Free Republic

The flames that consumed the spire of Notre Dame and burned the 856-year-old church to its foundations could have been doused by the tears of the faithful. If France heeds calls to rebuild the cathedral as a reflection of what modern “French people want,” the new structure may be flooded by their tears. The fire, whose origins remain under investigation, was initially reported to have left little more than medieval stones, rose windows, and — make of this what you will — its golden altar cross untouched. Donations nearing $1 billion have already poured in from around the world, without...

Witchcraft is thriving in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans now identifying as witches - more than the total number of Presbyterians. As Christianity declines across the country, paganism has swung to the mainstream, with witchcraft paraphernalia for sale on every high street and practises normalised across popular culture. In the past two years, it has also become darkly politicised. Dakota Bracciale, a 29-year-old transgender/queer witch and co-owner of Catland Books and witch shop in Brooklyn, is pleased with the outcome of the ritual hex placed on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in October. The curse, carried...

A Shocking Loss of Faith: Reflecting on the Closing of So Many Churches Msgr. Charles Pope • December 6, 2018 • Lincoln Congregational Temple in Shaw, credit: NCinDC, FlickrAs I walk or drive through my Capitol Hill neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., I pass by more than twenty churches (all of them Protestant) that have been closed in the past decade. Many of them are grand and prominent buildings. (Click here to see four of them.) Most of the them have been converted to condominiums, likely due to historic preservation norms that seek to retain the exterior appearance of...

The Catholic Church is rapidly disappearing from the Netherlands. Over ten years the entire archdiocese of Utrecht will probably only consist of 10 to 15 churches that still hold the Eucharistic celebrations, compared to the current 280 churches, Archbishop Wim Eijk said in an interview with the Gelderlander. According to Eijk, 10 percent of the parishes in his diocese are actually bankrupt, 10 percent are still rich and the other 80 percent are somewhere in between. The aging Catholic population and a rapid decline in church attendance is causing a problematic situation. Every year catholic church attendance decreases by 5...

...Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren’t there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe? Which conditions would speed up the process of secularization—or, conversely, make a population more religious? {snip} ….Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (FOREST), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education...

GRAPEVINE, Texas — Prominent Latino evangelical leader the Rev. Gabriel Salguero told a gathering of Christian college administrators this week that they are facing a "Daniel and Esther" moment as Latino millennials, overall, are becoming less religious the more they assimilate to American culture. "The longer Latinos are in the United States and the more Americanized they become, the more secularized they become," Salguero, a natural born American born to Puerto Rican parents, explained. "The fastest growing group among millenials is the nones — the n-o-n-e-s." Salguero, founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and the leader of Calvario City...

Volunteers have criticised the Red Cross charity after receiving a communication telling them to remove crucifixes from the walls of their branches as the organisation looks to become more secular. The Belgian branches of the international aid organisation received an email from the Provincial Committee of the Red Cross in Liège to remove all crucifixes. André Rouffart, president of the Red Cross in Verviers, said: “We were asked to respect the principles of the Red Cross”, and not to distinguish between race or religious belief 7sur7 reports. Mr. Rouffart said there had been pushback from volunteers and other members on...

Moscow, November 22, Interfax - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia is alarmed by the rise of atheism in the West. "What we are seeing today, particularly in Western countries, is far more dreadful than what happened to religion in the Soviet Union: the rapid atheization, the expulsion of God from human life, disregard for the divine, the moral law," the patriarch said at a meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in Moscow. There was a time when atheism was being planted in the Soviet Union, but "the weakness of that atheization consisted in the fact that it...

White Christians in the US are in the minority and declining, amid increasing ethnic diversity and growing numbers of people who identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to a new survey. The poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just 43 per cent of Americans now identify as white and Christian. This is in contrast to 81 per cent of Americans identifying as white Christians in 1976. But what is most striking about the new PRRI survey is that it shows a relatively recent decline among evangelicals – from 23 per cent to 17 per cent from 2006...

