Free Republic

Popular Christian singer Amy Grant is defending her partnership with Melinda Gates of the pro-abortion Gates Foundation after LifeNews.com exposed the partnership and the foundation’s massive financial support for the abortion industry. Amy Grant is pro-life on the issue of abortion, but she recently announced she is teaming up with one the head of the most pro-abortion foundations that shuttled millions towards abortions and abortion businesses. In an opinion column on Fox News’ web site, Grant announced she is partnering with Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation to push birth control and contraception in impoverished nations. Grant said she hosted...

It is nearly axiomatic that presidential contests tend to shine a harsh light on conservative Christians — inasmuch as they are viewed as the Republican Party’s base and are, therefore, deemed fair game. Of course, religious folks come in a variety of stripes, checks and polka dots. Many are Democrats. But it is the members of the Christian right — evangelicals and Catholics, especially — who are treated every four years to the sneers of lefties, academics, proud atheists (allow me to quote myself: “There’s no dogma like no dogma”) and certain but not all media. Roger Ailes’s Fox News...

New Evangelization, where art thou? The Pew Research Center reports that the number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen sharply, to the tune of nearly eight percentage points in only seven years.  The survey, carried out in 2014, was the second "Religious Landscape Study" Pew conducted since 2007. Based on the 35,000 people the institute interviewed, the American populace is 21% Catholic. It was 23.9% seven years ago.  While the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian dropped from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014, non-Christian religions are growing. Islam showed the greatest gains, growing half a percentage point...

Christians in Iraq are “on the edge of a terrible catastrophe,” an Iraqi nun said in May 13 testimony before the foreign-affairs committee of the US House of Representatives. Sister Diana Momeka, a Dominican sister who was forced to flee from Mosul, testified in Washington pleaded for help for Iraqi Christians, saying that persecution by the Islamic State has been more brutal than any suffering endured by the country’s Christians in over 1300 years. She also testified that the help furnished by Iraqi government officials for Christian refugees has been “at best modest and slow.” The Dominican sister told...

I’ve been a florist in Richmond, Wash., for more than 30 years. In that time, I’ve developed close relationships with many of my clients. One of my favorites was Rob Ingersoll. Ingersoll came in often and we’d talk. Like me, he had an artistic eye. I’d try to create really special arrangements for him. I knew he was gay, but it didn’t matter — I enjoyed his company and his creativity. Then he asked me to create the floral arrangements for his wedding. I love Rob, and I’d always been happy to design for his special days. But there’s something...

. . . but there is less here than meets the eye. At first, the numbers seem alarming, and there is an alarming element to it. Since the last time such a poll was taken in 2008, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped from 78 percent to 70 percent. Yes, 70 percent is still an overwhelming majority, but an 8 percent drop in just seven years is pretty big. So how does one account for those one-time devoted followers of Jesus Christ suddenly abandoning the Kingdom of God? One doesn’t, because that’s not what’s really happened here....

An extensive study by the Pew Research Center has revealed that Christians are declining sharply in America in terms of population share, while the religiously unaffiliated are rising, and now make up a larger share than American Catholics. The rise of religious intermarriages was one trend linked to the growth of the unaffiliated. The report, which was released on Tuesday, stated: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately 3 percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share...

Dillard University‘s 218 members of the Class of 2015 received a special treat in addition to their diplomas — Academy and Tony Award-winning actor Denzel Washington to deliver the keynote commencement address. And in contrast to the whiney, racial and excuse-driven address delivered by first lady Michelle Obama at another historically black university, Washington’s was filled of hope, humor, inspiration and love of his creator. “No. 1,” he resolutely told the graduates of the New Orleans university, “Put. God. First!”

Honor to the Martyrs! A Declaration of Gratitude to the Martyrs of Our Day By: Msgr. Charles PopeIn the Divine Office last week we read a remarkable passage on the persecution of the Church. It seems proper to consider a portion of it in times like these; more on that in a moment.Of course in writing of persecution and martyrdom, I write as an American who, though experiencing a lot more scorn these days, does not have to endure grave threat for being a Catholic. But as I consider Catholics and Christians in places like Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, the...

