Many years ago, I witnessed what happens when people who prevent others from speaking are not dealt with promptly.

During a “Firing Line” taping with William F. Buckley at Bard College in New York State on the topic of “Resolved: The ACLU is full of baloney” (the short answer is “yes”), two female activists stood up and started chanting “women of color have no voice.”

The moderator, a well-known liberal (well, okay, it was Michael Kinsley, who did an otherwise fine job), asked them politely to stop so the debate could continue, but the protesters refused.  At this point, he could have motioned to the campus cops to remove them, but instead let them go on ad nauseum.  I leaned over and whispered to then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen, “Nadine, do something. They’re your children.”  I meant her ideological offspring, of course.  And she did try to reason with them, to no avail.

Unlike some recent incidents, the debate finally went on after Mr. Kinsley gave in to the protesters’ tantrum, let them read a list of nonsensical leftwing ultimatums, and Bard’s president agreed to leave the team he was on in the debate.

I’m not sure how much of this made the eventual PBS broadcast, but it showed the folly of giving in to the heckler’s veto.  That’s when, in the name of free speech, someone silences someone else.  Courts have made it clear that the heckler’s veto is not protected speech under the First Amendment, no more than falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

Since President Trump’s election, the Left has been in full heckler’s veto mode, egged on by the same progressives who cheered the violent Occupy mobs in 2011 and 2012 and the goons disrupting the Trump rallies last year.

[Recently], protesters threated violence against Republican Party participants in the 82^nd Avenue of Roses Parade in Portland, Oregon, and managed to get the event canceled.   An anonymous email promised that “two hundred or more people” would “rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out…. police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

Then, amid threats of violence, conservative author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at the University of California, Berkeley.  In February, the campus had suffered $100,000 in property damage when black-clad leftist rioters stopped iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In March, political scientist Charles Murray was forced to change venues at Middlebury College in Vermont during a mob attack in which a female professor was injured.  Middlebury itself may be failing to teach about constitutional rights, if a letter signed by 450 alumni prior to Murray’s appearance is any indication:  “This is not an issue of freedom of speech.  In this case we find the principle does not apply.”

Well, okay then. Disagree with us and you lose your rights.

In early April, hundreds of activists blocked an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College in California to prevent author Heather MacDonald from speaking.  Ms. MacDonald’s analysis of crime statistics blows away the media narrative about racist cops spun by the Black Lives Matter movement.  No wonder they wanted her silenced.

For the Left, the issues themselves matter less than a show of force.  As author Angelo M. Codevilla has observed, “The point of PC [political correctness] is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.”

In “State and Revolution” (1918), Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“The replacement of the bourgeois (middle class) by the proletariat state is impossible without a violent revolution … it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance.”

Even if none of this involves something you hold dear, the mobs will get around to you if you’re out of step.  A byproduct is the chilling effect it has had on discourse in general.

I recall when liberals and conservatives could agree to disagree during, say, a party, and leave as friends, or at least not as enemies.  But when’s the last time you went to an eclectic gathering and heard genuine views exchanged?  Nobody dares anymore.  The Left’s scorched-earth tactics have poisoned the well.

In Massachusetts, an editorial at The Wellesley News on April 12 openly advocated attacking anyone who fails to bow to leftwing orthodoxy.  Their definition of what will not be allowed includes “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.  Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The good little Maoists (who are punctuation-challenged) went on to declare, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” Later, they denied that this meant engaging in violence.

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater charges about $63,300 annually for tuition, room and board.  Apparently, that buys the finest brainwashing against the bourgeoisie that a campus can conjure.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

On Tuesday afternoon, radio host Mark Elfstrand interviewed IFI’s Laurie Higgins about her recent article addressing the Black Lives Matter movement and the foolish and false statement made by Chicago Urban League president Shari Runner on the “root cause” of gang-on-gang and black-on-black violence.

Mark and Laurie also discussed her article about Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s decision to join other liberal states in filing an amicus brief in a federal district court in Texas in support of mandatory coed restrooms and locker rooms in all public schools.

Additionally, Mark asked Laurie about IFI’s letter of warning written by attorney Jason Craddock that was sent to Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Dr. Tony Smith and Board Chairman Rev. James Meeks in June.  In this letter, we warned them of anticipated lawsuits (which could cost our school districts millions) and asked them to prohibit school administrators from implementing a policy that would permit gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and/or locker rooms.

We also have an important call-to-action for this issue:

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send  Superintendent Smith and Board Chairman Meeks an email or a fax to let them know that you are resolutely against any policy that would have male and female students sharing restrooms or locker rooms.

You can also call Dr. Smith’s office at (312) 814-2220 and/or Rev. Meeks’ office at (217) 557-6626 to leave a message of concern.

To listen to this 10-minute interview, please click the link HERE or the graphic below:

https://soundcloud.com/lets-talk-with-mark/mark-interviews-laurie-higgins-august-2-2016

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachman!

