For too long, Christians have sold and bought the lie that loving God and loving your neighbor means embracing ill-named political centrism, caving in the culture war, and quietly refusing opportunities to obey the Great Commission. The assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the widespread revival that followed, however, proves that the third way-ism that has infiltrated even the most seemingly solid Christian institutions has no home here any longer.
It’s not difficult to see that the “Christian nationalist” slur and smearscorporate media, Democrats, and other cowards wielded in an effort to deter Biblically-informed life and law have taken root in key Christian circles, effectively neutering potential Good News bearers from delivering the best message of all time. Yet, a small but powerful sect of bold and morally courageous faithfuls, such as Charlie Kirk, successfully rejected those attacks and devoted their lives to sharing the Gospel with anyone who would listen.
The result of such a commendable act of obedience? A beautiful, one-of-a-kind memorial service in which millions of people across the world finally heard and saw the Good News that has been so readily suppressed from within in recent years.
Reports from within State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona suggested the room was electric with the Holy Spirit. From the stage, Tucker Carlson observed “God’s very obvious presence in this room, the presence of Jesus.”
Contrast Charlie’s exemplary evangelism and the many and mighty spiritual moments at his memorial with the behavior exhibited by some of the most renowned American Christian names, and you get an alarming picture.
Convincing an entire class of Christians to sit down and shut up about politics, or worse, pretend to coast in the middle of the road, certainly has been and would be an effective strategy for Satan to continue. Thankfully, God does not wait on the cooperation of man to enact his will.
Even without the help of Big Eva or the popular faith leaders who were shamefully silent or overly qualified their responses, God used Charlie’s martyrdom to spark a globalrevival.
People are flocking to churches, reading their Bibles, and publicly committing to live more like Charlie lived for Christ. Even the modern-day persecutors such as the corporate media have been forced to print stories with word-for-word calls to Christ-like love and forgiveness made at the memorial.
The Gospel by nature is offensive and “folly to those who are perishing,” which is why so many, even self-proclaimed shoo-ins for Heaven, fail to amplify it for fear of backlash. To the faithful and faith-curious who have received nothing but confirmation as of late that spiritual war for our souls rages on, however, the truth spoken from Charlie’s American Comeback tent and Charlie’s service shone with the unashamedness celebrated by Paul in Romans 1:16.
Americans are practically begging the Christians running our churches and country to return to the roots of their faith. The ever-present longing for a peace that surpasses all understanding and aching to taste and see that the Lord is good, however, won’t be satisfied with the lukewarmness that has dominated the pages of Christianity Today or possessed pulpits of many shapes and sizes any longer.
The mealy-mouthed and, frankly, cowardly behavior exhibited by so many prominent Christians in the last decade and especially this last week will not satisfy new converts who need pure spiritual milk nor will it nourish mature believers who long for soul-enriching meat.
The pastors, Christian podcasters, and others harping on Charlie’s past comments instead of focusing on the opportunity presented by his martyrdom are making a huge mistake. The time to make Heaven crowded is at hand, and those who have partnered with His will should waste no further time and effort whining about politics on colored Instagram graphics.
Instead, they should focus on living boldly for the Lord — like Charlie did. That includes staking everything on Christ, even if, as in Charlie’s case, it becomes the hill on which you die.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and 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 X @jordanboydtx.
Christianity is at risk of being “wiped out” in parts of the world due to intensifying persecution, the United Kingdom’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, David Smith, has warned. The British government is now targeting 10 countries as part of its revised foreign policy focus to defend this human right.
Smith, the Labour Party MP for North Northumberland, made the remarks during a briefing at the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office. A Christian who previously worked with Tearfund and the Bible Society, he announced a new plan to prioritize FoRB in countries where religious minorities, including Christians, Baháʼís and Ahmadiyya Muslims, face repression or violence, the Religion Media Centre reported.
Smith said the U.K. will focus on 10 countries, naming Vietnam, Algeria, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iraq. He said these were selected because of the severity of need, the U.K.’s diplomatic ties and the possibility of making progress.
He added that persecution, carried out both by governments and social groups, can involve harassment by police, social ostracism, detention without cause, denial of citizenship, torture, attacks on places of worship and even killings, citing research by the Pew Research Center.
He cited recent data showing that 380 million Christians face persecution worldwide and warned, “Persecution on the basis of religion or belief, enacted by States themselves and social groups, is taking place on every continent in the world.”
Smith called the U.K.’s commitment “a new chapter” in foreign policy and said freedom of religion was interlinked with other liberties, including freedom of speech, conscience and assembly.
Of the 10 selected, only three — Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan — are among the top 10 in the Open Doors World Watch List, which identifies countries where Christians are most severely persecuted. The worst offenders on that list, such as North Korea, Somalia and Yemen, are not among the U.K.’s current priorities.
Smith acknowledged the gap and said that countries like Eritrea and Yemen remain within his scope through ongoing advocacy. He stated that the strategy’s targeted nature does not prevent the U.K. from acting in other cases, including on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
He referred to the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan, who are not recognized as Muslims by the state and whose mosques are often desecrated, and the repression of Baháʼís in Iran and Christians in North Korea.
FoRB, Smith explained, is not merely about religious belief but about the health of societies. “Religious intolerance and persecution can fuel instability and conflict,” he said. He added that protecting belief rights is crucial to preventing future crises, especially in countries grappling with war or sectarian divisions.
The U.K. government’s FoRB strategy involves five strands.
First, it aims to uphold international standards through bodies such as the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Second, it will embed the issue into targeted bilateral diplomacy, encouraging individual missions to raise FoRB in foreign capitals. Third, the U.K. will strengthen international coalitions working on religious freedom. Fourth, the Foreign Office will incorporate FoRB into its mainstream human rights programming. The fifth strand involves collaboration with civil society groups working on interfaith respect and awareness.
Speaking at the briefing, Lord Collins of Highbury, minister for human rights, said the U.K. has long believed that rights and the rule of law strengthen global prosperity and resilience. He said his office had already written to British heads of mission directing them to embed human rights, including FoRB, into all areas of diplomatic work.
He cited the recent release of two individuals — Nigerian atheist Mubarak Bala and Cuban Pastor Lorenzo Rosales Fajardo — as examples of successful British-supported advocacy.
“Only by working together can we build a world where everyone, everywhere, can live with dignity, free to believe — or not believe — without fear,” Lord Collins said.
In April, during a debate, Smith said Britain’s diplomatic stance is informed by its own history, moving “from persecution to pluralism,” which he said provides credibility to advocate abroad. He described the U.K. as “uniquely well placed” to act in support of religious liberty, citing its legacy of legal rights and peaceful pluralism.
The role of FoRB envoy was created following a 2019 report by then-Bishop of Truro Philip Mounstephen, which found that Foreign Office staff lacked awareness of global religious persecution. The report led to recommendations that religious freedom be formally integrated into U.K. foreign policy.
Smith argued that defending FoRB not only benefits persecuted communities but also those who engage in repression. He said FoRB could unlock new opportunities and freedoms for their nations to flourish, and reaffirmed his commitment to press the U.K. government to act.
Meanwhile, Christian Today noted that new research by Jersey Road PR has found that mainstream U.K. media rarely report on attacks against Christians globally.
A major survey on the religious landscape of America was just released by Pew Research Center, and what it reveals about the decline of Christianity should alarm every American, whether or not one is Christian.
Why should the de-Christianization of America worry us? Because, as I’ve argued before, if America loses the Christian faith from which our system of government is derived, we will lose everything that makes America what it is. All of the rights and freedoms we enjoy, the rule of law, the checks and balances on government power, all of that will disappear.
Suffice to say, the loss of America’s Christian identity has huge implications for everyone in the country, Christian or not. And the Pew study demonstrates just how pervasive and precipitous the decline of Christianity in America is right now.
It’s easy to misread the study, or misapprehend what’s important about it, which is that the de-Christianization of American society is not going to stop anytime soon, in part because it’s being driven by a younger, less Christian, increasingly neopagan cohort of Americas as older Christians die off without being replaced and aging Christian parents fail to pass the faith onto their children. Pew itself seems to misapprehend its own survey, giving it the rather optimistic headline, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.”
This is true only in a narrow sense. Pew’s data indeed suggest that for the last five years, the share of the U.S. population that describes itself as Christian has wavered between 60 and 64 percent, and the new Religious Landscape Study (RLS) released earlier this month puts that figure right in the middle of that range, at 62 percent.
But the devil is in the details. Pew has done three RLS surveys over the past 17 years, each of which involved more than 35,000 adults. The first, in 2007, found 78 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christian. Smaller surveys in subsequent years showed this figure slowly ticking downward, and the second RLS, in 2014, found the total was just 71 percent. The most recent RLS in 2023-24 showed a 9-point drop since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007, which suggests the rate of our de-Christianization is accelerating.
When Pew says that the numbers are now “leveling off,” it means the smaller surveys conducted between 2019 and 2024 bucked the previous trend of a steadily shrinking Christian population in America, and instead of steady year-over-year decreases, it showed fluctuations within that narrow 60-64 percent range.
The overall trend, however, remains one of precipitous decline in Christianity over the past 17 years. And if one digs a little deeper into the RLS survey data, the picture that emerges is even more alarming. For example, the share of Americans who don’t identify with any religion—the “nones” — increased from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014 to 29 percent in 2024. This increase isn’t limited to growing irreligiosity among any particular group but is “demographically broad-based,” says Pew. “There are fewer Christians and more ‘nones’ among men and women; people in every racial and ethnic category; college graduates and those with less education; and residents of all major regions of the country.”
It’s hard to overstate the effect of the rise of the “nones” on the American religious landscape. As Eric Sammons noted last week, “for every 100 people who leave the religious ‘nones’ (i.e., they join a religion), a full 590 become part of that irreligious cohort.” Sammons also observed that the Pew study shows Catholics are facing a sharper decline than Protestants: for every 100 people who become Catholic, 840 leave the Catholic Church. Whereas for every 100 people who become Protestants, only 180 leave.
But either way it’s a story of decline in the Christian faith across the board, while the overall number of “nones” continues to grow — as do the number of non-Christian religious adherents (Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) whose share of the population went from 4.7 percent in 2007 to 7.1 percent today.
And it’s not just that the total number of Christians is declining. The practice of the Christian faith is deteriorating as well. Among the 62 percent who describe themselves as Christian, only a third of them say they attend religious services monthly, either in person or virtually (TV or online). Pew doesn’t compare church attendance figures in this new RLS survey with the results from 2014 or 2007 because it used a slightly different methodology (those earlier surveys were conducted entirely by telephone, whereas the new RLS was done with online and paper surveys).
But Pew did note that the old telephone surveys were registering a decline in church attendance in the years before switching to online/paper surveys: “The share of Americans who reported attending religious services at least monthly dropped from 54% in 2007 to 50% in the 2014 RLS and had fallen to 45% by the time the Center transitioned away from phone surveys in 2018-19.”
For Catholics, the single largest cohort of Christians in America, who now make up just 19 percent of America’s Christian population (down from 24 percent in 2007), the attendance problem is even worse. Catholics are obligated to attend Mass weekly, yet less than a third of them (29 percent) say they fulfill this Sunday obligation. That means of America’s roughly 65 million Catholics, only 18.8 million could be considered “practicing”—and that’s not taking into account other Catholic obligations that are increasingly shirked, like going to confession at least once a year.
But one need not get lost in all this survey data to grasp the essential reality that the Pew study reveals: America is losing its Christian religion. Buried in Pew’s analysis is the critical observation that “it is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die. We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious.” That, in turn, means in order for the decline in Christianity to halt, “today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.” Is that possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not unless something changes.
There’s much more to unpack in the Pew survey, like the decline of Christianity occurring simultaneously with a growth in “spirituality,” which suggests the future of the West will not be one of atheistic, secular materialism but of re-enchantment and neopaganism. But for now, it’s enough simply to be honest with ourselves, and with the data, and acknowledge that we are rapidly de-Christianizing. Once we accept that fact we can begin to think clearly about what it means for our country, and begin at last to fight back.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Pro-life advocate Bevelyn Williams turned herself into a federal prison in Alabama earlier this month. Williams was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act during a June 2020 protest outside a New York City Planned Parenthood facility. Williams is a Christian wife, a devoted mother, and a woman who has experienced the pain of abortion. She should be pardoned and reunited with her family, and the FACE Act must be repealed.
In 2019, Williams watched in horror as then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law the Reproductive Health Act. That decision to legalize abortion up to birth was disturbing to her, even as someone who’d had multiple abortions. During her sentencing hearing, she made a statement before the judge. In it, she said:
After I got my first abortion, it took a toll on me. … The next thing I know, I am waiting in the room and it’s time. I go to sleep, I wake up, it’s done. But it wasn’t done. You can’t just pull something out, you can’t cut something out of you without the emotional consequences that people have to face every day. And for me, that led me down a very, very dark road of depression.
That emotional turmoil continued as Williams had two more abortions. Yet amid a chaotic life, Williams gave her heart to Christ. Her empathy for those considering abortion led her into pro-life activism. Williams never imagined she’d stand in front of an abortion facility in protest. Once her life was surrendered to Christ, she began to feel deeply for other black women considering abortion. Knowing the pain that comes with abortion, she wanted to reach these women to share her story and to help them choose life.
Now, Bevelyn Williams is facing the second longest sentencing in a series of recent FACE Act-related convictions. Lauren Handy was unjustly convicted in a FACE Act trial in Washington, D.C., in August of 2023 and was sentenced to 57 months, the only defendant to have received a longer sentence than Williams.
Williams, a married mother of a young daughter, was blindsided by the length of the sentence. When her legal team requested, she remain at home with her family during the appeal process, the judge refused, saying, in Williams’ words, that she was a danger to the “streets” and “society.” In her statement before the judge Williams said, “I am loud. I am passionate. But am I violent? No.”
During Williams’ sentencing hearing, prosecuting attorneys referred to Handy’s case, saying that both involved alleged injuries to abortion facility employees. In Willams’ case, at the New York City Planned Parenthood protest, a staffer’s hand was allegedly caught in a door — which government prosecutors presented as Williams doing intentionally. Williams’ attorney disagreed; in his opinion, it was relatively minor.
Bevelyn told the judge, “I didn’t go there with intentions to hurt that woman or anybody else. … I wanted to preach the gospel, and I wanted to use the message that God gave me because I lived it. I’m not judging those girls who go in there ready to get an abortion. I know exactly what it’s like.”
Willams was charged with violating the FACE Act in June 2020 in connection with her interference with individuals seeking to obtain an abortion. The official designation of the offense given to her was “unlawful assembly.”
A three-plus-year sentence for unlawful assembly is egregious. The Biden-Harris administration continues to inflict unjust prosecution against pro-lifers by invoking the FACE Act. The FACE Act was supposedly created to protect pregnancy centers and churches, along with abortion facilities. Yet the FACE Act has been weaponized and used to make an example out of pro-life activists. As Republican lawmakers Mike Lee and Chip Roy wrote earlier this year, “Since its passage, the FACE Act has been used approximately 130 times against pro-lifers — but has only been leveled in defense of churches and pregnancy centers five times, even though churches and pro-life centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion clinics.”
Kamala Harris, specifically, has leveraged the legal system to jail Americans who engage in efforts to protect preborn children for the majority of her political career. As California’s attorney general, she went after pregnancy resource centers and pro-life journalists, describing peaceful attempts such as Williams’ protest as “outrageous and immoral.”
In her own words, Bevelyn shared her thoughts on Facebook saying, “My family and I remain hopeful and are trusting God through this challenging time. The Bible is clear that persecution will happen, but ministry continues, even in prison. Our job as Christians is to be a light, especially in dark places.”
Pray for our ally in this mission for life, as she sacrificially suffers imprisonment for this cause. We must push back on this persecution and repeal the FACE Act, as Lee and Roy are leading the effort to do in Congress. Not only do our human rights depend on it, but the rights of the innocent babies in the womb as well.
Christina Bennett is a pro-life missionary and activist whose powerful personal story — she was moments away from being aborted — ignited her passion for advocating for life. Currently serving as a Live Action news correspondent, Christina is also a sought-after pro-life speaker, all while living in Connecticut with her husband and son.
The 2023 Nashville school shooter responsible for the deaths of half a dozen Christians expressed disdain for Christianity and her parents’ biblical beliefs, according to a copy of her long-hidden manifesto released on Tuesday. Obtained and published by The Tennessee Star, the 90-page journal documents the mental breakdown of Audrey Hale leading up to her attack on The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in March 2023. Hale, who identified as a male, killed six people during her rampage, including three small children.
The journal released by the Star offers insight into Hale’s gender confusion and how it induced her apparent disdain for Christianity. In one segment of the document, she seemingly lamented biblical teaching that all children are made in the image of God, writing, “If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f-ggot.”
She also attacked her parents for apparently holding similar beliefs, writing that “conservative religion gay sh-t makes them believe that the child they are given should stay that way.”
“Father is delusional … tells me ‘it gets better + better,’” Hale separately wrote. “OLD MAN, YOU’RE FULL OF SH-T. You don’t feel good every damn day. F-GGOT F-CK.”
“A terrible feeling to know that I am nothing of the gender I was born of,” she added.
Hale’s writings also indicate an alleged fascination with left-wing racial politics. In the early pages of the journal, she wrote, “No brown girls, no love,” and “Brown love is the most beautiful kind.”
