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As America prepares for November’s presidential election, the fight for votes will inevitably intensify.
But as conservative commentator Megan Basham explains in her new book, “Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth For A Leftist Agenda” (Broadside) — and in an interview with The Post — nowhere will the campaign be more fiercely fought than in the battle for the one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country: evangelicals.
A culture reporter for the Daily Wire and former editor at Evangelical publication World Magazine, Basham reveals in “Shepherds For Sale” how “progressive power brokers” are targeting not just churches but Christian media, universities and even entire denominations in a bid to force their hands when it comes to dealing with culture war flash-points like abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change. //
“Look at nearly any issue that represents a key priority for progressives, and you will find that even when all other major demographics have signed on, Christians, and evangelicals in particular, represent the most formidable roadblock,” she says. //
Basham maintains that in return for toeing a more left-wing line on key issues — as well as reinterpreting or even eschewing scripture — many church leaders have received everything from praise to prestige, career progression to significant amounts of cash, selling out Christianity in the process.
“Evangelicals don’t always win at the ballot box, but in most regions of the country, they always present a massive hurdle to leftist power grabs,” writes Basham. //
A significant aspect of the left’s ability to infiltrate the Church is the existence of what Basham calls the “Eleventh Commandment,” namely: Thou shalt not criticize church leaders.
“What the Eleventh Commandment has meant in practice is that even as prominent pastors and theologians have spent the last few years accommodating every sort of secular, progressive influence, critical or even cautioning voices have been slow to respond [to the challenge],” she says.
Now zoom out and think about the genocidal language of the last couple of years, that has been introduced, spun up, amplified, in our formerly more civil discourse. Pro-vaxxers wanted anti-vaxxers dead. Anti-vaxxers have made snide remarks about the deaths of the vaccinated. Pro-Palestinian protesters have cried, “Death to America” and “Death to Jews.” Pro-Israeli voices have called for the eradication — even “liquidation” — of Gaza and Gazans.
And on, and on.
My friend was telling me about the Pride parade in San Francisco this year —....
I wondered — as Candace Owens had done, I hope not as ignorantly — Why? Why devote this kind of energy - which is not needed, to support LGBTQ legal rights — to offending or degrading or corrupting public space, and affecting children?
Then I remembered something a mentor of mine had explained to me. He is involved with the Chabad movement, and many of the Rabbis expect the Messiah to appear (or appear again) soon.
My mentor is eager to see a world in which both Jews and non-Jews know about and follow the seven Noahide commandments. In the views of many Chabad religionists, it is only when humans align with God by living moral lives, that we prepare for and even “bring down” to earth, Mashiach, the Messiah. (In his view it does not matter if we call it a Christian or a Jewish Messiah; it is the same time of, act of, redemption, and the same establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven).
In this worldview, we had all better start getting ready, because Mashiach is due to arrive in the next few years.
“The dark forces know that their time is almost up,” he explained. “And so they want to get people to break every commandment — to do every evil deed — because only by doing so, does that delay the arrival of the Mashiach.”
Without a civic life shaped by Christianity, there can be no American republic. //
Some will acknowledge the Christian inheritance of America but insist that it’s a point of departure, that once the American experiment was launched, it could be safely separated from the religion that launched it. They think it’s possible to take the “best” parts of the Christian faith without the need to continually affirm Christ. “Christless Christianity,” you might call it.
But it doesn’t work like that. A few months ago the famous atheist Richard Dawkins wondered aloud in an interview why his own country, England, could not just go on having “cultural Christianity” without actual, believing Christians. He said he liked the cathedrals and the Christmas carols, and would like to enjoy them without the bother of actual Christianity. He wants fewer believing Christians and more cultural Christians.
It never occurred to Dawkins that you don’t get to keep the culture without the cult. The sad spectacle of modern England should suffice to prove the point. If there is no one to worship in the cathedrals, they will become concert halls or, in England’s case, mosques. If no one really believes what the Christmas carols proclaim, eventually people will stop singing them.