Mark Twain, quoting Disraeli, once said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” So it has been with the recent story that White Christians are a minority, To paraphrase Twain again, the reports of Christianity's demise have been greatly exaggerated. The headline was framed as if America was becoming outright pagan. Buried deep inside the story was this admission: Christians of all races and denominations still make up nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population. But that number is likely to shrink as the much younger populations of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists continue to grow....

August 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Historian Arnold Toynbee once famously said that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Using this as a springboard, commentator Mark Steyn shows in a new video how Western Europe is already in the death throes of “demographic suicide” because couples are no longer having enough children. He then shows how a thriving Muslim population in Western Europe is well on its way to filling all the empty space. Steyn explained how given the divergent birth rate between Muslims and post-Christian secularists, it will take only two generations for the current Muslim population (sitting at...

More Parish Closings Nationwide - What Are We to Learn and Do? Msgr. Charles Pope • May 8, 2017 • It was recently announced that a substantial number of Catholic parishes will be closing in Connecticut. This is just the latest in a national trend that is likely to affect the diocese where you live, especially in the north. I’d like to offer some rather quick thoughts and then ponder what I think is the root cause for our decline. Bishops don’t close parishes, people do. While it may be juridically true that bishops formally certify or give recognition...

The campaign to get rid of marriage has not gone away. Civil partnerships for heterosexuals were not thrown out by the Appeal Court last week, only put off till later. They will come. In fact, after 20 years of New Labour government (some of it nominally Tory) we can now look back and survey the smoking ruins of marriage. It's not that the New Labour radicals and their Tory imitators wrecked marriage on their own. It's just that they have more or less finished it off. The very words 'husband' and 'wife' have been erased from official forms and even...

Match.com just released their annual “Singles in America” survey, offering a chilling insight into the Millennial Generation -- those born between the early '80s and 2000 -- and what this demographic thinks about love, sex and relationships. It’s no secret that Millennials have a much looser – pun intended – view of sex and commitment than prior generations, following a change in social norms that now seem to place higher value on things like “strong, independent women” than on committed long-term relationships or the notion of waiting until marriage to become intimate. But Match’s study of 5,500 random Millennials pulls back...

“With slight shades of difference,” wrote George Washington in 1796, Americans “have the same religion, manners, habits and political principles. That is no longer true."

The Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its 2016 Word of the Year. The OED defined it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." This is an extraordinary development. Seeking restlessly for the truth has been at the heart of Western culture for more than 2000 years. Just 30 years ago, the idea of post-truth would have seemed just as absurd as “post-goodness” or “post-food”.

Pastor Steve Cioccolanti is declaring the start of global revival. This teaching begins an important series on Good Government called "Is America a Christian Nation?" available at http://www.discover.org.au/bookshop To understand the immigration problem & global terror threat, watch these videos on WW3: https://discover.org.au/bookshop/inde...

CHRISTMAS treats have been taken off a menu and replaced with 'winter delicacies' over fears the phrase would offend Muslims. A function held at the Austrian embassy in Germany still served traditional festive fare such as Lebkuchen but rebranded them as 'winter delicacies'. The event was a presentation by the Chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, who has written the book What Do Muslims Do at Christmas?: Islamic Faith in Everyday Life in Germany. The invitation to guests, from ambassador Nikolaus Marschik, was described as a “cosy get-together with winter delicacies.” A reporter attending the...

The challenge of racial division in America today is not just that there are forces pushing us apart, but that we've lost the things that held us together. Relations between black people and white people are probably at their worst in anyone's lifetime, with most of those divisions exacerbated dramatically in the last handful of years. The reasons for that have more to do with the manipulation of racial animosity than the reality of the racial situation. Politicians and activists, each standing to benefit by pitting people against one another, have whipped up an internal and seemingly unresolvable conflict between...

Around the world, people are beginning to turn their backs on religion. For some time, researchers have observed this trend as it ripples through developed countries, with the United States standing out as the exception. Now, a new study reveals this is no longer the case; with each passing generation, Americans too are steadily becoming less religious. --snip-- Researchers found each generation is subsequently less religious than the one before. In one example, the team found that 41 percent of people aged 70 and older reported they attend church services at least once a month. For people just under that...