As Evita Duffy-Alfonso previously wrote in these pages, contents from Hale’s spiral notebook published last year by conservative commentator Steven Crowder allegedly showed “that the transgender-identifying killer targeted Christian school children because they are white.” Both the journal and notebook were recovered by law enforcement from Hale’s vehicle following the horrific attack, according to the Star.
“[G]oing to fancy private schools with those fancy khakis + sports backpacks w/ their daddies mustangs + convertibles,” Hale purportedly wrote in the notebook. “I wish to shoot you weak-ss d-cks w/ your mop yellow hair wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little f-ggots w/ your white privileges.”
Tuesday’s release of the journal comes amid year-long efforts by local and federal authorities to keep its contents hidden from the public. A month after the shooting, Metro Nashville Council Member Courtney Johnston told the New York Post the FBI defended its refusal to release the manifesto by claiming, as she described, it “was a blueprint on total destruction” and “would be astronomically dangerous” if it fell into the “wrong person’s hands.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
It’s clear by now that the U.S. Secret Service is not a very elite security detail. Random, weaponless rallygoers paid more serious attention to the would-be assassin before he fired than the allegedly professional team assigned to Donald Trump on Saturday. Trump’s security detail did not secure him. Someone else did.
The Person who saved Trump’s life — and our nation from dangerous social unrest — is Jesus Christ. It is not random that wind gusts were present in just the right amount to have shifted the bullet’s course from fatal to flesh wound. It is not accidental that Trump turned his head at precisely the right second to avoid sudden death.
To phrase it as Whittaker Chambers did in explaininghis conversion from atheism to Christianity, which began when he watched his toddler eating: “My eye came to rest on the intricate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. … They could have been created only by immense design.’ … I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid on my forehead.”
The finger of God was also laid on Trump’s forehead Saturday night, turning it in the precise direction at the precise moment to spare his life. The chances of everything occurring as it did by random chance are impossibly improbable. No, the only Person who saved Trump is the same Person Who saves anyone who is ever saved: Jesus Christ, the God of the universe in human flesh.
He Who Controls Both Body and Soul
The whole world watched a miracle in live-time on global TV Saturday night. We watched in striking color the reality that the life and death of every person — and nation — is held in God’s hands. It is Jesus Christ who proclaims:
[D]o not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So, everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
This is why the Christian martyrs often surprised their captors by boldly declaring that no one could put them to death. For the true God promises that “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” The good man who died saving other people’s lives in Pennsylvania Saturday, Corey Comperatore, believed in Him Who Is “the resurrection, and the life,” and Who promises, “[W]hosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
According to Comperatore’s daughter, he was a “man of God” who “loved Jesus fiercely.” No one took Comperatore’s life. Like his Savior, Jesus Christ, he laid it down for those he loved. Also, like Jesus Christ, he will rise again. In the same chapter of Matthew quoted above, Jesus promises, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” See you in eternity, brother.
The Power of Life and Death Is God’s
Saturday was not Trump’s Day to die. His near-death experience was a very visible divine event displaying to all the world Who holds full power over life and death: Jesus Christ. It is a spiritual shock treatment to increase the faith of those who believe and ignite new faith in those ready to believe.
Even with a highly competent Secret Service, Trump could fall at any time God chooses, to any malady. Like every one of us, he could have — God forbid, of course — a heart attack, an aneurysm, or myriad other fatal events. Not even the world’s best doctors or warriors can stop death. The best they can do is sometimes delay it.
As Proverbs says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes.” Yes, the king’s heart and his head as well. The psalmist says, “But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. … I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.”
No one but God shifted Trump’s head that day, and no one but God decides when Trump will meet his Maker. It’s direct and clear evidence that, yes, there is a God, and he divinely intervenes in human affairs.
Miracles Are Proof God Is Real
Miracles are everywhere. They are proof that God is real. And the fact that He’s real should change all of us every moment of our lives.
Miracles are both a rare and everyday occurrence. Every time a child is conceived is a miracle. That happens hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of times each day. It’s a miracle there aren’t more wars, that millions of people have clean and even hot water, that billions of people can eat enough to stay alive every day. Such quotidian miracles are typically hidden: inside mothers’ bodies, plastic pipes, farmers’ tools, the everyday.
Miracles like the one we saw Saturday are rarer and thus a special call for us all to stop, reflect, and pray. That’s because, if we’re honest, we all understand that any of us could die at any moment and face God’s just judgment, yet so many of us are mercifully spared each minute. This highly visible mercy for our undeserving nation calls for national and international gratitude, repentance, faith, and prayer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
While millions of Christians throughout the world celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ this weekend, the Biden administration was busy hawking the demonic ideology of transgenderism.
On Good Friday, President Joe Biden, who claims to be a “devout Catholic,” issued a proclamation declaring March 31, 2024 — the same day as Easter Sunday — to be the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Because, as everyone knows, we don’t have enough faux holidays commemorating the rainbow mob, right?
“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden wrote.
Like clockwork, White House officials and prominent Democrat politicians celebrated the declaration. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul took her LGBT obsession a step further by issuing her own proclamation dubbing March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility” and illuminating 13 state landmarks in so-called “trans colors” in recognition of the made-up holiday.
Biden’s declaration came the same day it was revealed that children were prohibited from submitting Easter egg designs with “religious symbols” for the administration’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event. According to the guidelines, submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”
An Anti-Christian Pattern
Make no mistake. The White House was sending a message to faithful Christians across America this Holy Week: Your beliefs are no longer welcomed here.
During his presidency, Biden has effectively declared war on Christianity. From prosecuting peaceful pro-lifers protesting outside abortion facilities to infiltrating and surveilling Catholic churches, he and his administration have gone to extreme lengths to persecute Americans who worship God instead of government.
Recall when a trans-identifying shooter murdered innocent Christians, including children, at a Nashville Christian school last year. It wasn’t the victims’ families or their Christian faith the White House and Democrats uplifted after the horrific attack, but the (reportedly anti-white) shooter and “transgender community.” In the weeks following the shooting, Democrats across America’s conquered institutions — from legacy media figures to “Saturday Night Live” — rushed to paint trans-identifying individuals as the victims of transphobic Republicans Why? Because transgenderism is one of the main tenets of Democrats’ pagan faith, meaning any narratives and facts undermining it must be stamped out.
The same worldview underlies the Biden administration’s “Transgender Day of Visibility” stunt, leading the neo-pagans to dismiss and desecrate the holiest day of the Christian calendar.
That’s because Christianity is antithetical to the pagan religion of leftism, which has all its own dogmas, sacraments, rituals, and judgments.
Child sacrifice is sacred.
Antiracism is a creed.
Wrong-sex hormones and mutilative surgeries are the way to (your) truth and life,
and neopronouns are regular recitations.
Faithful leftists give to the poor by giving to the state.
Affirmations of sin are daily expressions of self-worship.
“Pride” is a spiritual celebration.
And wrongthink is confessed through struggle sessions and punished through cancel culture.
The only religious element the left’s neo-paganism doesn’t offer is grace or hope. And unlike Christians, who worship a God who explicitly claims to be the Truth and thus defines it, leftism disregards the idea of objective truth altogether. That’s why, for example, Democrats insist people can change their sex by simple declaration.
Democrats Embrace Paganism
Without objective truth, however, there is no shared understanding of “right” and “wrong,” leading to the justification of immoral behaviors and actions. We see this with the normalization of pedophilia with terms like “minor-attracted persons.”
Or consider Democrats’ defense of surgically and chemically mutilating healthy bodies beyond repair. Similar to how they justify killing unwanted preborn children — and not only justify but celebrate with campaigns like “shout your abortion” — leftists employ subjective arguments like “my body, my choice.” They contend it’s good and compassionate for people to reject their God-given physical embodiment and remake themselves into their own image. Notice the left’s warped religious appeals — and implications.
My colleague John Daniel Davidson further examines these phenomena in his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. According to Davidson, America’s devolution stems from its embrace of modern secularist ideals and simultaneous abdication of Christianity. He writes:
[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.
The modern Democrat Party champions all the pagan impulses of leftism. Its members regularly disregard objective truth and morality, all while touting their pain-inducing policies as “kind” and “compassionate” — and there’s no tolerance for beliefs that reject their paganism.
Christians must confront and defeat this unholy takeover of American society. Otherwise, they risk sacrificing what’s left of the country to the evil forces seeking to destroy it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A healthy little Dutch girl without a proper name died 52 years ago. Scientists keep her kidney’s cells multiplying in a process similar to cancer. They perform increasing numbers of experiments on derivatives of this baby girl’s kidney cells to develop technologies that include taste-testing experiments for PepsiCo. Her vivisection forms “the backbone of the global gene therapy market.”
Scientists call the baby girl HEK 293. HEK stands for “human embryonic kidney,” and 293 means she was the 293rd experiment in a set.
She likely died from an elective abortion, not a miscarriage, concludes a 2006 journal article and many other scientific publications. An older gestational age and harvesting her kidney while still alive would have made her more useful for experimentation, as Planned Parenthood officials affirmed of their baby harvesting operations in 2015.
Like many medications, Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics were tested on cells made from HEK 293’s kidney. Some of the vaccines have HEK 293 cells inside them. That’s one of several reasons Capt. Rob Nelson, an Air Force chaplain, couldn’t in good conscience accept those treatments despite massive pressure from the military, he told The Federalist in a phone interview.
“I have five [children], and it breaks my heart to think of this. This girl continues to be violated as her cells are replicated over and over again,” he said.
Nelson is one of 38 military chaplains whose petition is now before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the case Alvarado v. Austin. The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate, which the petition says has allowed statistically zero exceptions.
Eliminating People with Strong Ethical Boundaries from the Military
The DOD continues to violate the law by failing to rescind its punishments of conscientious objectors such as denied training and deployments required for promotions, the petition says. In addition, of course, denying soldiers’ religious exercise violates the First Amendment’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith in their everyday lives.
That is precisely why the military has chaplains, several told The Federalist. All soldiers, their families, and civilians working for the U.S. military “have a right to believe what they believe and no one can say otherwise. It’s the same reason we can’t have a religious test for federal positions. As a chaplain, my job is to make sure the free exercise of religion is allowed, that nobody infringes upon that inalienable right,” said Army Col. Brad Lewis, a chaplain also party to the suit.
Chaplains usually help determine whether soldiers receive religious accommodations for all sorts of things, from Norse pagans wearing beards to Sikhs wearing turbans and Jews eating kosher. While the military routinely approves such waivers, it told Congress it had denied essentially all religious vaccine waiver requests from soldiers who weren’t almost retired, say the plaintiffs.
“I got in with an age waiver,” Nelson noted of his military service. “They can supposedly give wavers for all kinds of things but not a religious accommodation.”
In its Supreme Court response filed March 27, the DOD claims it has removed all punishments from soldiers imposed “solely” for conscientious objections to vaccines. It claims removing career penalties that arise from banning conscientious objectors from career-promoting training and duties has no “lawful basis.” The DOD also says that because the vaccination requirement has ended, the case is moot.
“By denying religious exemptions, what the military has done is set about the removal of people who are willing to stand on conviction,” Lewis said. He and Nelson noted this dynamic is especially dangerous if cultivated among soldiers, whose job is to kill.
Four Years Deployed to Defend Freedoms the Military Denies Him
Lewis has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to the U.S. military, including 47 months of deployment. He’s taken seven deployments to Afghanistan, six to Iraq, and an entire year away from his wife and four children in South Korea. He’s a fourth-generation Assemblies of God pastor whose father also served in the U.S. military during the Cold War.
Lewis was the senior chaplain on Hawaii’s island of Oahu when the Army recommended him as one of two chaplains in 2020 to receive instruction at the U.S. Army War College.
Image of Col. Brad Lewis by U.S. Army / public domain
War College training is the height of an Army career. It’s preparation for high-level officer assignments. While he studied there, Lewis was ordered to take a Covid vaccine. But his conscience wouldn’t let him.
The immense global pressure for an untested medical treatment alarmed Lewis’ long-developed spiritual spidey senses: “The fact that commerce and travel and careers were hinging on receipt of this vaccine, that bothered me.” It seemed to violate biblical injunctions against total obedience to any state.
Lewis and his wife spent months talking about what to do. They knew objecting could kill his career right as he hit its peak, after decades of personal and family sacrifices.
In the end, he couldn’t violate his duty to obey the still, small voice inside, Lewis says. So he filed for a religious exemption. Like almost every other solely religious exemption of the 37,000 DOD told Congress soldiers filed, it was delayed. Then it was denied. So were Lewis’ appeals. He says his superiors told him he could get vaccinated or get drummed out of the military, but while Lewis was willing to sacrifice his body for his country, he would not sacrifice his soul.
So the Army punished him, first by leaving him with no orders upon graduation from War College. That left Lewis and his wife to sit for 11 months in student housing with no assignment for Lewis while another class of students came and went.
“My career was ended by those 11 months of unrated time,” Lewis said. The inaction the Army forced him into destroyed his ratings in the military’s evaluating system. When Congress ended the vaccine mandate, the military assigned Lewis to a rural post in Maryland, where he mostly oversees civilian contractors across the world who have local pastors to tend their spiritual needs.
He says he’s asked superiors whether he will have any opportunities to use his high-level, taxpayer-provided War College training. Lewis says they repeatedly ignored the question. So he’s filed to retire and will leave the Army for good in early 2025.
“I took real strength in the idea that my faith is more important than some bureaucrat’s opinion of my faith. It sustained me, it got me through,” Lewis said.
After asking The Federalist to provide Lewis’ birth date and Social Security Number and to delay this article’s publication, U.S. Army spokeswoman Heather Hagan, who according to her email signature works in the Pentagon, finally provided this in response to a request for comment: “As a matter of policy, the Army does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Not Just about Harvesting Killed Babies
Each conscientious objector’s reasoning is in some way unlike all the others’. There are commonalities, but they blend in individual ways, like fingerprints. That’s why religious objections to vaccines are not erased by a European Covid shot called Novavax, which its owner claims was developed and produced with no human embryo brutalization.
Army Chief of Chaplains Thomas Solhjem, who is now retired, highlighted Novavax when it came out in 2022. He ignored many soldiers’ religious objections not based on the vaccines’ use of murdered babies. They include concerns about damaging human health and reproductive capacity, ignoring natural immunity, the ethics of allegedly emergency decrees, the lack of informed consent, and heavy-handed manipulation tactics that include refusing to acknowledge any potentially legitimate conscience objections to the shots whatsoever.
It’s also unlikely any medical intervention today lacks a connection with the discarded little girl. Research done on cells descended from HEK 293’s tiny body is so “ubiquitous” now, wrote Dr. Melissa Moschella in 2020, that “Anyone who wants to completely avoid benefiting from the use of HEK 293 would effectively have to eschew the use of any medical treatments or biological knowledge developed or updated within the past forty years.” Even Tylenol was developed using cells her body generated.
Lewis said Solhjem’s video “blew my mind” because the job of a chaplain is not to negotiate people’s religious beliefs, it’s to support their exercise: “He didn’t say, ‘I stand with you. No matter what your reasons are, you have a right to believe them, and I will stand and die here defending your right.’ … It’s antithetical to what chaplains are supposed to do.”
‘The Department of Defense Is Hostile to Religion’
Several chaplains provided The Federalist “scripts” that military branches sent chaplains to pressure conscientious objectors into compliance rather than ascertain whether their objections were sincere. They include quotes from figures such as imams and preacher Russell Moore supporting vaccination.
But, for example, the Bible doesn’t say Russell Moore is its chief prophet and interpreter. While theologians and church tradition are helpful guides that Christians should take seriously, the final authority over Christianity is the Bible itself, and it says every individual is responsible before God for how he understands and applies it.
“The Department of Defense is hostile to religion,” said the chaplains’ lawyer, Art Schulcz, who is also a veteran. He said the way the DOD handled the vaccine mandate has contributed to the military’s recruiting crisis by repelling recruits and current soldiers with serious faith convictions. In response to ongoing shortfalls, U.S. military branches are lowering enlistment standards and issuing waivers of risk factors such as marijuana use.
The U.S. military’s chaplains “recruiting deficit is extreme,” wrote Rear Adm. Gregory Todd, the Navy’s chief of chaplains, last year.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.
Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end.
Ali is right, of course, although the reasons she gives for her conversion might raise some eyebrows. “Part of the answer is global,” she writes. Ali says the West is under threat from three different but related forces: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about.
Still, Ali’s conversion is instructive in an important way. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour noted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Ali was “the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam.” There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.
According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.
But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”
Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.
In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.
There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue. What commitment do our elites really have to liberal totems like science and rationality, after all, when they insist that a man can become a woman, or that children can consent to castration and sterilization? When a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court insists she cannot define what a woman is because she is not a biologist, we’ve stepped firmly into what C.S. Lewis called the void, where nothing is objectively true and all that matters is will and power.
“Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue,” writes Ali. “And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.”
Indeed it does, and it has given us all that is good in our civilization. Having first rejected the Christian faith, however, our secular elites are now rejecting all those other good things that sprang from it, and positing a very different sort of society. Instead of a society that embraces rationality and freedom and human rights, they offer something from the pagan past: a society that embraces power and violence and domination. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can already see, on the streets of London and New York and Paris, what that society will look like.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Today a Helsinki appeals court acquitted two Christians of “hate crimes” charges with potential prison sentences for tweeting Bible verses and publishing a Christian booklet about sexual ethics. This unprecedented application of Finnish law has kept Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola in court for nearly five years.
