided devotion. Whether it be our careers, reputations, or our patriotism, anything or anyone that seeks to share the throne of our hearts and lives with Him, is an idol that must be smashed.

    https://cdn.videpress.com/video/release/the-political-seduction-of-the-church.html

    Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on FacebookTwitter, or YouTube.

    Rachel Campos-Duffy the Left’s Latest Attack on Catholicism and the Rosary: “The First Thing the Communists Do Is Destroy and Attack Religion – They Have to Get Rid of It” (VIDEO)


    By Jim Hoft | Published August 15, 2022

    Read more at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/rachel-campos-duffy-lefts-latest-attack-catholicism-rosary-first-thing-communists-destroy-attack-religion-get-rid-video/


    As reported earlier today, Atlantic contributor Daniel Panneton has published an op-ed in which he claimed that the rosary is now a symbol of extremism. The rosary, of course, is a string of beads or knots that are used by Catholics as they do a series of prayers.

    In the article titled, “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” Panneton claimed that “just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics.”

    Panneton claimed that “on this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.”

    The writer claimed that the “the rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy.”

    This is just the latest shameless attack on Christianity and Catholicism by the radical left.

    TRENDING: This is Why Democrats Are Not Worried about 2020 — The Fix Is In… Postal Service Institutionalizes Ballot Interference Scheme with New Mail-in Ballot Division

    On Monday night FOX News host Rachel Campos-Duffy took on Panneton and the left. Campos-Duffy knows this is open communism.

    Rachel Campos-Duffy: There is a long history of this. So the first thing that the Marxists, communists do is they attack religion they have to get rid of it. And by extension they want to get rid of family bond. It’s all because the family and religion are threats to the authoritarian state… Bishop Sheen said if you make it – outlaw believing in God then we should all stand up as criminals.

    Jim Hoft

    Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

    Prosecuting Paivi Rasanen for Quoting the Bible Is Making Her an International Star


    BY: JOY PULLMANN | AUGUST 15, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/15/prosecuting-paivi-rasanen-for-quoting-the-bible-is-making-her-an-international-star/

    Paivi Rasanen speaking at the Issues Etc. conference

    Author Joy Pullmann profile

    JOY PULLMANN

    VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

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    Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans.

    She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation.

    She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which she’s been prosecuted and investigated now for three years and will be in court again this November. Her case could affect international law and is a foreboding example of where identity politics policies are quickly heading across the world.

    “If we break the gender system and if we break the natural marriage system between one man and one woman, then we have dangerous consequences, especially to children,” Paivi told The Federalist in person this summer in Chicago.

    This woman of science also firmly believes in supernatural revelation. In her pamphlet on Christian marriage that Finland’s top prosecutor is seeking to ban as “hate speech,” Paivi writes that “Jesus’s death and resurrection is the core of the entire Christian faith. On this the Bible stands or falls. If one does not believe it, there is nothing left of Christianity. And … if I believe this, it follows logically that I must believe everything else Christ teaches in the Bible through the Apostles and Prophets.”

    Paivi speaking to a sold-out audience of Christians in Chicago, Illinois, this summer. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)

    Persecution Spreads the Gospel

    As it has often in history, persecution has created global opportunities for Paivi to spread Christian theology: about sex, its design for lasting human happiness, and Christianity’s warm welcome to those struggling with every kind of sin from the God “who hates nothing He has made.” The 2004 booklet “Male and Female He Created Them,” which prosecutors want to ban entirely and fine Paivi for writing, has gone from a few copies in a few conservative Lutheran churches to translated into half a dozen languages and read all over the world.

    Rasanen’s 2004 booklet, printed from the online PDF and in its new second edition distributed worldwide.

    Paivi and her husband Niilo (nee-loh) spoke this June in Budapest alongside megastar Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his wife. Paivi said she’s seen especially strong support from Eastern European countries because many there still remember the Communists interrogating people about the Bible, as Finnish police did to Paivi three times for a total of 13 hours.

    The Rasanens flew to Chicago right after Budapest so Paivi could speak at the sold-out Christian “Issues, Etc.” conference on June 25. In pearls, a flowered dress, and silvered golden hair, the petite 62-year-old asked the American crowd to pray that her case would “allow for more chances to preach the gospel in public.”

    Rasanen’s case is on appeal in Finland and may end up in the European Court of Human Rights, developing precedents that could affect the world. If she loses in court, Paivi told a Christian outlet last year, “It will also affect religious freedom in other Western countries. LGBT groups have a very good network across national borders. They will try to achieve the same in other countries in Europe.”

    In Q&A after her talk, Paivi said Finnish Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen is expected to push the case as far as possible because Toiviainen has said identity politics is her top priority. Paivi’s legal help from Alliance Defending Freedom International has told The Federalist they are also prepared to appeal her case as far as possible should she lose.

    Paivi Rasanen speaking at the Issues Etc. conference
    Image courtesy Issues, Etc.

    Persecution Amplifies Word of God’s Mercy for Sinners

    Toiviainen claims agreeing with the Bible that sodomy is a sin is a criminal expression of hatred toward homosexuals. Paivi and her legal team have pointed out that if the court interprets the law this way, it will effectively outlaw Christianity and free speech in Finland.

    Rather than rejecting homosexuals, as she’s been accused in court, Paivi glows with happiness when relating that gay people have disclosed her “Bible trial” has brought them to faith. In speeches and court testimony, Paivi has emphasized she not only bears no animosity toward homosexuals or transsexuals, she earnestly desires them to join her Christian family by receiving the eternal life that Jesus Christ offers freely to every person.

    Paivi has been dragged into European courts and smeared in the press for years as a spewer of “hate speech.” Yet while battling severe jet lag that her husband said often gives her migraines, Paivi expressed not even a flicker of animosity toward her persecutors in Chicago.

    Instead, when The Federalist asked if her three-year-and-counting prosecution might be orchestrated by political enemies, she seemed stumped. She conferred with her husband and finally suggested she was simply an easy target as a well-known figure in Finland.

    “In all my career I have been known as a Christian and as a biblical Christian who doesn’t accept abortion and homosexual acts and so on,” Paivi told The Federalist. “And that’s why I think that perhaps it is the reason why the prosecutor has targeted just me.”

    Family Unites to Fight for Other Families

    Acknowledging the Biblical directive that only men serve as pastors has never tied Paivi to the kitchen — although perhaps she’d like to retire there given the suffering her political career has inflicted. Niilo prodded Paivi into running for office nearly three decades ago to try to stop Finland from forcing doctors like her to perform abortions, they told The Federalist.

    Niilo Rasanen is a pastor and theology professor at a Lutheran Bible college. Niilo’s widowed mother lived with the couple while their children were young, and Paivi’s parents moved nearby and “helped a lot,” Paivi said. That, with Niilo’s flexibility while earning his doctorate, allowed Paivi to enter public service without sacrificing their children’s needs, they said.

    During the five years when Niilo was writing his dissertation, “he was always at home when the children came home” from school, Paivi noted. Paivi and Niilo occasionally pulled out their phones to translate Finnish words into English or check they were using the right words, but Finns learn at least two foreign languages in school, Swedish and English.

    Niilo and Paivi Rasanen in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2022. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)

    In response to a question from the Chicago audience, Paivi revealed threats against her family. When she campaigned against child pornography, she said, a convicted pedophile entered their front yard and threatened their children: “It was quite a difficult time because we had to keep safe our children and they were a little bit afraid many years after that.” The most violent of the recent threats include a rape threat against her son, she said.

    These external threats may have helped strengthen family bonds. Paivi and Niilo’s faces light up when they talk about their now-grown children, whom the Rasanens say are a great joy and regularly text their parents Bible verses and prayers.

    “The task is communal, we do it together,” Niilo said of their marriage and family. “It has been so busy and hard time in this politic area — very, very busy, very long days. If you are not doing it together, it will not work.”

    “I think what has been a great power in our life is that we have felt that these callings and tasks that we have, that they are common,” Paivi added.

    From Church Only at Christmas to Global Witness

    Born in 1959, Paivi grew up in a remote area near Finland’s border with Sweden, in the village of Konnunsuo. Her father was the agricultural director for a prison there. He oversaw the prisoners raising vegetables and animals to feed and support themselves. Paivi remembers as a girl watching piglets being born.

    Her parents went to church only at Christmas, she said, but she learned the Bible from Sunday School and at prison church services. Her family also hosted missionaries to the prison, and they explained Christianity to Paivi and her two younger siblings.

    A skilled student, especially in mathematics, young Paivi read all the books in her tiny village library that was open only two hours per week, she said. An adult biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish scientist Marie Curie particularly inspired Paivi: “I admired her. I thought that I would like to be like her, to do something great.”

    At the University of Helsinki, she studied both mathematics and medicine for a half year, but it was too much. So Paivi decided to focus on medicine because “I wanted to work with people.”

    Organizing up to 70 Christian students for five years of weekly door-to-door evangelism in university deepened her faith, Paivi told The Federalist: “It was a very important time for me because there were students from different faculties and I had to defend my views, and I had to know [the] Bible because they asked difficult questions.”

    She met Niilo doing summer missionary work among immigrants in London, and they married in February 1985, a year after Paivi started working as a doctor. They welcomed their children in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996.

    Because Paivi kept organizing debates and speakers about abortion among fellow medical students and doctors, the Christian Democrat political party asked her to run for office. The Christian Democrats are a small party that focuses on faith and family. From 2011 to 2015, Paivi served as Finland’s Minister of the Interior as part of a coalition government.

    She Fights Like a Woman

    Paivi has fought steadfastly not by disposition, but by compunction. She and Niilo chuckled quietly when noting that in university, she flatly refused all public speaking offers and leadership positions.

    In person, the two Finns are true to type and their “Minnesota nice” American cousins: polite, soft-spoken, and deferential. In Chicago, Paivi and Niilo attempted for some 15 minutes to get the Uber app to work on their Finnish cell phones before they could be prevailed upon by this journalist to accept a ride.

    She would have walked the mile to the conference, Paivi assured, as they had the day before, but that morning’s rain would bedraggle her hair and dress right before her speech. After a bit of emotional discomfort at allegedly imposing, followed by a quick, rain-unaffected arrival, Paivi laughed softly, expressed thanks, and commented that this would be a good anecdote for The Federalist profile.

    Paivi Rasanen during audience Q&A in Chicago. Because English is a second language for Paivi, she was given the written questions in advance.

    Although she’s a public figure who regularly appears on TV, including a variety show that dressed her in a bear costume to sing to her grandchildren (she showed photographic evidence), Paivi habitually asks for others’ thoughts rather than discussing her own. It’s yet another contradiction to women’s mag-celebrated attributes: expressing her femininity not only doesn’t abrade Paivi’s character, it complements it.

    Paivi doesn’t assert herself as a “girl boss” who assumes masculine prosthetics, despite years of public leadership that could have taught her to do so. Her apparent emotional security in being the woman God made her bestows its own authority and charm.

    Only Men and Women Fit Perfectly Together

    That acceptance of one’s sex as a gift from God is also a foundation of the theological booklet that helped land Paivi in court indefinitely. Cultural Marxism foments a war between the sexes, but the Bible teaches that love means total self-giving: Husbands sacrifice everything to love their wives, and wives submit to their husbands as they do to God. The true war is not between the sexes, but against them, and in war clear chains of command are necessary to protect everyone.

    The 1960s feminist war fomented between the sexes has now expanded into a war on sex itself. Now even recognizing the differences between men and women and the exclusive fertility of natural marriage is heading toward being criminalized across the West, and with it the Christianity that protects and celebrates these natural realities.

    When she wrote the booklet, Paivi was already well-known as a Christian member of Parliament representing Hame, a rural Finnish province about an hour north of Helsinki. Pastor Juhana Pohjola, elected bishop of Finland’s non-state Lutheran church in 2021, had asked Rasanen to respond to proposals for government licensing of homosexual relationships. Here was a government endorsement of severing natural biological bonds between parents and children that raised both political and theological concerns.

    Rasanen’s resulting 24-page booklet is a succinct summary of Christian sexual ethics. “People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms,” Rasanen writes in the English translation.