Please register today, before the early bird special expires…

Written by J. Warner Wallace

When we heard about the shootings last week, my wife and I were heartsick. Seven people died in what feels like an escalating national crisis. Two people died at the hands of police officers, while five officers died at the hands of a single suspect. The tension and distrust between African Americans and police officers is at the highest level in my lifetime. As my son Jimmy (a third-generation police officer himself) flew as a member of the Honor Guard to represent our agency at five officer funerals in Dallas this week, I began to gather my thoughts about how we, as Christians, might respond to the growing dilemma. I’ve tried to accurately communicate the nature of police work, but for every person who asks for my police perspective, there’s another who wants my advice as a pastor and Christian Case Maker. In this article, I’d like to outline six things each of us, as citizens and Christians, can do to respond to the growing dilemma:

1. Educate with a purpose.

I’m often surprised to witness the vitriol and intensity of those who are ready to debate the issues before they’ve taken the time to examine the facts closely. It’s easy to find yourself in an argument without truly understanding the perspective of those involved. A balanced education requires us to view the issues from both sides of the coin. All of us should take the time to do the research and be informed. As Christians, however, our desire to be educated must involve more than merely the consumption of information. Our education must have a goal: empathy and compassion. When Jesus saw the crowds of people in the region near Capernaum, He “had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). These people weren’t yet disciples of Jesus, and they likely didn’t yet agree with what Jesus’ had to say. But Jesus understood their situation, and this knowledge informed His response. The information resulted in compassion and empathy, in spite of the fact the crowds may not have been in agreement with Jesus or his disciples.

If you’re on one side of this debate or another, you may be having difficulty feeling empathy for those with whom you disagree. Take some time to educate yourself. There’s enough human struggle on both sides to warrant your understanding and compassion. Let me give you two examples of how a brief education can help you rethink your vitriol. A law enforcement agency recently reached out to an African American civil rights leader and invited him to participate in a day of “Shoot or Don’t Shoot” training. This realistic exercise placed the civil rights leader in several law enforcement scenarios that required him to make a quick decision about the use of force. In one scenario he acted too slowly and was “killed” by the role-playing “suspect”. In a second scenario he “shot” an unarmed “suspect” role-player. By the end of the day, this educational experience helped the leader to empathize with the burden of the officers. In a similar way, a recent experiment was conducted to see if people treated a little girl differently if they thought she was underprivileged or homeless.  The same girl was dressed as a lost, upper class child and as a lost, under-privileged, homeless girl. She was treated in two remarkably different ways. People asked the better-dressed girl if they could help her find her parents, but walked by the homeless girl as though she didn’t exist. After watching this video, I began to understand the inherent bias we express toward certain people groups. As a result, it’s now easier for me to empathize with those I used to shun, ignore or vilify. Educate yourself about the plight of those with whom you disagree. You just might feel your heart grow.

2. Love the other side because there is no “other side.”

At the police memorial in Dallas last Tuesday, President Obama said, “Faced with this violence we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs can ever understand each other’s experience.” One way to bridge the divide is to remember that what we have in common far exceeds what separates us. As Christians, we should know this better than anyone. Each of us, regardless of race, has at least three important things in common. First, we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Second, we are deeply rebellious and lost in our sin nature (Romans 3:23, 1 John 1:8). Finally, every one of us is desperately in need of a Savior (Ephesians 2:1-7). Regardless of any other differences we may have, these three foundational truths are common to all of us. I bet you’re a lot different than many members of your own family, but somehow you manage to come together on holidays and get along. Why? Because you have something important in common. Guess what? All of us may be different racially, economically or culturally, but we also have something important in common: we are members of the human family. There is no “other side” when it comes to family. All of us have something for which we can be praised, and something we can do better.

Take an honest look at your own shortcomings before you point a finger at others, then adopt Jesus’ view toward those you’ve thought of in an adversarial way. Jesus was, after all, the master of “counter-intuitive compassion.” He famously taught, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven’” (Matthew 5:43-45). As Christians, we’re called to love those we previously described as our enemies. Let’s talk the talk and walk the walk. Love the people on all sides of this issue and look for what we have in common rather than what might divide us.

3. Be a patient leader.

Most of us understand the value of patience, as long as it’s required ofsomeone else. In the instantaneous Information Age in which we live, the virtue of “measured response” has become a lost art. But Scripture is clear about the value of being “quick to hear, slow to speak,” and “slow to anger” (James 1:19). This is an important quality for good leaders. In my career, I worked for three different police chiefs. Each of them understood the value of patient, appropriate, disciplined response. If a questionable incident or shooting occurred, they would address the press within 24 hours and tell reporters that the officers involved had been removed from the field pending investigation, and that the full resources of our agency (and the DA’s office, if necessary) would be mobilized to determine the facts of the case. If asked to comment specifically on the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the incident, these leaders refrained from taking a positon or making any kind of statement in one direction or the other. They remained neutral and told reporters there would be nothing further to report until the investigation was conducted. While this measured response usually frustrated the press, it was a sign of true leadership.