Despite today’s unanimous ruling affirming a unanimous lower-court acquittal, those five years are likely to increase. The state prosecutor told media she will appeal to Finland’s Supreme Court, and the court is likely to take the case, said Rasanen and Pohjola’s lawyer, Matti Sankamo, in a press conference from Finland this morning. An adverse ruling could effectively outlaw Christianity in Finland and damage the fundamental human rights to free speech and religious exercise across the world.
“This is a significant win … for everyone concerned with the protection of fundamental freedoms,” Rasanen said in the press conference. “While I celebrate this victory wholeheartedly, I am also saddened at the thought of the enormous state resources expended over the last four years to prosecute us for nothing more than the peaceful expression of our Christian faith. The basic human right to free speech remains under serious threat in Finland and around the world.”
Rasenen and Pohjola said they immediately texted friends and family the news of the court decision this morning, with Pohjola reading Psalm 103’s words of praise to his family, he said. He also immediately shared the news with fellow pastors, and “I got an immediate reaction that ‘We are so happy our bishop is not labeled as a criminal,’” he said.
“This is not only a cultural or legal battle but also a spiritual battle,” Pohjola said, noting their prosecution raises the “question of [whether] pastor and church can teach publicly what we understand to be the word of God and the created order and the natural law. There have been difficult moments, but I understand this is my calling as a Christian and a pastor to guard the faith and teach it publicly and carry the cross.”
That cross, he said, is not a physical cross like the one he wears around his neck, “It’s to pay the price in this age to be a witness for Christ.”
The case began in 2019, when Rasanen argued on X (then Twitter) that Finland’s state church, in which her husband is a pastor, should not sponsor an LGBT parade. She tweeted a picture of Bible verses that say non-heterosexual acts are unnatural.
Finland’s top prosecutor investigated complaints filed over Rasanen’s tweet. This led to three days of police interrogating Rasanen and an investigation into Rasanen’s 25 years as a member of Parliament and former interior minister for the nation recently admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
That investigation unearthed a 2004 booklet Rasanen, a medical doctor, wrote and Pohjola published as part of a church catechism series. The booklet, titled “Male and Female He Created Them,” explains basic Christian doctrines about God’s design for marriage to comprise one man and one woman for life.
Helsinki prosecutor Anu Mantila argued Finnish courts should ban from the internet the booklet, Rasanen’s tweet, and an audio recording of Rasanen defending Christian views. Mantila also seeks punitive fines. “Male and Female He Created Them” was published in 2004, several years before Finland adopted the antiterrorism laws now being used to prosecute the two Christians for “hate speech.”
“With the right police and prosecutor, we could expect to see similar cases crop up across Europe and in fact around the world,” noted Alliance Defending Freedom International lawyer Paul Coleman, who is assisting the Christians’ legal defense. Hate crimes laws like Finland’s are on the books in many European nations and American states and cities.
Rasanen said the most difficult part of her prosecution has been the prosecutor’s false accusations against her, including that Rasanen considers homosexuals inferior. She said that is “against my conviction” as a Christian. Christianity teaches that every human is made in God’s image and so beloved by God that He sacrificed His own Son to wash away every sin ever committed.
“We represent the common traditional classical understanding of family and sexual ethics, and now this has been labeled widely in our society and also in the established Lutheran church as something which is … not only offending and extremist but it’s also criminal,” Pohjola said.
Pohjola is the bishop of a small non-state church body that adheres to the Bible’s teachings, which Finland’s state church has in large part abandoned. The Federalist interviewed Pohjola in person in 2021, and Rasanen in person in 2022.
In the press conference, Pohjola and Rasanen expressed gratitude for all the prayers and messages of support they’ve received from around the world, as well as their own families’ steadfast support during their trials. They both called it a “privilege” to defend Christianity and the basic human rights of free speech and freedom of religion in court and in numerous media appearances since their prosection began.
Rasanen, whose 11 grandchildren include a newborn, highlighted a message she’d received from a 16-year-old Finnish girl who said the prosecution has encouraged her to be more public about her faith at school.
“In a free society, faith is not meant to be hidden behind closed doors,” Rasanen said today. “This is what happens in dictatorships, not democracies.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The events of the past 120 hours have made it abundantly clear that Israel can no longer coexist alongside Hamas. The violence unleashed by Hamas against unarmed civilians, including women and children and the elderly — much of it filmed and livestreamed online — has shocked the world. On Tuesday, we learned that at a kibbutz near the Gaza border called Kfar Aza, Hamas terrorists slaughtered entire families, including at least 40 babies and small children, some of whom they beheaded.
The Western world has not seen this kind of barbarity in nearly 80 years, and most of us recoil from it in horror and incomprehension. Make no mistake: Kfar Aza will take its place in history alongside Auschwitz and Treblinka. The evil of Hamas is that kind of evil, perhaps not in scale but in kind. In some ways, it is worse because while the Nazis took care to hide what they were doing from the world, Hamas has broadcast its atrocities, boasted and reveled in them. All Hamas members are guilty and deserve swift execution.
Delivering justice to Hamas is now Israel’s grim task, and they will go about it as best they can. But another, perhaps more difficult, task is confronting the Western world at large. In the immediate wake of the Hamas atrocities, demonstrations were staged all over the Western world — in support of Hamas. Those who marched in the streets, who signed pro-Hamas student statements, who posted memes online praising Hamas are not, by and large, antisemitic neo-Nazis. They are left-wing zealots, BLM and LGBT activists, the woke grandchildren of radical Baby Boomer politics, brain-washed by “anticolonialism” propaganda, which they regurgitated before a watching world.
This should not surprise you. The people who cheer the beheading of babies are of course those who also cheer the slaughter of babies in the womb. They are, like Islam itself, post-Christian, and their morality, like the morality of Hamas, is decidedly pagan. That means they do not believe in universal human rights or inherent human dignity. They do not believe in the Christian doctrine of imago Dei and the moral imperatives that flow from it. They do not believe in objective morality or truth. They reject the Christian precepts that constitute the basis for Western civilization.
These are the barbarians who reside beyond the gates of the Christian West. They believe only in power, and they will do whatever they can to gain it. Once they have it, they will exercise it as they see fit, unconstrained by questions of right and wrong, or notions of justice and morality whose premises they reject. They will not have qualms about their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. Appeals to compassion and mercy will fall on deaf ears.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Romans 1:18-32
These are the same people, after all, who insist that “words are violence” and that debates and free speech and even jokes must be suppressed because of the “harm” they cause to vulnerable and marginalized people. If you say a man cannot become a woman, they want you to be fired, to be silenced, to lose everything. If you say we must not castrate and mutilate children in the name of gender ideology, they want your own kids to be taken from you. Confronted by the wholesale slaughter of women and children, the decapitation of babies by armed men, they respond with a shrug and a meme. They do not care about violence as such, they simply want to be the ones to wield it.
Do not think these people are just confused or ignorant. They are pagans, and like the Hamas terrorists whom they champion, they cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. If it is obvious that Israel and Hamas cannot coexist, it is equally obvious that these two worlds, the Christian and the pagan, also cannot coexist. We will become all one thing or all the other.
Under such circumstances, we need to recognize this struggle for what it is: a fundamentally religious struggle between two irreconcilable religious worldviews. For many centuries the Christian West was able to see this clearly. It’s why the Catholic Church worked tirelessly for centuries to stamp out paganism in northern Europe. It’s why the Spanish conquistadors, confronted by human sacrifice cults in the New World, toppled them and razed their temples. They understood that there could be no peace with such a regime. It had to be destroyed utterly.
So, the problem we confront today is old, and the solution is the same. But do we even have the ability, at this late hour, to recognize the problem and do what is necessary? Probably not. We are likely too far along in the process of dechristianization.
Just look at how we responded to 9/11. Many have been calling the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11, which is an apt comparison. But Israel should not make the mistake America and its leaders did. We did not recognize the 9/11 attacks as a religious act. In fact, we actively denied that the massacre was religiously motivated, and so we failed to respond on religious grounds. Remember the infamous words of then-President George W. Bush immediately after the massacre of 3,000 Americans. Surrounded by Islamic leaders who more or less shared the basic worldview of the al-Qaeda terrorists, he proclaimed that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and insisted there could be no connection between the killing and the religion the killers professed.
It was incredible to behold at the time. And what followed was equally incredible. We invaded Iraq on the premise that the Iraqis were just like us, or that we could make them like us. Absurdities followed. The State Department flew political scientists to Baghdad to devise an “Islamic” basis for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In Afghanistan, we went well beyond offering education to Afghan girls and women and instead spent decades and untold billions catechizing them into gender theory and queer studies. For years our leaders repeated ad nauseum the fatuous notion that deep down all people want to be free. Never did it occur to them that some people would rather have justice or power or revenge.
All of these things were indications that we had finally severed ties with our Christian past and stepped firmly, perhaps without realizing it, into the pagan future. We never grappled with the root causes of 9/11, never entertained the notion that a people’s relationship to God shaped everything and was therefore insurmountable. All such discussion was totally absent from the public square. We bought into the lie that all religions are the same, democracy and classical liberalism are fungible and can be imposed at will on any culture, and that religious differences are mostly matters of aesthetics.
What a monstrous lie — and a dangerous one, too, as we are learning every day now. The conflict unfolding in the Middle East is fundamentally religious in ways that are fairly obvious. What is less obvious, because we are a post-Christian people, is that the conflict unfolding in America is equally religious. Hamas and the pagans stand on one side; Christians and Jews stand on the other. Only one side is going to win.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A Canadian pastor has “exiled” his family to Kenya after his government invoked emergency war measures to punish citizens who attended a protest where he prayed and sang the national anthem. Harold Ristau, a decorated veteran and seminary professor, participated in the “trucker convoy” against lockdowns last February, when The Federalist interviewed him last. He is now party to a lawsuit arguing the government’s response to Covid that included treating dissent as terrorism violated Canadians’ fundamental rights.
“The fight is far from over,” said Marty Moore, a lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which is litigating Ristau’s case. More than 14 months after the protest, police arrested another convoy leader this May. Lockdown litigation will likely continue for several more years, Moore said. The same is true across the West.
For peaceably assembling to petition his government for one day last year, Ristau says, he was threatened with the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his retirement nest egg, kids’ college funds, and other life savings. Ristau says he’s also experienced serious damage to his reputation, career, and friendships after the government used anti-terrorism measures against peaceful protesters.
“There’s no protection, if a pandemic started tomorrow, from future mandates. So that’s why I was really open to coming here,” his wife, Elise Ristau, said, sitting beside her husband in a recent video interview from Kenya.
Besides dealing with overbearing health restrictions, their children were mocked at school for their family’s religious and political views, Elise Ristau told The Federalist. After enduring more than two years of severe social and government repression, the Ristaus moved outside Nairobi with their five children last August.
“I don’t know that I can go back and be a Christian in Canada. So that’s why we’re here in Kenya,” Harold Ristau said. There, the former chaplain with a Ph.D. in philosophy trains Kenyan pastors at the Lutheran School of Theology.
Confiscating Dissenters’ Life Savings
Government use of “debanking” to punish dissent is growing in the West. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government used it on essentially every convoy participant authorities could identify, said Moore.
“As soon as they knew your name if you were on the ground [protesting] in Ottawa, they froze your bank account,” Moore told The Federalist. “…The federal government met with the banks, they gave the [protesters’] names to the banks, and the banks were then pushed to freeze the bank accounts of anyone with that name in their banks. It was a fascist collaboration.”
In May, American whistleblowers disclosed the FBI obtained, without any warrants, “a huge list” of citizens’ private banking data in its Jan. 6, 2021 capitol riot investigation. Investigators targeted any American who legally bought a firearm using a Bank of America account all the way back to the 1990s, the whistleblower testified.
Treating a Veteran Like a Terrorist
After the Canadian government announced it would freeze the bank accounts of convoy protesters and their mostly small-dollar donors without legal due process, rumors of bank runs spread. Multiple large Canadian banks appeared to shut down online operations soon after the announcement. Elise withdrew their family’s savings that Friday, too, she and Harold said. Like thousands of Canadians, they had donated to the convoy. Yet Ristau was the only one of the four plaintiffs in his lawsuit whose accounts were not frozen. He thinks it’s because of his military record.
“Some of the measures that were at least attempted to be invoked are the kind of measures you find to freeze terrorist financing,” Moore noted. “So peaceful protesters were the equivalent of terrorists and the government leaned on banks in the guise of a national emergency to freeze their bank accounts.”
Leftist activists also filed a class-action lawsuit against every Canadian who donated to the convoy. It seeks $300 million in damages. When before the convoy Canada experienced multiple race protests that included violence against stores and police, no class action was filed.
Christians Assisting Government Persecution
Canadian lockdowns kept gyms, restaurants, and liquor stores open but closed churches. Leftist protesters were allowed to yell and sing without masks, and the prime minister kneeled to them, all while provinces banned Christians from singing and chanting in church for years.
Rev. Johannes Nieminen wasn’t allowed to cross provincial borders to perform his pastoral duties, while other Canadians could do so for work, he told The Federalist. After he was denied border entry several times, he said, police finally let him through — but told him he wasn’t allowed to meet with parishioners or hold church services.
“If I’m going to go to the grocery store for physical food, I’m going to the church for spiritual food. If I’m going to the doctor’s office for physical medicine, I’m going to church for the medicine of immortality,” Nieminen said. His denomination believes Jesus Christ’s body and blood are physically present in the wine and bread of communion, and that Christians are commanded to physically eat these — impossible without gathering in person.
Until moving to pastor in New Mexico this summer, Nieminen was clergy in the same denomination as Ristau, the Lutheran Church Canada. He said lockdowns sharply divided many churches, and even though most Covid measures are now lifted, church leaders have largely failed to seek reconciliation and repentance, as commanded in the Bible.
“We need to repent. There’s been crazy division here, and we need to actually talk about it,” he said.
State-Run Western Churches
Nieminen said pastors who obeyed the government to treat churches worse than liquor stores and gyms taught lay people church is non-essential or can be conducted online. The Bible commands keeping a day of worship, meeting in person, singing hymns and psalms, and physically receiving the bread and wine of communion. Christians have done all these every week since the time of Christ.
Communion is a “sacrament,” an action God commands that produces faith and eternal salvation. Only pastors can deliver it, a tradition going back to Christ’s commissioning of His apostles. In all the great pandemics of history, priests and pastors knowingly braved death to bring the sacrament to the dying desperate for the peace and unity with God it promises.
Nieminen said he saw Canadian Christians publicly plead for the sacrament amid lockdowns that nearly lasted three years. They received no response from their pastors, who told Nieminen the pleading parishioners didn’t use the “proper channels.”
“There’s that lack of trust in pastors and a church that they see as giving up on them and basically persecuting them,” Nieminen said. “…They’re being coerced by tyrants to do something against their conscience, and then they go to church and then they’re hearing the same thing from the church.”
Within days of him praying at the protest, says Harold Ristau’s sworn affidavit, fellow clergy began refusing to let him preach and to take communion with him. Some checked with superiors on whether to commune him. Refusing communion to a church member is tantamount to excommunication.
Praying at the protest “demonstrated I was this political insurrectionist” to some clergy whose beliefs about Covid were shaped by state-funded, anti-Christian media, Harold Ristau said: “Prior to Covid, everyone recognized the media were a bunch of liars who hated Christians, but with Covid suddenly we trust them entirely.”
A Political Decision, Not a Health Decision
So far, “none of the [legal] challenges to worship restrictions on church services have succeeded” in Canada, said John Sikkema, a lawyer at the nonprofit firm ARPA Canada.
“Culturally, people find going to the gym very important and less so going to church,” Sikkema noted. “Especially when some churches don’t seem to care and don’t think it’s necessary.”
To secular authorities, keeping the economy going easily trumps the church’s work of caring for human souls, Sikkema noted. That’s why they opened restaurants while restricting churches despite similar health risks: “That’s not really a health decision, it’s a political decision about what’s important to the health of your society.”
Police regularly showed up at churches on Sunday mornings and fined pastors whose parking lots had too many cars, he said. ARPA Canada and JCCF litigated a number of those cases and were often able to get pastors’ fines negotiated down to charitable donations.
Most churches that capitulated to government discrimination against Christians were already declining before lockdowns, and disproportionate percentages of their members didn’t go back to church afterward. Churches that kept to historic orthodoxy, on the other hand, tend to have recovered better from post-lockdown membership losses and many have even grown, Nieminen and Sikkema noted.
Religious Freedom Better in Africa
The difficulty of raising their children in rapidly apostatizing Western culture also affected the Ristaus’ decision to move across the globe.
“Things are normal here, people have traditional values,” Elise Ristau said of Kenya. “It’s inconceivable to think of transgender mutilation. As a mother and father, we do our very best to keep our kids Christian.”
In Canada, Christians are often required to lie or betray their faith to access government grants and licensing credentials, and avoid punishment in many professions, Sikkema said. Many Canadian doctors, lawyers, and teachers, for example, are required to endorse abortion and LGBT sexual acts.Canadian doctors and many other health care workers must help patients obtain an abortion or doctor-assisted suicide.
In 2018, Canada’s Supreme Court banned a Christian law school from opening over Christian sexual standards. The Canadian military is also working to eject chaplains over Christian sexual ethics. Just about every Canadian business sports a government-provided pride flag, Nieminen said. Churches that object to transgender mutilation of children have faced naked protesters as families arrive to worship, Sikkema said.
