Free Republic

In CBS’s Madam Secretary episode on Sunday titled “The Detour,” Elizabeth McCord's (Tea Leoni) husband, Henry (Tim Daly), is brought into an FBI investigation of a Christian doomsday cult called the Covenant of John. Raided by authorities in their operation in Bolivia while he was there, Henry has knowledge of the militia group and sets out to determine if Rex Mayfield (James McCaffery), a cult member now living in eastern Virginia, is the bomb-maker responsible for selling a bomb used on an Illinois coffee shop attack on orders from ISIS leader al-Mutaya. Christians working with ISIS? Far-fetched indeed. The raid...

Kurdish fighters in the Syrian town of Hassakeh have been involved in fierce fighting with Isil jihadists including Chechens. A Christian militia formed to protect the community as Syria falls apart is fighting its first major battle against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), attacking across a front in the north-east of the country before being driven back again in a fierce counter-blow. Christian groups said they were checking a report that up to 200 civilians had been kidnapped by Isil jihadists in the fighting and were being held as hostages. A number of fighters from the militia,...

Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil. Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 - a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted. "It's very different," he said, asked how the experiences compared. "Here I'm fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and...

…Not a campus crusade, but a true crusade, in which the saints carry their cross to fight with the forces of darkness. Christians in the Middle East have for a long time been accustomed to staying away from the fray with Muslims. This has come as a result of both comfort and suppression, but the persecution against the saints has reached an intensity almost unheard of in our times, and the apex of this oppression is at hand. With this diabolical torment and violence becoming more fierce and cruel, Christians are now being confronted with the choice to fight or...

DETROIT (AP) -- Federal authorities had been monitoring members of a Michigan-based Christian militia for some time but were forced to "take them down" over the weekend after learning of an imminent threat against police, the U.S. attorney leading the prosecution said Tuesday. Barbara McQuade's comments came three days after eight members of a small group of "Christian warriors" were arrested in several Midwestern states and a day after the FBI nabbed a ninth suspect, Joshua Stone, following a standoff at a trailer in rural Michigan. "The time had come that we needed to arrest them and take them down,"

WHEATLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) -- Members of a rural Michigan-based Christian militia who believed a battle with the Antichrist was coming were plotting to attack police officers in hopes of fomenting a violent uprising against the government, federal prosecutors alleged. Seven men and one woman believed to be part of the group called Hutaree were arrested over the weekend after raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. The ninth suspect was arrested Monday night after a search in southern Michigan and was expected to be arraigned Tuesday. FBI agents moved quickly against Hutaree because its members were planning an attack sometime...

Iraq's Christians have taken up arms and formed new militias in a desperate effort to defend their beleaguered communities from an onslaught by Islamic extremists. In the five years since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, murders and abductions have driven about half of the 800,000 Christians who once lived in Iraq to flee the country. Checkpoints manned by civilians armed with heavy machine guns and assault rifles have received official backing in Christian villages on the Ninevah plain in northern Iraq, where their presence dates back to the missions of St Thomas the apostle. Father Yusuf Yohannes combines the duties...