If you’ve ever been involved in an investigation of this kind, you know one thing for sure: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). It’s a fool’s game to think you know the truth before you’ve taken the time to talk to everyone, examine every perspective, and collect all the facts. Good leaders don’t jump on social media and make a provocative, early statement. Leaders should be patient, measured and disciplined. It’s time for all of us, as Christians, to be leaders. Next time you see something in the press, even if it’s a short video clip that appears to be decisive, resist the temptation to draw an immediate conclusion. Let the process run its course, there will be plenty of time to respond later with more accuracy.

4. Rely on prayer and the power of God.

It might sound trite for a Christian to suggest prayer as the proper response to a crisis, but at the risk of saying something obvious, let me remind you of two important aspects of prayer. First, God alone is powerful enough to change the hearts of everyone involved in our present dilemma. Even though I know this is true, my actions are often contradictory; I know I can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” to “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16), but I often fail to do so. Maybe you’re the same way. If, however, you’re frustrated that you don’t seem to be in a position to effect the kind of change you’d like, maybe it’s time to summon someone who is (and can).

There’s a second important truth related to prayer: communal prayer has the power to unify. There’s plenty of evidence to support this truth; we’ve seen many examples following the shooting in Dallas.Officers who pray together before watch are unified as a team, despite their diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. Communal prayer reminds us of our common dependence on God. In a similar way, we’ve seen a number of examples of prayer unifying those who might otherwise be dangerously opposed. When one Black Lives Matter group met a counter-protest group on the streets of Dallas, the potential for conflict was palpable. But when members of both groups came together to hug and pray for one another, they reclaimed their identity as brothers and sisters in Christ. Prayer does more than bend the ear of God; it bends our hearts toward one another. Take the time to pray for our situation, and whenever possible, seek opportunities to pray together.

5. Help agencies train and hire.

Most concerns related to law enforcement personnel revolve around two important questions: (1) Will our police officers act ethically, and (2) Will they use an appropriate level of force? As it turns out, police agencies can train their officers in both of these areas. As I mentioned in my last article, my Chief asked me to develop a six-session ethics program for our agency. Prior to this, we’d never engaged in a systematic, prolonged approach to ethics training. We were always in compliance with our state regulations related to ethics training, but we wanted to raise the bar and do even more, so we developed our own program. In a similar way, our agency also decided to exceed the state requirements for defensive tactics training by using several professional grapplers and force experts who happened to already work for our agency.

If you’re suspicious about police officers and their use of force, you might think it unwise to offer them additional training in this area. But, the more proficient an officer becomes in his or her use of force, the less likely they are to over-react when confronted physically. If you don’t feel confident grappling with a suspect, you’re all too likely to resort to a higher level of force in an effort to control the situation and defend yourself. Many shootings involving unarmed suspects are simply the result of an officer being afraid he or she was going to be fatally overpowered. The better we train police officers to handle themselves physically, the more likely they are to use an appropriately low level of force. But, in order to become proficient in this area, officers have to train regularly. That’s not an inexpensive proposal. If we want our police officers to be the most ethically and physically responsible officers they can be, we’ll need to support an increase in their training budget. As citizens, we need to make this clear to our local city governments.

We also need to address another increasingly difficult task facing local police agencies: hiring. When my son applied for his position five years ago, he was one of three-hundred candidates. Of these potential hires, only five passed the grueling testing and vetting process and made it to the Police Academy. Only three survived the Academy. Only two survived the training that followed. It tookthree-hundred applicants (and approximately one year) to produce two officers. That’s what it was like five years ago; it’s a lot more difficult today. Given the increasingly hostile climate and negative view of police officers, fewer good candidates are interested in law enforcement. We’re lucky to get eighty people to show up for the first battery of tests. As a result, agencies are shrinking. You and I can help, however. It starts with something simple: resist the temptation to vilify the entire law enforcement community when single officers make a mistake or do something unethical. This is still a noble profession. This is still the kind of calling you’d be proud to have your children answer. And people on both sides of “the divide” are invited to participate. Dallas Police Chief, David Brown (a devout African American Christian), reminded protestors following the Dallas murders that they could “become a part of the solution.” He told them to “serve your community, don’t be a part of the problem. We’re hiring… get off that protest line and put an application in, and we’ll put you in your neighborhood and we’ll help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about.”

6. Be courageous enough to seek (and address) the root causes.

When a paramedic responds to someone who’s having a heart attack, he or she responds to the attack, not the cause; the paramedic has no control over the bad eating habits or genetic history that preceded the attack. In a similar way, when a police officer responds to a violent assault, he or she confronts the attacker, not the underlying cause of the assault; the officer has no control over the social or environmental conditions that preceded the behavior. Police officers respond and react to crimes committed in their city, they don’t cause or create the conditions that resulted in the crime.

Politicians, sociologists and philosophers can debate the underlying causes for crime, and many have attributed some form of systemic racism as the chief culprit. Let me also offer an explanation that is grounded in my own anecdotal experience and in a number of important studies. When I served on my agency’s Gang Detail in the early 1990’s, I was in constant contact with a wide spectrum of gang members. We engaged white, Hispanic, Asian and African American gangsters from every economic background. I was interested in what caused these young men to become gangsters in the first place. It certainly didn’t seem to be something in their cultural, racial or economic lineage; they came from a very diverse set of circumstances. The more I got to know these young men, the clearer the problem became: all of them suffered from what I call, “lack of dad.”