“Canadians are very aware that we don’t have freedom of religion, we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t have the right to assemble if that’s in disagreement with the regime,” Nieminen said. “Pastors and teachers cannot speak about the morality of human sexuality. That is a reality Canadians live in, and I think that’s partly why they’re afraid to speak out.”
Christians Welcome in Kenya
The Ristaus had been invited to their current post before lockdowns, but Elise hadn’t wanted to uproot after moving the family so many times for Harold’s military career. They had bought land in Canada for their dream home and planted more than 1,000 trees on it.
“I had dreamed of this perfect life for myself in Canada,” Elise said. But then “there was a kind of turning point where I said, ‘We can go. Nothing is holding us here.’ It was a ‘shake the dust off our boots’ moment.”
From Toronto to Nairobi is approximately 7,500 miles. Flying commercially between the two takes 16 hours or more.
“In Kenya, I know it’s poor, and there’s corruption, but we’re not getting arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics,” Elise said. “For a Christian in Canada, it’s pretty bleak.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The most uneducated but wildly popular critique of Christianity in America — especially on social media — is that Christianity has been a bastion of oppression and intolerance. So much so that the advancements made in liberty and equality over the centuries have come only when America and American leaders have rejected Christianity. In his new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, historian Mark David Hall offers a concise corrective to this inaccurate and often ignorant hot-take and popular narrative.
Hatred of Christianity is one of the pillars of the current anti-American ideology that permeates universities and the governing spirit of our ruling elite. Mockery of Christians, especially evangelicals, is also one of the core tenets of progressive culture. This hostility and mockery are unwarranted. Far from being agents of oppression and anti-intellectualism, Hall highlights how Christians have been the bedrock of social activism advancing liberty and equality, as well as promoting education reform, increasing literacy, and publishing newspapers and magazines.
We are all familiar with the asinine proclamations of America as a secular country, that progress, liberty, and equality are atheist ideals, and that committed Christians are the greatest threat to America’s future. Yet, as Hall forcefully rebuts, “it is simply false to claim that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America’s leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether.”
Looking at the Puritans, the American Revolution, evangelical social reform prior to the Civil War, and contemporary debates over religious liberty, Hall reveals what used to be well-known: Christianity has been the heart of true social progress and explosive advancements in human liberty, equality, and democratic government.
Puritans and Foundations of Liberty
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, one of the most important senators the United States ever had, lauded the Pilgrims and Puritans as champions of the liberty that our “civil and religious liberty” grew from. Today, however, it is common to imagine Puritans as petty tyrants, intolerant theocrats, and bah humbug killjoys.
When I was a student at Yale taking classes on American Puritanism, our professor went to great lengths to de-indoctrinate us of the popular stereotypes of the Puritans. The Puritans were among the most educated people at the time, established our most venerable institutions of higher education, promoted the advancement and discoveries of Enlightenment science, vigorously advocated for public literacy, and enjoyed a good laugh, beer, and sex.
The real history of the Puritans that I learned at Yale is covered again by Hall in his opening chapter deconstructing the lies of secularists and anti-Christian writers and hacktivists portraying the Puritans in a dark and inaccurate light. The Puritans, our author reminds us, “valued natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and limited government; they were convinced that citizens have a right, and perhaps even a duty, to resist tyrannical government.” When traveling through the lands the Puritans helped to build in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”
As historians and scholars of Puritanism have long asserted, the democratic ethos of congregationalist church politics helped develop the local customs of self-government in New England that would form the basis for “Democracy in America,” as Tocqueville famously put it. But what about the banishment of certain Baptist dissenters and the Salem witch trials, the critic asks? These events did happen, but they are drastically overblown by contemporary critics.
The banishment of a handful of religious dissenters in Massachusetts was only after these rabble-rousing individuals repeatedly, and deliberately, returned to cause trouble and disturb the peace. Also, Hall reminds us, when compared to Europe, where more than 100,000 men and women were prosecuted as witches and half sentenced to death, only 272 individuals in America were ever charged with witchcraft. The Salem witch trials, which happened in 1692, marked the last execution of a witch in North America. In Europe, witches were still executed as late as 1782.
Completing his overview of the Puritans, Hall writes that the Puritans “created political institutions that were more democratic than any the world had ever seen, and they strictly limited civil leaders by law.”
Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God
Another one of the popular putdowns of Christianity by its critics (and even some Christians) is that Christianity doesn’t permit rebellion to tyrannical government but supports tyrannical government. In a gross and deeply literalist reading of the Apostle Paul in Romans (somewhat ironic all things considered), these critics assert that because a single passage in the New Testament supposedly teaches obedience to government, which is ordained by God, the American revolutionary patriots rejected Christian teachings and had to utilize secular and Enlightenment arguments to advance the cause of liberty during the American Revolution.
Again, this is patently false, as any decently educated person knows. Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer recently published a superb book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, addressing this myth in detail. Hall, too, quickly covers the problems of this critique. Highlighting Calvinist theological history (something that these critics have no knowledge of, despite their claims of educated intelligence), covering important names known to students of theology, such as John Ponet, John Knox, George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, and even John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather), Hall shows that Christian theological history had come to see rebellion to tyrants as obedience to God and Scripture.
Moreover, most of the popular and patriotic arguments for revolution were not conversant with theorists such as John Locke but with Scripture. The Old Testament, especially, was appealed to by the patriotic clergy in favor of revolution. Christians, far from submitting to tyranny, offered complex theological arguments against tyranny and, therefore, helped formulate a political theology of liberty and equality in the process.
Evangelicals Against Oppression
Perhaps the most common trope that our contemporary anti-Christian elite culture pushes is the tyrannical and ignorant evangelical Christian. This, too, is a stereotype with little basis in history. In fact, many of our best institutions of higher learning were founded by evangelical Christians even if they have since departed from that faith that gave birth to them (Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin, to name a few). The first opponents of slavery and proponents of abolition were the heirs of the Puritans, such as the Rev. Samuel Sewall, who published the first anti-slavery writing in 1700.
Motivated by a vigorous religious faith, the Second Great Awakening was the fire that fueled anti-slavery and abolitionist politics in antebellum America. Men and women of Methodist, Baptist, and congregationalist (Puritan) backgrounds were oftentimes the leading champions of liberty and equality for African-Americans and indigenous Americans. As Hall writes, it was American evangelicals, and especially evangelical women, who most actively “oppos[ed] the evils of slavery and Indian removal.”
During the antebellum years, American evangelicals sought to “work together to help end social evils” and established “thousands of organizations aimed at alleviating suffering and reforming society.” Evangelicals were on the front lines of creating new educational institutions, promoting education reforms to advance public literacy, and establishing newspapers as a means of confronting social evils. Furthermore, Evangelicalism, originally a religious minority grouping, was deeply indebted to religious liberty as the means for its social growth and prominence.
This spirit of religious social reform for liberty led to the contemporary defense of religious liberty as the bedrock on which all liberty and equality before the law stands: “Christian legal organizations have been among the best advocates for religious liberty for all, including citizens who embrace non-Christian faiths,” Hall writes.
Why Christianity Matters to America
In Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, Hall gives us yet another triumphant and important book to correct the polemical, inaccurate, and deeply misleading public presentation of the relationship between Christianity and American politics. Far from the evil bogeyman and religion of oppression that ungrateful critics claim, Christianity has been a positive force for good and the growth of liberty and equality. In fact, America has been best when it has reached into the heart of Christianity for its social reforms and advancement of liberty and equality rather than rejecting Christianity.
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of “Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics” (Academica Press, 2023), “The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books” (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and contributed to “The College Lecture Today” (Lexington, 2019) and “Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters” (Routledge, 2022).
It’s difficult to fathom that several families started their day with one less precious child around the breakfast table this morning. It’s also hard to fathom responding to that reality — caused by a transgender mass shooter who left three 9-year-olds and several adults dead in a “targeted attack” at a Christian elementary school — by confessing you misgendered the murderer and blasting your political opponents over the same tired gun-control talking points.
But behind all the partisan smoke and mirrors of the Nashville story is an unmistakable and unavoidable reality: Our modern mental health crisis is out of control.
You don’t even have to dig into the glaring transgender element of the case to acknowledge this fact. No mentally healthy person blasts their way into a building of defenseless children to murder them in cold blood, much less devises a detailed plan literally mapping out how to make it happen. Transgender perpetrator or not, this sick pattern has repeated itself with unsettling frequency.
And though President Joe Biden, his press secretary, and other politicians disgustingly spun the attack to blame so-called “assault weapons” and imply conservatives are complicit in mass murder, the simple reality is that over the past handful of decades, firearms have changed very little. Meanwhile, mental illness has proliferated and our culture’s conception of it dangerously evolved.
That’s why the transgender identity of the shooter can’t be fully ignored — not for those who truly care to understand the gnarly roots of this violence. Despite the protestations of LGBT apologists, gender dysphoria and trans-related narcissism are inextricable from America’s broader mental health emergency.
A Celebration of Sickness
The psychological pendulum has swung woefully far: Illness that was once stigmatized, often to the unhelpful point of suppressing it instead of encouraging the sufferers to seek help, is now celebrated and socially encouraged. If it isn’t teachers brainwashing impressionable kids with sexual confusion and instructing them to keep it secret from their parents, it’s parents catechizing their own children in fallacies. Spend just a fewminutesonTikTok, and you’ll get a glimpse of the affected masses — self-loathing, split personalities, nonsensical pronouns and sexual identities, desperate androgyny, narcissism, bipolar outbursts, and more.
Examples of encouraged mental illness abound — even medical doctors fuel delusion by pretending sex is “assigned” and asking for patients’ preferred pronouns — but here’s one directly in response to the shooting. A group called the Trans Resistance Network made the shooter out to be a victim, blaming the “avalanche” of legislation seeking to protect minors from chemical and surgical castration and accusing conservatives of “nothing less than the genocidal eradication of trans people from society.” Many trans-identifying people suffer from “anxiety, depression, [and] thoughts of suicide,” the group correctly noted, but then associated these struggles not with broader mental unhealth but with “lack of acceptance” of gender dysphoria from “religious institutions.”
Note the group’s promotion of mental instability:
It is a testament to the inner strength and beauty of transgender people, that despite the … constant anti-trans bigotry and violence, so many of us continue to persevere, survive, and even thrive. We will not be eradicated or erased.
The same can’t be said for the innocent lives that were snuffed out in an instant in the Nashville shooting. Where derangement is considered “inner strength and beauty,” mental sickness thrives, and now children, not angry activists, are the ones who have been erased.
At least in part. There’s more to the story for these Christian families, who can cling to the assurance that for a follower of Jesus to be absent from his body is to be present with the Lord. This violent and sin-marred world is not our home, and it’s the closest to hell Christians will ever get. No religious hatred, mental affliction, or targeted attack can eradicate that sure hope.
A Call to Action
Those truths aren’t just a comfort for the broken-hearted, however. They’re a call to action for redeemed sinners. With a focus on eternity, we’re still sojourners here, surrounded by tormented souls with not only deep spiritual needs but physical and mental ones. And so we must fight.
We must fight against the spiritual forces that discourage us and tempt us to doubt and deny truth, and against agents of the devil who seduce our children with sexual fantasies. We must fight for the beauty and sacredness of human life. For the mental and physical health of those within our care. And for the glorious truth of the gospel and the immutable nature of the sexes that leads to human flourishing.
This fight requires compassion. But it also requires that we don’t forfeit the definition of that word to medical professionals who profit from carving up children, or to Marxist ideologues, or to a bad-faith press. Instead, follow the only perfect example: When Jesus saw the “helpless” crowds, “like sheep without a shepherd,” He was “movedwith compassion” toward them. He engaged. He healed.
May He be the source of our compassion as we engage our modern mental affliction, and may He provide the healing we desperately need.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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.
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’ 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.
Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 https://t.co/0GEJ5tZEb6
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.”
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.
Religious devotion, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an ‘atheocracy.’
The West is facing its deepest civilizational crisis since Jesus Christ resurrected, and addressing the crisis requires removing militant secularists’ monopoly on education, former U.S. attorney general William Barr told a packed Christian conference in Chicago, Ill. on Saturday.
“We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”
In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.
That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So, in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint. Such self-restraint is primarily developed through religious devotion, he said. But religious observance, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an “atheocracy,” his amalgam of the words “atheist theocracy.” These anti-religious forces now control the minds of American kids due to their monopoly on U.S. education institutions.
“The threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,” Barr said. Barr also spoke to The Federalist about the asymmetric justice being carried out under Joe Biden by the agency he has led twice, the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a 2021 interview with the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Barr said anti-religion leftists have effectively turned public schools into “secular-progressive madrassas.” In his Chicago speech on Saturday, the nation’s former top lawyer told the audience this state of affairs is likely a violation of the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of one religion over others, as well as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause that forbids the government from interfering with Americans’ religious obligations.
“What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion,” Barr said.
Barr told the sold-out Chicago audience at the 2022 conference of the Christian radio show “Issues, Etc.” that American politics now aligns with religious beliefs. The dichotomy in American life is no longer about prudential issues but religious ones: whether one acknowledges an objective, external, unchanging reality ordered by a transcendent deity or whether one insists the material world is all there is, which makes one’s god the self.
This anti-God materialism now maps onto and fuels political leftism, Barr said:
When a purely materialist worldview takes hold in society, it’s drawn to a messianic utopianism. Its adherents become enthralled with the idea that the meaning of life, what gives them purpose and meaning, is to be found in the quest for a perfect earthly society. The manipulation of the material world to achieve some form of nirvana here on earth. And the means used is achieving political power.
The main obstacle to this earthly paradise is the existing structure, conventions and superstitions like religion. Any obstacle to our earthly paradise has to be torn down.
These ideas are represented by the progressive movement in the United States. It basically is an ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives. It also explains the bitterness in our politics today. Because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.
…Another part of this revolutionary era and the consequences we have been witnessing over the last couple of hundred years is a worldview that boils questions of morality solely down to an individual’s internal feelings. And their interior sense of pleasure and satisfaction. That’s how we gauge acts, whether people feel internally satisfied. And anything that advances that feeling is good, and anything that constrains or restricts that feeling is bad. This is a fundamental change in the worldview of the West.
Because the U.S. Supreme Court and other American political institutions have turned public schools from essentially Christian schools into essentially anti-Christian schools, Barr said, the U.S. school system has been erasing the faith required to sustain limited government. Multiple studies provide evidence this is true.
Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.
“Personal and civic moral systems don’t just sort of hover in the air,” Barr explained. “They have to rest on an explanatory foundation, a metaphysical foundation. When people tell you to do something, you ask ‘Why?’ Why is it necessary to be good and what is it that consists of being good? So, the extent to which an education seeks to contribute to a student’s moral formation, it necessarily invades the space of religion when explaining what the moral values are and how they should be inherited.”
Thanks to the current Supreme Court’s adherence to the original Constitution as written, Barr said he thinks this is an opportune moment for both court and legislative work to address this existential national crisis.
“Public education was established as a melting pot that would establish a common American identity. How are the public schools doing on that front?” Barr asked, at which the audience burst into laughter. He continued: “The curriculum is now attacking the fundamental legitimacy of our form of government and our founding documents. That’s no way to bring us together as a nation.”
The most direct way to resolve this constitutional and existential crisis in American education is to end the government monopoly over the provision of education, Barr said, with full school choice. (The form of school choice that offers the fewest opportunities for hostile bureaucrats to interfere with parent choices, by the way, is education savings accounts.)
“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr said. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral anymore.”
Because anti-religious public schools hold a monopoly on public education funds, Barr noted, parents are forced to fight mostly ineffectively over what public schools teach, such as transgender ideology to kindergarteners and anti-white racism. Allowing parents to take their children’s public education dollars to institutions that match their beliefs will end such culture wars, he said, as well as help families more effectively pass their republic-sustaining faith on to their children.
This alone can’t solve the entire existential crisis of the West, Barr conceded: “It’s not a panacea, but I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system.”
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.
Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.
This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,”suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.
Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.
Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)
Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime
It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.
It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It
These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?
Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.
Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters
The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.
Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.
You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.
In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.
Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers
So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.
Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).
Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.
What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.
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.
The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview.
Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.
Among all respondents, other measured worldviews (such as secular humanism, nihilism, postmodernism, etc.) garnered even fewer adherents. Fully 94 percent subscribed to “a blending of multiple worldviews in which no single life philosophy is dominant.”
The needle scarcely moves for all self-identified Christians (not just pre-teen parents). Only 6 percent of them look at and interpret the world through a biblical lens; that number rises to 21 percent among those attending evangelical Protestant churches.
The fact that the biblical Christian worldview has become so insignificant in the culture should be of concern to all Americans because our country, including its governing principles and legal system, was based on our founders’ biblical worldview.
All around, we see the results of our abandonment of the biblical worldview. According to CRC research, more than half of the population accepts that truth is subjective.
Without objective truth, there is no way to determine what’s real and no moral absolutes to distinguish right from wrong. So we hear the popular “my truth” refrain as the justification for any idea or behavior depending upon what feels right at the time.
Why Worldview Matters
Professor Mikael Stenmark defines worldview as “beliefs, values, and attitudes that … constitute [people’s] basic understanding of (a) who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in it is, (b) what they should do to live a good and meaningful life, and (c) what they can say, know and rationally believe about these things.”
A dividing line between a secular and a biblical worldview is the belief in how the world came to exist. Secularists hold that reality consists entirely of physical matter and forces, which can only be explained through science. For the secularist, the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution explain how all things came to be.