The same goes for us here in America. The American proposition that all men are created equal is a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. Not to belabor the point, but the American founders only ever believed that all men are created equal because they believed that we are God’s children, created in His image. Our entire system of government flows from that belief; without it the whole system collapses. //
America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?
Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence. We’ve long been accustomed to talking about America as a “propositional nation,” a phrase taken from Abraham Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The idea is that America is fundamentally different from the ethnic nation-states of Europe, which were based on blood and soil and religion. America supposedly transcended all that. It was based instead on an idea — a proposition. Anyone could become an American if he agreed to the proposition.
And this is true. But nearly everyone who says America is a propositional nation is wrong about what the proposition is. America is not a collection of Enlightenment tropes at the intersection of Locke and Rousseau, a grab bag of philosophical sentiments about the rights of man. America is the creation of Christian civilization.
The proposition at the heart of America, undergirding our nation’s existence, is not just “all men are created,” but Christianity and all that comes with it. Without Christianity, you don’t get free speech, liberty, equality, freedom of conscience. All of it relies on the claims of the Christian faith, none of it stands on its own. //
To be clear, the contest is not between secularism or “wokeism” and Christianity. If we reject Christianity, the future of America will not be a secular liberal utopia, where we go on living off the capital of our Christian inheritance without replenishing it. It’s going to be a new version of paganism, and you’re not going to like it. //
The American founding is therefore not comprehensible in strictly secular, rationalist terms. Our nation begins with a proposition about the nature of God and man. If that proposition is discarded or denied, whatever comes after that isn’t America. It might call itself America, it might even deploy the familiar vocabulary of rights and liberties, but it is not America. //
To fight this new paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the false notion that their religion is a purely private matter, that there must be a “wall of separation” between our religion and our politics. We have to argue, without apology, that public life in this country should be shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most of our civilization’s history.
Most of all, we have to accept that our American culture of self-government and liberty under law cannot long survive cut off from its source, which is and always was the Christian faith.
Without that faith, alive and active among the people, there can be no American republic. If we want to save the republic, we’ll have to become a Christian people once again. And that means we’ll have to fight — and win — a religious war for America. //
We see now that there is more than one way for a nation to fall. There is the Roman way: a centuries-long decline eventually succumbing to wave upon wave of invaders. There is the British way: a dwindling to irrelevance and impotence, passive in the face of an assertive Muslim immigrant population.
And then there is the American way: not to decline and fall, not to dwindle into irrelevance, but to become evil.
Clyde S. Kilby joined the faculty of Wheaton College in 1935 at the age of 33 as an assistant professor of English and dean of men.
In 1943 Kilby read a new book published by C. S. Lewis, entitled The Case for Christianity, which changed the course of his life. It was based on two series of broadcast talks Lewis had given for the BBC and was later published as the first two sections of Mere Christianity. “I . . . read it right through feeling almost from the first sentence that something profound had touched my mind and heart.” It was like discovering “something bottomless,” and he was captivated by “the depth and freshness of his observations and the permanency of his expression.”
Sometimes, when teaching theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, I would quote Pressler warning about what he called the “Dalmatian theory of inspiration.”
“Once you say that the Bible could contain error, you make yourself the judge of what portions of the Bible are true and which portions are error,” Pressler said in an interview at the height of the Southern Baptist controversy over biblical inerrancy. “It is a presumptuous thing for an individual to edit God. Somebody has called it the spot theory of inspiration. The Bible was inspired in spots, and we are inspired to spot the spots.”
Even before the court actions and subsequent revelations, though, those of us in the conservative wing of Baptist life should have recognized the low view of biblical authority even in the actions Pressler did in full public view. Instead, we were told, and believed, that the stakes were too high—the orthodoxy of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination—to worry that the warlords leading the charge were not like Jesus. Many of us learned to tolerate the idea that one can do evil that good may result—a contradiction of the inerrant Word of God (Rom. 3:8).
The implicit idea is that, if the stakes are high enough, the usual norms of Christian morality—on truth-telling and kindness, gentleness, love, joy, self-control, etc.—can be ignored, at least long enough to fix the problem and return to normal.