Some of their fathers were uninvolved, alcoholic or “deadbeat” dads. Others were workaholics who were never home. Some were habitually incarcerated. Others simply hadn’t stuck around long enough to raise their sons. Over and over again I saw the same thing: young men who were wandering without direction or moral compass, in large part because they didn’t have a father at home to teach them. Many studies have confirmed my own anecdotal observations.

The evidence is clear: kids do best, in nearly every metric, when raised by two biological parents in a committed, low conflict setting. One study found that “Children with involved fathers have better social skills, more successful relationships, stronger self-esteem, more self-control and higher grades. They are less likely to be overweight, suspended from school, bully others, take drugs, engage in risky sexual behavior or commit crime.” Intact families guided by engaged fathers are the remedy, at least in my view. When I first recognized these gangsters all suffered from “lack of dad,” I started to assess my own paternal leadership. Was I leading my sons? Was I available and attentive? Was I modelling what it means to be a man, a husband and a father? Was I impressing God’s Word on my children and talking about it with them when sitting at home, walking along the road, lying down or sitting up (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)? If we want to confront one of the most prevalent root causes of crime, we need to model fatherhood for our culture and advocate policies that affirm and support families (and fatherhood) nationally.

This is a crisis we can actually address, if we choose to. I wasn’t raised in an environment in which my father was present every day. My parents divorced when I was three. But he was an important role model for me when we were together, and my grandfather, Warner, was a paternal icon. Christians have the power to come along those young men who are fatherless and provide them with the role model they need. Are we willing to do it?

This article, along with the first in this set, are two of the longest pieces I’ve written for this website, yet neither truly does justice to the complexity of the problem or potential solutions. But they’re a start. The bar is high for police officers, and it’s just as high for Christians. We’ll have no voice in our society unless we commit to the principles we are suggesting for others. Are we willing to surrender our pride? Are we willing to love our “enemies”? Are we willing to put our money where our mouths are? Are we courageous enough to address the real issues? As Christians, we must lead, and our response to this growing dilemma must reflect both the mercy and justice of God.

This article originally posted on coldcasechristianity.com.

Written by William Kilpatrick

In a speech delivered to the Annual MAS-ICNA (Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America) Convention in December 2015, Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), urged Muslim Americans to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter. “Black Lives Matter is our matter,” he said; “Black Lives Matter is our campaign.”

At the same conference, Khalilah Sabra, another activist, told the Muslim audience, “Basically you are the new black people of America… We are the “community that staged a revolution across the world. If we could do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?” “That revolution” is apparently a reference to the “Arab Spring” revolutions which were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and which brought death and destruction to wide swaths of the Middle East and North Africa.

Do CAIR and other activist groups merely want to support Black Lives Matter, or do they hope to recruit blacks to their own cause? In 2014, ISIS used the protests and clashes in Ferguson, Missouri as an opportunity to attempt to recruit blacks to radical Islam. But ISIS is a known terrorist organization while CAIR, despite its shady history, is considered by many to be a moderate, mainstream Muslim organization. Thus, if it wanted to convert blacks, it would presumably want to convert them to a moderate version of Islam.

Or would it? According to Paul Sperry and David Gaubatz, the authors of Muslim Mafia, the supposedly moderate CAIR acts like an underworld cospiracy. In fact, it (along with numerous other prominent Muslim groups) was named by a U.S. court as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist funding case. In addition, CAIR has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, CAIR is a direct outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also listed as a terrorist group by the UAE, as well as by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood that fomented the “Arab Spring” revolutions, the likes of which Khalilah Sabra wants to bring to America.

The move to bring black Americans into the Islamic fold actually predates CAIR and ISIS by quite a few generations. Black Muslim organizations such as Louis Farrakhan’s The Nation of Islam have been recruiting blacks to their unorthodox brand of Islam for decades. The vast majority of blacks have resisted the temptation to join, perhaps because of NOI’s overt racism, its anti-Semitism, and its criticism of Christianity. In any event, it seems that the Black Muslim movement is being gradually displaced by traditional Sunni Islam. That’s because Sunni Islam has a much better claim to legitimacy—it being a worldwide religion that traces its roots back not to a 1930s Detroit preacher named Wallace Fard Muhammad, but to a seventh century prophet named Muhammad.

Will Islam catch on with black Americans? A great many blacks in America have a strong commitment to Christianity, which serves to act as a buffer against conversion to Islam. Still, it’s likely that Islam will make more inroads into the black community than it has in the past. For one thing, traditional Islam doesn’t have the “kook” factor which keeps most blacks at a distance from The Nation of Islam. The NOI belief system includes giant space ships, an evil scientist who created a race of “white devils,” and, most recently, an embrace of Dianetics.