    “No choice of policies is ethically neutral,” she notes. “…In actuality, the acceptance of homosexual partnerships meant a more profound change in values than was willingly acknowledged at the time.” For example, she notes, in Finland, those proposing a homosexual partnerships act promised it would affect adults only. Yet immediately after the act passed, the proponents moved to make taxpayers pay for lesbians to be artificially inseminated and for homosexual couples to adopt children who could never know either a father or mother.

    The act’s proponents also promised that Finland’s state church could maintain Christianity’s historic teachings if state recognition of homosexual couples passed. Paivi’s trial today, under a law passed seven years after the booklet was published, directly refutes that claim. It also highlights how impossible it is to reconcile the hard-won natural law framework that protects everyone equally with the identity politics that provides special rights to only government-favored groups.

    Seeking an Internet Interdiction

    Writing the booklet is one of three charges Toiviainen has filed against Paivi. It forms the sole count against Pohjola, the pastor who published the booklet. The two other counts against Paivi relate to her tweet of a Bible verse at the nominally Lutheran state church for sponsoring a homosexual pride parade and comments in a public radio debate she participated in years ago.

    How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?” #lgbt #helsinkipride2019
    Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier

    In 2019, several Finns lodged complaints against Paivi’s tweet. Police investigated, interrogating Paivi about her beliefs three times. Although the police ultimately recommended against prosecuting Paivi, prosecutors sifted through her three-decade public record. They dug up the three alleged hate crimes and charged her.

    The charges against Paivi fall under the legal category of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The prosecutors have asked for Paivi’s writings and audio clips to be completely banned from the internet and for her, Pohjola, and his church to be fined up to a third of their annual incomes, but courts could put Paivi in prison for up to six years if she’s found guilty. Pohjola could be imprisoned for up to two years.

    During Paivi and Pohjola’s trial in early 2022, thousands of Finnish supporters gathered in Helsinki outside the court. Free speech supporters in other countries rallied at Finnish embassies. The American Family Research Council sent Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey detained for two years for preaching Christianity, to give Paivi a pledge of prayers from Christians around the world. U.S. members of Congress, international human rights groups, and coalitions of religious believers have also petitioned the Finnish government to stop prosecuting Rasanen and Pohjola’s human rights to free speech and religious exercise.

    “It is important that we have the freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Paivi told The Federalist in Chicago. “Freedom of speech because it is important for everyone. It is important for every minority and majority. For Christians, it is crucial because we have the commandments of Jesus to tell the good gospel to all people…”

    “Also I think that it is important to respect in society also everyone’s right to speak and argue and oppose you,” she continued. “So this is [a] fundamental issue.”

    For more on this case, read this profile of Bishop Pohjola, who spoke to The Federalist in person in November 2021.


    Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

    Christian Nationalism Is Biblical and America-First, But It’s Not White


    BY: CARINA BENTON | AUGUST 11, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/11/christian-nationalism-is-biblical-and-america-first-but-its-not-white/

    God bless America hay bales

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    If you want to know what the establishment’s all-seeing eye is maniacally fixated on, the amount of energy the corporate media orcs spend bludgeoning “Christian nationalists” provides a clue. Over the past 48 months, there have been dozens of hit jobs on the terror of “Christian nationalism”; there have been about a score of these smear pieces just this past month alone.

    Their Pavlovian function is to condition Americans to associate the term with a bunch of extremists and racists who pose a Hitleresque threat to this country’s democratic institutions so that they will dutifully freak out. These articles rely on the same tactics: straw man arguments that misrepresent both Christianity and nationalism, and phony attempts to depict the movement as white.

    “Christian Nationalism is an un-Christian concept,” opines the New York Times. The Christian right “is beginning to part with democratic norms,” laments NPR. “Christian nationalism has a long dark history … of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi party,” warns MSNBC. “The movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America,” explains CNN.

    The trusted media sources who sold you Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation hoax, and “transitory” inflation, are at least this time right about one thing: Christian nationalism is real, and it’s gaining traction. It’s biblical, it’s America First, but it’s not “white.” It’s not about a white supremacist “Christian Taliban” installing a theocracy, idolizing the nation, or in any way rewriting this country’s great Republican constitutional model.

    In fact, Christian nationalism is entirely consistent with that model. The Declaration of Independence vests the sovereign power with the people, on loan to the government, and entrusts the state with the responsibility of safeguarding the individual’s Creator-endowed rights. In asserting that “the United Colonies are and ought to be Free and Independent States,” the signers appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions” and committed themselves to “the protection of Divine Providence.” If nationalists believe that government should prioritize the interests of the country and the people, Christian nationalists believe, as did the Founders, they should do so under the banner of God.

    The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.

    It also envisages, from Genesis to Isaiah, from the Gospels to the Book of Revelation, the conversion of whole nations or peoples, and warns of the inevitable harm of instead embracing a culture of idolatry, depravity, and deceit. Hence, we read in Proverbs that “a nation without God’s guidance is a nation without order.”

    The biblical message of rightly ordered praise, an objective standard of morality, and free will is a steadying hand, tempering the self-interest of nationalism and the reactionary tendencies of its close cousin populism. When, on the other hand, generic nationalism is shaped by the coercive and unobstructed power of a godless, behemoth administrative state, grave problems arise.

    This was the story of early 20th-century Germany. Hitler was not a Christian nationalist but an illiberal, anti-capitalist, anti-religious national socialist. Hitler’s New Order was the culmination of a decades-long counter-Renaissance revolution in Germany. The enemy — one they shared with communists — was the essence of Western civilization: liberal democracy, the individual man qua man, and the majesty of God.

    In his 1944 book “Road to Serfdom,” the Viennese Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich von Hayek warned not to repeat Germany’s fate by implementing the same policies of big government, central planning, collectivism, social engineering, and the subjugation of the individual to the will of the omnipotent state. Hayek’s concern was not Hitler’s nationalism per se, but his socialism.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippman similarly warned about the “cult of the Providential state.” He wrote that a generation no longer looking confidently to God for the regulation of human affairs is now realizing what happens “when men retreat from freedom to a coercive organization of their affairs.”

    Today, Americans are reaching the same conclusion, with evidence indicating a collapse in support for the Democrats’ socialist, America-last agenda. Economically, Americans recognize that the manipulation of the energy sector in the name of the bogus Green New Deal is driving up gas prices. They’re also blaming Biden’s economic mismanagement for record high inflation, a crisis the administration is now exploiting to expand the IRS by more than six times its current annual budget. Voters are losing interest in spending billions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty when the U.S.’s own southern border is being overrun by human and drug traffickerssex offenders, and violent criminals.

    Socially, Americans are trending toward family policies that reflect a conservative, Judeo-Christian worldview: honoring the nuclear family and parental rights, ensuring medical freedom, and fiercely protecting the innocence of children.

    As much as the left fetishizes skin color, none of this is about race, although different racial groups are feeling the pain in various ways. The Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels is affecting both the Native Americans whose resource-rich tribal lands bring wealth and employment to Native communities, and the predominately white Americans employed in mining, oil, and gas extraction.

    Hispanics, more than any other ethnic or racial group, want the southern border closed and are registering their disapproval by flipping former Democrat strongholds on the southern border red. And with an exponential increase in business ownership to approximately 12 percent of the 27.6 million total U.S. businesses, they’re understandably not impressed by Biden’s economic performance, an assessment 60 percent of black voters agree with. Parents across all racial groups overwhelmingly favor initiatives such as school vouchers and education savings accounts.

    Not surprisingly then, elections in North CarolinaVirginiaPennsylvaniaMarylandArizona, and Michigan, reveal a gravitation toward populist candidates united not by their race or gender but by their Christian, America First principles. The message is one of decency, not degeneracy, prosperity, not pauperdom, and self-determination, not serfdom.

    It’s this love of God, country, and freedom trifecta that has the enemy screeching like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s a winning formula, and the establishment fears it, which is why its hordes in the press keep militantly pounding away at those racist white supremacists every chance they get.


    Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.

    Oklahoma man allowed to sue local school board members for cutting his mic because he spoke about God: ‘Mr. Chaffin was removed because he was predicating his comments on a Biblical worldview’


    By CORTNEY WEIL | August 04, 2022

    Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/oklahoma-man-allowed-to-sue-local-school-board-members-for-cutting-his-mic-because-he-spoke-about-god-mr-chaffin-was-removed-because-he-was-predicating-his-comments-on-a-biblical-worldview-2657809434.html/

    A state judge in Oklahoma has refused to dismiss a lawsuit which alleges that a local school board turned off a public microphone because a man used “a Biblical worldview” to frame his comments.

    Back in April, Brice Chaffin spoke at a public school board meeting in Stillwater, Oklahoma, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City and the home of Oklahoma State University. Though the board had not planned to discuss rules related to bathroom use at schools, many in the audience, including Chaffin, elected to speak about the topic nonetheless.

    Many residents wanted to weigh in on the issue since the board had recently updated its anti-discrimination policy to include “gender identity,” which meant that students could use the bathroom which corresponds to their “gender [identities],” rather than their biological sexes.

    Chaffin began his comments by arguing for the reality of God and the necessity of accepting Jesus. When board members then asked Chaffin to speak about the bathroom topic at hand, Chaffin hinted at his opposition to “gender identity” as a concept and the related bathroom issue by referencing the Bible.

    “So, I talked about physical laws,” Chaffin said. “We have spiritual laws. We also have natural laws. Natural law, for instance, one natural law is that on the day God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female. So, we have males and females.”

    Chaffin then began to quote from the first chapter of the New Testament book Romans, a chapter often cited to denounce homosexuality.

    At that point, school board members interjected once again and asked Chaffin to stay on topic. When he continued to read from Romans, the board silenced the microphone, and Chaffin’s words became inaudible. Security then removed Chaffin from the meeting.

    After the meeting, Chaffin, with the help of attorney Maria Seidler, filed a lawsuit against Stillwater Public Schools, members of the Stillwater school board, and Gay Washington, who was acting superintendent at the time.

    Jenni White, president of the group Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment (ROPE), which is also listed as a plaintiff, issued a statement in support of the suit.

    “Any member of the taxpaying community has the right to speak at a school board meeting,” White wrote. “If you watch the video, it was clear that Mr. Chaffin was removed because he was predicating his comments on a Biblical worldview. According to the First Amendment our speech is protected from interference by the government and a school board is a governmental entity.”

    “I’d just like the school boards to uphold the Constitution as they’re required to pledge upon taking office. Free speech must include religious speech,” White added.

    Though the judge dismissed the charges against the school board as a whole, the judge upheld the suit against the district and each individual board member. A pretrial hearing has been scheduled for November. Chaffin and Seidler are not seeking monetary damages from the defendants, but a public apology and remittance for attorney’s fees.

    State legislators have since changed state law to restrict students to using the bathroom which is in accords with their biological sex.

    Video unavailable.

    Most Americans believe religious freedom is in decline; a third says Christians complain too much: poll


    Reported By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | Friday, July 15, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/most-americans-believe-religious-freedom-is-in-decline-survey.html/

    Religious freedom supporters hold a rally to praise the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case on June 30, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

    More than half of all Americans say religious tolerance for Christians is on the decline, even as more than a third also believes Christians complain too much about how they are treated in society, a newly released Lifeway Research survey suggests.

    In a study of just over 1,000 Americans conducted last September, 54% said religious liberty in the United States is in decline, including around a quarter (24%) who strongly agree with that statement. Almost a third (32%) of respondents disagreed, while 14% said they weren’t sure.

    An even greater percentage of Americans believe religious tolerance for Christians in America is in decline, with 59% agreeing that “Christians increasingly are confronted by intolerance in America today.” Less than a quarter (24%) disagreed, and another 18% said they were unsure if intolerance for Christians is increasing in America. African Americans (68%) and white Americans (59%) were more likely to agree than people of other ethnicities (47%).

    Protestants (69%) and Catholics (59%) were most likely to agree that Christians are facing increasing intolerance. Fifty-three percent of respondents of other religions and 41% of religiously unaffiliated respondents said the same. Those who attend a worship service at least four times a month (64%) are more likely to believe religious liberty is on the decline in America than those who attend less than once a month (53%).

    The religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” were the least likely (40%) to agree religious liberty is on the decline. 

