Free Republic

Attacks on churches and Christian institutions on American soil are at an all-time high. The March 27, 2023 killings in Nashville — where a woman claiming to be a man (aka “transgender”) stormed a private Christian school and murdered three children and three adults — is just the spectacular tip of a growing but concealed iceberg. According to recent reports by the Family Research Council, “criminal acts against churches have been steadily on the rise for the past several years. ... there were more church attacks in the first quarter of this year than there were in the first quarters...

The Presbyterian Center, a building belonging to Presbyterian Church (USA) located in Louisville, Kentucky. | PCUSA Presbyterian Church (USA) lost more than 100 congregations and over 53,000 members in 2022, reflecting the yearslong trend of decline for the mainline Protestant denomination.The PCUSA Office of the General Assembly released its annual statistics for 2022 this week, which found that the denomination dropped from having approximately 1.193 million members to approximately 1.140 million members.Additionally, PCUSA saw the number of member congregations decline from 8,813 in 2021 to 8,705, as well as their number of ministers drop from 18,458 in 2021 to...

Patriarch Kirill commends and thanks the volunteers for their selfless service.The Common Cause Project is a collection of volunteers who are dedicated to preserving the Russian spiritual tradition in the North of Russia by means of restoring and renovating wooden churches in Russia’s North, many of which have fallen into disrepair or ruin due to decades of enforced neglect or outright attack under communism. Since 2006, however, stalwart volunteers each year trek into the inaccessible North in order to restore and save these spiritual treasures from destruction. Often when they are finished with the renovations, they turn the temples over...

Virginia Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine gave the FBI his approval to investigate Catholic parishes in his own state on Monday. When asked by a local ABC affiliate about the FBI’s Richmond division infiltrating Catholic communities to spy on the church for alleged extremism, Kaine called the revelations a misunderstanding. “I think the key is communication,” Kaine told ABC13. “If the FBI has a concern like that, then go to the church leaders and say, ‘Hey look, we have a concern and we don’t want your members to get unwittingly caught up in something.'”Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin blew the...

Andrey Sadovoy, the mayor of Lviv in western Ukraine, announced on April 6 that the two Ukrainian Orthodox Churches in his city were no more -- the Church of St. Vladimir was demolished by backhoe and the Church of St. George was made part of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, backed by the Zelensky government, reported RT, the website Orthodox Christianity, and The Kyiv Independent. The Church of St. Vladimir was under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, as was the Church of St. George. Under President Volodomyr Zelensky, some churches formerly attached to the Russian Orthodox Church have,...

A recent poll showing a decline in traditional American values confirms what conservatives have been saying: the character of America is changing. The percentage of those polled who said patriotism is important dropped from 70 percent 25 years ago, to 38 percent today. While 59 percent said having children was important 25 years ago, now just 30 percent do. And the importance of religion dropped from 62 percent to 39 percent now calling it important. The poll, released in March 2023, was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and funded by the Wall Street...

Washington D.C., Mar 22, 2023 / 14:47 pm A coalition of conservative organizations is taking legal action to obtain documents from the Department of Justice related to the surge in pro-abortion attacks on churches and pro-life pregnancy centers and a lack of prosecution from the agency. Based on data compiled by CNA, there have been more than 100 attacks on churches and pro-life pregnancy centers since the May 2022 leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the abortion protections guaranteed in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The DOJ has...

A 60-year-old black man was arrested in Atlanta last month after he allegedly vandalized a historic Baptist church with spray-painted imagery of swastikas as a hanging. Atlanta Police arrested James McIntyre on February 19 in connection to the vandalism after surveillance cameras caught him tagging Providence Missionary Baptist Church on Benjamin E. Mays Drive, according to Fox 5. Officials said that during the investigation, they found McIntyre sitting across the street from the scene of the crime.

VIENNA (AP) — Austrian police warned Wednesday of a possible “Islamist-motivated attack” in Vienna against churches and other houses of worship, citing undisclosed information received by the country’s intelligence service. Police in Vienna tweeted that they had heightened security in front of certain buildings and increased the presence of officers in the Austrian capital. “There is a nonspecific threat of an assault against churches,” Vienna police tweeted. “As (a) precautionary measure ... points of interest have been put under increased guard by regular and special operation police forces.” “If there is a concrete danger for the population at a concrete...

Enforcers of the county’s rules reported the number of cars in the parking lot, whether or not masks were being worn, and even instances of hugging.SAN JOSE, California (LifeSiteNews) — A Christian church in California’s Santa Clara County was hit with hefty fines and its members were surveilled via stakeouts, cell phone monitoring, and other measures “reminiscent of totalitarian regimes” after the church defied the county’s draconian COVID-19 lockdown rules in 2020, according to a March 5 report by independent journalist David Zweig. San Jose’s Calvary Christian Fellowship, headed by pastor Mike McClure, openly defied the Silicon Valley county’s harsh...