By contrast, traditional Islam looks much more like … well, like a traditional religion. Indeed, when approaching Christians, Islamic apologists like to play up the similarities between the two religions. Each year around Christmastime, Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s Public Relations Director, sends out a Christmas letter with the message, “We have more in common than you think.”

One of the common elements is Jesus, who is honored as a great prophet in Islam. The self-proclaimed leader of the Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on July 7, 2016 once wrote of feeling called to follow Jesus into Islam. In November 2015, the Reverend Jeff Hood, a white leftist pastor, wrote:

I have no question that Jesus is so intimately incarnated with and connected to our Muslim friends that he has become one. If we want to walk with Jesus in this moment of extreme oppression and marginalization, we will too.

Islam is an equal-opportunity recruiter. It is open to white leftists and black boxers alike. But Islamic proselytizers may see the present moment as an opportune time to concentrate on blacks. Why is that? Perhaps mainly because our educational system has managed to convince both black and white students that America is a racist society that was built on the back of slavery. Almost all students have been indoctrinated in the narrative that America has a shameful history and heritage. For blacks, however, this version of American history is more plausible because their ancestors actually did suffer from the ravages of slavery and the humiliation of Jim Crow laws.

Nevertheless, during the Civil Rights era and afterwards, both blacks and whites worked hard to heal racial divisions. Racism—both black and white—seemed to be dying a natural death until leftists, with the aid of the media and the Obama administration, managed to resuscitate it. Despite the two-time election of a black president and the appointment or election of black Attorney Generals, black Secretaries of State, black U.S. Supreme Court justices, a black chief of Homeland Security, black mayors, and black police chiefs, a number of blacks seem convinced that white racism is the number one factor that is keeping them down.

Enter CAIR and other Muslim “civil rights” groups that are only too happy to reinforce this narrative. They profess to understand the plight of American blacks because they claim to be victims of a similar oppression—victims of colonialism, racism, and Islamophobia. Part of their pitch is that there is no discrimination in Islam. That might seem a hard sell if you’re familiar with the history of the Arab slave trade or with Islam’s own version of Jim Crow, the dhimmi system. The trouble is, those items have been dropped down the memory hole. The same teachers and textbooks that excoriate the Christian West tend to present Islam as though it were the font of all science and learning.

It might be hoped that blacks who convert will choose some milder form of Islam—something like the Sufi version practiced by Muhammad Ali after he left The Nation of Islam. Unfortunately, that’s not likely because CAIR, ISNA, and similar Islamist groups are practically the only game in town. They have successfully managed to present themselves as the official face of Islam in America, and ISNA, along with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked North American Islamic Trust, controls a majority of the major mosques.

In backing Black Lives Matter, CAIR and company run the risk that their own radicalism will be revealed. Apparently, they don’t consider that to be much of a risk. They know that the court eunuchs in the media will do their best to mainstream Black Lives Matter as a peaceful movement, just as the media has accepted the premise that CAIR itself is a mainstream, moderate organization.

CAIR can also count on President Obama to take the side of Black Lives Matter. Recently, he went so far as to compare it to the Abolitionist Movement against slavery. CAIR is no doubt confident that Obama has its back too. After all, the president made it clear from the start of his administration that he supported the Muslim Brotherhood—the “Mothership” (to borrow an NOI term) out of which CAIR sprang.

At the MSA-ICNA Convention, CAIR and associates felt safe to reveal their revolutionary side. They understand that Obama has a penchant for revolutionary causes—provided that they are leftist (the Castro brothers in Cuba) or Islamist (the “Arab Spring” revolutions) in nature. Before his first election, Obama promised a fundamental transformation of American society. CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood are also interested in a fundamental transformation. Indeed, the chief theorists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, were heavily influenced by Lenin and by communist revolutionary thought. So was Maulana Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Asian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Islam,” wrote Maududi, “is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” He added, “‘Muslim’ is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary program.”

That statement has to rank fairly high on the fundamental-transformation scale, and it bears a striking resemblance to the tear-it-down-to-build-it-up leftist school of thought to which Obama belongs. Whether or not the fundamental transformation that Obama desires is the same as that sought by Islamists, he does seem anxious to effect one before his term in office runs out.

The emerging confluence of interests between radical Muslim groups, radical black groups, and a leftist president bent on a radical transformation of America should give us more than pause; it should alarm us. Does Obama intend to speed up the leftward movement of American society during his remaining months in office? Does he hope to accelerate the Islamization of America through a coalition of radical black, leftist, and Islamist groups? Or does he even care what the change is, as long as it’s revolutionary in nature?

Most Americans tend to assume that we are still operating under the same rules that have governed our society since its founding. They have not come to terms with the possibility that some of our leaders are operating under a completely different set of rules—what leftist activist Saul Alinsky called “rules for radicals.”

Read more about Jeff Hood HERE.

Read more about Black Lives Matter HERE.

This article was originally posted at Crisis Magazine.