Those with a biblical worldview believe in an all-encompassing divine mind — i.e., God — who rules over and maintains physical matter and forces. The theistic worldview is founded on the core belief that God exists and is the creator of all things.
It is easy to see why the biblical worldview is all but extinct in the culture. Every living generation — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and many of the silent generation (pre-1945) — has been educated predominantly in a secular or naturalistic worldview based on the prevailing science of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.
Science Declares God Is Dead
The only “official” science approved to be taught in the primary grades through post-graduate education is the anti-faith naturalistic one. It’s virtually illegal to teach anything that hints at creation science or intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education proudly displays ten major court cases, including a Supreme Court ruling, that essentially ban the teaching of intelligent design.
It’s not just the education system. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls the scientific establishment’s approach to intelligent design a “zero-concession policy.”
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement claiming “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”
Scientists and post-graduate students who dare to challenge naturalistic-science orthodoxy are subject to professional ridicule, or loss of jobs or research funds. Peer-review journals reject their submissions, as do scientific conferences and meetings.
It’s not in support of science that the establishment defends its official position so vehemently, but to protect its secular worldview. And the American Civil Liberties Union backs them up with legal firepower a detailed statement about why students must be protected against intelligent design at all costs.
Truth Will Come Out
Not all scientists are so didactic. But the “vital few” in control have effectively kept any serious discussion of intelligent design from the rest of the scientific community. However, when they are presented with evidence supporting intelligent design, many discover truth there.
That includes scientists like astronomer Allan Sandage, who studied under Edwin Hubble and continued his work after Hubble died. Sandage’s study of astronomy and astrophysics led him to conclude there is “evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event,” or what he called a “creation event.”
Plenty of members in the scientific community see much to challenge in Darwinian doctrine. More than 1,000 academics and scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwinism petition stating, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The number of acclaimed scientists who challenge the establishment’s orthodoxy is growing thanks to the work of places like the Discovery Institute, the research arm of the Center for Science and Culture.
Rekindling the Discussion
The education and scientific establishments have become co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one. But there is hope. Belief in God “as described in the Bible” is still held by a 54 percent majority of Americans, according to a 2022 poll reported by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.
Noting that 72 percent of Americans agree the nation’s moral compass is “pointed in the wrong direction,” she writes, “As generations age and the push for secularism and the erasure of faith continues in American establishments such as public schools, younger people are losing spiritual influence and instruction, and with it their faith.”
That is the ultimate goal of our society’s ruling institutions, including government, education, science, medicine, and business. They are determined to wipe out faith by indoctrinating all into their secular worldview using the Big Bang and evolution as the cudgel.
So far, the scientific establishment has been successful in shutting down discussion that the Bible might be true from beginning to end. But continuing research in intelligent design and more scientists who question science’s naturalistic orthodoxy will arm the public with information to support the biblical worldview and loosen the stranglehold of the secular one on our youth and culture.
“Let there be light,” God said in Genesis 1:3. “And there was light.” Jesus said in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That day isn’t here yet, but we pray it comes quickly.
Pamela Danziger is a market researcher specializing in the study of consumer behavior and motivation. Author of ten books, she shares insights as a senior contributor on Forbes.com. And as a Christian, she is co-founder of Faith Underground. She holds an M.L.S. from University of Maryland and B.A. in English Literature from Penn State.
In a recent legal settlement, Catholic Charities West Michigan successfully challenged Michigan’s decision to bar state funds to adoption agencies that do not serve same-sex couples. The settlement forced Michigan to reimburse the charity for its legal fees and other costs. Using an argument that has now become familiar to most Americans, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a lesbian mother of two and former gay rights activist, charged Catholic adoption agencies with discriminating against same-sex couples. In response, the Catholic adoption agencies used the same logic, accusing the Michigan state government of discriminating against Catholics and effectively denying them their religious freedom.
While Christians should celebrate this recent victory, it’s nonetheless sad this appeal had to be made. When gay marriage was legalized in Obergfell v. Hodges, Christians were assured that they could practice their faith and live out their values in peace, but this was almost immediately proven wrong. As the ink of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was drying, LGBT groups immediately went after Christian bakers, florists, photographers, popular chicken sandwich chains, and other Christian organizations for their religious beliefs.
Defense Based on Reason not Faith
This war will continue so long as Christians keep using the religious freedom defense. Even though this argument has the best chance of winning in legal courts, it is unconvincing in the court of public opinion. As more Americans drift away from Christianity, they increasingly view this defense for denying service to same-sex couples not as a valid objection, but as a childish copout: “The Christian God doesn’t like gay people.”
Rather, it’s important to establish that most Christian churches are established on natural law (that is, moral laws based on objective truth) as much as the Bible. To be sure, faith and reason both matter enormously, but for an increasingly secular populace, actions and policies must be defended on the basis of reason much more than faith.
This has been the case with abortion, with the pro-life position steadily gaining popular support as it has adopted more reason-based arguments. The pro-life movement has grown because it has argued that unborn babies are people, and therefore abortion is murder. Although the Bible acknowledges this argument, the argument itself isn’t strictly based on the Bible.
Reasons Against Same-Sex Couples Adopting
Similarly, in issues involving marriage and children, Christians need to appeal to reason more than their faith. In the case of same-sex couples adopting, two issues need to be addressed. First, do all couples have a right to adopt a child? Second, do children have a right to a father and mother?
Concerning whether all couples have a right to adopt, the answer is that they do not. As any couple who has gone through the process of adoption understands all too well, many screenings and conditions have to be met. Someone from the adoption agency will inspect their home, rifle through their personal information, interview them and others, and then, after so many legal hurdles, possibly allow a child to live with them. Even then, the biological parent may change his or her mind and take back the child.
As painful and expensive as this process is, it is necessary because children are human beings with rights of their own, not objects a couple acquires out of boredom or simply some charitable impulse. Consequently, adoption agencies must discriminate among couples wanting to adopt, only selecting those who meet the criteria of good caretakers.
A Right to a Mother and Father?
This leads to the second issue of whether a child’s rights include having a mother and father, as opposed to two fathers or two mothers. The science on this is mixed, both because it’s a politically charged issue and because it’s a difficult thing to measure. One may say that a loving committed couple is enough, but one may contend that a loving committed heterosexual couple is necessary.
Katy Faust persuasively argues this latter view in her excellent book “Them Before Us.” She explains that men and women represent two distinct and essential supports to a child growing up; fatherhood and motherhood are not interchangeable or dispensable. Furthermore, she argues that a child does best with his or her biological parents in nearly all cases. For Faust, adoption is an alternative that should only be considered in cases of serious abuse or neglect.
Not only does Faust support her argument with a multitude of studies, but she has both a homosexual parent and an adopted child. Even though her situation would suggest that same-sex adoption should be treated the same as any other parental arrangement, her reasoning leads her to think otherwise.
Faust’s example is a good model for all Christians trying to serve their community in accordance with their values. Whatever charitable work they do — whether it is finding homes for orphans or allowing those orphans to be born in the first place — it is done for the person in need, first and foremost. This is not a political or religious issue, but a human one.
It is not a coincidence that this means they are doing God’s will in the process. Contrary to what opponents claim, Christian values are based on objective truth, not blind faith to various Bronze Age prejudices. As such, the goal is not about winning, but about making the world a better place.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
There’s a lot of panicked chatter about World War III lately. Twitter is awash in propaganda from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine border. Instagram is flooded with pro-Ukraine posts and profiles are painted with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. NPR wants to make sure you know, amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how to self-care. Not to be outdone, Fox also has a primer on how to cope with the stress of news of war.
Many of those reactions aren’t bad. It’s good to celebrate stories of courage and to vocally support peace. It’s also good at times to walk away from the news cycle and be present in your own daily responsibilities.
But there is a real danger to thinking that you, as an American Christian who is not on the ground in Ukraine, can do the most good by getting sucked into the online informational meatgrinder. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using a post or a hashtag to show support for suffering people, it would be a mistake to use such a contribution to pat ourselves on the back for “helping” — as many well-meaning Christians posted black squares on Instagram in 2020 that did little but alleviate their own sense of wanting to be able to say they did something. We all have a human desire to be in the know, and to an extent, involved, when crisis strikes. It’s why “if it bleeds, it leads” became a news industry saying and why people gossip. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve seen it in myself this week and felt convicted for it.
Fellow Christians, have you spent as much time in prayer this week as you have refreshing headlines, sharing viral internet posts, or fretting to your friends about what’s going on in Europe? It’s worth considering.
We are called, as the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 6:18, to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.” In Romans, he entreats us to “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” Specifically, we are commanded to pray for those in positions of worldly power.
That isn’t to say that, when presented with opportunities to tangibly serve, we should sit on our hands atop our prayer mats. The Bible has plenty to say about faith without works, or being hearers of the word and not doers. The clear-eyed actions of the church in Ukraine should remind us all to reach for our Bibles before our Twitter feeds. Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church, announced his plans to bring Mass to citizens huddled in bomb shelters. He was reportedly scheduled to attend a meeting of bishops in Florence but scrapped the trip to stay behind in Kyiv.
“The church will come to the people,” he said. “Our priests will descend to the underground, they will descend to the bomb shelters, and there they will celebrate the Divine Liturgy.”
Other Ukrainian Christians are asking for, along with prayer, more Bibles.
A defining truth of our faith is our security in salvation that does not come from this world, and our peace that is not attainable through geopolitics. We should seek to steward this earthly life in peace, but its lack should not cause our faith to founder. If Ukrainian Christians can stalwartly bear witness of their heavenly hope from bomb shelters, surely American Christians can do our shared faith the credit of not participating in panic.
May our unchanging concentration on our Savior at a time that makes many anxious even be a testimony pointing to his sovereign grace. He has used times of crisis to His glory before.
The second book of Kings recounts the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, king of Assyria. In response to his taunts and saber-rattling, we’re told, the people of Jerusalem, under the leadership of Hezekiah, “were silent and answered him not a word, for the king’s command was, ‘Do not answer him.’” Instead, Hezekiah went to the house of the Lord. The humble prayer he prayed before the Lord’s deliverance remains a worthy template for our own prayers for the protection of the church, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
O Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth. Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Today in Finland, two Christians will stand trial for publicly stating the theological and scientific truth that men and women are different. Finnish Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola stand accused of “hate crimes” for affirming basic Christian theology and natural reality concerning the sexual differences between men and women. One of the three charges against Rasanen includes a count against her for tweeting a picture of a Bible verse in challenging the state church of Finland’s decision to sponsor an LGBT parade. Another charge attempts to criminalize her participation in a 2019 public debate.
If the court finds them guilty, Rasanen and Pohjola could face fines or up to two years in prison. It would also set the precedent of making quoting the Bible a criminal offense in Western countries.
In November, human rights lawyer Paul Coleman told The Federalist that these cases in Finland are a “canary in the coalmine” for freedom of speech in the Western world. Coleman works for Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is assisting the two Finns’ lawyers. “Part of the scary thing about what’s happening in Finland is that it could happen anywhere else,” Coleman said Jan. 23 on the British show GBNews. Many countries have similar hate speech laws, including states and cities in the United States.
While accused of hate crimes, Rasanen and Pohjola emphatically affirm their love for all people as beautifully created in God’s image and deeply loved by a God who sent his own Son to die an excruciating death to atone for every sin, including all sexual sins. Their aim is not hate but love, they say, another core teaching of Christianity, which also commands its adherents to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”
Both are also charged for a booklet Rasanen wrote and Pohjola published in 2004. Pohjola told The Federalist in an exclusive in-person interview in November 2021 that he asked Rasanen to write the booklet because she was qualified, as a medical doctor and the wife of a pastor. That booklet affirms the classic understanding of sex as reserved solely for marriage, and marriage as comprising one man committed to one woman for life. In spring 2019, the two were suddenly served with criminal charges for writing and publishing this booklet decades ago, well before Finland passed its hate crimes laws on behalf of powerful special interests who dispute the differences between the sexes and their role in procreation. Rasanen and Pohjola have been summoned several times by Finnish police to be interrogated separately for hours about intricate details of their theology.
In their interrogations, the police demanded that Rasanen and Pohjola recant their beliefs. Both refused. Both have also noted the contrast between their country’s claim to be a free and modern democracy that allows for full and open debate and the way they have been treated, as thought criminals.
“If I’m convicted, I think that the worst consequence would not be the fine against me, or even the prison sentence, it would be the censorship,” Rasanen said in a statement ahead of her trial. “I will continue to stand for what I believe and what I have written. And I will speak and write about these things, because they are a matter of conviction, not only an opinion. I trust that we still live in a democracy, and we have our constitution and international agreements that guarantee our freedom of speech and religion,”
Christians all over the world are praying for Pojhola and Rasanen, including corporately in their churches. On Jan. 23, free speech supporters rallied in front of the Finnish embassy in Oslo, Norway, to show support for Rasanen and Pohjola. Several of the protesters filling the street carried signs that said “Finland: Freedom of speech?”
Several members of the U.S. Congress led by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said in a public letter that the Finnish government’s prosecutions of these Christians for their religious beliefs “raise serious questions regarding the extent of Finland’s commitment to protect religious freedom for its citizens.” Roy’s office is closely watching the trial, as are many other U.S. and international human rights organizations.
Pohjola was recently elected the bishop of the Lutheran non-state church in Finland. He was kicked out of the state church approximately a decade ago for upholding Christian teachings on the differences between the sexes. The small non-state church in Finland is growing, while the large state church is shrinking.
The Federalist is monitoring the trial today and will be covering its outcome.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” 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.
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.
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.”
In what conservative commentator Glenn Beck slammed succinctly in an Instagram message as “Afghanistan betrayal,” Afghan Christians are being turned away from the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, as time ticks away for them to escape the Taliban, according to new reports.
A report by the Catholic News Agency said that although the Taliban have made no secret of the group’s antipathy to Christianity, Christians were not given priority status by the Biden administration, which bestowed it upon women, journalists, academics and other populations the administration considered important. And that means Christians will be left behind when the frenzied flight to find safety ends before the Aug. 31 deadline for U.S. forces to leave Afghanistan.
“I was told by contacts from various groups working to rescue those still in danger in Afghanistan — who must remain anonymous — that the State Department, at least at a certain point, was not implementing the lists that they require the organizations to compile — even though they have sent them multiple times,” said Faith McDonnell, director of advocacy at Katartismos Global, an Anglican nonprofit group, according to CNA.
“It seems at present as if no one is getting any priority unless they have some sort of special connection inside the airport.”
Republican Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia said Tuesday that Christians are in danger, according to Townhall.
“The environment, obviously, under Sharia law, creates an extremely dangerous situation for anyone who is of any other faith, probably, the top of which, is Christians. And of course, not only us but many offices have been in contact with many Christians who are being literally hunted by the Taliban right now. Every effort possible is underway to try to evacuate those individuals and I’m sure those efforts will continue with unceasing resolve until we get those people to safety,” Hice said. “[T]heir lives are our biggest concern.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said priority for fleeing Afghanistan should go to “Afghan religious minorities, in recognition of the severe risks they already face, which will only heighten after the end of the U.S. evacuation,” according to a statement by USCIRF Commissioner Frederick A. Davie.
According to CNA, McDonnell said that in the rush to pack planes, lists prepared in advance amount to just so much confetti.
“Several organizations have reported that even though these organizations‘ aircraft have passenger manifests, the airport personnel are loading different people [from] those on the manifest onto all the aircraft that are departing,” she said.
“Others have reported that at times, one government agency is rejecting people that another government agency has approved and tried to bring into the airport,” she said.
Amid the chaos and cross purposes, Beck’s nonprofit group, The Nazarene Fund, is working independently of the Biden administration to rescue Afghan civilians. Beck, who posted a moving message about the crisis on Instagram Wednesday, has said that based on the more than $25 million received, he hopes to get 7,000 people out of Afghanistan by Friday
The Biden administration is NOT telling you the truth about what's going on in Afghanistan. TONIGHT on GlennTV, I join you from the Middle East as the Nazarene Fund's rescue mission continues. pic.twitter.com/YZi8bFPcqI
“I’ve started receiving panicked emails from Afghan Christians through their Western contacts. They are not being allowed to board USG [U.S. government] flights in Kabul. I’m advising them to try to board Glenn Beck’s flights instead,” Shea said, according to CNA.
“Kabul is falling apart and our people are panicking. The next 72 hours are going to be very dark,” Jason Jones, a podcaster who runs a nonprofit humanitarian organization called The Vulnerable People Project, wrote in an email to CNA.
“Kabul has descended into chaos and confusion and our citizens and friends are collapsing into despair. People are being contacted by the State Department and told to go to the airport only to be sent away,” he wrote.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Christmas is the most wondrous day of our calendar in any year of our lives.
The bright lights, smells, and smiles discernible even to an infant quickly grow into a sense of hope, awe, and mystery as young boys and girls crane their necks on the car ride back from papa’s house to look out the window for a sign of that bright red nose in the sky. As time moves on, our hopes turn to the company of friends and family, and our awe to the sacred mysteries of God made man for our sake.
Our experience of Christmas changes as we grow older. While the fortunate ones spent childhood ignorant of the troubles between men and maybe even their own families, over the years our broken world comes into focus, and hopefully we come to understand that Christ came among us not to sing carols, but because we have gone astray.
