Free Republic

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the only justice to join Sotomayor in dissenting from the majority’s opinion in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined in full by liberal Justice Elena Kagan, concluded that a state government could not categorically deny churches that have playgrounds from competing with other institutions in the state grant program. “The Free Exercise Clause ‘protects religious observers against unequal treatment’ and subjects to the strictest scrutiny laws that target the religious for ‘special disabilities’ based on their religious status,” wrote Roberts. “Applying that basic principle, this...

The AKP government has usurped churches, monasteries and graveyards belonging to the Syriac community in Mardin and handed them over as state property to the Diyanet, Turkey's Presidency for Religious Affairs. According to the Armenian newspaper Agos many churches, monasteries, graveyards and other assets of the Syriac community in the city of Mardin have been usurped and transferred to the state's Treasury and other relevant state institutions. After Mardin became a Metropolitan Municipality, its villages were officially turned into neighbourhoods as per the law and attached to the provincial administration. Following the legislative amendment introduced in late 2012, the Governorate...

Alliance Defending Freedom joined 47 other signatories to a letter delivered to congressional leaders this week that encourages them to make hearings and votes on the Free Speech Fairness Act a priority. The bill, introduced by Reps. Steve Scalise, R-La., and Jody Hice, R-Ga., in February, would allow non-profit organizations to speak freely in the ordinary course of their business on all matters of life, including elections and candidates, if they choose to do so. ADF has been actively seeking to end enforcement of the Johnson Amendment against churches through its Pulpit Freedom Sunday effort since 2008. “Americans don’t need...

Christianity is making a comeback in Europe – and it’s mostly thanks to Muslims, say experts in Islam and faith leaders. A soaring number of Muslims, many of them refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are converting to Christianity, breathing new life into Europe’s once floundering Christian churches. The Muslims are flocking to various Christian denominations, experts said, including becoming Protestants, evangelical or Catholic. As many parts of Europe are becoming more secular and houses of worship are seeing congregants leave in droves, it is Muslim converts who are reviving struggling Christian churches. "European churches have struggled for decades to...

Christians in Turkey have – throughout the centuries — been turned into a tiny, dwindling minority.  The remaining few Christian churches in Anatolia are also on the path to total annihilation. Hagia Sophia in Trabzon: Church-mosque-museum and now mosque againThe Hagia Sophia, Greek for “Holy Wisdom,” was one of the many historic Orthodox churches located in the city of Trabzon.  Watch this short video by the marine archaeologist Susan Langley to see the unique etchings on the walls of the former church: The third and youngest of the Hagia Sophia’s in Turkey, the church was first converted to a mosque during...

President Donald Trump will take executive action on Thursday to ease a ban on political activity by churches and other tax-exempt institutions as part of an order on religious liberties, a senior White House official said on Wednesday. Trump's executive order to mark the National Day of Prayer will also mandate regulatory relief to religious employers that object to contraception, such as Little Sisters of the Poor, the official said in a briefing.

CBS This Morning on Tuesday did the bidding of the ACLU and expressed concern over an Alabama mega church lobbying to have its own police force. Showing a clueless attitude in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, reporter David Begnaud asked Greg Garrison of AL.com: “Why can't they just rely on 911 and call for help if they need it?”

If you have a ministry and a church you are automatically tax exempt. This book shows you how to cut through the road blocks and simply claim it The Communist-George Soros Democrats running the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have managed to bully churches into becoming partners with them by the creation of the 501c3 (Not-for-Profit) status. This action pushed churches to incorporate themselves as franchises of the United States in order to avoid taxes they never owed in the first place. Don’t forget that last sentence. According to an informative book; Things You Need to Know about Non-profits-Making Sense of...

The ISIS terror group has claimed responsibility for two separate Palm Sunday bombing attacks at Coptic Christian churches in Egypt that have killed 37 people and injured more than 100. The first blast happened at St. George church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta, where at least 26 people were killed and 71 others wounded, officials said. Television footage showed the inside of the church, where a large number of people gathered around what appeared to be lifeless, bloody bodies covered with papers. A second explosion was later reported at St. Mark's Cathedral in the coastal city of Alexandria,...