    “Freedoms are not limitless,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “As some groups seek more freedom, it often encroaches on another’s freedom. It’s not surprising those who are more religiously active are the ones noticing reductions in religious freedom compared to those who don’t practice religion.” 

    The survey also found an interesting corollary to the perceived decline in religious liberty: more than a third (36%) of all Americans say Christians in the U.S. “complain too much about how they are treated,” including 14% who strongly agree. Nearly half (49%) of respondents disagreed, while another 15% weren’t sure. Males (40%) were more likely to agree than women (32%) that Christians complain too much about how they are treated. Respondents over 65 were the most likely to disagree that Christians complain too much (64%). The survey found that those who hold Evangelical beliefs are more likely to disagree that Christians complain too much (61%) than those who don’t have Evangelical beliefs (45%). 

    The religiously unaffiliated (53%) were more likely to agree than either Protestants (27%) or Catholics (34%) that Christians complain too much. 

    “Intolerance is about cultural pushback,” McConnell said. “In the American marketplace of ideas, not all systems of thought are welcomed. The majority of all religions notice this pushback against Christians today.”

    The survey was conducted online with over 1,005 respondents and has an error margin of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, with error margins being higher among subgroups. Quotas and slight weights were used to balance gender, age, region, ethnicity, education and religion to more accurately reflect the U.S. population.

    Christian football coach wins Supreme Court case over being fired for praying on field after games


    Reported By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor 

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/supreme-court-sides-with-christian-coach-punished-for-praying-after-football-games.html/

    Coach Joe Kennedy at the Bremerton High School football field. | Courtesy of First Liberty Institute

    The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a Washington school district was wrong to punish a high school football coach for praying on the field after games. In a decision released Monday morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Bremerton School District discriminated against Coach Joe Kennedy. 

    Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the court’s opinion, being joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. 

    “Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway,” wrote Gorsuch. 

    “Both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s … The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.”

    In response to today’s opinion, Kennedy said, “This is just so awesome. All I’ve ever wanted was to be back on the field with my guys. I am incredibly grateful to the Supreme Court, my fantastic legal team, and everyone who has supported us. I thank God for answering our prayers and sustaining my family through this long battle.”

    Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO and chief counsel for First Liberty, a religious liberty law firm based in Plano, Texas, which represented Kennedy, hailed the court’s decision as a “tremendous victory for Coach Kennedy and religious liberty for all Americans.”  

    “Our Constitution protects the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of getting fired,” she added. “We are grateful that the Supreme Court recognized what the Constitution and law have always said — Americans are free to live out their faith in public.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, in which she argued that “this Court consistently has recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible.”

    “Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free
    Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,”
    she wrote. 

    “This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state.”

    Paul Cement, former U.S. Solicitor General and First Liberty network attorney who argued Kennedy’s case before the Justices, said, “After seven long years, Coach Kennedy can finally return to the place he belongs — coaching football and quietly praying by himself after the game. This is a great victory for Coach Kennedy and the First Amendment.”

    A devout Christian, Kennedy had a practice of going to the 50-yard line after high school football games and praying, often with fans and students joining him. In 2015, the school district suspended Kennedy for praying on the field after games and later decided not to renew his contract because of his refusal to stop praying on the field. Kennedy sued the school district in 2016, accusing them of violating his religious freedom. 

    Earlier this year, Shackelford said First Liberty was representing Kennedy because “No teacher or coach should lose their job for simply expressing their faith while in public.”

    A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the coach in 2017, while the Supreme Court initially refused to hear his case in 2019. In March of last year, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit again ruled against Kennedy, with Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. authoring the unanimous opinion.

    “[T]here is no doubt that an objective observer, familiar with the history of Kennedy’s practice, would view his demonstrations as BSD’s endorsement of a particular faith. For that reason, BSD had adequate justification for its treatment of Kennedy,” wrote Smith.

    “BSD had a compelling state interest to avoid violating the Establishment Clause, and it tried repeatedly to work with Kennedy to develop an accommodation for him that would avoid violating the Establishment Clause while nevertheless offering him options that were narrowly tailored to protect his rights …”

    In January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case and heard oral arguments in late April, with the justices debating whether Kennedy’s prayer practice was coercive.

    Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

    Pride Month: Things I’m proud of and things I’m not


    Reported By Jay Lowder, Op-Ed Contributor | Friday, June 10, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/pride-month-things-im-proud-of-and-things-im-not.html/

    File photo shows men kissing each other during a gay protest in front at Nossa Senhora da Paz church in Rio de Janeiro, August 3, 2003. | (Photo: REUTERS/Bruno Domingos)

    This month, the Church is confronted with a great opportunity as individuals, companies and the LGBTQ community celebrate “Pride Month.”

    I was 18 when it was revealed to me that a family member had come out as gay. Shocked, embarrassed, and more concerned with how it might make “me” look, I responded out of anger that looked like hate more than anything else. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I viciously lashed out and actually told this individual I was ashamed of her, that she was no longer my family, and that I never wanted to speak to her again.

    Sure, it was a different day and time, but that is no excuse. At the time, same-sex relationships were mostly covert and culturally viewed in a completely different light than they are today. Those who “came out,” at least in the South where I lived, were usually met with a dump truck of condemnation and at the very most a thimble of love and compassion, especially from people like me who were legalistic, judgmental, and filled with self-righteousness.

    My actions erected a barrier between us as big as the great wall of China, and I kept it intact for the worse part of the next two years. It lasted until something major happened in my life; I went from a religious person who knew about Christ to a person who had received Him and had Him living in my life. Only then, did I realize how wrong I had been.

    I reached out and expressed my regret, apology, and unconditional love. That simple act instantly restored a severed relationship. Of course, we had different opinions and convictions but never again was there any division or separation. I am proud to say we both began to genuinely love and respect one another, and it has continued this way in the decades since.

    Regrettably, my original response is often the same that many other professing believers continue to serve on plates of false superiority.

    For believers, the non-negotiable template has been given to love others…regardless! We must not forget the example of Christ who commonly showed love, concern, and compassion to people who had fallen into an array of transgressions. Jesus never categorized wrongs but made it clear that each of us has fallen extremely short and are in need of forgiveness and grace.

    Why are we so eager to receive mercy yet so unwilling to dispense it to others?

    Jesus made it clear it is not our duty to “change” anyone. This alone is the work of God. Our job is to pray for people and recognize EVERY person on earth has worth in the sight of God. It is an undeniable truth that Christ did not come to save “some,” and we would do well to remember the well-known verse that states “God so loved the world.”  He did not select a few or the religious, righteous, or untainted but the entire world. 

    We as believers need to stop categorizing the failings of others. Have we dismissed the admonition to first take the plank from our own eyes? Jesus did not treat the thieving tax collector any different than the demon-possessed man or the adulteress woman. He did not berate, condemn or belittle anyone except an occasional religious phony. It is quite possible, maybe even likely, if He were on earth today, that the group He would chastise the most would not be those who had fallen into adultery, same-sex relationships, or fornication, but rather those of us who are busy quoting His words but not living them.

    Our call is certainly to speak the truth but NEVER, absolutely never, without love or the recognition that we are also severely stained and not without fault. Jesus said love covers a multitude of faults and is the greatest gift of all. Speaking love alone is not enough; it must be shown through words and deeds, or otherwise it is nothing more than an annoying, empty sound.

    During not only this month but every day of the year, this is what I hope we can remember most.

    I just hung up the phone with the family member I wrongly judged and mistreated. I wanted to ask her permission to write about the incredible relationship we have shared for countless years. She gladly agreed and told me she couldn’t wait for me to meet her new boyfriend this July – the first guy she has dated in over three decades.

    God’s love always wins!   

    Jay Lowder is an evangelist and founder of Jay Lowder Harvest Ministries. He is also the producer of “The Darkest Hour” television program and author of “Midnight in Aisle 7.”

    Shane Idleman Op-ed: America — weak and woke. We need more prophets, not puppets.


    Commentary By Shane Idleman, CP Guest Contributor | Tuesday, June 07, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/america-weak-and-woke-we-need-more-prophets-not-puppets.html/

    Repentance from sin plus faith in Christ equals a new life. | Pixabay

    In a recent documentary, I discussed the rapid decline of America and the desperate need for serious prayer and fasting. To say that we are at a crossroads is an understatement — we are in the crosshairs.

    This is an urgent call to the pulpits of America. America’s lukewarm temperature is caused by a lack of fire in the pulpit and apathy in the pew. Leonard Ravenhill once lamented, “We need more prophets in our pulpits and less puppets.” That same cry goes out today. We simply cannot remain silent.   

    Is saving America the mission of the Church? 

    CNN recently released an article quoting pastor Andy Stanley who said, “saving America is not the mission of the church.” 

    I don’t know Pastor Stanley, nor do I know his heart, but he highlights a real dilemma in our nation — prophetic voices who lack humilityIn short, many bold preachers don’t weep before they whip (cf. John 2:13-16). But balancing love with anger over the condition of our nation, families, and churches is a hard balance to find. 

    People who say things such as, “Saving America is not the mission of the Church,” often use this phrase to justify their silence on important issues. Biblically speaking, it’s impossible to be non-confrontational to a culture hell-bent on rejecting God. We can’t be “unhitched” from God’s Word. 

    But Shane, can you answer the question? 

    Back to the question, “is saving America the mission of the Church?” Of course not, but shouldn’t we desire godly leaders and laws that align with God’s Word and not be shamed for it? Shouldn’t we want to protect our borders and our children without being chastised? Shouldn’t we be a voice to those who have no voice and stop the slaughtering of the innocent? 

    The dilemma Pastor Stanley and others face is that they can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They can’t avoid controversial topics in the hopes of not offending. Watering down difficult topics is exactly why America is drowning in a cesspool of moral relativism.  

    CNN quotes Stanley because, in their eyes, he supports their narrative. You won’t find secular news outlets quoting and supporting bold preachers. Why? Because bold, Christ-centered, truth elevating preaching exposes and dismantles their agenda. If secular news outlets are on your side, are you sure that you’re on the right side?

    Weak and woke won’t awaken 

    My goal isn’t to divide the Body of Christ, but to convict it. I don’t have a beef against Pastor Stanley (I’m sure he’s a great guy), but if a Christian leader says controversial things, can’t we lovingly challenge their words? This isn’t dividing the Body, rather it’s sharpening our iron (Proverbs 27:17). 

    Many of us are becoming weary of the silent pulpit that seems more comfortable slamming bold saints than confronting blatant sinners. Weak sermons from woke pastors won’t convict the sinners who need redemption. 

    A person who is considered “woke” prides themselves on being extra sensitive and aware of racial and social discrimination and injustice. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on the motive of the person using the phrase. 

    If we repent of our skin color, dislike policemen, disdain America, and support sexual perversion by our silence (all under the banner of “wokeness”), we are in deep trouble. If we won’t preach the truth because some in our audience are on the other side of the political spectrum, we aren’t pastors, we are appeasers. 

    Love of country over love of people 

    Love of country shouldn’t take precedence over love of people, but doesn’t loving people also mean loving the country in which they live? 

    What many are really saying is: If you vote for a mean-tweeting president, care about God-given freedoms, and talk about hot-button issues, you don’t love people. With all due respect, that simply is not true!

    Is it even possible for Christians to embrace a political party without hurting the feelings of the other party? No, it’s not. This is the dilemma of Pastor Stanley and other leaders. Instead of asking, “How can we not offend others?” they should be asking, “Are we offending God?” 

    There must appear a new type of preacher

    A.W. Tozer hit the nail on the head decades ago: “If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation, it must be by other means than any now being used … there must appear a new type of preacher.”

    Tozer continues, “The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting.”

    He concludes, “Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the One and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.” God, give us more prophets and less puppets! 

    Appeasement — an exercise in futility 

    Those who have been called to preach will confront compromise, condemn moral digression, and powerfully denounce sin in the hope of reconciling man to God. The world despises them because they challenge the sin the world enjoys. Trying to please a Christ-rejecting world is an exercise in futility.

    Although ruffling feathers is not our goal, we will step on toes from time to time when we speak the truth. This can’t always be avoided, nor should it be. 

    Weak and woke won’t turn America around, but neither will pride and arrogance. Speaking the heart of God flows from a reservoir of brokenness and time spent with Him. How are you doing in this area? 