William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, includingPsychological Seduction; Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West and the forthcoming The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.  For more on his work and writings, visit his website, turningpointproject.com

It seems that America is now locked in an endless loop of tension and violence. Many disaffected Americans are railing out at a government they see as being abusive and vindictive. Movements like “Black Lives Matter” have pitted some African-American (and other) citizens against police officers, in a vicious cycle of street demonstrations and police force.

In some ways, these tensions are not new, and can be traced all the way to the American Civil War, through segregation, the Civil Rights Movement up to today. Americans have always been deeply divided on issues of race, and equal rights.

Now, police are being targeted in random shootings by those who feel anger at what they view as a system of oppression and tyranny.

The question is, where will all of this end?

There are really two facets to this situation that must be explored if we hope to understand the roots of this predicament.

Racism and Prejudice

What very few people stop to consider is the roots of all so-called “racial” prejudice. As Bible-believing Christians, we believe that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). From one man, and one woman, all of the more than seven billion people on planet earth have descended. That makes all of us related by blood. We are all part of the same race: The Human Race!

Racial prejudice comes mainly out of evolutionary teachings. If you study the roots of the Eugenics movement, you will see that it is based in the view that some people groups are more highly evolved than others. Very few people know the full title of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking 1859 book on evolution. It is called, “On Origin of Species, by Way of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

Over 150 years of evolutionary teaching has saturated our culture, and has convinced many that we must struggle for the strongest races to survive. The solution to prejudice is found in the hope offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not only are we all equal in creation, and therefore equal in value, the Apostle Paul declared, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28).

Anarchy vs. Totalitarianism

The other consideration in this situation is the age-old struggle between a desire for freedom from authority (on the one hand) and a demand for supreme authority by the State (on the other). This tension has always existed in every society. There is a rogue spirit in humankind that wants to be free from the bonds of restriction and law. But a lawless society, where everyone makes up their own rules (moral relativism), and where people’s passions run unchecked (hedonism), is not tenable. No civilization can bear up under the weight of an antinomian mindset (a believe that all law is bad).

When a culture begins to shake itself from moral law, it soon finds itself at the mercy of an ever-encroaching government that seeks to provide stability and regulation. The response to anarchy is always totalitarianism, and the response to tyranny is almost always rebellion, which leads to the cycle of more tyranny.

This situation is only remedied when people recognize that there is a universal moral law that exists outside of themselves, and to which they are all subservient. Once again, we find the solution to both extremes within the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The entire “Sermon on the Mount,” puts external law in the only place where it ultimately works; inside the human heart.

Until the evil of the heart is addressed, we are simply trying to put a cultural bandage on a proverbial brain tumor. No amount of political posturing will make bad people want to do good. It is only when the human heart is changed by love that we will hope to see citizens desire to do good, rather than harm, to their neighbor. It is only when we forgive, rather than seeking another eye or tooth in retaliation for harm, that we can end the vicious cycle of bloodshed and violence.

Ultimately, Christianity provides a totally unique remedy in the history of ideas. Every other worldview teaches that we must solve our own problems through human effort and initiative. Christianity, in contrast, presents us as the heart of the problem, not the solution. The Bible insists that it is only through humility and repentance that we will find healing for our own souls, and then be able to extend that grace and healing to others.

May God grant us that grace of repentance and humility as we seek to walk through the turbulent days that lie ahead.

Recently, ABC 7 Eyewitness News anchor Terrell Brown interviewed Shari Runner, the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League on the problems of black-on-black violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her predictable responses sound like she just returned from a White Privilege Conference and illuminate why “progressives” exacerbate rather than ameliorate inner city violence.

Brown: “Gun violence is still a big problem in the city, and it’s often gang-on-gang and it’s black- on-black crime….What do you do to stop it?”

Runner: “Well, I think the root cause is…jobs for kids who are disengaged. We have 46,000 disengaged youth in our city. That means that they are out of school and out of work, and they need jobs. And they really want to be in legal jobs. And they want to be able to be trained to do those jobs rather than be involved in gangs. So, that’s really a big focus of ours for the next ten years, to make sure that happens.

“We need to have better schools. We need to train our kids for the things they’re gonna face when they graduate, and make sure that they graduate, make sure that they stay in school.

“College is an option for many, not for all. Certificates are good. There are a lot of opportunities in the city that just are not being taken advantage of because people cannot get access to them.”

Brown: “Let’s talk about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There’s a lot of debate right now about the genesis of the movement, what it represents, where it’s going. Often when someone says, ‘Black lives matter,’ the response is, ‘Well, you know what? All lives matter.’ What’s your take on that?”

Runner: “I think the thing is that ‘black lives matter’ is a cry about the fact that institutional, systemic racism still exists in our society. And when you look at the evolution of [BLM] coming from the police violence and the shooting of young black men, unarmed men and boys, 12-year-olds who are confused as 30-year-old men, and the kind of narrative and stereotyping that goes into those kinds of decisions, it is a real cry about the racism that still is very endemic in our society.”

What was most stunning in her troubling comments was her assertion that the absence of jobs for teens is the “root cause” of gang-on-gang and black-on-black violence. The dearth of jobs for teens cannot possibly be the “root cause” of gang-on-gang or black-on-black violence. By the time young males in urban areas who join gangs or engage in violence reach the age at which they are able to work, the root causes have been operative in their lives for a decade.

