THE WAR ON CHRISTIANITY

THE WAR ON CHRISTIANITY

BY REBECCA TERRELL

SEE: https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/35201-the-war-on-christianity; 

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research 

purposes:

From the print edition of The New American:

Even as Christians are given huge fines for acting Christian and are forbidden to practice their faith in the public sphere, complaints of unfairness are met with scorn.

“Are U.S. Christians being persecuted — or just whiny?” asks Larry Eubanks, pastor of First Baptist Church of Frederick, Maryland, in an Ethics Daily op-ed. He contends that many of his fellow believers’ complaints of maltreatment are merely a smoke screen for their inability to take constructive criticism or their stubborn unwillingness to accept those of other creeds. Addressing these “whiners,” Eubanks accuses them of irrationally claiming persecution “when you are criticized, when someone disagrees with you and says so, or when you are prevented from using your religion to discriminate against others.”

“Some Christians equate not getting their own way in the political sphere with brutal and unjust persecution,” opines Adam Lee in The Guardian. He mocks American conservatives who cry foul “because they’re not getting their own way on same-sex marriage or the Obamacare contraception mandate,” labeling their claims “ridiculous and embarrassing” when compared to the “genuine persecution” of forced conversion and genocide that minority religious groups in other countries face.

Is this depiction accurate? Are American Christians nothing more than inflexible simpletons, unable to come to terms with a society outgrowing their comfort zone? Do they just need to grow up and learn to live with those who do not share their views? What about the Christian mandate to “love your enemies, and do good to them that hate you”?

These arguments assume that Christians are, as a rule, intolerant of views or lifestyles different from their own. There is truth to that accusation: A moral life presupposes intolerance of immorality. In the past, this was known as having standards. But the modern definition of intolerance includes a specious insinuation that Christians’ personal morals pose a direct threat to everyone else’s personal freedom. Newfangled “tolerance” demands that Christians not only put up with perversion but also agree with, endorse, and promote it.

“Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society,” wrote the late D. James Kennedy, Ph.D., former president of Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality.”

This warped tolerance has been festering in our culture for decades. In 1987, Andre Sarano won a taxpayer-funded award for his photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. Outraged taxpaying Christians were silenced and told they didn’t have to look at it, but they had to respect the artist’s so-called right of self-expression. In 1996, Chris Ofili created a warped image entitled Holy Virgin Mary and adorned it with pornographic images and elephant dung. Then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to pull Brooklyn Museum funding over the exhibit, but a U.S. District Court squelched him, claiming violation of the museum’s First Amendment rights.

Predictably, things have gotten uglier since. Who can forget when A&E suspended Phil Robertson of the hit TV series Duck Dynasty in 2013 for expressing his opinion that homosexuality is a sin? Instead of defending Robertson’s right to free speech, the network pandered to outraged activists and only reluctantly reinstated the celebrity after fierce public backlash to the suspension.

Earlier that same year, Aaron and Melissa Klein, who owned a bakery in Oregon called “Sweet Cakes,” refused — based on their religious convictions — to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The lesbians sued, claiming an astonishing 88 symptoms of emotional distress, including such outlandish ambiguities as “mental rape,” “acute loss of confidence,” “shock,” and the remarkably incongruous trio: “loss of appetite,” “impaired digestion,” and “weight gain.” For their supposed transgressions the Kleins were fined $135,000, forcing them to shutter the bakery. Today they are still out of business and embroiled in legal appeal battles.

Whiny Christians?

The above cases are a few that have made national headlines, but discrimination against Christian standards is ubiquitous and ongoing. Let’s look at a few representative examples and then decide if these Christians are “whiny.”

Last fall the California state Assembly passed a resolution, ACR 99, pressuring clergy and educators to cease preaching against “lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)” lifestyles and discouraging them from engaging in conversion therapy, a term that refers to biblical counsel for people struggling with same-sex attraction. Though the resolution has no force of law, the next logical step would be for California to enact punitive measures for non-compliance. “It is the goal of ACR 99 to eventually criminalize one’s choice to seek counseling and other services,” reads a Capitol Resource Institute analysis of the bill. More than two dozen doctors, counselors, and pastors also condemned the resolution as a violation of their freedom. “Religious leaders have the constitutionally protected right to teach religious doctrine in accordance with their faith,” reads their open letter, “and politicians have no right to tell clergy what is moral, dictate the content of their sermons, or instruct them in religious counseling.”

