Free Republic

What are we to make of this rapid, cross-denominational apostasy?2 The fact of this phenomenon is a clear example of culture reporter Megan Basham’s recent warning: “You may have wanted to avoid this subject, but you cannot avoid it any longer. [LGBT ideology] is coming to your church, no matter how solid you think it is.”3 Those who cannot see this are woefully ignorant of the times. Yet the cause of this phenomenon is anything but recent. Indeed, the “journey” that leads to this dead end (let the reader understand) is so well worn that one can see it from...

American evangelicalism is deeply divided. Some evangelicals have embraced the secular turn toward social justice activism, particularly around race and immigration, accusing others of failing to reckon with the church’s racist past. Others charge evangelical elites with going “woke” and having failed their flocks. Some elites are denounced for abandoning historic Christian teachings on sexuality. Others face claims of hypocrisy for supporting the serial adulterer Donald Trump. Old alliances are dissolving. Former Southern Baptist agency head Russell Moore has left his denomination. Political pundit David French has become a fearsome critic of ­many religious conservatives who would once have been...

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid said Wednesday on her show “The ReidOut” that former President Donald Trump’s supporters had made MAGA a religion. Reid said, “Only in America could a party have its president foment an insurrection and have people who participated in the insurrection have a shot at having national and state leadership. That is where we are in this country. The insurrection didn’t cause the Republican party to pull back.”

The Christian cold war will mean an increase in church splits, takeovers, and other power struggles as people choose sides on existential questions, including theology.Along with the rest of the country, American Christianity is in the middle of a cold war. As this war heats up, it will mean church splits, takeovers, fights over denominational resources, and other power struggles as the Donald Trump era has increasingly brought clarity and pushed people to choose sides on existential questions.The Southern Baptist Convention, the United States’ largest Protestant denomination, is one key example of this dynamic affecting American Christianity as a whole....

In a letter to the spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Pope Francis called for the creation of new institutions of “global governance” to help advance the “integral human development of all peoples.” He also said the “financial industry” should calculate the “ecological debt” of countries “so that developed countries can pay it.…” We cannot “overlook another kind of debt: the ‘ecological debt’ that exists, especially between the global north and south,” said the Pope in his April 8 letter. “We are, in fact, in debt to nature itself, as well as the people and...

Rachel Held Evans, a best-selling Christian author who was unafraid to wade into fierce theological battles over issues such as the role of women, science, LGBT issues and politics on her blog and social media, died Saturday, after spending weeks in the hospital for an infection. She was 37. Her husband Dan, who has been writing health updates, wrote on her blog on Saturday that she had been weaned from an induced coma, but swelling in her brain was not survivable. The hashtag #PrayforRHE became a trending topic on Twitter for Evans, who had two young children, ages 3 and...

“Sexual abuse is the most underreported thing — both in and outside the church — that exists,” says Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham and a former Florida assistant state attorney. As a prosecutor, Tchividjian saw dozens of sexual abuse victims harmed by a church’s response to them. (In one case, a pastor did not report a sexual offender in his church because the man had repented. The offender was arrested only after he had abused five more children.) In 2004, Tchividjian founded the nonprofit organization Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), which trains Christian institutions...

WHEN Pastor Jimmy Parade took over at Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church in Bandung, on the island of Java, five years ago, around 180 people came to services each week. Now the church—in a nondescript building in an outdoor shopping complex—is packed with around 450 each Sunday. “People keep coming,” Mr Parade shrugs. Some 1,000 miles away, up several sets of escalators at a shopping mall in Singapore, thousands of people take part in a two-hour service on a Saturday evening at the City Harvest Church, which has a weekly attendance of just under 16,000. The service involves a rock...

“Meanwhile, a widespread decline in churchgoing and religious affiliation had contributed to a growing anxiety among conservative believers.” Statements like this are uttered with such confidence and frequency that most Americans accept them as uncontested truisms. This one emerged just this month in an exceedingly silly article in The Atlantic on Vice President Mike Pence.Religious faith in America is going the way of the Yellow Pages and travel maps, we keep hearing. It’s just a matter of time until Christianity’s total and happy extinction, chortle our cultural elites. Is this true? Is churchgoing and religious adherence really in “widespread...

(Skip) “Most evangelical Christians like me exclaimed, ‘Who are these people?’” wrote Mark Galli, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, in his essay. “‘I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian[s], who voted for Trump.’” In trying to understand Trump-supporting evangelicals, journalists and commentators have often smoothed over the vast diversity within evangelicalism. “Many of us shake our heads at the ‘evangelical leaders’ that the news media anoints for us,” wrote Tom Lin, the president of InterVarsity Fellowship, in his essay. (Skip) Fundamentalism, argued Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is the driving force behind the...