This year has been America’s worst in a long while. We’ve seen our churches boarded up by those who think God merely a hobby. Our elderly have died alone under the orders of those who think it’s better for their health this way. Our livelihoods have been shattered, and even that fleeting innocence of childhood has been taken from masked boys and girls not allowed to go to school or play on public swings.
But for those children whose innocence is injured too early, Christmastime still can bring wonder. The smell of the tree and of mom making cookies fills many houses. Even for those in broken homes or those who don’t celebrate, Main Street and the park downtown are filled with bright lights, there are candles in windows, and sometimes still carolers and Christmas concerts in the road.
This year was a hard one. Many of my friends suffered more hardship than I, although loneliness and anger stalked us all. And since the moment Halloween ended and All Saints Day dawned, I’ve been excited for Christmas with what feels like the hope of a young child. Christmas, and all the traditions it welcomes.
Our best celebrations of the coming of our Lord swirl like a Christmas globe around nostalgia. It calls up the music our parents and grandparents played to ring in the season, special ornaments and decorations passed down through family, familiar hymns sung by millions before us, and those candles our ancestors lit to let Mary and Joseph know there is room in this home for the heavenly child.
When we’re older, we have to make the cookies our mothers once made, but with some written instructions, a bit of a mess and maybe a call home, it can be done. Family might be more spread out now, but if they are our friends and neighbors can fill our tables. And even if it’s been a hard, hard year, we can remember what this life is about, surrounded by the artifacts and traditions of generations past.
On Monday night, an older Hindu friend who’s had to work two jobs making less than he did in 2019 in order to not have to leave his adopted home told me he’d set up his Christmas tree too. “My children are American,” he said. “They love all the holidays.” We spoke of the lights, smells, and music in the air in December and January, and how they fill us with a warmth and sense of comfort much needed at the end of this year. “Soon,” he said, “it will be a new year.”
This year, let us remember the good times we’ve had and the good times to come. Even while saying goodbye to some too soon, we’ve also welcomed new lives into our families and among our friends.
Although for many there might be less under the tree or fewer at our table, our faith in God remains strong. And the songs, traditions, and tales passed down from those who celebrated Christmases past in trenches, basement shelters, empty homes, and sometimes without even a home, just as the Holy Family, can keep us warm wherever we find ourselves.
“She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn,” the Gospel of Luke tells us. The child was indeed holy, the Son of God, and he saved his people from their sins. Merry Christmas.
ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR:
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on Twitter.
Commentary By Michael Flynn | Published August 5, 2020 at 11:17am
We are witnessing a vicious assault by enemies of all that is good, and our president is having to act in ways unprecedented in decades, maybe centuries. The biblical nature of good versus evil cannot be discounted as we examine what is happening on the streets of America.
It’s Marxism in the form of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement versus our very capable and very underappreciated law enforcement professionals, the vast majority of whom are fighting to provide us safe and secure homes, streets and communities.
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When the destiny of the United States is at stake, and it is, the very future of the entire world is threatened. As Christians, shouldn’t we act? We recognize that divine Providence is the ultimate judge of our destiny. Achieving our destiny as a freedom-loving nation, Providence compels us to do our part in our communities.
It encourages us in this battle against the forces of evil to face our fears head-on. No enemy on earth is stronger than the united forces of God-fearing, freedom-loving people. We can no longer pretend that these dark forces are going to go away by mere prayer alone. Prayers matter, but action is required.
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This action is needed at the local, state and federal levels. Action is also required in the economic, media, clerical and ecclesiastical realms.
Decide how you can act within your abilities. Stand up and state your beliefs. Be proud of who you are and what you stand for. And face, head-on, those community “leaders” who are willing to allow dark forces to go beyond peaceful protests and destroy and violate your safety and security.
Do you think Christians in America need to stand up and act?
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Churches and houses of worship must return to normal. We invite everyone of goodwill to not shirk their responsibilities and instead act in a fraternal fashion. If for no other reason or with no other ability, act in a spirit of charity. We cannot disrespect or disregard natural law along with our own religious liberties and freedoms.
I am witnessing elderly people lose their connection to all that is good in their lives: connections to their faith, their families and their individual freedoms, especially the simple act of attending church, something they’ve been doing for decades. Let us not be intimidated or fear those who cry out that we are in the minority; we are not. Good is always more powerful and will prevail over evil.
However, evil will succeed for a time when good people are divided from each other and their personal lives — children away from their teachers, preachers from their congregations, customers from their local businesses. America will never give in to evil. Americans work together to solve problems.
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We do not and should not ever allow anarchy and the evil forces behind it to operate on any street in our nation. No one should have to fear for their very life because some dark, disturbed force is challenged by the very essence of what America stands for.
We are “one nation under God” and it is our individual liberties that make us strong, not liberties given to our government. Our government has no liberty unless and until “we the people” say so.
God bless America and let’s stand by everything that was and is good in our lives, in our communities and in our country. Otherwise, America as the true North Star for humanity will cease to exist as we know it.
Twitter censored an inspirational post by former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow asking Christians to hold onto their faith during times of personal tribulation. The former Heisman Trophy winner tweeted a simple message Tuesday: Keep your faith intact, and remember that all of the Bible’s messengers struggled.
“This could be your time. That breakthrough could be tomorrow, or it could be next year. But, you have the opportunity to turn however you’re being tested into a testimony. So many heroes were wounded deeply before they were used greatly!” he wrote, alongside a video message.
“The following media includes potentially sensitive content,” read a warning from the social media giant that covered the video portion of his post.
The Western Journal reached out to Twitter for comment about why the video post was labeled with a warning but did not immediately receive a response. It’s difficult to discern what anyone could find “sensitive” about the content in Tebow’s video.
In the post, Tebow, breathing heavily after an apparent workout, called on Christians to turn to God during times of difficulty.
“Bible believers, when we look at the Bible, and we see a lot of the heroes, a lot of times they truly were wounded deeply before they were ever used greatly,” he said.
“So maybe you’re going through a time in your life where you feel like you’ve just been wounded greatly. It hasn’t been your year, hasn’t been your day — you just don’t feel like this is your time,” Tebow continued.
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“But this could be your time for learning. This could be your time for growing. This could be your time for adapting. This could be the time that is a test for you, but tomorrow it gets to turn into a testimony,” he said.
“Because you never know what God is doing with your life. You never know what he is preparing you for. So many times in the Bible, when we look at the heroes, there were times in their life where if they stopped, if they quit, if they said, ‘No, God, I’ve had enough,’ then they would have missed out on the most impactful, most influential times of their life,” the former Florida Gator said.
Tebow then appealed to those who might be struggling.
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“Maybe that is the next step for you. Maybe that is tomorrow. Maybe that is next week, maybe that is next year,” he said. “But when we quit, we will never know what we missed out on. We will never know what’s in store for us.
“Because maybe that breakthrough is coming tomorrow. Maybe it’s next year. Maybe you have a little bit more time going through a hard time in your life.
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“But I can tell you this: We get to trust an unknown future to a known God, because we know how much he loves us. We know what he did for us in sending his son. He gave his best for us. …
“When we remember that, then we can have trust in the character of our God, because we know how much he loves us. That’s how we get through the tough times.
Tebow concluded his video message by saying, “Right where you’re at, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re going through, he loves you. You were enough for his son to die on the cross, that’s how much you’re loved. Hold onto that in your time of need.”
Johnathan has authored thousands of news articles throughout his career. He has also worked as an editor and producer in radio and television. He is a proud husband and father.
Given the current social climate, it probably came as little surprise that every MLB player from the four teams that played on Opening Day took a knee as a statement about inequality.
Well, every MLB player except for one.
San Francisco reliever Sam Coonrod was the only player among the Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Washington Nationals who didn’t take part in the demonstration.
To be clear, the players all knelt before the playing of the national anthem. They all held a black ribbon while a recorded message from actor Morgan Freeman played. Some players stayed kneeling during the national anthem. But again, not Coonrod. And his reasoning for not partaking in the social justice festivities is as good as it got.
“I’m a Christian,” Coonrod told reporters, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I can’t get on board on a couple of things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean toward Marxism and said some negative things about the nuclear family.”
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He went further to explain that he meant “no ill will” by not taking a knee.
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody,” Coonrod said. “I’m just a Christian. I believe I can’t kneel before anything but God, Jesus Christ. I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”
Of course, it didn’t take long for the establishment media mob to jump on the Giants reliever as cancel culture reared its ugly head. Sports Illustrated said Coonrod “stood out like a sore thumb” and that he “hid behind his religion.” The Chronicle claimed that there might already be a “sticky situation” in the Giants clubhouse. USA Today compared Coonrod to Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, who has largely been vilified for her critical Black Lives Matter sentiments.
And of course, amateur internet sleuths just had to dig into Coonrod’s past, dredging up the fact that he once wore a “Make America Great Again” hat on the Fourth of July.
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While it will be fascinating to see if anyone joins Coonrod or cites similar faith-based reasons for not wanting to partake in the social justice demonstrations, the tide is certainly working against him. MLB seems insistent on committing to the Black Lives Matter movement, no matter how divisive some may find it.
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While most players so far haven’t taken a knee during the national anthem, some are doing so. It’s more than a little jarring seeing a player like Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts, a man who just signed a monstrous $380 million deal, kneeling during the anthem as a form of protest against “inequality.” It’s more jarring yet seeing MLB promote and endorse the kneeling on its official Twitter account.
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Much like Dr. Anthony Fauci’s opening ceremonial pitch on Thursday, MLB might have an embarrassing miss on its hands if its social justice initiatives are going to ostracize anyone who would dare have a dissenting opinion.
Bryan Chai has written news and sports for The Western Journal for more than two years and has produced more than 1,300 stories. He specializes in the NBA and NFL as well as politics.
Justin Sullivan / Getty ImagesGavin Newsom speaks during his primary election night gathering on June 5, 2018, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
The California Department of Health clarified Tuesday that indoor religious services in the state have been suspended indefinitely. Over four months after California initially instituted a lockdown on March 19, the state issued a new order on Monday that rolled back reopening plans. The guidance mandates that restaurants, bars, churches, fitness centers, hair salons and barber shops must be closed in 30 of the hardest hit counties in California.
“We’re going back into modification mode of our original stay at home order,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, according to The New York Times. “This continues to be a deadly disease.”
The DCNF pressed both the governor’s office and the California Department of Health on when Californians may attend indoor religious services again, and what punishments Californians face if they do attempt to attend banned services. Newsom’s office referred the DCNF to the California Department of Health. CDPH referred the DCNF to a news release on the matter, noting that the order went into effect immediately and that it will remain in effect indefinitely until the State Public Health Officer decides to lift it.
CDPH did not provide an end date.
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CDPH would not directly address what punishments Californians might face if they continue to gather for indoor religious services.
“The Governor has consistently said that asking people to do the right thing is the most powerful enforcement tool we have,” spokeswoman Ali Bay told the DCNF.
“We all have a shared responsibility to do the right thing to not only protect ourselves, but those around us.”
“This is a statewide requirement and flows from the same legal authority as all of the other state orders,” she added.
“Californians have done incredible work following those orders — saving lives in the process. We expect that will continue to be the case.”
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The new guidance comes after months of outrage from Californians who have been prevented from attending religious services. The Department of Justice intervened in May, warning the governor that California’s reopening plan discriminates against houses of worship.
“Simply put, there is no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights,” Eric S. Dreiband, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in May.
Dreiband also reminded Newsom that Attorney General William Barr recently issued a statement in which Barr emphasized that “even in times of emergency … federal statutory law prohibits discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers.”
“Government may not impose special restrictions on religious activity that do not also apply to similar nonreligious activity,” Barr said.
“For example, if a government allows movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls, and other comparable places of assembly to remain open and unrestricted, it may not order houses of worship to close, limit their congregation size, or otherwise impede religious gatherings.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that America must “turn to God” to overcome race-related problems.
“We have racism in this country, Shannon,” Patrick told “Fox News @ Night” host Shannon Bream on Wednesday. “But it’s really an issue of love. It’s loving God. You cannot love your fellow man, if you don’t love God — and we have a country where we’ve been working really hard, particularly on the left, to kick God out.”
“We need a culture change to address this racism. You cannot change the culture of a country until you change the character of mankind,” Patrick continued.
Protests surrounding George Floyd, who died in police custody on May 25, have spread internationally. In some case, protests have turned violent, causing injuries and property damage.
“The crime against George Floyd, in my view, was a crime against all black America and against humanity and we’re coming together,” Patrick said. “We’ve got a lot of healing to do and we can’t do it unless we turn to God and we need to do that now more than ever.”
“We need a culture change to address this racism,” he explained. “You cannot change the culture of a country until you change the character of mankind. And you can’t change that unless you change the heart.
“And for billions of us on the planet, we believe you can’t do that unless you accept Jesus Christ, unless you accept God.
“And God has been left out of this equation,” he added, “through all of this.”
You can watch the entire interview with the lieutenant governor here:
Patrick also called out former Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ for his recent comments about President Donald Trump. Mattis came out hard against Trump on Wednesday, releasing a statement to The Atlantic blaming him for the violence.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” said Mattis, whom Trump asked to resign in December 2018. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
The problem with asking for someone to give you a letter of resignation, which you do as a courtesy to help them save face, is that it is then harder to say you fired them. I did fire James Mattis. He was no good for Obama, who fired him also, and was no good for me!
“We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,” he added.
“I think the timing was terrible, Shannon,” Patrick said in regard to Mattis’ remarks. “And I think there are a lot of people speaking up now that are creating real distractions and undermining what we’re all trying to do in this country.”
Amalia is a passionate free speech supporter and aims to encourage conservatives to put their principles into action. She is currently working for a state senator, has a business degree and has contributed to several publications.
PERTH, AUSTRALIA – NOVEMBER 07: Margaret Court looks on during the 2019 Fed Cup Final Official Dinner at Frasers on November 07, 2019 in Perth, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
The 77-year-old, who won a record 24 Grand Slam singles titles, made the comments while giving a sermon at her Victory Life Church in the Australian city of Perth. Addressing the issue of trans athletes competing in male or female sports, the Christian pastor said: “You know with that LGBT, they’ll wish they never put the T on the end of it because, particularly in women’s sports, they’re going to have so many problems.”
She also claimed children as young as seven were beginning to change gender, adding: “It’s so wrong at that age because a lot of things are planted in this thought realm and they start to question, ‘what am I?’
“You know, even that LGBT in the schools, it’s of the devil, it’s not of God…”
Court is known as an opponent of gay unions and stated in the past that lesbianism on the women’s tour has a corrupting influence on young players, as Breitbart Sports reported.
Twelve-times grand slam champion Billie Jean King last year called for Court’s name stripped to be from the Australian Open showcourt in Melbourne because Court’s views on sexuality, including the claim that “tennis is full of lesbians”, are offensive to her.
Australian tennis player Margaret Court-Smith plays a forehand, 03 July 1970, during the Wimbledon championships in London. Court-Smith won 24 women’s singles titles in Grand Slam tournaments, 11 of them in Australia, between 1960 and 1973. (AFP via Getty Images)
Despite the backlash from modern players, Court does not resile from her opinions. In fact she doubled-down on her controversial views regarding sexuality during the sermon. She said:
You have got young people taking hormones and having changes, by the time they are 17 they are thinking, ‘Now I’m a boy and really I was a girl’. Because you know what, God made us that way.
Court also highlighted the difficulty of talking about her religious beliefs, claiming “the devil” controlled parts of the media and government.
“The devil gets in and the media and the political, the education, TV — he wants to control a nation so he can affect people’s minds and mouths,” she said.
“I can go on television and if I say, ‘well, this is what the Bible says’, well, it’s like opening a can of worms. My goodness, you’ve let a torpedo off or something. No it’s true, because they hate the word of God.”
The 2020 Australian Open — where Court has been invited to attend as a special guest — commences Tuesday, January 14th in Melbourne.
AFP contributed to this story
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
Chick-fil-A will reportedly stop donating money to charities including the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes following pressure from LGBT groups.
The company announced Monday that it is refocusing its charitable foundation to a smaller number of charities, focusing exclusively on education, homelessness, and hunger.
“Our goal is to donate to the most effective organizations in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger. No organization will be excluded from future consideration – faith based or non-faith based,” Tim Tassopoulos, president and COO of Chick-fil-A, said in a statement.
Chick-fil-A’s tax records shows that it gave to several Christian schools and charitable groups in 2018. None of those groups appears in a list of Chick-fil-A’s 2019 charitable giving that the company made available for preview.
Tassopoulos told the news site Bisnews on Monday that Chick-fil-A wants to be “clear about who we are” as it enters new markets.
“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” he told the site. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”
As a result, the company will no longer give money to organizations including the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and the Paul Anderson Youth Home.
Those charities have caused LGBT activists to target Chick-fil-A due to those organizations’ stances on homosexuality.
In 2018, Chick-fil-A gave $115,000 to the Salvation Army for the Angel Tree program, which provided gifts for 11,000 children during the holiday season. The fast-food chain also gave $1.65 million to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to provide underserved youth with week-long summer sports camps at historically black colleges and universities (HCBU).
In August, progressive Silicon Valley giant followed Chick-fil-A’s lead, giving $1.5 million to the Salvation Army to fight homelessness.
Chick-fil-A has faced mounting criticism from LGBT groups as it seeks to expand its corporate footprint. The Atlanta-based company recently announced the closure of its first restaurant in Great Britain just a week after it opened due to protests from LGBT activists. Airports in Buffalo, New York, and San Antonio, Texas, have banned Chick-fil-A restaurants in the face of similar pressure.