This is not an unusual temptation: Let’s violate human rights in order to save human rights. Let’s terminate the Constitution to save the Constitution. Let’s elect sexual abusers to protect the family. Let’s disobey the Bible to save the Bible. Pressler warned (about other people in other situations) that what is tolerated is ultimately celebrated. That’s not always true, of course, but it certainly was in the case of conviction defined as quarrelsomeness.
Before one knows it, one ends up with a partisan definition of truth, all the more ironic for defenders of biblical inerrancy and—with a situational definition of ethics—for warriors against moral relativism. When this happens, the criterion by which the confession of faith is interpreted is through whatever controversy enlivens the crowd. Biblical passages that seem to be violated by one’s “enemies” are then emphasized, while those applying to one’s own “side” are minimized. To do this well, one needs some authoritative, if not authoritarian, leaders to spot the spots that are to be underlined and to skip over those to be ignored.
What difference does it make if one’s liberalism is characterized by ignoring Paul but quoting the Sermon on the Mount, or by ignoring the Sermon on the Mount but quoting Paul? How is one a liberal who explains away the Exodus but takes literally the Prophets, while that’s not true for the one who explains away the Prophets but takes literally the Exodus?
If the Bible is breathed out by God, then all of it is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout). A high view of biblical authority does not, by itself, guarantee orthodoxy.
Again, and you must note this objective fact, notwithstanding those old denominations that long ago started in the United States as egalitarian with male and female pastoral roles, every single denomination that has decided to abandon traditional male pastoral roles for men and women has ultimately moved from embracing just female pastors to also embracing gay ordination and gay marriage.
You can say that will never happen to you, but that is what they all said. Look at the PCUSA, ELCA, United Church of Christ, Episcopalians, and now the United Methodist Church. If your church thinks contemporary times mean updating the role of pastor to women, it won’t be long before those same contemporary times mean updating even more.
There is no greater example before you now than the United Methodist Church where the majority of congregants rejected gay ordination and marriage. But progressives promoted themselves within, taking over leadership roles, and ultimately, despite a majority against them, took over and forced a schism.
BUTKER: Our love for Jesus, and thus, our desire to speak out, should never be outweighed by the longing of our fallen nature to be loved by the world. Glorifying God and not ourselves should always remain our motivation despite any pushback or even support. I lean on those closest to me for guidance but I can never forget that it is not people, but Jesus Christ I’m trying to please.
(...)
For if heaven is our goal, we should embrace our cross, however large or small it may be, and live our life with joy, to be a bold witness for Christ."
Last year, Democrats split up the terms “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” in the Minnesota Human Rights Act, and that meant religious organizations still had an exemption for not hiring on the basis of “sexual orientation,” but that exemption no longer applies to “gender identity.”
When these two terms were split in the Minnesota Human Rights Act, we thought the ramifications on religious exemptions were accidental. //
Throughout this year’s committee process, it became very clear that the folks who pushed this change had no intention of extending the exemptions to “gender identity.”
Recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard the bill during an evening hearing but waited until 12:30 a.m. to bring the bill up for discussion. Issues of this significance should never be discussed under the cover of darkness. Republicans offered an amendment that would have extended the religious exemption to include to the new “gender identity” term, but Democrats did not support that change. This bill will now be considered for inclusion in the Omnibus Judiciary bill.
This is alarming because in this bill S. F. 4292, it means that religious organizations can now be held legally accountable if they choose to not hire someone of a certain “gender identity,” regardless of their religious beliefs. This is a blatant infringement on constitutional rights. The government cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion according to the 1st Amendment and the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed this throughout our history. That means we are dealing with an unconstitutional law.
Earlier this year a Democrat senator went on record stating that constitutionality shouldn’t matter when legislators are writing their bills. I disagree – it is our duty to know the potential constitutional ramifications that our laws may have. The government cannot compel churches and religious organizations to abandon their deeply held religious beliefs.
People often ask: why did Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, not speak out more forcefully against Hitler? Historian Fr Dermot Fenlon of the Birmingham Oratory looks at the facts and sets the record straight. //
"Those rescued by Pius are today living all over the world. There went to Israel alone from Romania 360,000 to the year 1965."