The reactions from Left and Right are all too predictable in the wake of the Parkland shootings. My social media feeds are overflowing with self serving proclamations, dubious statistics, hateful name calling, and all around foolishness. As usual, both sides are screaming at each other and no one is really listening. I get the Left’s position on gun control. If we want to prevent these national tragedies, we should make it as difficult as possible for people to get their hands on assault rifles. Even if these guns can be obtained via illegal channels, why make it easy for a...

With the appalling apostasy, both overt and subtle, engulfing many evangelical churches in these last days, I have found myself in search of a truly Bible-believing church body that is serious about the Truth taught by God through Jesus Christ. To be specific, these are the things I am trying to avoid: - The cultish "mega-church" mentality (though size doesn't not necessarily disqualify an otherwise orthodox church culture) - Any sympathy, working agreement, or tacit acknowledgement of any Christian legitimacy with Rome. - The hyper "grace only" heresy of the need just to "believe on Jesus Christ," nothing else matters...

Feb 6 2014 The Virtue of Being Suspicious As contrary as it runs to popular perceptions, Fundamentalists were not fools. In fact, their powers of discernment make contemporary Evangelicals, who have supposedly advanced beyond Fundamentalists’ defense of simple verities, look downright gullible. Fundamentalists knew they were in a battle, that the church is always being threatened with false teachers and members with “itching ears.” They took the New Testament seriously when its writers charged the early church to be on the lookout for those who would lead God’s flock astray. Fundamentalists also knew that the greatest danger to the church...

I have been listening to a lot of Christian talk radio lately, and reading web sites of evangelicals that lean towards the Arminiasm view, and it seems like the talking heads are almost unanimous that they want a true conservative to go up against Obama next November. But when I listen to the callers and read comments by their readers on their web sites, I am learning that a vast majority will stay home and not vote if Romney is the Republican nominee. A sentiment I am quickly learning here at FR that many evangelicals who lean towards the...

First-time novelist Rebecca Makkai gives us a character in "The Borrower" who faces a moral dilemma: a Missouri librarian who must decide whether she can help a child running away from home after his parents enroll him in an evangelical program to "discourage" homosexuality. The librarian struggles to choose. The book begins with 26-year-old Lucy Hull's confession: "I might be the villain of this story. Even now, it's hard to tell."

I've concluded that the typical evangelical funeral can go quite a ways to making a person an atheist. I've also concluded that the church needs to reclaim the fundamental truth that Christianity is primarily for dying. Not primarily for living, but for dying; and because it is primarily about preparing to die, it has something profound to offer about living. Funerals need to rediscover death and thus once again have something to say to the living. Before looking at the causes of the death of the funeral, a true confession about a funeral--oops, sorry, a celebration of life--I recently attended....

Back in 2007, the New York Times famously proclaimed that the evangelical movement in America was cracking up. Since then, the media has relished exposing what they see as fault lines in evangelicalism over such issues as abortion, marriage, and the environment. The pundits seized upon President Obama’s decisive electoral victory last fall to opine that evangelicals were no longer the political force they once were. And just last week, a well-known evangelical blogger predicted the “collapse” of evangelicalism in America within the next decade, even though he also predicted that out of the ruins of evangelicalism, “new forms of...

In case you didn't notice, there is a concerted war on serious biblical faith in our post-Christian society. And that's why, any day now, you can expect Sarah Palin to be asked a question designed to knock her right out of the race for the vice presidency. It won't be a question about the Bush Doctrine. It won't be a question about her teenage daughter. It won't be a question about Alaska state troopers. It won't even be a question about abortion. None of those questions threaten to deliver a killer blow to her bid to be the first woman...

Palin considers herself a born-again conservative Christian. She supports teaching creationism in public schools, outlawing nearly all abortions (even in cases of rape or incest) and prohibiting same-sex marriage. But she has yet to advance legislation that insists that creationism, or "intelligent design," be taught in public school science classes whenever biological evolution is taught -- as urged by a plank in the official Alaska Republican Party platform. Nor has she tried so far to eliminate standard sex-education classes in public schools in favor of the abstinence-only programs she prefers. That Palin hasn't yet pushed a religious conservative agenda isn't...

What is evangelicalism? Who are evangelicals? Because evangelicalism has experienced a metamorphosis, the answer to these questions is more complicated than one might guess. In the term’s early use in 18th and 19th century in North America, where evangelicalism was more narrowly defined by revivalism and its associated emphasis on personal conversion, evangelicalism became identified with the largest Protestant movement in North America. In the wake of the infiltration of theological liberalism into the mainline churches and the massive immigration of foreigners of diverse religious background, the virtually ubiquitous force of evangelicalism tempered, yet its arteries extended so as to...