Free Republic

It has all come down to you, the Georgia evangelical voter. You may not have asked for such a responsibility, but here you are. The eyes of the nation are upon you, and our future rests with you. “Enter the church” — this is where you have the opportunity— dare I say the biblical responsibility— to make your witness a formidable influence for righteousness regarding the outcome of the two special senatorial elections coming Jan. 5.This may sound overly dramatic, but the truth is, because of your vast numbers in Georgia, you hold in your hands the deciding vote that...

By their reckoning, white evangelicals have become reckless plague-bearers with no regard for the poor and oppressed, and their cruelty rightly earns them the world’s opprobrium.So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men. America’s legacy media elites used the Sunday before Christmas for extra Christian-bashing, with white evangelicals the preferred targets. Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Luo complained that “white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election,” and that “churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed leftist pastor Jim Wallis, with the...

According to a lengthy new article and a recent book, a driving force behind white evangelical support for Donald Trump was the preservation of white America. This factor, we are told, and not just Trump’s support for other causes of importance to white evangelicals, such as being pro-life and pro-Israel, helps explain why so many of these Christian conservatives got behind such an unlikely candidate. Is this true?According to Sarah Posner in her book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Trump, a key factor in white evangelical support for Trump was “the realization that Trump was the...

According to a new survey by veteran researcher Dr. George Barna and The Cultural Research Center (CRC) at Arizona Christian University, President Trump received a record number of votes from conservative Christians in the 2020 election. The survey, which was conducted after election day, looked at a group of conservative Christians known as SAGE Cons (Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians). A near universal amount of SAGE Cons turned out in the 2020 election with 99 percent (representing 23 million voters) casting their ballot. Meanwhile, 97 percent cast their ballot for Trump, giving the president a net margin of more...

The 2020 election will be remembered as the first presidential election to take place during a global pandemic, a record turnout that brought to the polls the largest number of eligible voters since 1900, and recounts and legal challenges not seen since the Florida recount of 2000, which wasn’t resolved until the Supreme Court ruled in December. But whatever else will be remembered about 2020, one fact is clear: evangelical Christians voted in the largest numbers in modern American political history, and they gave President Donald Trump more votes than any presidential candidate had ever received. According to network exit...

For Bible-believing Christians in 2016, Donald J. Trump was the most unlikely presidential candidate imaginable. He fathered children by three different wives, made some of his wealth in the gambling industry, and was known for using vulgar and degrading language. He was no one’s image of a choirboy. But at some point, Trump managed to win the confidence of enough voters to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, and in the process he convinced the largest number of evangelicals in history to vote for him on Election Day, which was nothing short of a miracle.Earlier this month, USA Today wrote that Trump’s...

At the United Methodist Church, money’s tight, factions are readying exits, and social justice takes priority in witness. However, the denomination’s “traditionalists” — so named for their support for the accuracy and authority of the Bible, especially regarding LGBT marriage and clergy — are growing in number and telling others how Jesus saves. The Wesleyan Covenant Association, the largest of the groups forming out of the UMC, champions evangelical beliefs and values. WCA President Keith Boyette tells The Christian Post more than 3,000 churches have affiliated with the association, and the number is steadily climbing, though the next General Conference...

The Christian Post fully endorses the conviction that whichever candidate a pro-life voter chooses to support in the electoral process is a matter of individual conscience. However, while people are certainly entitled to their own opinion they are not entitled to their own facts. When a guest opinion article employs arguments that severely lack factual context, The Christian Post believes it has a journalistic responsibility to its readers to provide that context and perspective in order to help our readers to decide for themselves the best way to express their pro-life convictions in the voting booth. Recently a group of...

Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden logo   Let’s get one thing straight. Abortion is the intentional taking of a human life. Whether by scalpel or chemical abortifacient, abortion ends the life of a human being—a child with his own fingerprints, heartbeat, brain waves, and DNA. A child who can feel pain beginning at 12 weeks after conception.Let’s get another thing straight: You can’t be pro-life and pro-Joe Biden.Some so-called evangelicals think they can have it both ways. In an op-ed at the Christian Post, Ron Sider and Richard Mouw defend a statement urging pro-life evangelicals to vote for Joe Biden.“Climate change...

In a period of less than 10 minutes on Monday, I read an article about candidate Joe Biden’s extreme pro-abortion views and then was sent a link to the home page for “Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden.”The article cited Biden’s response to a question about abortion rights, where he addressed the potential of Amy Coney Barrett becoming a Supreme Court justice. Should that be the case, he said, and should the court overturn Roe v. Wade, “the only thing, the only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That's what I would...

