Free Republic

Via the Brody File, hard to believe a country that’s 70 percent Christian would acquiesce in a legal regime like that, but then I look at this poll and remember we’ve already reached the point where Christian-owned businesses can be effectively shuttered by the state for politely declining to participate in a gay wedding. It’d be more accurate to say that the effort to brand Christian teachings that undermine progressivism as “hate speech” has already begun in the public sphere, with the fate of the private sphere still undetermined. Based on early indications, though, merely entertaining an opponent of...

"This is a Christian nation," said the Supreme Court in 1892. "America was born a Christian nation," echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: "This is a Christian nation." But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation." Comes now a Pew Research Center survey that reveals the United States is de-Christianizing at an accelerated rate. Whereas 86 percent of Americans in 1990 identified as Christians, by 2007, that was down to 78 percent. Today only 7 in 10 say they are Christians. But the percentage of those describing themselves as atheists,...

21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate you? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against you? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them my enemies. Psalm 139 American King James Version You Have Searched Me and Know Me 1O lord, you have searched me, and known me. 2You know my sitting down and my rising up, you understand my thought afar off. 3You compass my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 4For there is not a word in my tongue, but, see, O LORD,...

In the tradition of charlatans like Ahmed Deedat and Zakir Naik, Yusuf Ismail is convinced that he can be as inaccurate as he likes, because most of the people listening to him won't bother examining what he says (so long as he sounds confident when he speaks). This tactic is based on numbers. If 400 people are watching a debate, and a Muslim debater completely distorts the facts while sounding like he knows what he's talking about, how many in the audience will take the time to research his claims? One or two? And if one or two do the...

I recently attended a service that might help solve the riddle of the fantastic decline of American Christianity. It was a different church from the one I normally go to. Let me set the scene, perhaps it will sound familiar: I walked in and immediately realized that IÂ’d inadvertently stumbled upon a totally relaxed, convenient, comfortable brand of church. The first hint was the choir members dressed in shorts and flip flops. Sweet, bro. So chill. There were a bunch of acoustic guitars and drums and tambourines and a keyboard. Before the service/concert began, some guy came out to rev...

A couple of weeks ago a toddler shot himself in the head after finding a gun under the pillow of his parent's bed. Just days later a police officer accidentally shot his mother at a family wedding while adjusting his jacket. Last year, a nine-year-old girl was being shown how to use an automatic weapon and accidentally killed her instructor. In Idaho a two-year-old boy was shopping at Walmart with his mother and three other children, when he found a gun in his mother's bag; he pulled the trigger and killed her. Some would argue that these tragic stories...

A woman who said she feared for her life after she converted from Islam to Christianity as an Ohio teenager has written a book through which she hopes to inspire girls and women who are desperate for freedom. Rifqa Bary, 22, gained national attention in 2009 when she ran away from her northeast Columbus home to Florida, saying her father had threatened to kill her. The book Hiding in the Light: Why I Risked Everything to Leave Islam and Follow Jesus tells her story. It was released on Tuesday by the WaterBrook Press division of Penguin Random House. “Writing this...

[Embedded Video--28:30] Israel Frontline is a weekly program hosted by Shira Sorko-Ram. On this program: – Jews and Arabs prepare for battle. – What was the Arab Revolt. – Were there only Arab Refugees? – In the second part of the program, our panel guests will offer their views of the Jewish-Arab relationships at the time.

Political correctness dictates that all religions are of equal worth; that there are “Three Great Abrahamic Religions,” and “The Arabs are Semites too, so they can’t be anti-Semites.” All these clichés need to be buried. While Christianity and Islam were both offshoots of the Jews and took from them the concept of having one’s own Holy Writ, their self-definitions as new faith communities were radically different. The Coine Greek language narratives appended to the Hebrew Bible purport to be a continuation of Jewish history. The Catholic Church even defines itself in Latin as Verus Israel, the True Israel. But Muslims...

Much has been made of the recent Pew poll that highlights America’s religious landscape. What has drawn the most attention is the apparent decline of Christianity in the U.S. “The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining,” began the piece. Many liberals took gleeful notice. The Institute on Religion and Democracy’s Mark Tooley noted, “Secularists and their fellow travelers are ecstatic. The secular utopia about which John Lennon crooned is impending. Christianity is finally dying!” Of course, this is far from the case, as Tooley later reveals. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the...