The root cause of violence perpetrated by black men against the black community and others is family turmoil, including the absence of fathers or the presence of poor fathers. In a 2013 research paper titled “Why American boys join street gangs” about Mexican and black boys who had joined street gangs, author Stanley S. Taylor writes that “Each gang affiliated subject…expressed deep-seated frustrations in early childhood (prior to 10 years old). In addition, each gang member (and the reformed members interviewed) attributed their feelings directly to unstable home lives.”

A poor economic climate may be one of the contributive factors to family instability, which points to the importance of creating an economy able to sustain families. But it is not a dearth of jobs for teens that makes them vulnerable to gang membership, which in turn results in black-on-black crime.

Taylor identifies the factors that contribute to gang membership, the top two of which are “frustration and anxiety stemming from family problems such as fatherlessness,” and “sadness, frustration, and anxiety in home life.” To illustrate this tragic reality, Taylor shares the story of how 32-year-old “Joseph” became a member of the Crips, a black Los Angeles gang:

Joseph…described what his life was like as a 7 year old. He mentioned that he and his younger brother who was 6 years old had their father in the home. However, at around the time he turned seven years old his father moved in with a woman on the same city block and had children with her, while he and his brother were left to live with their mother. Joseph explained how this devastated him and that… abandonment was on his mind constantly….

Joseph mentioned his father never visited with them nor allowed he and his brother to come to the father‘s residence. Joseph spoke of several instances where his father would not stop to talk to he and his brother when the father drove by. He mentioned the few times that his father did stop and speak to them as they played outside, that he made promises to visit them or take them for car rides with him that he never kept. He stated that their father stopped once and gave them both one dollar and left. Joseph stated that he would see his father taking Christmas presents out of the car for his other children while they received nothing for Christmas. Joseph said that it hurt him very badly. He mentioned that as he got older the inner pain was with him every day and that he and his brother were unsupervised by their mother because she worked late.

He had begun to associate with boys in the neighborhood that were in gangs and participated in delinquent activities such as defacing property, bullying non gang members, and missing classes at school to spend time with the local gang members. By the time Joseph was 12 he had joined the Crip gang….

Joseph described how a 31-year old veteran gang member began taking him to parties where he met older girls, smoked marijuana, and drank alcohol. He said that it made him feel like he was “on top of the world.” He gained a reputation in the neighborhood as being “gangsta” because he was accepted by the gang and could therefore “hang out” with various members. Many of them sold drugs and had money and cars. Joseph stated they did many things to make him feel like part of the family so he joined the gang.

Camaraderie was developed by doing delinquent acts, drinking together and just hanging out. But as time went on, he said that he was expected to commit delinquent acts from vandalism and fighting rival gang members, to drive-by shooting.

It would take tortured reasoning to identify the “root cause” of Joseph’s problems as a dearth of jobs for teens. Gang members are telling us that they join gangs—not because they couldn’t find “legal jobs” as teens—but because they found no peace, security, and stability in their families during childhood. Why isn’t society listening to them?

The factors that contribute to gang membership, gang-on-gang violence, and black-on-black violence are numerous and tied up in a tightly woven Gordian knot. Certainly, a weak economy in which both parents must work or in which parents cannot find work contributes to family tension and breakdown, but there are other issues at play as well.

When divorce is hailed as a solution that is “best for the children,” when “progressives” normalize motherless and fatherless family structures (e.g., same-sex faux-marriage), when Hollywood normalizes and glamorizes non-marital sex, when having and raising children is viewed as a “right” to which single men and women and homosexuals are entitled, when children are objectified and commodified, and when purported Christians—including Christian leaders—turn a blind eye to or even affirm the unbiblical sexual and marital views and values of “progressivism,” family instability increases and children suffer.

If progressives truly cared about the violence destroying our black urban communities, they would be willing to sacrifice their deleterious sexual views and values for the good of black children. The Chicago Urban League and Black Lives Matter would turn their focus, energy, and money away from finding “legal jobs” for hurting teens to ensuring that all children grow up with mothers and fathers, preferably their own biological mothers and fathers. Of course that goal has been made even more politically challenging now that our president has endorsed legalized homoerotic pseudogamy—a family structure that necessarily deprives children of mothers or fathers.

Read more:  Exposing Black Lives Matter

**Caution: Parental Guidance Suggested**

What the tragic events of last week did not need was the distraction posed by one of the organizers of the Dallas protest, Dr. Jeff Hood, the 32-year-old bearded, bespectacled white man who is effective at one thing: self-promotion. While Selma had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an eloquent, dignified, and committed follower of Christ, Dallas had Dr. Hood, a narcissist committed to self-aggrandizement, sexual deviance, and syncretism.

After the shocking shootings of Dallas police officers, Hood—an admirer of Jeremiah Wright—could be found all over the airwaves, including on The Kelly File with Megyn Kelly.