Even more disturbing is what’s happening in classrooms across the country since the National Education Association (NEA) partnered with the radical pro-sodomy group “Human Rights Campaign” to create “welcoming schools” and force teachers to play along with their students’ supposed “gender” confusion. Writing for The New American, Alex Newman relates stories of teachers such as Peter Vlaming at West Point High School in Virginia, who “have already been fired … for refusing to refer to girls using male pronouns, and vice-versa.” A middle-school physical education teacher in Florida, Rob Oppedisano, nearly lost his job and teaching certificate when he resisted school administration for allowing a girl (who “identifies” as a boy) to change clothes and shower in the boys’ locker room. District administrators turned a deaf ear when he tried to point out how the situation so obviously set him up, the male students, and the school for accusations and lawsuits, especially in a setting where pedophilia charges run rampant these days.

“I also teach a health class, and they are starting to present the LGBT stuff in a positive manner,” Oppedisano said. “We’re supposed to call children by the name they prefer, then we are supposed to try to hide it when their parents come in.” He continued, “If you’re a Christian and you stand up for something, you can rest assured … that’s not going to be tolerated.”

While LGBT is promoted and defended, Christian causes are stifled. Last year administrators at a Florida high school thwarted student attempts to form a pro-life club and even threatened to fire the teachers who had volunteered to serve as faculty advisors. Their reason: The group was too controversial — a pathetic excuse considering the school has 78 approved clubs including the Gay-Straight Alliance, the Animal Rights Club, and Collier Students for Change, an affiliate of the state Democratic Party.

These are only a few cases of government-endorsed discrimination against Christians. We could add Montana’s refusal to allow religious schools access to its state scholarship program; the new law in New York that forces pro-life groups to hire pro-abortion employees; the Virginia realtor persecuted by her state’s Real Estate Board for using Christian references in digital communication; the Pennsylvania National Guard Unit that tried to ban a Christian scouting group from touring its facility; the Florida soup kitchen told to remove Christian banners and stop giving out Bibles or risk losing USDA funding; two ministers arrested for reading the Bible aloud on the sidewalk outside a Hemet, California, DMV; and the city of San Francisco’s recent commercial blacklist of 22 states with strong pro-life laws. And this list is only the tip of the iceberg; many more examples could be added.

Perhaps that explains why the Pew Research Center reported last year that half of U.S. adults agree that evangelical Christians are subject to discrimination, up from 42 percent in 2016. And even though American Christians are not facing the same type of persecution as their fellows in other countries — torture, rape, human trafficking, burning of churches and homes, murder, genocide — those who witness such barbarity have warnings for the United States.

“It wasn’t only ISIS who laid waste to the church; our cultural compromises with the government and our divisions against each other brewed for a long time. We are Damascus, the seat of Christianity; what happened to us can happen to you. Be careful.” Those are the words of a Syrian missionary quoted by K.A. Ellis in Christianity Today. She also cited an underground church leader in the Middle East who warned: “Persecution is easier to understand when it’s physical — torture, death, imprisonment. American persecution is like an advanced stage of cancer; it eats away at you, yet you cannot feel it. This is the worst kind of persecution.”

“There is a war being waged against the world’s Christians and unfortunately American Christians have been lulled or shamed into silence,” Dede Laugensen told attendees at last summer’s National Religious Broadcasters convention in California. Laugensen is executive director of Save the Persecuted Christians Coalition (SPCC). “More Christians have died for their faith over the last 100 years than in all prior centuries since Jesus’ time,” she explained, describing Americans as oblivious, asleep in a “carefully constructed bubble of ignorance and distraction,” while the media and government maintain vigilant silence about brutalities worldwide.