    Whether you’re on the Right or the Left, you must be on the right side of God’s Word. 

    We need more men like the Old Testament prophet Micaiah, who said, “As surely as the Lord lives, I will speak whatever the Lord tells me” (1 Kings 22:14).

    Shane Idleman is the founder and lead pastor of Westside Christian Fellowship in Lancaster, California, just North of Los Angeles. Shane’s sermons, articles, books, and radio program can all be found at shaneidleman.com or wcfav.org. He is the author of Feasting & FastingIf My PeopleDesperate for More of God, and Help! I’m Addicted. Follow him on Facebook at: facebook.com/confusedchurch. You can also follow Pastor Shane on the new free speech platform Parler https://parler.com/profile/ShaneIdleman/posts

    Activists claim police shot unarmed pregnant woman with her hands up. Then body cam footage is released.


    Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | June 02, 2022

    Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/police-charge-leonna-hale-body-cam-footage-shows-firearm/

    Prosecutors have filed charges against a Kansas City woman who activists claim was the victim of excessive police force. Leonna Hale, 26, was approached by police officers last Friday after she was spotted inside a car that police say matched the description of one involved in an armed carjacking. According to police, the driver of the vehicle jumped out and ran when police approached. They claim Hale also exited the vehicle, went to the rear of the car, and drew a firearm. Police told Hale to drop the firearm, but she allegedly pointed it at police. Law enforcement responded by firing three shots. Hale was wounded in the incident, but she did not die.

    The incident generated significant attention online. Activists claimed police had shot an unarmed pregnant woman five times. Even worse, they claimed she had her hands up.

    • Activist Leslie Mac: “#LeonnaHale is a 26 year old unarmed pregnant Black Woman who was shot five time by Kansas City police on Friday. She had her hands up and told police she could not follow their directions to get on her stomach b/c she was pregnant. There is no reforming this. #AbolitionNow.”
    • CRT scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw: “Please send prayers and support to Leonna Hale, unarmed, shot 5 times in a traffic staff. If mass murderers of Black people can be apprehended alive, why must Black people in traffic stops constantly fear for their lives?”
    • The Kansas City Defender: “Kansas City Police Department shot an unarmed Black woman 5 times. Eyewitnesses say the woman had her hands up. The police handcuffed her while she was bleeding out on the pavement.”
    • Linda Sarsour: “Cops can apprehend white mass murderers without a scratch but will shoot unarmed Black people that pose no threat to them. Leonna Hale. Kansas City, MO.”
    • Occupy Democrats: “BREAKING: A witness reveals that Kansas City police shot Leonna Hale, a pregnant unarmed Black woman, five times as she was running away from them — she has been hospitalized with serious injuries but remains stable.”

    Prosecutors are now charging Hale after they say body cam footage shows that Hale was, in fact, in possession of a firearm and that she pointed her weapon at police.

    Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker explained in a statement:

    Some false narratives about what happened last Friday night at 6th and Prospect Avenue, unfortunately, were relied upon by some media and other sources. Our job, as prosecutors, is to remain neutral and review all evidence. Our review of body cam videos provided the actual accounting of events that night.

    Our review of the investigation revealed the defendant, although she denied having a weapon at the time of the encounter with law enforcement officers, continually displayed a weapon during her encounter with police officers and also appeared to be attempting to flee. The two officers stated that she was armed with what they believed to be a handgun. Body camera footage confirms the officers’ statements that Hale was holding a handgun. Still photos, taken from body cam footage, of this encounter also demonstrate a weapon was present and in the hands of the defendant.

    Hale has been charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful use of a weapon, and a misdemeanor resisting a lawful detention. Local activists, however, do not believe police are being truthful, the Kansas City Star reported.

    Hale remains in the hospital. The driver of the vehicle who fled from police has also since been apprehended. Neither the police nor the media have confirmed that Hale is pregnant, WDAF-TV reported.

    Supporters of woman shot by KC police shocked of image, charges of her pointing weapon at officers www.youtube.com

    Virginia passes law defining religion as including ‘outward expression,’ not just ‘belief’


    Reported By Michael Gryboski | Mainline Church Editor | June 1, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/virginia-passes-law-protecting-outward-religious-expression.html/

    OWEN li | Unsplash/Owen li

    Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has signed a law that legally defines religion as including actions and expressions, not just personal belief, which is viewed as a win by religious liberty advocates. Known as House Bill 1063, the legislation defines the word “religion” as meaning “any outward expression of religious faith, including adherence to religious dressing and grooming practices and the carrying or display of religious items or symbols.” Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter told The Christian Post in a statement Tuesday that the legislation is a “modest step” to advance religious liberty in Virginia.

    “Governor Youngkin has a firm spiritual foundation that guides his entire life and will use every ounce of his authority to protect Virginians’ First Amendment right to freely live out their faith,” Porter said. “HB 1063 is a modest step toward preserving religious freedom in the Commonwealth and the Governor hopes to continue to build on that in the future.”

    Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has argued religious liberty cases before the United States Supreme Court, applauded the passage of HB 1063. ADF Senior Counsel Gregory S. Baylor said that the measure “provides a necessary and helpful clarification in the law to help ensure Virginians won’t face discrimination simply for outwardly expressing their religious beliefs.”

    “Virginia law forbids discrimination on the basis of religion in multiple contexts yet fails to define the actual term ‘religion,’ which can leave Virginians vulnerable to hostile reactions to expressions of their faith,” said Baylor in a statement.  

    “We commend Gov. Youngkin and the Virginia General Assembly for resolving this ambiguity so that Virginians can freely live out their faith without fear of government punishment.”

    The bill was introduced by Del. Irene Shin, a Democrat representing northern Virginia, with the aim of protecting individuals with an outward religious expression like wearing a yarmulke or cross from being discriminated against.

    In April, after the legislation passed both houses of the General Assembly in unanimous votes, Youngkin offered an amendment to HB 1063 that would have instead defined religion as “all aspects of religious observance, practice, or belief.”

    Shin denounced this change of language, claiming in a statement posted to Twitter that it “perverts the intention of this legislation and the legislative body.” After maintaining that Youngkin “hijacked my bill to push his own insidious, right-wing agenda,” Shin unveiled the hashtag #GetYourOwnDamnBill to highlight her disapproval of the amendment. 

    Last week Gov Youngkin aka Wolf in Fleece Clothing™ amended my bill HB1063.

    I’m furious he hijacked my bill to push his own insidious, right-wing agenda. Maybe I should be used to it by now but nah I’m still appalled by his recklessly divisive policies.#GetYourOwnDamnBillpic.twitter.com/f41xQgV5Ah— irene shin ???????? (@ireneshintweets) April 21, 2022

    “The practical implications of the Governor’s amendment would be to create legal protections for discriminatory and bigoted policies, acts and beliefs under the guise of religion,” she continued.

    “The fact that this Administration would co-opt a universally approved bipartisan measure designed to ensure equal protections and weaponize it to advance their agenda of discrimination and division, while sadly unsurprising, is still appalling.”

    Although the governor’s amended version of HB 1063 passed the Republican-controlled House of Delegates in a vote of 52-48 last month, it was not taken up by the Democrat-controlled Senate in time for the governor’s action deadline.   

    HB 1063 was one of 23 bills Youngkin signed into law Friday, as the regular session of the 162nd Virginia General Assembly came to a close. He acknowledged that “while most of these bills were returned to me in an imperfect form, I firmly believe they offer a bipartisan path forward.”  The governor vetoed an additional seven bills sent to him by the legislature.


    BREAKING: San Francisco archbishop bars Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Holy Communion

    CHRIS PANDOLFO | May 20, 2022

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Archdiocese of San Francisco because of her increasingly “extreme” position on abortion, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone announced Friday.

    In a “letter to the faithful,” the archbishop wrote that after repeated attempts to speak with Pelosi and persuade her to adhere to the Catholic Church’s teaching that life begins at conception and abortion is a sin, he has determined to place her under public church discipline.

    “Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi’s position on abortion has become only more extreme over the years, especially in the last few months,” Cordileone wrote. “Just earlier this month she once again, as she has many times before, explicitly cited her Catholic faith while justifying abortion as a ‘choice,’ this time setting herself in direct opposition to Pope Francis.”

    He quoted a statement Pelosi made to the Seattle Times earlier this month in which she fumed over the leaked draft Supreme Court majority opinion that would uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

    “The very idea that they would be telling women the size, timing or whatever of their family, the personal nature of this is so appalling, and I say that as a devout Catholic,” Pelosi said. “They say to me, ‘Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope.’ Yes, I do. Are you stupid?”

    “After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion ‘rights’ and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance,” the archbishop announced.

    “Please know that I find no pleasure whatsoever in fulfilling my pastoral duty here. Speaker Pelosi remains our sister in Christ. Her advocacy for the care of the poor and vulnerable elicits my admiration. I assure you that my action here is purely pastoral, not political,” he said, asking faithful Christians to continue to pray for her.

    The announcement that Pelosi would be denied communion is the culmination of a years-long conflict between the speaker, a self-described devout Catholic, and her archbishop on the abortion issue. Last year, Cordileone issued a missive condemning “the evil of abortion” and suggesting that an “erring Catholic” who continues to support abortion rights after being confronted by their pastor must be temporarily excluded from communion.

    Pelosi has said that overturning Roe would be an “abomination” and that should the Supreme Court do so, it would be “one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.” She and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have led Democrats in support of a radical abortion bill that would wipe out state pro-life laws and dramatically expand abortion access by codifying Roe into federal law.

    Islamic cleric reportedly defends killing of Nigerian Christian woman: ‘Here we kill’


    Reported By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | Wednesday, May 18, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/islamic-cleric-defends-murder-of-christian-woman-report.html/

    College student Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu was stoned to death in Sokoto, Nigeria on May 12, 2022. | Facebook via Morning Star News

    A Muslim cleric in northern Nigeria reportedly defended the murder of a Christian woman over false accusations that she committed blasphemy, which is punishable by death under Islamic law.

    Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu was fatally beaten and burned on May 12. She was accused of sending blasphemous messages to a group chat after refusing to date a Muslim boy.

    A purported video of her killing showed an angry mob vandalizing cars and other targets while shouting “Allah akbar” as Yakubu’s apparent body is burned underneath a pile of objects.

    In response to Yakubu’s murder, Bello Yabo, an Islamic cleric in the Nigerian state of Sokoto, is alleged to have called on Muslims to kill anyone who “insults the prophet,” according to global persecution watchdog International Christian Concern (ICC). 

    ICC’s report didn’t name the cleric, however, an ICC spokesperson told CP that the group’s field staff stated that Yabo is the cleric who made the comments.

    ICC’s translation of Yabo’s comments quotes him as saying: 

    “A young person in Sokoto insulted Allah’s prophet yesterday. In Sokoto we kill such. We don’t tolerate such idiocy in Sokoto. This is not Kano, which is a commercial center, where someone called the prophet names, including being an adulterer. They have been dragging about it.

    “Here we kill. When you touch the prophet we become mad people. No talk of a person being out of his mind. Kill him!

    “Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment. Just kill! Even if the person repents or recants, forgiveness is God’s business. We must kill such. Out of his mind, but buys a device, data, opens social media and insults the prophet? Kill him! Don’t report as a grievance to any authority. Kill him! Even if he is an Islamic teacher, much less a useless rascal.

    “Like Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, we are Mujahedeen (holy warriors) and Jihadists.

    “No compromise.

    “Allah curse whoever touches the prophet. Those of you who displayed your wrath, Allah bless you. Kill and disperse!”

    Yakubu was a student at Shehu Shagari College of Education and a member of the Evangelical Church Winning All denomination. She was accused of sending a message to a school WhatsApp group that her classmates interpreted as blasphemous. 

    “Deborah Emmanuel was complaining in a class WhatsApp group chat, kicking against how they discriminate against Christians in the school in areas of assignments and test in favor of the Muslims,” a local pastor told Morning Star News. “This is what they used as a yardstick to say she insulted Muhammad. She didn’t insult prophet Muhammad, but it was discovered that she turned down a Muslim proposal to date her. That led to him accusing her of insulting prophet Muhammad.”

    Yakubu’s father, Emmanuel Garba, told local media outlets his daughter’s violent death was “an act of God.”