Ted Cruz's whacko father is at it again. Rafael Cruz, a preacher from Lewisville, Texas, addressed a Republican group in Alvin, Texas, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on same-sex marriage last week, according to Right Wing Watch: While boasting that his son, Ted Cruz, has introduced two measures in the U.S. Senate to block a Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, Cruz told the audience that “we are going to have to stand firm on the agenda to destroy America.” “I lost my freedom once, I’m not willing to lose it again. I will die fighting...

It is almost beyond my comprehension that Bill O’Reilly could co-author a book about Jesus Christ and then say this: Reverend [Franklin] Graham reflects the Christian view that you don’t demean other people unnecessarily. Jesus would not have sponsored that [Draw Muhammad] event.

As the American hegemony continues to recede across the world, the status of non-Muslims in Muslim countries continues to deteriorate. And the West continues to struggle to suppress speech and criticism of the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.

Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly argued it is “bogus” to invoke freedom of speech in the debate over the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest on Thursday.

As the Western establishment works to bolster the communist regime ruling mainland China, Beijing has been intensifying its brutal campaign of persecution against Christians and other believers as part of a broader war on dissent. In fact, according to a recently released report by Christian human-rights organization China Aid, the dictatorship’s crackdown on believers of numerous faiths last year reached levels unseen in at least a decade, surging by more than 10,000 percent in one category over 2013. Analysts are warning that the worst may be yet to come as the Communist Party of China seeks to smash any and...

Why do Christian churches meet and worship on Sunday? After all, doesn’t the fourth commandment clearly say “the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God?” So is Sunday worship just a Christian tradition? Did we not want to get mistaken for Jews? Or perhaps there was a church council that met to decide the day should be moved? Well no, none of those is the reason that Sunday became the day upon which Christians worship. Sunday worship was not fixed by a church council and as William Perkins points out, “The church, has no power to ordain a Sabbath.” The only...

Even inmates will be made to care about the liberal Gaystapo-obsessed quest to quash Christians. In 2003, both houses of Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act by unanimous consent, and President Bush signed it into law.  Unfortunately, implementation of the law was left to future administrations, and if you give a mile of authority to the Jacobins in the Obama administration, they take a marathon. After years of ruminating over how to prevent violent inmates from playing “don’t drop the soap,” the government published its final PREA standards in June 2012.  Now states have to comply with these regulations or face...

Sister Diana wants to tell Americans about ISIS persecution of Christians in Iraq, but the State Department won’t let her in. Why is the United States barring a persecuted Iraqi Catholic nun — an internationally respected and leading representative of the Nineveh Christians who have been killed and deported by ISIS — from coming to Washington to testify about this catastrophe? Earlier this week, we learned that every member of an Iraqi delegation of minority groups, including representatives of the Yazidi and Turkmen Shia religious communities, has been granted visas to come for official meetings in Washington — save one....

Until there came to them clear evidence

A Christian print shop owner who refused to print pro-LGBT T-shirts in 2012 has the constitutional right not to print messages that conflict with his Christian beliefs, a Kentucky court ruled on Monday. After Blaine Adamson, the managing owner of a Lexington print shop called Hands on Originals, refused to print T-shirts for Lexington's 2012 gay pride festival, he was found to be guilty of discrimination by the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission last year, even though doing so would have violated his religious conviction. Additionally, the print shop was ordered to serve future requests from LGBT activists. The...

An extensive study done by the Pew Research Center has yielded some fascinating information regarding the trajectory of world religions over the next four decades. As of 2010, Christianity was the dominant world religion with roughly 2.2 billion adherents and Muslim's were second with about 1.6 billion adherents. If current demographic trends continue however, Islam is expected to catch up to Christianity midway through the 21st century