That silence means most Americans are unaware that Christians are overwhelmingly the most targeted religious group in the world, with persecution in some areas reaching “genocidal” levels, according to a 2019 report commissioned by the U.K. foreign secretary. The result has been mass exodus from regions of greatest violence. For example, in fewer than 10 years the Syrian Christian population has nosedived from 1.7 million to under 450,000. In Palestine, Christians make up less than 1.5 percent of residents. Yet these are the areas of Christianity’s oldest roots.

Frank Gaffney, SPCC president and CEO, told Troy Anderson of The New American that persecution of Christians around the world is a “precursor to what can happen closer to home if we’re not careful, and if we don’t do a better job than we have to date in trying to stop” atrocities worldwide.

Revolutionary Origins

What is the source of this animus? Why is the cross targeted for destruction? “Rest assured, the cake baker here in the United States, the 15-year-old girl being held by jihadists as a slave for life in Nigeria, and the imprisoned North Korean being slowly starved to death for the crime of being Christian, are casualties of the same brutal war that has been festering for centuries,” mourned Laugensen.

“Since its birth in the fires of the French Revolution, the political left has been at war with religion and with the Christian religion in particular,” writes New York Times bestselling author David Horowitz in his 2019 book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America. Troy Anderson, who favorably quoted the above passage last year in his own article for TNA on the war against Christianity, says the same hatred has inspired revolutionaries ever since. He paints a frightening past as prologue: 

In Russia, socialist revolutionary Karl Marx’s followers scrubbed religious teaching from the schools, forbade criticism of atheism, and burned over 10,000 churches. When priests demanded freedom of religion, they were executed. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested, 95,000 of whom were shot by firing squads.

“Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto expended a lot of red ink on the need to eradicate religion and family ties by any means necessary,” explains The New American contributor Charles Scaliger. “And communism’s well-known hostility to God and family is shared by all other forms of socialism, although behind a kinder, gentler mask of ‘tolerance.’”

The modern anti-Christian crusade we are witnessing in the United States is a textbook case of cultural Marxism’s “tolerance” in practice. “Radicals in America today don’t have the political power to execute religious people and destroy their houses of worship, yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion,” said Horowitz. “They want to save the human race from the social injustice and oppression that religion allegedly inflicts on humanity.”

“Religion must die in order for mankind to live,” proclaimed left-wing commentator Bill Maher in the 2008 documentary Religulous. In response, it’s worth asking exactly what is so offensive, unjust, and oppressive about the Christian creed? Among other virtues its principles promote honesty and ethics, outlaw killing and stealing, and prevent a husband or wife from abandoning spouse and children. People offended by these values are those who claim rights to a warped version of so-called freedom — what they really want is freedom from conscience and a license to practice depravity. It is telling that Christians get into the most trouble with radicals promoting LGBT and pro-abortion agendas.

“According to the Left … people who oppose abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’ have a kind of mental illness,” warns Horowitz. “Stigmatizing one’s opponents is a classical radical tactic.” Using this typical Marxist trick, leftists label anyone who censures them as homophobes, xenophobes, fill-in-the-blank-phobes. “Calling critics ‘phobic’ is a rationale for denying their First Amendment rights” and silencing them.

Target: The Next Generation

But is it all religions, or only Christianity, that must be silenced? What about those who adhere to beliefs such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam — the latter being far more intolerant, bloodthirsty, and misogynistic than the others?

On the contrary, non-Christian religions are coddled and applauded. Schools in Baltimore, Maryland, recently joined those in New York, Detroit, and other districts throughout the country in closing for so-called holy days on the Muslim calendar, despite the fact that no other religious holidays are recognized. Otherwise scheduled school closings — once known by the Christian names of Christmas and Easter — now go by the insipid titles of winter vacation and spring break.

Buddhism and Hinduism are promoted in a different way. For more than a decade, U.S. public schools have been indoctrinating children with Far East mystical practices, masked under so-called “Mindfulness” programs to supposedly promote stress management. Youngsters are made to sit on classroom floors in the lotus position, eyes closed, hands resting on knees with palms raised, meditating or chanting Hindu mantras. When she exposed the agenda in 2014, Christian activist Debbie Degroff advised, “Chances are that you, like me, had never heard of Mindfulness until today. What other programs, curriculums and practices are you unaware of?”