Last month, America lost a great defender of freedom, Michael Novak.Novak was committed to rightly ordered liberty and cared deeply about the principles and practices that produce it. His enormous body of work emphasized the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible.In the words of Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, “Michael forced those of us trained in the dismal science of economics to explain that we should be more than ‘free to choose’—rather we should be free to make good free choices.”Last year, I was the recipient of the...

California is the only state in the U.S. that requires health insurance plans to cover elective abortions. Its onerous mandate even forces churches and other religious groups to pay for abortions in their employee health plans. The new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare in Congress could change that, and some California leaders are upset. The Sacramento Bee reports the proposed American Health Care Act would get rid of taxpayer-funded subsidies for insurance plans that cover elective abortions. If enacted, all of the health insurance plans in the California exchange would no longer be subsidized, according to the report. Here’s...

President Donald Trump vowed Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” a provision barring religious groups from participation in politics. “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution,” he said. “I will do that. Remember.”

A German court has found seven men guilty of burglarizing churches to financially support Islamic extremists fighting in Syria. Cologne’s regional court sentenced the men to between three years and 6 months, and four years and 10 months in prison for the robberies. Judges say that there’s sufficient proof the men — aged between 24 and 37 — broke into up to five churches and other buildings between 2013 and 2014. …

Police are hunting vandals after a series of chapels and shrines were desecrated within the space of a few days in northern Austria. Statues have been beheaded, prayer books burned and sacred images destroyed since the New Year in the Innviertel region on the Bavarian border. On New Year’s Eve, the vandals struck a chapel in the village of St Radegund, damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary before burning prayer books and wooden objects from the chapel in a nearby wood. That same day, another chapel at the nearby town of Auerbach was also attacked, with vandals smashing the...

A Canadian study found that conservative churches are still growing, while less orthodox congregations dwindle away.Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, further ensuring their decline. Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S....

“Now Is Time to Behead Unbelievers” The jihad on churches -- including those in America and Europe. Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reports of Muslims torturing, raping, and forcing Christians to embrace Islam continued to mount throughout the month of October.   Alice Assaf, a Christian woman recounted the experiences of Christians—including her son’s execution for refusing to deny his faith—in a village near Damascus at the hands of the Islamic State.  She also told how the Islamic State massacres children in cruel and unusual ways—including by throwing them...

File this under “things that should be obvious,” but immigration control isn’t slavery. Nor is breaking a just federal law consistent with Christian ethics. Nonetheless, a network of “progressive” Christians is preparing to fight the Trump administration’s immigration efforts with an “underground railroad” for illegals. A recent story at The New York Times details how a network of 450 churches across the country are planning to break federal law and defy the will of the American people by sheltering criminal illegal immigrants against deportation.

FULL TITLE: FBI warns of possible Christmas ISIS attacks after list of US churches is posted on Islamic extremist website The FBI has warned state and city police of possible ISIS threats against the US after a list of churches across the country was posted online by fanatics. The bureau said while no one specific threat had been traced, officers should be more vigilant over the holidays given the amid 'aspirational calls for attacks'. In a memo it told how the Islamic extremist group had compiled a list of churches across the country and shared it online. 'The FBI is...

The Islamic State has published a list containing the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States, Canada, France, and the Netherlands, encouraging followers to attack them during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday season. http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/12/22/isis-lists-u-s-churches-attack-bloody-celebrations-christian-new-year/

The terror group threatened "bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year" The Islamic State published the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States and called on its adherents to attack them during the holiday season, according to a message posted late-night Wednesday in the group’s “Secrets of Jihadis” social media group. A user going by the name of “Abu Marya al-Iraqi” posted an Arabic-language message calling “for bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year” and announced the group’s plans to utilize its network of lone wolf attackers to “turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror...