Free Republic

To Shawn Teamann, posting a sign of the Ten Commandments in the front yard of his North Huntingdon home is an affirmation of his faith and his stance against what he sees as an erosion of religious freedom in America. “It's just standing up for what you believe in. We feel religious freedom is being taken away,” said Teamann, a member of the Immaculate Conception Church of Irwin. Immaculate Conception has joined with the two Roman Catholic churches in North Huntingdon — St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Agnes — in distributing about 1,000 signs to members of the three...

“Let not this Book of the Teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night, so that you may observe faithfully all that is written in it. Only then will you prosper in your undertakings and only then will you be successful.” Joshua 1:8 (The Israel Bible™) The Trump Cabinet’s weekly Bible study meetings, composed of the most influential lawmakers in the country, may be the first such gathering in 100 years, Ralph Drollinger, founder of Capitol Ministries and leader of the study sessions, told Breaking Christian News (BCN), bringing the Bible back to the White House in...

Hungary is spending $1.7 million (463 million forints) to help restore Christian churches in Lebanon, according to government records. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has instructed the Minister of the National Economy to transfer this amount, as the Hungarian government aims to help Lebanon’s Christian minority continue living in their own country and also wants to play a role in preserving the Christian identity and presence in the Middle East. Hungary is not only involved in the funding of church restorations in Lebanon, but also in the coordination of these projects, in which the Embassy of Hungary in Beirut will play...

* In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim of ownership of cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not the way to acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that "Christendom's greatest cathedral has become a mosque". * The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church into...

A special commission established under the Mardin Governor’s Office has cancelled a decision to transfer Syriac churches and monasteries to Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate, the Birgün daily reported on Wednesday. Some of the assets, including churches in Mardin province that were owned by the Syriac community, were seized by the Treasury and were planned to be transferred to the Religious Affairs Directorate. Renate Sommer, a member of the European Parliament from the Christian Democratic Union, part of the European People’s Party, also harshly criticized the decision and said the Syriacs were at risk of being wiped out in Turkey. The...

Arrogant Mark Zuckerberg needs to acknowledge to himself that “some savvy Facebook users, reportedly including Russian hackers, turned the internet platform he built into an online machine that spread fake news and helped elect Trump as President First came Barack Hussein Obama presented to a largely unsuspecting world as the Messiah. Now it’s Mark Zuckerberg. The tenure of Obama’s eight long years, (having branched off into the ‘Resistance’ and still going) proved that those who worshipped at the feet of Barry Soetoro, marketed as the Messiah, are no better off now than they were when he first came into power....

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...