There’s a lot to celebrate in Christian worship services. Singing hymns, prayers, and the learning of God’s Word are all part of corporate worship, and I happily participate in that. I also participate in confession. The Protestant tradition involves both a public and silent confession of sins. It’s an acknowledgement that we are sinful by nature, and have sinned by thought, word and deed. Through this confession and our earnest repentance, we seek and receive forgiveness through God’s grace. I sin every single day. I don’t like that I sin but as a member of the human race, it is...

A trio of Florida Republicans are among 20 GOP lawmakers demanding that the FBI explain why it is targeting conservative Catholics for surveillance and intelligence-gathering. Sen. Rick Scott and Reps. Greg Steube and Bill Posey, of Sarasota and Rockledge, respectively, signed a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray expressing deep concerns about the Richmond field office’s warning about “Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.”

Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics. As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic. The situation means some hard decisions for pastors, who have to decide when a dwindling congregation is no longer sustainable. But it has also created a boom market for those wanting to buy...

Hundreds of Roman Catholic churches have been attacked since the violence that erupted nationwide following George Floyd’s death in May 2020, according to a Catholic nonprofit. Since May 2020, there have been nearly 300 attacks against U.S. Catholic churches as far afield as Emmonak, Alaska, with the most recent tally at 275 as of Sunday, according to a tracker from CatholicVote. The religious nonprofit organization noted that “while the riots and looting mostly died down in the summer of 2020, the attacks on Catholic churches have continued and escalated.” The attacks against churches include arson, broken windows, decapitated statues and...

Nearly all U.S. House Democrats voted against a resolution condemning attacks against anti-abortion facilities and churches. The vote came after a report was published showing violence escalated against churches and pro-life groups last year ahead of and after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The House passed the measure Wednesday mostly along party lines. Three Democrats voted for it: Reps. Vicente Gonzalez of south Texas, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington. The resolution “condemns recent attacks of vandalism, violence, and destruction against pro-life facilities, groups and churches” and “calls upon the Biden Administration to use...

The news is astounding. Churches with fewer than 250 in average worship attendance account for 92% of all churches in the United States. At Church Answers, we call these congregations “standard churches” because they represent all but 8% of churches. It is incumbent upon us, therefore, to discern what important trends and developments are taking place that have direct bearing on standard churches. Here are five major developments. 1. There will likely be a migration to neighborhood and rural churches. We are certainly aware that the greater majority of attendees are in larger churches. But we are also aware that...

Johnson’s political muzzling silenced the primary moral and religious voices that Founder John Adams said were essential to the life of the Republic.. In 1954, then freshman U.S. senator Lyndon B. Johnson was running for re-election in a hotly-contested Democratic primary against fellow-Democrat State Representative Dudley T. Dougherty. THE NEW DEAL WITH THE DEVIL IN 1954: GIVE UP YOUR MORAL AND FREE SPEECH RIGHTS IN EXCHANGE FOR TAX WRITE-OFFS In the heat of that 1954 Texas primary campaign, Johnson introduced his now infamous “Johnson Amendment” in the U.S. Senate. His revisions further restricted the free speech of churches and religious...

At least 420 acts of hostility against churches occurred in the United States over the past five years, while 57 of those hostile acts between January and September 2022 have been related to abortion, an analysis suggests.The new report by the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative activist organization based in Washington, analyzes publicly available data between January 2018 and September 2022 to document acts of hostility targeted at 397 individual churches across 45 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.Those acts include vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents and bomb threats. The report finds that the severity and frequency of such attacks can...

In an op-ed for Christianity Today, Carl H. Esbeck, R. B. Price Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Missouri, offers a positive assessment of the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA). He writes, “All in all, RMA is a modest but good day’s work. It shows that religious liberty champions and LGBT advocates can work together for the common good.”With due respect to Prof. Esbeck’s legal knowledge, I categorically differ from his assessment.I have already challenged the Republican senators who voted to advance the bill this week. Here, I want to focus on Prof. Esbeck’s reasoning.He writes, “Some conservatives...

merica is about to learn that what liberals actually mean when they claim to support “separation of church and state” is they want to use the power of government to silence those who disagree with them on same-sex marriage. For years, liberals have perverted the meaning of Thomas Jefferson’s “absolute wall of separation” for keeping the state out of the church to keeping those in the church who uphold the Bible’s definition of marriage out of the public square. The occasion for this teachable moment is the “Respect for Marriage Act” now before the Senate. Democrats claim the proposal is...