In a period of less than 10 minutes on Monday, I read an article about candidate Joe Biden’s extreme pro-abortion views, and then was sent a link to the home page for “Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden.” The article cited Biden’s response to a question about abortion rights, where he addressed the potential of Amy Coney Barrett becoming a Supreme Court justice. Should that be the case, he said, and should the court overturn Roe v. Wade, “the only thing, the only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That’s what I...

"We need to talk about race," Phil Vischer says in a video posted June 14 on YouTube. The evangelical creator of VeggieTales, a children's show that tells Bible stories using animated vegetables with names like Junior Asparagus and Pa Grape, tells viewers in his 17-minute video that Black households have one-tenth the wealth as white ones and delves into the history of Jim Crow laws, the "war on drugs" and "militarized police." He talks about a TV news media that scares Americans with images of Black criminals and teachers who favor white kids due to their "unconscious bias." Call Vischer...

The Joe Biden campaign is releasing three ads this month targeting Catholic and evangelical Christian voters in an effort to portray the Democrat presidential nominee and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as “the clear moral choice” in the election. The Biden campaign is investing financial resources in an attempt to win over Americans of faith at the same time the Democrat Party has embraced the radical position of access to abortion at any time during pregnancy; an insistence it has no room for pro-life individuals or candidates; a stated intention to provide full taxpayer funding for abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood;...

A majority of voters who identify as evangelical support the reelection of President Donald Trump but this support remains skewed along ethnic and party lines, a new poll from Lifeway Research shows. The online poll of 1,200 Americans conducted Sept. 9-23, with a plus or minus 3.2% margin of error, shows that among likely evangelical voters, 61% overall plan to vote for Trump while 29% are backing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Some 8% were undecided while about 2% supported other candidates. Breaking down evangelical voters by race, the poll shows that most of Trump’s support from the group comes...

Lamenting that the term “evangelical” is now too “largely political” and hasn't been helpful in conveying the character of their organization, Evangelicals for Social Action, a Christian scholar-activist group started in 1973, announced Monday that they have changed their name to Christians for Social Action. “Today the word ‘evangelical’ in the popular mind has largely political connotations. For significant numbers of people, it signifies a right-wing political movement irrevocably committed to Donald Trump. Many young people raised in evangelical churches are turning away in disgust–abandoning evangelical churches and even sometimes the Christian faith itself. And the larger society thinks of...

A new study has revealed that 22% of U.S. evangelicals appear to reject the Bible’s teaching that the gender of a person as male or female is given by God, the Creator, and instead believe in “gender fluidity.”While 73% of American evangelicals disagree that “gender identity is a matter of choice,” 22% say they believe in that statement, according to the LifeWay Research “State of Theology” poll released Sept. 8.The survey, sponsored by Orlando-based Ligonier Ministries, and conducted by surveying more than 3,000 Americans in March, also showed that Americans with evangelical beliefs (73%) are more likely to disagree that...

More than half of American adults, including 30% of evangelicals, say Jesus isn’t God but most agree He was a great teacher, according to results from the 2020 State of Theology survey.Even though the Bible and traditional teachings of the Christian Church hold that Jesus truly existed as both man and God, among the key findings of the biennial State of Theology survey from Ligonier Ministries conducted with LifeWay Research, is that 52% of American adults believe that Jesus was a great teacher and nothing more.And nearly a third of evangelicals also support that view, a preliminary release on the...

Two reports caught my eye this week.One: In 2007, 90 percent of evangelicals said their church forbid (63 percent) or strongly discouraged (27 percent) “homosexual behaviors.” In 2020, that figure has dropped to 65 percent (33.7 percent forbid, while 31.4 percent strongly discourage). Two: In 2008, 34.4 percent of evangelicals between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five supported same-sex marriage. In 2018, that figure had risen to 56.1 percent. Could this data be related? Are evangelical churches changing their position on same-sex marriage to align with and attract younger adults? Are younger evangelicals changing their position on same-sex marriage because...

We should stop trying to evangelize Protestants, some Catholics say. “Let’s get our own house clean first, before we invite our fellow Christians in,” someone commented on a recent article of mine that presented a Catholic rejoinder to a prominent Baptist theologian. Another reader argued that, rather than trying to persuade Protestants to become Catholic, we should “help each other spread God’s love in this world that seems to be falling to pieces before our eyes.” As a convert from Protestantism, actively engaged in ecumenical dialogue, I’ve heard this kind of thinking quite frequently. And it’s dead wrong. One common...

We all know the saying, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” But if something is broken, then by all means, we should fix it. When it comes to the American evangelical church, what is broken and what needs fixing? A 2019 article in Christianity Today stated that, “Evangelicals in the United States are holding steady at just under a quarter of the population, according to the latest biennial figures from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running measures of religion in America.” That, in itself, would seem to be positive news. Wikipedia, relying on respected Christian sources,...