    Garba said the family is looking for answers after the tragedy.

    “We can’t say or do anything, except to take it easy as an act of God. We have left all to God, we have decided to take it like that,” Garba was quoted as saying in an interview with the Nigerian newspaper Daily Post

    He also said he paid the equivalent of nearly $300 to transport his daughter’s corpse back home to the Tungan Magajiya in Rijau local government area of the Niger State so he could bury his daughter.

    Her mother, Alheri Emmanuel, told reporters none of the family’s seven surviving children would attend school again to prevent further tragedy.

    “What has happened to me is my cross, and I will surely carry it, but none of my seven surviving children will go to school again,” she was quoted as telling Vanguard newspaper.

    Police arrested two Muslim men in Yakubu’s death, which sparked riots in Nigeria’s Sokoto state, where a mob of Muslims have vandalized three church buildings and damaged and looted Christian-owned shops.

    Holy Family Catholic Cathedral, St. Kevin’s Catholic Church and an Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) building were attacked on May 14, according to ICC. 

    “Hundreds of Muslims here in Sokoto this morning converged at various points in the city to protest the arrest of two Muslims who were involved in the killing of Deborah,” area resident Angela Anthony was quoted as telling Morning Star News. “In spite of efforts by the police and other security agencies to prevent them from becoming violent in their protest, these Muslims still succeeded in attacking and destroying.”

    The Rev. Christopher Omotosho, the spokesman for Sokoto Diocese, said the protestors also shattered the windows of the diocese’s Bishop Lawton Secretariat and vandalized a bus parked on the premises. Additionally, vandals attacked the diocese’s Bakhita Centre and set a bus on fire. 

    Residents of Sokoto told Morning Star News that they’re asking for prayer even as church leaders of the ECWA and the Christian Association of Nigeria are demanding justice from the government.  

    Reverend Joseph Daramola, a leader in the Christian Association of Nigeria, responded to the violence in a statement last Friday. 

    “It is the failure of the security agencies and the government to rise to such criminalities in the past that gave birth to terrorists and bandits,” he said. “As long as the state fails to bring these beasts and criminals amidst us to book, so also the society will continue to be their killing fields.”

    Islamic militants, including radical Fulani herdsmen and the terror groups Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, routinely target Nigeria’s Christians for kidnapping and even murder. 

    In 2021, ICC designated Nigeria as one of the world’s “Persecutors of the Year,” calling the African country “one of the deadliest places on Earth for Christians.”

    Anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2000, according to the ICC report.

    Open Doors USA, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, reported that at least 4,650 Christians were killed between Oct. 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, an increase from 3,530 the previous year. Additionally, more than 2,500 Christians were kidnapped, up from 990 just one year earlier.

    Hedieh Mirahmadi Op-ed: Be very wary of the US thought police


    Commentary By Hedieh Mirahmadi, Exclusive Columnist | Thursday, May 12, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/be-very-wary-of-the-us-thought-police.html/

    It was astonishing when I first read about the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board.

    In my 20 years of government service fighting terrorism, the most complicated element of our work was protecting the sanctity of free speech while preventing radicalization. We watched young Americans leave their families to either marry a stranger or die in a foreign war but could do nothing about it because they had not committed a crime. They believed the persuasive pleas of the recruiters and wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves.

    Civil rights groups, free speech activists, and others were very wary of our efforts. They claimed we were infringing on religious freedom and free speech by monitoring the recruiters’ activity. Back then, the social media giants wanted no part in censoring online profiles unless they advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. or encouraged acts of violence. We understood it as Americans; we are not in the business of policing ideas, however unpopular they may be.

    The Supreme Court even established “an imminent threat” standard to ensure we did not regulate grossly unpopular or hateful speech. So, it was not until groups like ISIS and Al-Shabab were officially designated as foreign terrorist organizations that criminal charges could be imposed for recruitment and/or material support. 

    Fast forward to today, and this new board is tasked with addressing the threat of disinformation. The repeated use of the word “threat” by DHS Secretary Mayorkas should be a cause for concern. It purposely creates connectivity between disinformation and the potential for physical harm, so there is a crime that can be investigated and eventually prosecuted.

    We already have laws to address any potential harm stemming from intentionally providing false information. There are civil penalties in defamation and slander cases and criminal charges for perjury or obstruction of justice against government officials. However, the Constitution does not allow the government to punish the exaggeration of a story or having a different opinion from the cultural norm.

    Look, for example, at all the controversy surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. What was commonly touted as a wacky MAGA conspiracy was eventually demonstrated to be fact. Same with the research about the utility of masks in fighting off COVID infections and the risks associated with vaccines. Just because something may sound outlandish to some does not mean it’s false. The power of free speech is that the marketplace of ideas allows our opinions to evolve and change with new data. Isn’t that how we defeated slavery and gave women equal rights?

    This recent push to criminalize “unpopular” speech started with the backlash against the parental rights movement. Passionate and angry parents at school board meetings triggered the Justice Department to issue a memo about prosecuting the “threat” to school officials. Soon after, DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory, warning of a heightened terrorism threat caused by disinformation introduced by foreign or domestic actors. Consider the language of the bulletin very carefully:

    “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”

    The alarming conclusion is this: Our leading national security agency says the most significant domestic terrorism threat today is from people who share unpopular ideas with others, which could make them angry enough to commit a crime. To address this apparent threat, they create a Disinformation Governance Board to advise the operational departments of DHS on who to investigate and possibly prosecute for these alleged crimes.

    I am shocked and dismayed this is happening in the public service sector, where I dedicated most of my professional career. How is the U.S. government suddenly the arbiter of “truth?” And why is lack of public trust defined now as a potential terrorism threat?

    As if the unconstitutionality of regulating truth in the public square was not bad enough, the choice to govern the Disinformation Board makes it obvious who is the intended target of this effort. Nina Jankowicz, a clearly left-leaning social activist, has already labeled opponents of CRT “disinformers” and considers gender-based harassment online to be a national security threat, equal to terrorism. 

    U.S. law enforcement power should never be partisan. We saw how damaging that was during the Russian collusion debacle when corruption in senior leadership tarnished the stellar reputation of the FBI. DHS and FBI officials are also never meant to be the thought police. We pride ourselves on that as Americans. Thankfully, many legislators are voicing their objections to this partisan attempt to silence opposition.

    Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee wrote to DHS that the “federal government has no place interfering with the rights of all Americans to speak publicly about their political views … In fact, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that this kind of ‘core political speech’ is the primary object of First Amendment protection.” Ranking Senator Rob Portman said, “I do not believe that the United States government should turn the tools that we have used to assist our allies counter foreign adversaries onto the American people.”

    It is no secret that the U.S. has directly engaged in “disinformation” campaigns in countries worldwide to defeat communism, totalitarianism, and in many cases, terrorist recruitment. The American people should not tolerate its government now turning around to tell us what truth we can or should believe.

    As Christians, even those who try to remain “apolitical” must realize we will be the greatest casualty of this effort. Our truth about who Jesus Christ is as God incarnate and that life begins with conception can easily be weaponized against us when the arbiter does not believe in God’s word. Look at the underwhelming response by law enforcement as the radical’s torch Christian nonprofits and harass conservative Supreme Court judges at their homes. Nothing is being done to stop those crimes as if their truths or legal rights do not matter.

    There are dark days ahead of us, “For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). 

    Hedieh Mirahmadi was a devout Muslim for two decades working in the field of national security before she experienced the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and has a new passion for sharing the Gospel.  She dedicates herself full-time to Resurrect Ministry, an online resource that harnesses the power of the Internet to make salvation through Christ available to people of all nations, and her daily podcast LivingFearlessDevotional.com.

    Pennsylvania school board votes down parent’s request to launch After School Satan Club


    Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, April 21, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/pennsylvania-school-board-votes-down-launch-of-after-school-satan-club.html/

    A Pennsylvania school district has voted against a parent’s request to launch a satanic group’s After School Satan Club at an elementary school for students who want to participate in an extracurricular program that is non-religious. In an 8-1 vote Tuesday, the Northern York County School Board based in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, rejected the request to establish an “After School Satan Club” at the district’s Northern Elementary School.

    The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting indicates that Samantha Groome sought to establish the club on a “probationary basis.”video clip of the school board meeting, obtained by the York Daily Record, shows parents and others gathered in the crowd standing up and erupting into applause after the effort to create the satanic club was defeated.

    Groome said she wanted her children to be able to participate in extracurricular activities, but sought a secular alternative to the Joy El Christian club, which operates at nine of the 16 school districts in the county and offers off-campus activities. 

    While an After School Satan Club will not come to fruition in Northern York County, Pennsylvania, other school districts in the country have embraced the extracurricular programs sponsored by the Satanic Temple. Earlier this year, Jane Addams Elementary School in Moline, Illinois, received criticism for handing out flyers promoting the After School Satan Club. 

    A logo for the After School Satan program. | Satanic Temple of Seattle

    The Moline-Coal Valley School District defended its decision to allow the club to operate at one of its elementary schools. Noting that it “does not discriminate against any groups who wish to rent our facilities, including religious-affiliated groups,” the district explained that “religiously affiliated groups are among those allowed to rent our facilities for a fee.” 

    The district pointed to the Good News Club, which it described as “an after-school child evangelism fellowship group,” as an example of a religious organization that it allows to use its facilities even though it doesn’t endorse its message. 

    According to the Satanic Temple’s website, “the After School Satan Clubs meet at select public schools where Good News Clubs also operate.” Other school districts that host After School Satan Clubs include Lebanon City School District in Lebanon, Ohio, which also faced intense pushback for allowing the Satanic Temple to host an after-school activity for elementary school children. 

    June Everett, who serves as a minister of Satan at the Satanic Temple and is the campaign director of the After School Satan Club, announced that the club would begin meeting at William Bruce Elementary School in Eaton, Ohio, in February. Everett stressed that “ASSC is ONLY in schools that have a Good News Club or other religious club operating after hours.” 

    Everett listed the presence of the extracurricular program LifeWise Academy, a “released time religious instruction program focused on Bible-based character education,” at the school as justification for seeking to launch an After School Satan Club there. She also posted a flyer advertising the After School Satan Club at William Bruce Elementary School.  

    The flyer touted some of the activities participants would engage in, including “science projects,” “puzzles games,” and “arts and crafts projects,” and listed “benevolence and empathy,” “critical thinking,” “problem solving,” “creative expression” and “personal sovereignty” as concepts children will learn there. It also asserted that the United States Constitution protects the After School Satan Club’s right to distribute flyers on public school grounds.

    “The United States Constitution requires schools to respect the right of all external organizations to distribute flyers to students at school if the school permits any such organization to distribute flyers. Accordingly, the school cannot discriminate among groups wishing to distribute flyers at school and does not endorse the content of any flyer distributed at school.”

    The After School Satan Club contends that the U.S. Supreme Court precedent gives it the right to hold meetings on public school grounds after hours: “The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in the case of Good News Club v. Milford Central School that schools operate a ‘limited public forum’ and that, as such, they may not discriminate against religious speech should a religious organization choose to operate an After School Club on their premises.” 

    The After School Satan Club Handbook insists that the group is “not offering any materials or lectures to your child about satanism.” The handbook cites “free inquiry and rationalism” as the focus of the club, adding: “While the classes are designed to promote intellectual and emotional development in accordance with TST’s tenets, no proselytization or religious instruction takes place.”

    A video on the After School Satan Club’s website features a song titled “My Pal Satan,” which includes lyrics declaring, “Satan’s not an evil guy, he wants you to learn and question why, he wants you to have fun and be yourself and by the way, there is no Hell.” Additionally, the song maintains that “Satan’s not a scary guy, he wants you to share and to be kind.”

    “When all is said and done, Satan doesn’t actually exist,” the song continues. “He’s an imaginary friend who can teach us how to live.” 

    Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

    ‘Fasting from Whiteness’: Woke church in Illinois says during Lent it is avoiding music and liturgy created by whites


    Reported by ALEX NITZBERG | April 05, 2022

    Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/fasting-from-whiteness-woke-church-in-illinois-says-during-lent-it-is-avoiding-music-and-liturgy-created-by-non-whites-2657103238.html/

    The website of a woke church in Illinois says that during Lent the church will not utilize any music or liturgy created by white individuals. A section on the home page of the website of the First United Church of Oak Park bears the headline, “Lent 2022: Fasting From Whiteness.”