WASHINGTON (Christian Examiner) – A group claiming to defend the military against a Christian takeover is demanding an Air Force general face a court martial for saying he is a "redeemed believer in Christ" while in uniform at a National Day of Prayer Task Force meeting in Washington May 7, the Air Force Times has reported. Mikey Weinstein, who heads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, wrote an editorial on the organization's website May 15 that Maj. Gen. Craig Olson violated Air Force instructions about speaking openly of God and Jesus Christ as a representative of the military. Weinstein believes the...

One of the most common assumptions is that religiosity is linked to economic and technological underdevelopment. As a society gets more technologically and economically advanced, the thinking goes, religiosity naturally fades away and is replaced by a more secular worldview. Exhibit A is usually Western Europe, which grew more secular as it grew richer (and much, much more violent) across the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhibit B is the world's most religious continent — Africa — which happens to be its poorest. Under this view, the 21st century will be the century in which secularization spreads even further as the...

A recent Pew Research Center study found there has been a big drop since 2007 in the number of Americans who identify as Christian. Although 70 percent of Americans still describe themselves as Christian, more people are identifying with no religion at all.The survey found Americans who call themselves atheist, agnostic, or of no particular faith showed the largest increase jumping from 16 percent in 2007 to nearly 23 percent in 2014. In the same period, Christians dropped from 78 percent to just under 71 percent.Though not an affirmed Christian, George Washington realized the importance of religion in maintaining our...

As leaders of state, including the Vatican, recognize the illegitimate claim of Palestinian statehood, there can be no peace as that claim is based wholly on the outright destruction of Israel, the Jews, and the subjugation of Christianity Abandoning his own constituents, Pope Francis has embraced the divisive, terror-backed Palestinian Authority with a treaty recognizing its (nonexistent) statehood and an open-armed welcome of Mahmoud Abbas, P.A. leader, as an “angel of peace.” With this action, the pope iced the cake of tumultuous Middle East politics by celebrating a condoner of ISIS that continues to persecute members of his own Catholic...

Christians decided going to church was enough, rather than advocating Christian morals and values. Jews decided even God wasn’t necessary.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 12, 2015 If Ben Shapiro’s simply stated point isn’t enough to drive home the idea that the latest Pew survey on religious life in America reported absolutely nothing new, just check out one of the latest episodes of the Kardashians in which Kim Kardashian has to Google who baptized Jesus before concluding that she wanted to “find a guy named John” to baptize her daughter, North West. What’s worse, the “guy named John” concept, the...

Last month, New Atheist God-hater Daniel Dennett wrote an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal that used a Pew poll to argue that the future of religion is bleak. I responded with a column of my own in which I mocked this claim, since the poll Dennett relied on actually made mixed predictions about the future of religion in the United States and painted a fairly rosy picture of its next few decades around the globe. Now Pew has released another major poll focused in much greater depth on the United States, and it's being widely interpreted as providing...

(ANSA) Terni, May 15 - A schoolboy of African origin attacked a 12-year-old-girl at a school in central Italy because she was wearing a crucifix on a neck chain, police said Friday. The boy punched the girl violently in the back at the entrance to a middle school in the town of Terni on Thursday and the girl's mother caught the boy, who subsequently told Carabinieri paramilitary police he attacked the girl because she was wearing a crucifix, police sources said. The boy, who first attended the school some three weeks ago, had bullied the girl over the past four...

1.) Obama Dismisses Wealthy Americans As ‘Society’s Lottery Winners Speaking to a panel on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama dismissed wealthy Americans as “society’s lottery winners” and called on them to make a “modest investment” in the poor in the form of tax increases. You pretty much have more than you’ll ever be able to use and your family will ever be able to use. “There’s a fairness issue involved here. And by the way, if we were able to close that loophole, I could now invest in early childhood education to make a difference. That’s where the...

The Pulitzer Prize board is receiving criticism for giving an award to a South Carolina newspaper for a series on domestic abuse implying that Christianity and the Bible are the sources of the problem. The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) won the 2015 public service prize for a seven-part series titled "Till death do us part.” But the paper blamed part of the problem of domestic abuse on "deep-rooted beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and the place of women in the home." Tim Graham with the Media Research Center believes there's a natural tendency in southern states for newspapers...

On Tuesday, Pew Research released a new study finding a radical increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans. That increase correlated strongly with the decrease in the number of Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelical Protestants over the past seven years.