The vindication of Pius XII has been established principally by Jewish writers and from Israeli archives. It is now established that the Pope supervised a rescue network which saved 860,000 Jewish lives - more than all the international agencies put together.
After the war the Chief Rabbi of Israel thanked Pius XII for what he had done. The Chief Rabbi of Rome went one step further. He became a Catholic. He took the name Eugenio.
While the Biden administration cracks down on the Christians Democrats and the press smear as extremists, church attacks are up 800 percent in the last six years, according to a new report from the Family Research Council (FRC). //
Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla, who co-authored the magazine’s article on “Christian nationalism,” followed up with an appearance on MSNBC.
“The one thing that unites them as Christian nationalists — not Christians by the way, because Christian nationalists is very different — is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority; they don’t come from Congress; they don’t come from the Supreme Court — they come from God,” Przybyla said.
Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi, an atheist, wrote about her remarks in a column last week. “If This Is ‘Christian Nationalism,’ Sign Me Up!” Harsanyi headlined his article.
As numerous critics have already pointed out, ‘Christian nationalism’ sounds identical to the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence. Then again, the idea that man has inalienable, universal rights goes back to ancient Greece, at least. The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms. It is the best kind of ‘extremism.’
Size: 24 x 36 inches on sturdy cardstock
Description: This colorful, easy-to-read poster shows the family tree of every major Christian denomination.
ISBN: 978-0-7753519-3-1
For those unfamiliar with William Shakespeare’s masterpiece, King Lear is about an old British king who decides to leave his kingdom to his two older daughters. Lear’s older daughters flatter him while he repudiates and disowns his youngest daughter because she tells him the truth. Sure enough, the older daughters quickly seize their inheritance and kick their father out, leaving him to wander the countryside with his court jester. As this happens, the daughter whom he rejected works to save him despite his former behavior.
Something similar is happening with Francis, an old and distinguished monarch who has surrounded himself with shameless yes-men. These advisers are inept ideologues with ample personal baggage. They have absolutely no clue how to address any of the challenges facing today’s Christians. Sadly, Francis evidently prefers the sweet nothings of his circle to the harsh truths of men like Strickland. His circle has kept him safely insulated from reality for years now. This fact was recently revealed in his bizarre rant on priests acting like dandies.
Just as Lear and his kingdom could only be saved by the daughter he spurned, Francis and his church can only be saved by Catholics who remain loyal despite it all.
Most Catholics, if they are paying attention, can see that the Catholic left’s supposed victories will soon evaporate. They will pass away with the Boomer generation. Francis is 86, and the average cardinal is in his early 70s.
Waiting in the wings are much more conservative clergy ready to swing the ideological pendulum the other way. According to a recent report from the Catholic News Agency, “a full 85% of the youngest cohort describes itself as ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox’ theologically. Only 14 percent described themselves as “middle-of-the-road.” //
Thus, for the foreseeable future, the best thing Catholics can do is to exercise the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Our king is out in the wilderness, and his evil daughters are in charge, making a mess of things. Moreover, his advanced age has not made him wise but has only caused him to double down on his folly.
Music shapes our hearts and minds. What we fill our ears with—for better or worse—forms who we are and what we love. This is one reason why music has loomed large in Christian worship and catechesis throughout church history. In church, we don’t only rehearse our confession by speaking creeds and hearing biblical truths preached; we sing these confessions and biblical truths. And as we sing, God’s truth roots down deeper in our souls. //
New adult believers unfamiliar with (or understandably skeptical of) Christian music might not know where to start.
That’s why I put together this playlist of 100 songs with a catechetical flair to them: songs that teach Christian truth and yet do it poetically, with excellence.
[Deconstruction] has little to do with objective truth, and everything to do with tearing down whatever doctrine someone believes is morally wrong. //
it was very personal and it focused on the human beings who have come out of this, rather than on whether a certain kind of theology is right or wrong. //
If deconstruction means nothing more than changing your mind or correcting bad ideas, then I can say I deconstructed by switching from AT&T to Verizon. //
Deconstruction is not about getting your theology right.