    “For Lent this year, First United is doing a mix of ‘giving something up’ and ‘taking something on.’ In our worship services throughout Lent, we will not be using any music or liturgy written or composed by white people. Our music will be drawn from the African American spirituals tradition, from South African freedom songs, from Native American traditions, and many, many more,” the website states. “For Lent, it is our prayer that in our spiritual disciplines we may grow as Christians, united in the body of Christ with people of all ages, nations, races, and origins.”

    Turning Point USA posted a photo of a church sign that bears the headline, “Fasting from Whiteness” — the sign includes the message, “This Lent we build our worship life around the voices of Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.”

    The church is unabashedly pro-LGBT, declaring on its website, “We welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into the full life and ministry of the church, including ordination, expecting and encouraging them to share their talents and gifts in the life, liturgy, leadership, and employment positions of our congregation, as our ministers, teachers, members, visitors, and friends.”

    Editor’s note: The original published version of this story contained a headline that erroneously stated that the church was avoiding liturgy created by “non-whites.” We apologize for the error.

    10 Christian converts forced to take Islamic re-education classes in Iran: report


    Reported By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor | Monday, February 07, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/10-christian-asked-to-take-islamic-re-education-classes-in-iran.html/

    Iranian flag
    An Iranian flag flutters in front of the United Nations headquarters in Vienna, Austria, June 17, 2014. |  Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader

    Intelligence agents in Iran’s Khuzestan Province have instructed 10 Christian converts who had been cleared of all charges to participate in “re-education” classes led by Islamic clerics, according to a watchdog report.  Agents of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told the 10 Christians, including eight who were cleared last November of any crime in a court in Dezful, on Jan. 29 that they will have to attend 10 sessions with Islamic clerics to “guide them back onto the right path,” Article 18, a nonprofit that promotes religious freedom and tolerance for Christians in Iran, reported

    The IRGC had summoned more converts, but they didn’t appear. However, those who didn’t appear were called and asked why they hadn’t appeared.

    The IRGC arrested four converts in the southwestern city of Dezful last April and charged them with “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” because they participated in a house church, according to an earlier report from Article 18. The IRGC also summoned other Christian converts for interrogation at the time. The four arrested had personal property confiscated for nearly six months, including necessary items for their children’s schoolwork, laptops and mobile phones.

    The U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern states that the “mandatory Islamic re-education classes directly conflict with the rulings of the Civil and Revolutionary Court of Dezful that said the group ‘merely converted to a different religion.’”

    “The court noted that this apostasy could be punished under Islamic Sharia law but was ‘not criminalized in the laws of Iran,’” ICC noted in a statement

    In reference to other charges that Iranian Christians often face, the courts also ruled they “didn’t carry out any propaganda against other groups,” ICC added.

    In 2021, Revolutionary Guards were responsible for 12 of the 38 documented incidents of Christians being arrested or their homes and churches being raided, Article 18 noted.

    “So-called ‘re-education’ sessions have become much more common in recent years, even appearing in the list of ‘corrective punishments’ on official court papers,” Article 18 detailed.

    Converts from Islam to Christianity are most at risk of persecution in Iran, especially by the government and to a lesser extent by society and their families, Open Doors USA states in a fact sheet on Iran. 

    “The government sees the growth of the church in Iran as an attempt by Western countries to undermine Islam and the Islamic regime of Iran, the fact sheet states. “House groups made up of converts from Muslim backgrounds are often raided, and both their leaders and members have been arrested, prosecuted and given long prison sentences for ‘crimes against national security.’”

    Iran is an Islamic republic, and Shia Islam is the official religion of the country. It is illegal for Muslim citizens to convert or renounce their religious beliefs. Conversion from Islam is considered a crime punishable by death. It is also unlawful for Christians to share the Gospel with Muslims. Proselytizing is also a criminal offense. Those who convert to Christianity usually practice their faith in secret. However, in 2020, a survey of about 50,000 Iranians over the age of 20 found that 1.5% of respondents identify as Christian. Applied across Iran’s population of more than 80 million, the number of Christians in Iran is “without doubt in the order of magnitude of several hundreds of thousands and growing beyond a million,” the Netherlands-based secular research group GAMAAN, stated after the study.

    Iran ranks as the 9th worst country globally when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USA’s 2021 World Watch List. Iran is listed by the U.S. State Department as a “country of particular concern” for engaging in severe violations of religious freedom. 

    North Korea no longer the worst persecutor of Christians on Open Doors’ World Watch List


    Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Wednesday, January 19, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/north-korea-no-longer-worst-persecutor-of-christians-open-doors.html/

    Taliban
    Taliban fighters atop vehicles with Taliban flags parade along a road to celebrate after the US pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan, in Kandahar on September 1, 2021 following the Taliban’s military takeover of the country. | JAVED TANVEER/AFP via Getty Images

    For the first time in over 20 years, North Korea is not listed as the worst country in the world when it comes to Christian persecution on watchdog Open Doors USA’s influential World Watch List.

    Afghanistan has replaced North Korea as “the most dangerous place on the planet to be a Christian” on Open Doors USA’s 2022 World Watch List, released at a virtual press conference Wednesday morning. 

    Open Doors CEO David Curry said that his organization, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, takes into account “on-the-ground expert consensus about what’s happening around the world to Christians who are targeted simply for their faith.”

    The World Watch List measures “pressure, intolerance and violence against the Christian faith worldwide.”

    “The 2022 World Watch List reveals the most seismic changes in the history of our research,” Curry said. “For the first time ever, Afghanistan is the most dangerous place on the planet to be a Christian, coming in at No. 1 on the World Watch List. It has supplanted North Korea, which is now No. 2, for the first time in 20 years.”

    Curry clarified that “North Korea has not gotten better” but rather that “Afghanistan has gotten worse.”

    The ranking comes months after the Taliban Islamic radical insurgency retook control of the Central Asian country after the United States withdrew its military presence.  Curry shared the personal story of a young Afghan woman who “fled for her life and went into hiding” after the Taliban took control of the country. The woman finds herself in particular danger because she is both a female and a Christian. Curry recalled a conversation Open Doors had with her and retold it from her perspective. 

    “A few years ago, the Taliban came, and they took my father away because he was a Christian. They tortured him for months and then killed him. A few months later, my brother also disappeared, and we’ve never heard from [him] again.”

    “It’s no doubt that she knows where her fate is, and thus she and her mother are now on the run,” Curry said. 

    The human rights advocate maintained that the Taliban’s recapturing of Afghanistan led to a global rise in Islamic extremism that extends beyond its borders.

    “In September, shortly after the Taliban seized control, a list was circulated with the names of prominent Christians. Somehow, this list fell into the hands of the Taliban,” he said.

    “Those listed were among the first to be hunted,” he continued. “The Taliban’s interpretation of Islam considers Christians to be traitors, enemies of the state, enemies of the tribe and community. They are infidels from Islam, and in their mind, the punishment is death.”

    Curry declared that every Christian who remains in Afghanistan “is either on the run or in hiding.”

    He shared testimony from another Afghan Christian Open Doors USA spoke with, asserting that “the Taliban are going door-to-door and snatching young girls and destroying … families.” 

    Assessing the state of religious freedom worldwide, Curry said Open Doors’ data shows that “free societies” that protect freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are “facing a war against hatred and discrimination on two separate fronts.”

    “The one battle is against tribal, religious and nationalistic extremists that’s sweeping the globe,” he described. “And there’s a second battle against authoritarian regimes who are deploying sophisticated systems of surveillance, censorship and punishment of anyone who believes or worships outside of a strictly enforced boundary.”

    “Today, religious extremists and the governments they control or influence lead the World Watch List for the first time,” he said, adding that “extremism and tribalism are skyrocketing” along with “related incidents of harassment against Christians.”

    “Nine of the top 10 countries on the World Watch List are run or influenced by radical Islamists or Hindu extremists,” Curry stated. 

    The only exception is North Korea, which is run by a “murderous dictator with a communist ideology.”

    In addition to Afghanistan and North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran and India rounded out the World Watch List’s top 10 “countries where it’s most difficult to follow Jesus.”

    “Our report shows that 360 million Christians globally now suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination. That’s one in seven Christians worldwide,” he lamented.

    Curry emphasized that the World Watch List “also illustrates the challenges … to freedom of conscience and expression for all people, whether they have a religious faith or … consider themselves an atheist or just have different views from the majority of their culture.”

    The list contains a total of 50 countries where persecution of Christians is either “extreme” or “very high.”

    Open Doors USA determined that the top 10 countries on the list, as well as Saudi Arabia, have “extreme” levels of Christian persecution while the remaining 39 have a “very high” amount of persecution. While the countries on the list are primarily located in Asia and Africa, a handful of countries in the Western hemisphere made it on the list.

    Mexico, located directly south of the U.S., is ranked as the 43rd most dangerous country for Christians because of “organized crime and corruption.” Cuba came in as the 37th most challenging country for Christians because of “dictatorial paranoia.”

    The complete report, which contains detailed examples of religious freedom violations in each country on the list, is available on the Open Doors USA website.

    Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

    Tony Perkins Op-ed: Military works to boot Christian ‘extremists’ from its ranks


    Commentary by Tony Perkins, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Thursday, January 13, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/military-works-to-boot-christian-extremists-from-its-ranks.html/

    Military Chaplains
    Bishops speak with military chaplains in New Orleans in this file photo. | (Photo: ENS / Sarah Bartenstein)

    January 6 was a convenient background for a lot of Democrats, but especially the ones in Joe Biden’s Department of Defense. To them, it was a chance to highlight the dangers of conservatives — and fight to get them out of the ranks, once and for all.

    Gearing up to the riot’s one-year anniversary in December, Press Secretary John Kirby warned that new rules on “extremist activity” were coming. “As Secretary [Lloyd] Austin has emphasized, the department is focused on prohibited activity, not on a particular ideology thought or political orientation. The department has always maintained a distinction between thoughts and actions.” So they say. But behind the camouflage, FRC’s Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin argues, is a different agenda entirely. And it’s not about weeding out extremism — it’s about weeding out the people of faith and principle.

    “First of all,” he warned, “nobody in the [DOD] can define extremism. And because this is so ill-defined and because there are so many nebulous things associated with [it], what you’re going to see if that they’re going to start adding to it. And even though they say that they’re not after ideology — they’re not after people’s ideas or people’s faith or people’s leanings politically — that’s just simply not true. [They’re] going to start adding groups like ours — the Family Research Council — as an ‘extremist group,’ telling our troops, ‘You cannot be associated with them, because we stand [things like] biblical marriage.”

    How does he know? Because it’s happened before. Remember, Joe Biden served under Barack Obama for eight years — and in that time, the duo turned America’s government into one of the most vicious, anti-faith institutions the country had ever seen. During the wave of “diversity training” in Obama’s second term, organizations like the American Family Association were on a hit list of “hate groups” that service members were ordered not to follow or engage. If they did, there would be consequences. If you’re associated with them, the military said, you’re risking a court-martial and dishonorable discharge.

    So, this isn’t an empty threat. It’s not hypothetical. It’s already happened. Only now, unfortunately, it’s starting to progress. Thanks to radical groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who’ve partnered with the Biden administration in this extremist witch hunt, it’s not going to stop with organizations like American Family Association, Family Research Council, or Alliance Defending Freedom. Under the Defense Department’s new regulation, just released before Christmas, anyone with a natural view of “gender identity or sexual orientation” or any other biblical truth that is politically incorrect could be labeled as an extremist.

    Consider what these new regulations will eventually do to chaplains who are endorsed by religious denominations that actually believe the Bible. These chaplains will silence themselves on a growing list of “untouchable” issues or they will be silenced by the military for these teaching, which they’ve labeled “extreme.”

    General Boykin has seen a lot of things, but he says he’s “more concerned about our military today” than he’s ever been in his life. He points to the vaccine mandates and the good people our country is losing. “We’re recruiting the wrong people, and we’re [kicking] out the right people. We’re upside-down in the military today, and this is going to destroy our [force] if somebody doesn’t step in and turn this around. And I hope that will be Congress in 2022, when [Republicans] retake the House and Senate.”