Pennsylvania Democrats, including the state’s governor, chastised a freshman Republican representative for an “offensive” and “Islamophobic” opening prayer at the state capitol in Harrisburg on Monday, during which she mentioned Jesus numerous times.
In her prayer, Rep. Stephanie Borowicz — an associate pastor’s wife representing a district in the center of the Keystone State — also thanked President Donald Trump specifically for “unequivocally” supporting Israel.
The lawmaker began the invocation, “Jesus, I thank you for this privilege Lord of letting me pray. I Jesus am your ambassador here today representing you, the King of kings, the Lord of lords. The great I am.”
Borowicz referenced the tradition of leaders praying for the country, including George Washington at Valley Forge, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, as well as the members of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia who “fasted and prayed for this nation to be founded on Your principles and Your words and Your truths.”
“God forgive us — Jesus — we’ve lost sight of you, we’ve forgotten you, God, in our country, and we’re asking you to forgive us,” she said.
Borowicz then paraphrased the Bible passage 2 Chronicles 7:14, saying, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek Your face, and turn from their wicked ways, that you’ll heal our land.”
The verse has often been quoted by political and religious leaders, including Ronald Reagan who had his family Bible opened to it when he was sworn as the 40th president of the United States in 1981, CBN News reported. Mike Pence used the same Bible, opened to the same passage when he took the oath as vice president.
Borowicz further prayed, “thank you that we’re blessed because we stand by Israel,” a clear reference to the Bible’s Genesis 12:3.
The representative concluded her invocation: “I claim all these things in the powerful, mighty name of Jesus, the one who, at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are Lord, in Jesus’ name.”
Someone, apparently a representative, yelled out as Borowicz was finishing, prompting Republican House Speaker Mike Turzai, who had looked uncomfortable at various points throughout, to nudge her arm indicating it was time to wrap it up.
Borowicz’s prayer came before Pennsylvania’s first Muslim-American female representative, Movita Johnson-Harrell, was sworn in. Johnson-Harrell recently won a special election to fill a vacant seat for a Philadelphia district.
Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said on Tuesday that he apologized to Johnson-Harrell for Borowicz’s prayer, Fox News reported.
“I was horrified. I grew up in Pennsylvania,”Wolf said. “Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn on the basis of freedom of conscience. I have a strong spiritual sense. This is not a reflection of the religion I grew up in.”
Johnson-Harrell told reporters she thought pretty much the “entire invocation was offensive,”describing it as a weaponization of Jesus and the Israeli – Palestinian issue.
“It blatantly represented the Islamophobia that exists among some leaders — leaders that are supposed to represent the people,”she added in an interview with the Pennsylvania Capital Star.
Democratic Leader Frank Dermody called Borowicz’s invocation “beneath the dignity of this House,”The Associated Press reported.
Majority Leader Bryan Cutler did not find fault with his Republican colleague.
“I, for one, understand that everybody has sincerely held beliefs and I would never ask any one of us as an individual to go against that,” Cutler said.
Borowicz was unapologetic, according to state house reporter Andrew Bahl.
“That’s how I pray every day,” she said, adding, “Oh no, I don’t apologize ever for praying.”
Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, said that individuals offering the opening prayers “should be free to pray as their faith and conscience dictates.” He said he would hope their words would not be censored.
“A Christian praying out loud to Jesus and speaking his name should not be a surprise to anyone, nor viewed as offensive,” Geer said. “From the days of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, prayer is at the centerpiece of Pennsylvania’s founding and flourishing, and we must never abandon it.”
Harrisburg-based conservative radio talk show host Marc Scaringi agreed.
“State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz’s prayer wasn’t offensive,”he contended. “It was a beautiful invocation for the blessings of Jesus Christ. What’s offensive is Governor’s Wolf’s apology — that he was ‘horrified’ by the prayer.
“Strangely, Wolf invoked Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, in rebuke of Borowicz and her prayer. Yet, Penn founded Pennsylvania to be a peaceful refuge for members of all religious beliefs — and yes, that includes Christians too! Pennsylvanians should be horrified by our Governor’s apparent rebuke of the blessing of Jesus Christ.”
Rep. Jason Dawkins, a Muslim lawmaker, opened Tuesday’s Pennsylvania House session by reading from the Quran, prompting applause in the chamber, Fox News reported.
Randy DeSoto is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”
A Christian filmmaker says by defending faith, family, and freedoms, and exposing Islam and communism, American evangelicals are performing a service that is “vital to national security”– and interfaith dialogue, he argues, is the greatest threat to evangelicals.
Evangelical Christians in the U.S. are under attack by Islamists and Marxists, says Brannon Howse, founder of Worldview Weekend, because they are “the only real obstacles [to America] being completely overtaken” by those groups. When the Judeo-Christian ethic of America falters, he affirms, “we are done as a constitutional republic,” because it is Christian faith which promotes the defense of a constitutional republic based on a Judeo-Christian worldview.
Howse also declares the greatest threat to evangelicals, specifically, is interfaith dialogue. An egregious example of that, he says, came from the words of Sayyid Qutb – the late Muslim Brotherhood leader – who declared that “interfaith dialogue is a one-way bridge to bring the non-Muslim to the side of the Muslim – not the other way around.”
Islamists aren’t the only ones who use that tactic, says Howse.
“Interfaith dialogue is [also] being promoted by Marxist groups like the Gamaliel Network,”he tells OneNewsNow. The Gamaliel Network can be found in over 17 states and was “expanded greatly”in the 1980s, says Howse, by a former Jesuit priest by the name of Gregory Galluzzo. He notes Galluzzo studied under Saul Alinsky and helped to bring Barack Obama to Chicago to be a community organizer.
Howse emphasizes that the Gamaliel Network promotes interfaith dialogue because “they understand the importance of what Karl Marx, the father of communism understood.” He understood “the Hegelian dialectic process – pitting opposites against each other so there can be a merging or a synthesis – and that’s exactly what Saul Alinsky taught” Galluzzo to do.
Alinsky taught that “change comes from the conflict,” Howse continues.
“You get people to conflict; you get them to have chaos,”he explains – then they “tire of the conflict [and become] “willing compromise to have unity and to have peace, so everybody can get along.”
Having learned that tactic from Alinsky, Galluzzo then expanded the Gamaliel Network by using “Christian terms and Christian names” and “twisting Scripture” to create confusion amongst evangelicals.
“So, the greatest threat right now facing evangelical Christians,”Howse believes, “is interfaith dialogue coming at us from both the Marxists and Islamists.”
And that, says Howse, is the reason he produced the new six-hour documentary Sabotage. “[The film] is all about understanding how the Islamists, the Marxists, and their useful idiots are destroying America from within,”he adds.
Sadly, says Howse, “some of these useful idiots are coming from inside evangelicalism – [from those] who don’t understand either Islam nor do they understand Marxism.” In which case, he continues, they suggest the “things we’re promoting [are] conspiracy. [But] their ignorance doesn’t make me a conspiracy theorist; it just makes them ignorant [to the facts].”
Howse accurately paraphrases the words of evangelist Vance Havner, who said:“The devil is not fighting religion …. He is producing a counterfeit Christianity, so much like the real one that good Christians are afraid to speak out against it.”
“And that’s what we have today with so-called Christian useful idiots giving way to social justice, a social gospel, white privilege, reparation, and interfaith dialogue,” Howse concludes. “This is how you destroy a nation from within: with a Trojan horse.”
A teaching assistant at the University of Georgia made absurdly racist Facebook posts targeted toward white people and suggested dismantling “churches, schools, and families.” There is always a degree of left-wing lunacy that you can expect from America’s colleges, but professors and students seem to be getting crazier by the day.
Irami Osei-Frimpong, a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at the University of Georgia, made several racist Facebook posts explicitly attacking Christians and white people, Campus Reform reported. In a public post, Osei-Frimpong suggested an idea to deal with “crappy” white people who push “voter suppression” and “voter ID laws.”
“We can talk about voter suppression. We can talk about ID laws,”Osei-Frimpong wrote. “But all of this begins and ends with the fact that we make crappy White people.” He went on to suggest “dismantling” churches, schools and families.
“So if we are serious, we have to dismantle the institutions that make crappy white people: their churches, their schools, their families.”
I’m not sure how Osei-Frimpong wants to “dismantle” families and churches, but I doubt it’s through peaceful means.
In another public Facebook post, the left-wing radical suggested putting an end to “respectability” and going “to war on the White electorate.”
“Democrats need to go to war on the White electorate,” Osei-Frimpong wrote. “Acknowledge that we are going to lose elections for at least the next few years, as we campaign to change the conventional wisdom of the electorate.”
“Respectability Democrats, Black and White, are worthless,” he added.
Osei-Frimpong is exactly the type of left-wing radical that conservative students on college campuses have to engage with every day. These left-wing radicals, who are often filled with hatred toward white people and Christians, are the ones who accuse others of “racism” and “fascism.”
Osei-Frimpong previously made comments in August about his white students, calling them “sociopaths” and comparing them to “autistic kids.”
“There is a way in which White people in the South learn manners as a series of behaviors the way autistic kids learn to read social cues for behaviors,” he said. “Except since these guys and gals aren’t autistic, I just feel like I’m around a bunch of sociopaths.”
Malachi Bailey is a writer from the Midwest with a background in history, education and philosophy. He has led multiple conservative groups and is dedicated to the principles of free speech, privacy and peace.
Far-left Democrats have made their general disdain for Christianity very well known. It’s no secret to anyone who has even remotely kept up with their narrative in recent years. Despite that, leftists like to bring up Christianity as some sort of barometer when criticizing conservatives — and especially when criticizing anyone who supports President Donald Trump.
To the surprise of nobody, many liberals and Democrats only seems to applaud the merits of Christianity when the faith can be used to attack conservatives and Republicans. In fairness, that line of liberal thinking has certainly befuddled some Christians. Do devout Christians sometimes struggle with supporting an organization or person who can at times do or say un-Christian things?
While that can certainly be hard for some to answer, it was no problem for White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. In fact, it may be the best response I’ve ever heard. In a recently published interview with the New Yorker, Sanders perfectly responded to any and all critics who claim Christians can’t work in or support the Trump administration.
“Frankly, if people of faith don’t get involved in the dirty process, then you’re missing the entire point of what we’re called to do,”Sanders said.
Honestly, had Sanders simply stopped right there, it would have been a simply great answer. Of course, she elaborated on the issue to further cement her point.
The New Yorker cited Trump’s alleged sexual encounter with a porn star as one of the reasons why many outsiders condemned Christians who hold high positions in the Trump administration. Sanders again had the perfect response
“I’m not going to my office expecting it to be my church,” she said. Again, this is a very valid point. For many Americans and Christians, work is a wholly separate place from church.
Even if work involves unsavory accusations, Sanders is 100 percent correct to say that believing in Christianity means she should be wanting to go into work to spread the good word.
“You’re not called to go into the places where everyone already thinks like you and is a believer — you have to go onto a stage where they’re not,”Sanders said.
Sanders did clarify that she was not speaking directly about the White House, but rather her mission as a Christian in general.
“You have to take that message into the darkest places, and the dirtiest places, and the most tainted and dysfunctional places. If you can influence even one person, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” she added.
When the New Yorker writer Paige Williams pointed out that she thought Trump specifically needed the most help, Sanders didn’t miss a beat.
“We all need help,”Sanders responded. “That’s the whole basis of Christianity. No one is perfect. We are all sinners.”
That, in particular, seems to be the biggest point the media is missing. Nobody is perfect, and Sanders clearly realizes that. The mainstream media that’s so intent on attacking the Trump administration that it seems blind to its own flaws ought to remind itself of that every once in a while.
If I could have two television shows and two movies on a desert island, they’d be “The Office,” (the American version) “Breaking Bad,” “The Dark Knight,” and “Die Hard.” I love sports, video games, comics, movies and television. And I guess my job, too.
When you think about the censorship and outright banning of books and opinions, do you imagine the United States of America? Or, more likely, does that kind of suppression strike you more as the tactics of communists or fascists that America has frequently fought against?
If liberal lawmakers in California get their way, that west coast state may be one step closer to being unrecognizable as part of the United States. A bill currently pending in the legislature would essentially ban the sale of books that include traditional Christian views on marriage and sexuality.
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Shockingly, the proposed law could even be construed to make it illegal to sell Bibles, since they include verses that the far left finds unacceptable.
“Assembly Bill 2943 would make it an ‘unlawful business practice’ to engage in ‘a transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer’ that advertise, offer to engage in, or do engage in ‘sexual orientation change efforts with an individual,’” explained National Review.
That’s a lot of legalese to digest, so let’s break it down. What the bill basically says is that anything that can be seen as trying to impact a person’s sexual orientation would be illegal to sell or offer. This would almost certainly include traditional Christian counseling services and books.
“The bill then defines ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ as ‘any practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex,” continued National Review (emphasis added).
“Efforts to change behaviors” is where the real problem is. After all, almost all counseling and even common psychiatric care are intended to “change behaviors” in various ways.
If you think about it, that’s the entire reason people seek help in the first place: They want to stop drinking or becoming angry or, yes, having troubling thoughts about their sexuality.
It’s also worth pointing out that the bill as written would apply to people who are trying to change theirown behavior. This would mean that if a person was struggling with same-sex behavior or sexual identity and they themselves wanted to change, it would be illegal for them to buy any book meant to help them with this. The problem here isn’t limited to Christian books. Bizarrely, the bill appears to put almost any counseling or psychiatric service in the cross-hairs.
For example, let’s say a man has the paraphilia of crossdressing or transvestism. For whatever reason, the person has become addicted to wearing women’s clothes and has found that showing up to work in high heels and a dress has a negative impact on his life. Setting aside any personal judgment about this lifestyle choice (how liberal of us), suppose he voluntarily seeks counseling to get a handle on this problem. Maybe he just wants to stop being addicted to cross-dressing in public.
It’s his own choice. Yet counselors or books intended to help him would be illegal because they’re “efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions,”in the words of the proposed law.
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You might consider that example silly, but this concern is rather serious: If passed, it could only be a matter of time before the law’s extremely vague wording is used against traditional Christian teachings in the Bible.
Take Romans 1:26-27, for instance. This verse calls out homosexuality as “shameful” and encourages Christians to not act in this way.
Then there are 1 Peter 1:15-17, Romans 6:1, and Ephesians 4:22-24, all of which direct followers of Christianity to abstain from homosexuality even if they have those desires.
Let’s be extremely clear: The point of this article is not to lecture about gay lifestyles. There are an increasing number of gay conservatives who have reached their own conclusions about their beliefs, and many are on the front lines of the culture war.
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You don’t even have to particularly agree with the Bible verses mentioned here to see the problem. Efforts like the proposed bill represent dangerous slippery slopes that would use the legislature to attack traditional beliefs, and even mainstream views that happen to be at odds with the far-left agenda. If nothing else, it’s an affront to the free exchange of ideas — yes, even ones that someone might dislike — and a censorship of speech.
“No one doubts that (Christianity’s) teachings on sexual morality are increasingly unpopular,” summarized National Review. “But they remain constitutionally protected, and no state legislature should be permitted to ban a ‘good’ (such as a book) or a ‘service’ (like counseling) that makes these arguments and provides them to willing, consenting consumers.”
It’s amazing that the same liberals who bemoan “government in the bedroom” eagerly jump at the chance to give the same government control over sexual and moral topics the moment it helps their cause.
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Even non-Christians and political moderates need to fight against the new wave of suppression before a 21st-century iron curtain appears. Free speech is everyone’s fight.
Democrats — the self-proclaimed party of tolerance and inclusivity — have hypocritically displayed an increasing amount of intolerance and exclusivity toward one particular subgroup of the American population: conservative Christians. That intolerance and desire to exclude Christians from modern American society is no more evident than in the left’s relentless attacks against Chick-fil-A, a prominent and growing Christian-owned restaurant chain.
The New Yorker recently provided the worst yet example of the left’s anti-Christian bigotry with an article lamenting the success the franchise has seen in the liberal bastion of New York City.
The success of the chain — the piece admitted that a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich is sold in the city every six seconds, and the chain is set to open a dozen more storefronts in the city — is largely dismissed and invalidated as “creepy” and an “infiltration” due to the religious ideology of the restaurant’s founding family.
Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. https://t.co/wnhMrMBN6z
“And yet the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism,” wrote Dan Piepenbring for The New Yorker. “Its headquarters, in Atlanta, are adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet. Its stores close on Sundays.”
The piece proceeded to attack CEO Dan Cathy for his charitable donations to causes in support of traditional marriage, which were characterized as “anti-gay” and “anti-LGBT.”
It also attacked the manner in which the new Fulton Street restaurant — the grand opening of which served as the basis for the attack piece — used the word “community,” as if non-Christian liberals are the only ones who can lay claim to fostering a positive “community.”
“This emphasis on community … suggests an ulterior motive,” wrote Piepenbring. “The restaurant’s corporate purpose still begins with the words ‘to glorify God,’ and that proselytism thrums below the surface of the Fulton Street restaurant, which has the ersatz homespun ambiance of a megachurch.”
The piece also took on the instantly recognizable Chick-fil-a Cows, a highly successful marketing gimmick by the restaurant whose role in the franchise’s success was characterized as being the “ultimate evangelists” in the “church” that is Chick-fil-A. Piepenbring seemed disgusted at the popularity of the cows and their misspelled catch phrase “Eat Mor Chikin,”which he viewed as a “morbid” advertising campaign in that “one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place.”