What about Teaching Social Activism, the cornerstone of New York City’s “Civics for All” social studies curriculum? William F. Jasper of The New American says this latest un-Christian propaganda scheme not only indoctrinates “K-12 captives in race theory, gender theory, LGBTQ rights, social justice, environmental justice, and a continually evolving potpourri of made-to-order Marxist grievances, but also encourages and directs students to take to the streets to demonstrate their righteous zeal.” Under Teaching Social Activism, administrators gave kids a free day off school if they would attend Greta Thunberg’s 2019 Youth Climate Strike. The program hypes such causes as carbon footprints, toxic masculinity, homophobia, white privilege, gun control, economic inequality, and police brutality. They may not be able to read or write, but these students can “spout all the ‘progressive’ tropes about issues that demand their outrage,” says Jasper.

As in New York, educators across the country have been diligent in transforming public schools into anti-American, Marxist boot camps. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation measured the effectiveness of these efforts in a 2019 poll, which found that an astonishing 70 percent of millennials (people born in the 1980s and 1990s) are likely to vote for a socialist candidate. Only 57 percent of those surveyed believe the Declaration of Independence is a better safeguard of freedom than the Communist Manifesto.

No wonder the latter document admits it is the purpose of communism to “rescue education from the influence of the ruling class,” the term “ruling class” being a 19th-century Marxian slur for the Christian society that revolutionaries were fighting to purge from European culture. Addressing their opponents, Marx and Engels opined that education is “determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools.” They then declared that communists intend “to alter the character of that intervention.”

Thus we have programs such as Teaching Social Activism, Mindfulness, and the most nefarious, which encompasses all others, multiculturalism, aimed at teaching American students to respect other cultures and despise their own. In 1982, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education mandated “multicultural education” as an integral part of teacher training and described the philosophy as “treating diverse cultural groups and ways of life as equally legitimate.” Writing for The New American in 2010, the late education expert Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld painted a more realistic description:

Multicultural education … legitimizes different lifestyles and values systems, thereby legitimizing moral diversity — which is simply moral anarchy. The concept of moral diversity directly contradicts the Biblical concept of moral absolutes based on the Ten Commandments, on which this nation was founded.

Taught not as a separate subject matter but through careful planning and integration into all areas, multiculturalism is spoon-fed to children from their earliest days in school and belittles pride in patriotism and the American culture.

Being American “means accepting the essence of what the Founding Fathers stood for and died for. That essence is founded on Biblical principles which include the concept of moral absolutes,” said Blumenfeld. “To deprive school children of that knowledge is to rob them of their common American heritage.”

The point of this indoctrination is to steer young Americans away from patriotism, toward “a world socialist government in which American national sovereignty will be surrendered for the greater good of ‘world peace and brotherhood.’” Blumenfeld cautions parents of their tremendous responsibility to safeguard their children from such “socialist brainwashing,” to teach them that “this nation was created with God’s help and blessings,” and that “without Him we will be consigned to the same tyranny and misery that now afflicts the millions of people who live under paganism, atheism and communism.”

We are already there, under the foul tyranny of neo-paganism, having enthroned licentiousness and debauchery in every imaginable way. We have legitimized sodomy with  same-sex “marriage,” justified willful murder by calling it “abortion,” and subverted marriage — the sacred institution created by God for the propagation of the human race and the rearing of children — with the abolition of children to the point of depopulation and the proliferation of cohabitation and divorce. The sacrilege of desecrated Sundays is universal, as are blasphemies against God. Impurity permeates our culture in immodest clothing and heinous themes in music and entertainment. Our government oppresses the poor through a corrupt welfare system and defrauds workers through a Marxist graduated income tax.

What is the solution? Jesus Christ warned His apostles that it wouldn’t be easy: “If the world hate you, know ye that it hated me before you…. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you,” reads the 15th chapter of the New Testament’s Book of Saint John. No matter the cost, Americans must once again permeate civil society with Christian principles, or society will not be civil.