    Until then, he agrees, there’s an intentional effort to purge conservatives from the ranks, and we need to stop it. Without a viable military, we live in a vulnerable America. And obviously, if Democrats can’t succeed in abolishing our force, like the Marxist squad wants, then they’ll settle for the next best thing: hallowing it out until it’s nothing but an empty shell.

    We can’t sit on the sidelines and watch. We’ve got to be engaged — and even more so now, when things aren’t going the direction we want. When we see these threats against our freedoms, it’s all the more reason to be active, informed, and hopeful — because we’re anchored in the truth. And that hope doesn’t change. It doesn’t come around every four years. It’s new every morning as we see the glory and goodness of the Lord.


    Originally published at the Family Research Council. 

    Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council.

    Over 400 million Christians live in ‘lands of persecution’: human rights activist


    Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, January 06, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/over-400-million-christians-in-lands-of-persecution-activist.html/

    Iraqi Christians
    Reuters/Thomas Peter

    More than 400 million Christians live in countries that persecute churches — and that persecution is only worsening, according to the leader of a Roman Catholic human rights organization based in Italy.

    Alessandro Monteduro, director of ACS-Italia, the Italian chapter of Aid to the Church in Need, told Vatican News in an interview published last week that there were around 416 million Christians who live “in lands of persecution.”

    “I want to clarify that ‘living in lands of persecution’ does not mean ‘persecuted,’ but living in a land of persecution, however, exposes you daily to risks that may arise due to the behavior of the persecutors,” explained Monteduro, as rendered by Google translate.

    “Unfortunately, all the reports of the charity agencies, but also those reports that involve the states most willing to do so, such as the United States and Great Britain, tell of a tightening of their conditions.”

    Monteduro also told Vatican News that in “certain areas of the planet,” such as the continent of Africa, “the suffering of Christian communities is worsening” due to religious intolerance.  

    “Across Africa, from sub-Saharan Africa to East Africa, there are at least a couple of dozen terrorist organizations that have the ambition, from their point of view, to install caliphates in their territories,” he continued.

    He also spoke of violent persecution in India due to local fears that Christian groups are trying to convert Hindus to Christianity, adding that there was “too much indifference to these tragedies.”

    Monteduro’s concerns over the rising intolerance of Christianity in Africa were echoed by the ecumenical Christian group Release International and its Persecution Trends 2022 report.

    Release International cited multiple African countries, as well as the nations of India and North Korea, as regions that were “of growing concern” for local Christian communities.

    In 2021 in Burkina Faso, for example, local Islamic terrorists engaged in a host of attacks on churches, including bombings, school burnings, assaulting places of worship and murders.

    Release International also expressed concern about Afghanistan, which was recently taken over by the Taliban shortly after the U.S. pulled its troops out but left its military equipment.

    “In 2022, there is a very real threat of higher levels of violent persecution in Afghanistan,” stated Release International CEO Paul Robinson, as part of the report.

    “Our partners tell us that Christians who are unable to follow the outward forms of Islam, such as praying at the mosque and saying the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, will stand out more clearly.”

    Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

    A 2021-Wearied World Can Still Rejoice Over The Same Old ‘Thrill Of Hope’


    Posted BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | DECEMBER 20, 2021

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/20/a-2021-wearied-world-can-still-rejoice-over-the-same-old-thrill-of-hope/

    thrill of hope at Jesus' birth, nativity scene

    In your despair and weariness this tired Christmas, embrace the thrill of hope and the glorious morn it brings.

    KYLEE ZEMPELVISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPELMORE ARTICLES

    Less than a week out from Christmas, we’re once again steeped in the season that compels us to marvel at the incarnation, bustle to and fro with family and friends, and radiate all the levity our hearts can muster. Yet if there’s one word that best encapsulates many dispositions as 2021 comes to a close, it’s “weary.” Although we’re closing the chapter on another year, it doesn’t feel like any of the tiring stories are ending.

    Covid-19 is still with us after two grueling years, and it’s poised to be the forever pandemic. Many churches and schoolchildren remain masked and socially distant. Gas and grocery prices are up, and wallets are lighter. Afghanistan and our borders are still in shambles. Small businesses in cities such as Kenosha are still trying to rebuild in the absence of justice for senseless destruction. Family activities are less light-hearted after traumas like the Waukesha Christmas parade replaced euphoria with fear. Broken families in Middle America are picking up the pieces after tornados leveled their homes and took loved ones. Others lost their livelihoods for having a different opinion on vaccines than the president and the other people in charge.

    Around every corner lurks another obstacle, driving even optimists to wonder when the next shoe will drop. Just when parents got their kids back into classrooms, they were tasked with rising up against propaganda and exposing districts that concealed sexual assault allegations. Churches were finally gathering again as God intended, yet Christians have been stuck combatting divisive and anti-gospel racial ideologies within their own ranks.

    And work is exhausting — for noble educators, needlessly understaffed nurses and doctors, business owners who can’t get people to work, truck drivers, firefighters and increasingly imperiled police officers, and medically coerced airline employees, just to name a few.

    Meanwhile, the news cycle is endlessly mired in woke absurdity, corruption, death, lies, elitist hubris, and soul-sucking diktats, and every time you start to think you can catch your breath, the bad news begins all over again. This is our reality, and it hangs heavily over us even when daily responsibilities or moments of leisure temporarily distract us.

    But there’s another reality — a reality that’s more real than any of the multitude of concerns we shoulder and wounds we nurse — and that’s the reality of eternal joys. As Christmas calls us to remember, those eternal joys were actually embodied in a holy babe, fully God yet fully man, who arrived humbly to rescue broken people from their curse of sinfulness. He arrived to live the life we could not live and die the death we no longer have to.

    The reason for this season can feel far away. The miraculous birth was in another age in a faraway place, after all. And our current struggles can make it seem inaccessible, like the realities of Christmas aren’t compatible with the realities of our troubles. How can a historical event outshine our acute despair and uncertainty?

    These dual realities bring to mind the masterful imagery of C.S. Lewis, who described heavenly things with a kind of concreteness and unfading quality that mortals can hardly fathom. In 2021, as in “The Great Divorce,” everything temporal and hellbound is gossamer — it is passing vapor and fleeting ghosts — when compared to the lasting actuality of all we find in Christ, which though now is often hidden, is as real and concrete as diamonds.

    Thus, although COVID despair and riot violence may seem far more tangible than the Christmas story, for instance, those things are not worth comparingwith the future glory that began with the birth of Jesus.

    It’s here we stand, gazing upon the swaddled Savior of the world, who was sent to a sin-stained Earth to teach his followers about their own brokenness, about the hard-to-swallow truth that their lives and their problems are like a mist, which “appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

    His path too would include temptation, loss, and eventually death. But it would also include resurrection, enabling him as the conqueror of death to pluck our helpless lives out of the pit of despair and sin, onto the Solid Rock, and into a Living Hope.

    This season and these truths recall a familiar tune:

    O Holy Night!

    The stars are brightly shining

    It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth!

    Long lay the world in sin and error pining

    Till he appear’d and the soul felt its worth.

    A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

    For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

    This winter season as we’ve endured Thanksgiving and anticipated Christmas, it’s often been difficult to overcome this weariness and embrace joy.

    But deliverance is here. It came in a dark and dirty stable, amid government decrees, weary travels, first-time parenting, and stressful logistics of acquiring basic necessities such as shelter. Thousands of years later, our new birth is still secured by the same Messiah that was born of humble beginnings and hope still emerges in the dark and dismal places. In your despair and weariness, embrace the thrill of hope and the glorious morn it brings.

    Repent and believe. Trade your burdens and despair for hope. This is the gospel, and it is for you.


    Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

    Democrats’ Massive Entitlement Plans Include Banning Christians From Government Childcare


    Reported By Joy Pullmann | DECEMBER 13, 2021

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/democrats-massive-entitlement-plans-include-banning-christians-from-government-childcare/

    Democrats’ current proposed $3.5 trillion welfare expansion would effectively ban faithful Christians from profiting from federal subsidies for separating infants and toddlers from their families. The current text of Democrats’ massive “Build Back Better” entitlement bill contains provisions that would require religious child-care providers to disavow longstanding theology about sex in order to receive federal child-care funds under a massive new early childhood program.

    “The Democrats went out of their way to make sure and prohibit religious care providers from receiving any of these funds, and unanimously rejected an amendment to allow all child-care providers to be eligible for grants, including religious providers,” said Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Indiana, the ranking member on the House’s subcommittee on Worker and Family Support.

    Democrats’ legislation would create a new federally controlled child-care entitlement available to the majority of families in the nation. The legislation authorizes up to $20 billion in the program’s first year, $30 billion in its second, $40 billion in its third, and an unlimited amount after that. The estimated cost of this program over the next ten years is $400 billion.

    “Making faith-based providers of child-care and pre-kindergarten into recipients of federal financial assistance triggers federal compliance obligations and non-discrimination provisions,” note the leaders of several religious organizations in an opposition letter to Senate Democrats last week.

    This means potentially forcing religious organizations to deny all theology that acknowledges basic truths about human biology and reproduction. Given the state of federal “nondiscrimination” law, this could include forcing religious organizations to allow males into female bathrooms, hire transgender babysitters, and teach small children that men can turn themselves into women and that theologically condemned sex acts are in fact morally good.

    Just one-third of American children younger than five are placed in center-based care, according to federal statistics. Sixty-three percent of American kids ages five and younger are cared for by family, and 11 percent by a babysitter or nanny. Most American kids ages 0 to 5 who do have regular childcare are away from their parents only part-time. Among the minority of American families who enroll young children in full-time care, 53 percent currently choose a religious facility, according to a January 2021 survey of parents from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Family care was parents’ top preference for their children, with religious-based care the second-most preferred option in the BPC poll.

    Democrats’ bill would also likely dramatically increase the costs of childcare by increasing the licensing requirements for people the government pays to babysit tiny children. Most child care workers have low education levels, but states usually don’t raise their licensing requirements because that would reduce the availability of government-controlled child care.

    Numerous studies have found that the quality of language and interaction available to a child in infancy and early childhood is extremely important to that child’s intellectual and social development. Studies have also found that frequent one-on-one interaction between a small child and his parents benefits early language development even if the child’s parents are poorly educated. This effect disappears, however, if that poorly educated mother is employed to care for many tiny children at once instead of one of her own to whom she can fully dedicate her attention and conversation time.

    Research also resoundingly finds that living with married parents provides far bigger positive benefits to children for their entire lives than does attending an early childhood program.

    Large early childhood programs are of notoriously poor quality. The major existing such program, Head Start, has failed to improve attendees’ education and life prospects in all the quality research done on the program that has spent some $250 billion from taxpayers since it began in 1965. In fact, federal research has found that children who participated in Head Start later learned less in math and behaved worse than peers who didn’t participate.

    The research that shows any long-term benefit to children of attending early childhood programs derives such results from small-scale, boutique programs that employed teachers and support staff such as doctors who were much better educated than the typical daycare or preschool employee.

    Research also shows mass programs that separate small children from their parents decrease children’s intellectual abilities and increase their aggression, risky behavior, and later likelihood of committing crimes. They also tend to erode parenting skills. The more time a small child spends away from his mother, the worse such negative effects tend to get.

    “The amount of hours spent in day care each week during the first four years of life was the key child care predictor of behavioral problems,” writes social scientist Dr. Jenet Erickson in a review of several such studies. “In fact, the statistical effect size of the relationship between day care hours and caregiver reports of behavioral problems at age four and a half was so strong that it was comparable to the effect of poverty. Importantly, these statistical effects did not diminish as children aged.”

    High-quality studies found that children who attended Tennessee’s state-run pre-K program had worse behavior and academic outcomes than children who did not. Children who attended Quebec’s universal early childcare program were 22 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime in young adulthood compared to children who did not participate in the program. Children separated from their parents in their youngest years through Quebec’s program also demonstrated greater emotional fragility that lasted into adulthood.

    “The left is at war with religion and family-centered things. They think cradle to grave, government knows best,” Walorski said.

    Walorski has sponsored legislation that would expand tax-free savings accounts families can use to pay for their own child care, tutoring, enrichment activities such as music lessons and summer camp, and more.