On a less bigoted note, the piece also took issue with the fact Chick-fil-A has grown to become a large and powerful corporation which was now “crowding out” local diners and restaurants in the city and criticized its “deadening uniformity” while lamenting the “palliative” effect of their “homogeneous” comfort food.
“Today, the Cows’ ‘guerrilla insurgency’ is more of a carpet bombing. New Yorkers are under no obligation to repeat what they say. Enough, we can tell them. NO MOR,” concluded Piepenbring.
This piece — ostensibly about the grand opening of a new Chick-fil-A location in New York City — was little more than a blatantly bigoted attack against Christianity disguised as a restaurant review.
Imagine for a moment the owner of Chick-fil-A was Muslim and sold chicken sandwiches from a chain of halal carts around the city. Would The New Yorker still characterize its growing success as an “infiltration” of religious values that was “creepy” and needed to be opposed? Of course not, and the fact The New Yorker felt safe denigrating the Christian faith of Chick-fil-A’s owners when they wouldn’t dare do the same for another religion is simply the latest example of the left’s bigoted hatred against all things Christian, which apparently now includes tasty fried chicken sandwiches.
In the current year, it’s apparently permissible to ban a student from a class on Christianity for expressing inconvenient truths to a feminist professor.
Lake Ingle, a religious studies major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was kicked out of Professor Alison Downie’s Christianity class on February 28 for telling her that “biologists don’t agree that there’s more than two genders” and that the supposedly sexism-caused 23-cent “gender wage gap”is a myth.
According to a report from Fox News, Ingle was “silenced and punished”by Professor Downie after the senior pushed back on arguments made in a 15-min TED Talk she showed to the class. The TED Talk speaker was a transgender ex-pastor named Paula Stone Williams who discussed “the ‘reality’ of ‘mansplaining,’ ‘sexism from men,’ and ‘male privilege.'”
Downie first asked only the women in the class to share their thoughts on the subject matter. When no women spoke up, Ingle says he challenged the notion that there are more than two genders and explained that even The New York Times has debunked the myth stating the “gender wage gap” is caused by sexism. This did not sit well with the feminist professor. She booted Ingle from her class for his Wrong Think and “referred him to the public university’s Academic Integrity Board (AIB),” reports Fox.
The class Ingle has been barred from is one he needs to pass by the end of the semester if he wishes to graduate in May.
“You are barred from attending this class in accordance with the Classroom Disruption policy,” said a letter dated March 2 from IUP Provost Timothy Moerland to Ingle.
The senior views the silencing as a violation of his First Amendment rights.
“My professor is violating my First Amendment rights because of the fact that my views and ideology is different from hers,” he told Fox. “So she took it on herself to silence and embarrass me – bully me – for speaking up in class.”
The self-styled conservative libertarian continued, “It is my firmest belief that every human being has the freedom and right to identify, dress, and represent oneself as they see fit. I think this is all an attempt to silence my views personally because they contradict the ones she pushes in class so evidently.”
According to Fox, the professor has accused Ingle of the following: “disrespectful objection,” “refusal to stop talking out of turn,” “angry outbursts in response to being required to listen to a trans speaker discuss the reality of white male privilege and sexism,” and “disrespectful references to the validity of trans identity and experience.”
The IUP student claims Downie has exhibited “overall abuse” in the classroom, “indoctrinating” students and refusing to hear, let alone teach, dissenting views.
“You can’t say that anecdotal evidence is fact,” Ingle objected. “My professor pretty much just tried to shut me up because she was just letting women speak. I brought up the fact that biologists don’t agree that there’s more than two genders and I said the wage gap she’s referring to – 77 cents on the dollar – that even The New York Times debunked that.”
An AIB hearing over the matter was held on Friday; the ruling is expected for March 19. Ingle will not be able to graduate in May if the board sides with Downie.
Ingle told Fox he plans on becoming a professor one day, one who does not abuse his “intellectual power.”
“When you see that kind of misuse of intellectual power, you want to be the person that comes back and does it responsibly and with morals,” said Ingle. “Instead of being the purveyor of your ideology, you can be an educator.”
In light of the ongoing anthem-protesters by entitled football millionaires, a group of former NFL legends showed the current crop what true greatness is all about. This past summer, 18 NFL Hall of Famers were baptized in the Jordan River in Israel, Sports Spectrum reported.
In Matthew 3, the Scriptures record that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.
The group of players who were baptized included Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Roger Staubach, Joe Greene, Cris Carter, Andre Reed, John Stallworth, Eric Dickerson, Marshall Faulk, Dave Casper, Jerome Bettis, Ron Yary, Aeneas Williams, Lem Barney, Willie Lanier, Mike Singletary, Andre Tippett and Bruce Smith,according to Sports Spectrum.
Former Arizona Cardinals player Aeneas Williams, who is a pastor at The Spirit Church in St. Louis, Missouri, was there to help perform the baptisms for the players.
This is the sort of stuff that the media should be covering, but of course they won’t because it would show something other than people kneeling on the ground to take part in a pointless protest.
“Baptism is an outward sign of what has already happened on the inside of us,”Williams explained.
“Getting in the water, literally, your sins have been washed away and when you come up, it is symbolically a new person. The old person has been buried. We rejoice in the Lord,” he stated.
This action also highlights the generation gap between football players. The old guard are concerned with their love for God, while the newer generation is more concerned about how many people will like a picture of them kneeling.
The newer generation really has its priorities screwed up. In a few years, once their bodies are completely shattered from playing football, they will be completely forgotten by the American public and will having nothing to show for their protests.
However, the old guard have made their peace with God, and have clearly accepted something more important than a cool hashtag and a 30-second sound bite.
Every time a tragic shooting befalls America, the media immediately begins “searching for answers.” Almost universally, those answers involve new gun control legislation — even when the shooter is found to have violated laws already on the book.
In the so-called “search for answers,”the media rarely goes where Philadelphia Eagles QB Carson Wentz went in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre. In fact, while news outlets kept tripping over themselves to report every political utterance of anyone even vaguely affiliated with the NFL over the past few days, Wentz’s tweet hardly registered in the aftermath of Sunday night’s tragic shooting.
Why? He said four words that the media freaks out every time they hear: “The world needs Jesus.”
In a tweet early Monday morning, Wentz expressed his condolences and urged Americans to turn toward Jesus for guidance.
“So much hate and evil. So sad. The World needs Jesus in a bad way. Praying for all those affected in Vegas,”Wentz tweeted.
The world does need God in the most dire of ways. Sadly, that’s the only solution reporters and politicians won’t look toward in situations like these. In fact, as the Washington Examiner reports, Democrats already want to move forward on gun control legislation without even knowing the full circumstances behind the Las Vegas massacre. So, in case you were wondering, no — they haven’t forgotten Rahm Emanuel’s maxim about letting a good crisis go to waste.
Congressional Republicans, thankfully, are blocking the reactive impulse to legislate the problem away without actually knowing the problem.
“I just think politicizing this terrible tragedy is beyond disgusting and we ought to wait a respectful period of time, out of respect for people who lost their lives or were injured before we get into the push and shove of politics around here,”Republican Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas said.
And yet, one thing we forget is that no legislation can prevent pure evil. We cannot take depravity and cruelty out of the human heart with a law. That’s what caused the massacre in Las Vegas. It wasn’t some pernicious legal loophole or some new type of hyper-malevolent weaponry Congress refuses to ban. It was evil, plain and simple.
There’s only one way to excise this kind of evil from our society: Returning to the values that made our country great by making it good. The only way to do that is to turn to God.
At least Carson Wentz is willing to acknowledge that, even if the media won’t.
A Christian baker from Colorado received an unexpected blessing from the administration of President Donald Trump last week when the Justice Department filed a brief on his behalf to the Supreme Court, which is slated to hear his religious liberty case upon returning to the bench next month.
For Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, the trouble started five years ago when he politely refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Although he only meant to protect his religious beliefs, he wound up triggering a chain reaction of undeserved backlash.
It included death threats from angry activists, character assassinations from the liberal media, a judgment of illegal discrimination from a Colorado civil rights commission and an affirmation of the commission’s ruling by a lower court.
The tide finally began to turn in Phillips’ favor in late June when the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal and decide whether he actually discriminated against the gay couple when he refused to bake their cake over his religious objections.
And just on Thursday, he won yet another “huge” victory when Trump’s DOJ filed an amicus brief defending his decision five years earlier to not bake the gay couple’s wedding cake. In the brief, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall specifically argued that allowing the lower court’s ruling against Phillips to stand would create a violation of the First Amendment “where public accommodations law compels someone to create expression for a particular person or entity and to participate, literally or figuratively, in a ceremony or other expressive event.”
“When Phillips designs and creates a custom wedding cake for a specific couple and a specific wedding, he plays an active role in enabling that ritual, and he associates himself with the celebratory message conveyed,”he added. “Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights.”
This is good. Very good, in fact.
And according to The Washington Times, the DOJ’s surprising decision to file a brief in Phillips’ case “raises the possibility that the government will also ask for time to argue in front of the justices when the case goes for oral argument.”
That would be even better.
During the administration of former President Barack Hussein Obama, a man who loved sitting idly by as Christians were persecuted, the DOJ said nothing about Phillips, instead choosing to allow him to suffer the indignity of being persecuted for his Christian beliefs. But with Trump in the White House, it appears those days are finally behind us. Thank God.
Several members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, as well as Vice President Mike Pence are meeting together for a weekly Bible study at the White House. CBN News reported that Trump’s cabinet has been called “the most evangelical”in the history of the country.
Regular attendees to the study include Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Pence — who described himself at the 2016 Republican National Convention as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order” — attends the study as often as his busy travel schedule permits.
The study is led by former NBA player Ralph Drollinger, who played for the UCLA Bruins under legendary coach John Wooden and became the first player in NCAA history to make it to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament four times. The Bruins won the national championship in two of those years.
After his retirement from the NBA, Drollinger founded Capitol Ministries, which has launched Bible studies in 40 state capitols, as well as several foreign nations. Its mission is to evangelize and disciple public servants.The organization also leads weekly studies at the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Drollinger told CBN News that about a dozen members attend his weekly White House study.
“These are godly individuals that God has risen to a position of prominence in our culture,”he said. “It’s the best Bible study that I’ve ever taught in my life. They are so teachable; they’re so noble; they’re so learned.”
Drollinger said he believes the regular study is the first formal one in the White House in at least 100 years.
The Christian leader spoke highly of Pence, likening him to key Biblical leaders whom God raised up to the second-highest spot in government, including Joseph, Daniel and Mordecai.
“And I praise God for Mike Pence, who I think with Donald Trump chose great people to lead our nation,”Drollinger said.
Trump is invited to the study, and receives notes following each week’s meeting.
As reported by Western Journalism, Trump’s top spiritual adviser, Pastor Paula White, said that the president has “heart for God, a hunger for God.”
She added that Trump “has a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. We’ve had in-depth conversations about God.”
A reverence for God and the Bible in Washington has strong precedent. The largest Protestant church congregation in the country used to meet at the U.S. Capitol in the 1800s. At its height, over 2,000 attended weekly, including members of Congress and the executive branch.
Thomas Jefferson was a regular attendee, both as vice president and president.
There’s a bizarre argument I’m hearing these days which basically goes like this. “Look at how many churches are embracing homosexual practice. This proves we’re getting closer to the truth.”To the contrary, all it proves is that more and more churches are apostasizing. The logic behind this argument is as wrongheaded as it is unbiblical.
First, to argue that greater acceptance of homosexuality by churches is proof of spiritual growth is like arguing that greater acceptance of obesity by doctors is a proof of medical progress. The reverse is actually true.
Second, the Bible often warns us against compromise and apostasy, both moral and creedal. And in every generation, there have been heretics who have departed from the faith. Should we therefore celebrate every heretical doctrine and practice as proof of our spiritual maturity?
Jesus warned His disciples, saying “See that no one leads you astray” (Matt. 24:4). He also said, “And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved”(Matt. 24:11-13).
What is to be celebrated, then, is not apostasy but faithfulness, not deception but steadfastness, not moral laxity but moral firmness. And while the words of Jesus may have more specific application to certain times in history, there is certainly a general application to our day, in which “lawlessness” has greatly increased. Today, just about anything goes, and that is not something to celebrate.
Last month, the gay activist organization Faith in America announced its plans to call on the Southern Baptist Convention to remove homosexual practice “from the sin list.”
“Ultimately,”they said, “we at FIA believe LGBT people should be removed from the sin list. We know interpretations and new revelations come to light. We believe the Church will one day stop diminishing the lives of those who are LGBT and we strive to help this come to pass. We are optimistic people and see the glass 75% full!”
So, they are encouraged by what they have seen in recent years, as more and more churches in America and Europe are dropping homosexual practice “from the sin list.”Soon enough, they believe, the whole Church will follow suit. To paraphrase (but in my words, not theirs!), “We’re encouraged by the increasing apostasy we see in the Church, and we’re expectant that one day, the whole Church will be completely apostate.”
The facts are as follows.
First, as I’ve stated repeatedly, “no new textual, archeological, sociological, anthropological, or philological discoveries have been made in the last fifty years that would cause us to read any of these biblical texts differently. Put another way, it is not that we have gained some new insights into what the biblical text means based on the study of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Instead, people’s interaction with the LGBT community has caused them to understand the biblical text differently.”
The truth, then, hasn’t changed. Instead, some professing Christians have departed from God’s unchanging truth because of personal relationships and cultural decline.
Second, most church groups that have removed homosexual practice from the sin list are in numerical and spiritual decline. In contrast, most church groups that are holding to biblical truth and practice, especially overseas, are growing numerically and spiritually.
Third, the embrace of homosexual practice cannot be separated from the larger cultural embrace of the sexual revolution. This includes an increase in sex out of wedlock, babies born out of wedlock, pornography, and divorce, along with the embrace of all kinds of sexual perversions. That’s why the same society that celebrates same-sex “marriage” is increasingly celebrating polyamory, polygamy, and consensual adult incest.(I’ve documented this in many articles and several books. See, conveniently, the relevant chapters here.)
This points to spiritual and moral regress, not progress.
Fourth, the idea that the whole Church will one day embrace homosexual practice is as certain not to happen as the idea that the whole Church will one day deny Jesus. Forget about not holding your breath. Don’t even think about holding your breath.
It’s certainly possible that, in some locations, increasing parts of the Church will fall away, and this will be marked by numerous moral and spiritual compromises. But the notion that the whole Church will fall away is completely self-contradictory, since if there is a true Church, it has been established by Jesus Himself. And it was He who said that He would build His church and that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”(Matt. 16:18).
But it is not only theologically ignorant to imagine that the Church worldwide will one day embrace homosexual practice. It is also missiologically ignorant, since wherever the Church is growing worldwide, it is growing with a conservative message and morality.
I truly believe that the leaders of groups like Faith in Action mean well and believe they are doing God’s work. That makes their self-deception all the more tragic.
How Does Growing Apostasy Prove That Christians Are Getting Closer to the Truth?
For the past few years, there has been a disturbing trend in schools all across America where administration officials have attempted to silence those who want to talk about their Christian faith. The latest example of this repression of Christian beliefs occurred at Beaver High School in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where the school officials tried to stop a student from including references to God in her commencement speech, Faithwire reported.
The administration initially wanted graduate Moriah Bridges to “remove all religious references” from her commencement address, including the words “God,” “Lord”and a prayer she had included. Effectively, they wanted her to silence Jesus.
The administration’s plan backfired though, because when Bridges actually gave the speech on June 2, she defied the administration and included a well-phrased reference to Jesus Christ.
“I’ve always been a rule follower,” Bridges stated at the end of her speech. “When they said not to chew gum, I didn’t chew gum. When they said not to use your cellphone, I didn’t use my cellphone. But today, in the spirit of defying expectations, and for perhaps the last time at this podium, I say, ‘in the righteous name of Jesus Christ, Amen.’”
You can watch the key part of Bridges’ speech here:
WTAE noted that Bridges is now being represented by “First Liberty,” a religious freedom law firm, which is demanding a meeting with school administration officials to change school policy.
The Beaver Area School District Superintendent, Carrie Rowe, released a statement on June 13th where he defended the actions of the administration.
“In Moriah’s case, the district could not approve a speech written as a prayer, but did approve a second version that she submitted,” Rowe explained in the statement. “As superintendent, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and of this commonwealth.”
Rowe went on to state that she had been advised that prayer during a commencement address was “not permitted,”and that she “cannot choose which laws to follow.”
Bridges managed to silence the administration for 11 days. It took them that long to come up with a response to her act of defiance. You can read the full statement here.
It took a lot of courage for Bridges to stand up and profess her faith after the administration had instructed her not to. This world could use a few more people like Bridges who aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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A Christian filmmaker says by defending faith, family, and freedoms, and exposing Islam and communism, American evangelicals are performing a service that is “vital to national security” – and interfaith dialogue, he argues, is the greatest threat to evangelicals.
Howse emphasizes that the Gamaliel Network promotes interfaith dialogue because 
After his retirement from the NBA, Drollinger founded 
officials have attempted to silence those who want to talk about their Christian faith. The latest example of this repression of Christian beliefs occurred at Beaver High School in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where the school officials tried to stop a student from including references to God in her commencement speech, Faithwire reported.
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