    ‘Kill God’: Pennsylvania church vandalized with satanic messages


    Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Tuesday, December 07, 2021

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/kill-god-pennsylvania-church-vandalized-with-satanic-messages.html/

    pews, church
    Getty Images

    A Pennsylvania church was vandalized by unknown assailants who desecrated the property with graffiti depicting satanic symbols and the words “kill God.” The Lititz Church of the Brethren in Lancaster County was vandalized sometime between Thursday evening and Friday morning, police said, according to The Morning Call. The chalk graffiti displayed the phrases “kill God” and “hail Satan,” as well as the satanic symbol of a star inside a circle. The vandalism also featured the number 666, the biblical number for the Antichrist.

    Eric Landram, the lead pastor of Lititz Church of the Brethren, told The Christian Post on Monday that the “chalk which was used left no permanent damage and clean up was minimal.”

    Landram explained that such vandalism has not occurred on his church’s property in the past, so they are “are treating it as a one-time prank and are not concerned by the antics.” He added that apart from “what has already been reported, we have no additional comments to make at this time.”

    News of the church vandalism grabbed the attention of the editorial board for Lancaster Online, which denounced the actions as “egregiously wrong” and “especially disturbing.”

    “There is something especially disturbing about vandalism directed at a place of worship or a religious symbol. It seems designed to rattle people of faith who regard their sacred spaces as sanctuaries to which they go in times of both grief and joy,” wrote the editors.

    “There was no lasting damage to the church. But memories of the desecration likely will linger. Even if it turns out to be the work of clueless young people. Or the product of a disturbed mind.”

    The editorial board also cited a report by Axios published in October, which concluded that houses of worship of various faiths were “experiencing high amounts of vandalism, arson and other property damage.”

    “2021 is on track to exceed last year’s spike in hate crimes in the U.S., many of them linked to religious bigotry,” Axios reported.

    “The number of hate crimes reported in FY 2020 was the highest since 2001, when a wave of Islamophobia followed the 9/11 attacks, according to updated FBI data.”

    Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

    In Case With Global Implications, Finland Puts Christians On Trial For Their Faith


    Reported By Joy Pullmann | NOVEMBER 23, 2021

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/23/in-case-with-global-implications-finland-puts-christians-on-trial-for-their-faith/

    In Case With Global Implications, Finland Puts Christians On Trial For Their Faith
    Photo Image courtesy International Lutheran Council

    Meet the man who appears to be the first in the post-Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for publishing long-held Christian beliefs. Juhana Pohjola wouldn’t be cast to play his own part if Hollywood made a movie about a bishop put on trial for his faith. The Finnish pastor has inherited a place in the church of Martin Luther, but it appears none of Luther’s pugnacity or vitriol. In person, Pohjola, 49, is forthright but unassuming, and gentle. Stereotypically, the Finn is thin and tall. He often pauses while speaking to carefully consider his next words. He listens attentively to others with far less impressive resumes.

    In more than two decades as a pastor, Pohjola has ministered to congregations as small as 30. He has spent his life building a network of faithful churches across Finland, many of which started with a few people gathered for prayer, Bible study, hymn-singing—and communion, if they can get a pastor. In an in-person interview with The Federalist, Pohjola urged fellow Christian leaders to be willing to seek out “one lost sheep” instead of crowds and acclaim.

    This is the man who appears to be the first in the post-Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for preaching the Christian message as it has been established for thousands of years. Also charged in the case that goes to trial on January 24 is Pohjola’s fellow Lutheran and a Finnish member of Parliament, Paivi Rasanen. Rasanen’s alleged crimes in a country that claims to guarantee freedom of speech and religion include tweeting a picture of a Bible verse. Potential penalties if they are convicted include fines and up to two years in prison.

    Finnish Authorities: The Bible Is Hate Speech

    Rasanen and Pohjola are being charged with “hate speech” for respectively writing and publishing a 24-page 2004 booklet that explains basic Christian theology about sex and marriage, which reserves sex exclusively for within marriage, which can only consist of one man and one woman, for life. The Finnish prosecutor claims centuries-old Christian teachings about sex “incite hatred” and violate legal preferences for government-privileged identity groups.

    Writer Rod Dreher pointed out the witch hunt nature of this prosecution: “Räsänen wrote that pamphlet seven years before LGBT was added to the national hate-speech law as a protected class. She was investigated once before for the pamphlet, and cleared — but now she’s going to undergo another interrogation.”

    Rasanen and Pohjola both have adamantly affirmed “the divinely given dignity, value, and human rights of all, including all who identify with the LGBTQ community.” Christian theology teaches that all human beings are precious, as all are made in God’s image and offered eternal life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

    In advance of the trial, Rasanen and Pohjola have been interrogated by police for hours about their theology. Pohjola told me in the interrogation police treated Christian beliefs as thought crimes. In a statement, Rasanen noted that the police publicly admitted their interpretation of Finland’s law would make publishing the Bible a hate crime.

    “It is impossible for me to think that the classical Christian views and the doctrine of the majority of denominations would become illegal. The question here is about the core of Christian faith; how a person gets saved into unity with God and into everlasting life though the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus. Therefore, it is crucial to also talk about the nature of sin,” Rasanen told Dreher. “As we are living in a democratic country, we must be able to disagree and express our disagreement. We have to be able to cope with speech that we feel insults our feelings. Many questions are so debatable and contradictory that we have to have the possibility of discussing. Otherwise, the development is towards a totalitarian system, with only one correct view.”

    Major International Implications

    Humans rights lawyer Paul Coleman, who spoke to The Federalist from his Alliance Defending Freedom International office in Vienna, Austria, says Pohjola and Rasanen’s cases are a “canary in the coalmine” for freedom of speech across the West. ADF International is providing legal support for Pohjola and Rasanen’s cases.

    “Although all European countries have these hate speech laws, and these hate speech laws are increasingly being used against citizens for things that they say, this is the first time we’ve really seen Christians face criminal prosecution for explaining their biblical views,” Coleman said. “…It’s unprecedented. We’ve not seen attacks on free speech on this level in Europe, and that’s why they are extremely important cases, not just for the people of Finland and Paivi Rasanen and the bishop themselves, but for all of Europe. If this is upheld in one jurisdiction, we will no doubt see it in other jurisdictions as well.”

    Such “hate speech” laws exist in every European country and Western countries such as Canada and Australia, and descend from Soviet influence. Coleman called them “sleeper laws,” saying that in other countries “they could be used any time just like they are in Finland. People need to mobilize against these laws and overturn them.”

    Legally privileging certain sexual behavior has thus broken western countries’ promises of equality before the law for all citizens, as well as enabling government discrimination against citizens who exercise their free speech and religious liberty, as in the Baronnelle Stutzman and Jack Phillips cases in the United States.

    “Establishing standards of identity” also lets government meddle in theological controversies that are none of its business, said the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Shaw, who directs church relations for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and has known Pohjola for decades. Pohjola’s church is an international partner of the LCMS.

    From a natural law and historic Western perspective, “the government isn’t supposed to get into people’s brains and tell them what’s right and wrong to believe and say,” Shaw noted in a phone interview. “That’s not their realm. Their realm is in externals, things like protect people in their bodies, go to war when necessary, and punish criminals… This is really what’s at stake [in the Pohjola case]. Government has lost its moorings and doesn’t know its purpose.”

    From Part-Time Pastor to Bishop

    After theological study in Finland and the United States, Pohjola’s first congregation in Helsinki started with about 30 members, he says. It was only able to support him part-time at first. He remembered his wife accompanying the congregation’s hymn-singing on a piano while their firstborn daughter, a baby at the time, laid on a blanket on the floor nearby.

    Finland’s state church began openly disobeying Christian theology concerning sex differences amid the global sexual revolution of the 1960s. So, Christians alienated by the state church’s embrace of anti-Christian cultural demands sought faithful pastors like Pohjola, who are known as “confessional” for adhering to historic Christian confessions. The resulting growth of his tiny congregation gradually led to establishing a seminary, then dozens of mission churches, which grew as the theologically unfaithful state church shrank. In 2013, 25 of these new confessional congregations formed the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of Finland. Today, that diocese oversees 45 congregations and missions and is training 64 pastors.

    That growth has been accompanied by suffering, including persecution first from Pohjola’s own church.

    First Persecuted By His Own Church

    In 2009, Pohjola was awarded the theological journal Gottesdienst’s Sabre of Boldness Award, which is granted “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity on behalf of the Holy Church of Christ, while engaged in the confession of His Pure Gospel in the face of hostile forces, and at the greatest personal risk.” The award honored Pohjola, with other faithful Finnish pastors, for standing firm as Finland’s state church sought civil charges against them for refusing to disobey the Bible’s commands that only men be sent to lead spiritual warfare as pastors.

    Like Luther before him, Pohjola was expelled by his own church body in 2014 for adhering to God’s word on this matter. The notice of his discharge declared Pohjola was “obviously unfit to be a pastor.” At the time, he responded with grief but also by saying that he must obey God rather than men, lamenting: “Instead of the Church being purged with God’s Word, she is being purged from God’s Word.”

    In the interview last week, Pohjola said being defrocked from “his baptismal church” grieves him to this day. On his mother’s side, Pohjola said, his family includes Lutheran pastors in that church going back to the 17th century Reformation. But he could not disobey God’s commands to retain his social status or employment.

    Division or Unity? Yes

    Pohjola’s separation from Finland’s state church also had the consequence of uniting him and his flock with other confessional Christians across the globe. The International Lutheran Council is a global network of theologically unified churches, and like the confessional churches in Finland, that network is growing.

    Mathew Block, the ILC’s communications manager, noted that the heightened contradictions between increasingly unnatural pagan practices and historic Christian teachings are causing a global “confessional realignment.” It’s forcing people to make a real decision about where they stand rather than allowing them to inhabit the increasingly nonexistent, indecisive middle. This is affecting churches all over the world. While it means divisions in some areas, it also is leading to unity in others. For example, despite other important theological differences, all the world’s largest Christian bodies agree with the doctrines for which the Finnish government is persecuting Pohjola. That allows them to speak in chorus to government leaders.

    Already many dozens of top religious leaders across the world have formally raised their concerns with Rasanen and Pohjola’s prosecution to the Finnish government and the United Nations. Several U.S. members of Congress have also asked U.S. agencies to take action against Finland for these human rights abuses.

    “I encourage Roman Catholic ecclesiastical leaders and all those who care for souls to speak up and join hands and lock arms with us as we talk about the absolute necessity of our historic Christian values of one man, one woman, marriage, and the freedom to be able to believe it, to say it, to publish books about it, and find practical ways through hospitality, education, and other social engagement to make society strong that way,” Shaw said. “All churches—one could even say all religions but in particular the Roman Catholic faith—this reflects their historic commitments as well.”

    The Shepherd Faces Wolf Attacks for the Sheep

    In August 2021, the international Lutheran church recognized Pohjola’s steadfast leadership amid persecution by supporting his election to bishop of Finland’s confessional diocese. The ILC hosted Pohjola’s November 2021 speaking tour in the United States, and is raising funds across the world to raise awareness of his case.

    “Our mission has been that, if the shepherd sees that one sheep is missing, he knows,” Pohjola said of the churches he oversees. He noted that many people coming to faithful Finnish churches are seeking love and connection from a church family as the secular world becomes increasingly isolated and family-less, in no small part because of pagan sexual behavior and beliefs.

    “People don’t go to church for social capital now. This is a serious life and they want to be serious with God. So, churches have to build communities that stand on solid Lutheran, biblical doctrine,” Pohjola says.

    While he may not share Luther’s temperament, Pohjola’s response to his own persecution by church and civil authorities does mirror Luther’s simplicity four centuries ago: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” He adds a pastoral message to Christians watching governments turn on them today.

    “We have to learn from the past, Christians who have suffered under persecution, and be prepared,” Pohjola said. “But it’s not something to be worried about, because Christ remains faithful to His church and wherever he is leading us, He will come with us. He will provide everything that is needed for the future of His Christians and His church.”

    You can hear Pohjola talk about his case and its implications during his November visit to the United States here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=413205860293995

    And watch a Federalist Radio Hour interview with Pohjola here:

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