Hood, a father of five young children, offers this description of himself on his website:

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Baptist pastor, theologian and activist living and working in Texas. A graduate of Auburn University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, University of Alabama and Creighton University, Dr. Hood also concluded a Doctorate of Ministry in Queer Theology at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. Dr. Hood was ordained at a church within the Southern Baptist Convention in 2006 and received standing in the United Church of Christ in 2015.

The author of ten books (The Queer: An Interaction with The Gospel of John, The Queering of an American Evangelical, The Sociopathic Jesus, The Year of the Queer, Jesus on Death Row, Frances, Last Words from Texas: Meditations from the Execution Chamber, The Rearing of an American Evangelical, The Courage to Be Queer and The Basilica of the Swinging D*cks)…In 2013, Dr. Hood was awarded PFLAG Fort Worth’s Equality Award for Activism….With deep soul and a belief that God is “calling us to something queerer,” Dr. Hood is a radical mystic and prophetic voice to a closed society.

Just two months ago, the Dallas Observer profiled Hood:

Hood says he’s anointed “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” “Jesus wasn’t a Christian” is one of his sayings. He thinks “Jesus has a vagina,” [and] “Jesus is queer” is one [of his sayings] that spurred hundreds of rebukes from Christians across Facebook, calling him a “false prophet,” a “charlatan,” and “nothing more than a left-wing activist.” Some of his former congregation put him in the ranks of scandalous TV evangelists like Jim Bakker.

…

He also suffers from bipolar disorder, which sometimes means hallucinations and bouts of paranoia.

After leaving the Southern Baptist denomination and purportedly seeking treatment for his mental illness, Hood started a church for homosexuals in a Denton, Texas homosexual bar that lasted a year. Former church members’ descriptions of Hood some remarkably like descriptions of cult leaders:

“After working within the church for several months as an ‘elder,’ it became apparent that a lot of the leader’s misogynistic white male privilege kept showing, regardless of how much he would hide it under a thin veil of faux hipster economic struggling.”…When various issues or statements regarding upsetting comments that could be perceived as misogynistic or offensive were brought to the leader’s attention, they were usually met with a defensive, self-pitying martyrdom which was served to give him immunity from any and all criticism.”

Another wrote, “No criticism of the pastor was allowed. If someone challenged his behavior, he told lies about them to the congregation. If someone brought up problematic elements of the church, they were immediately silenced. It wasn’t until I spoke with other people who had left that we began to realize the amount of lies that we had been told about [one another]. I left the church because I experienced firsthand the pastor’s lies, manipulation and lack of boundaries.

For a time, Hood was involved with the largest homosexual church in America, Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ (UCC) in Dallas, but like so many of his endeavors, this relationship was short-lived. After Hood was arrested and briefly jailed in Ferguson, Missouri, where, according to Hood, he was one of the protest leaders, Hood hurled epithets at his former church leaders at the Cathedral of Hope, complaining that “ those chicken sh*t a**holes…didn’t even announce that I had been arrested at church.”

Hood and his wife Emily support their five children under five (including two sets of twins) by “being creative, she as an artist and he as a writer, but they also receive help from friends and Hood’s 88-year-old grandfather, who still doesn’t quite understand his grandson’s ministry.”

On his blog, a picture of a deeply troubled  man and heretic emerges.

Hood expresses his appreciation for the “public witness” of Reverend Charles Moore who lit himself on fire to express “his frustration with the United Methodist Church’s position on human sexuality, opposition to the death penalty, disdain for racism (especially in his hometown of Grand Saline) and his deep anger at Southern Methodist University’s decision to house the George W. Bush Presidential Center.”

Hood asserts that  “Jesus sinned. Jesus was a racist y’all.” He finds everything “[f]rom the historical personhood of Adam and Eve to ideas of substitutionary atonement to a literal hell to the impending return of Jesus” to be “really problematic doctrines.”

And here is how he concluded one of his sermons:

Love your neighbor…put down your gun.

Love your neighbor…open your borders.

Love your neighbor…embrace the revolutionary spirit of our age.

Love your neighbor…be queer.

Last December, Hood posted an obscene novella he’s penned, a perverse, poorly written tale that, like John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, has a main character  named “Christian” whose story begins with a sojourn in jail. Reading The Basilica of Swinging D*cks offers a glimpse into Hood’s spiritually darkened mind. The rambling story is replete with references to homoerotic sex and masturbation. The first-person narrator Christian describes even the church building in sacrilegious terms: “At the top of the Cathedral, we placed a phallic steeple shooting up to heaven with a cross coming out of the domed tip.”

With the first black president fomenting social and political division, with public school teachers indoctrinating children with an imbalanced picture of American history, and with rebellious syncretists preaching heresies in our churches, it’s no wonder that racial tensions are escalating. Hood, a mentally ill, narcissistic heretic deserves neither pulpits nor press conferences.

Read more about Black Lives Matter HERE.

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Renowned Evangelical flagship Wheaton College has been embroiled in a controversy generated by the Facebook statement from associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She made this statement when she announced that during the entire Advent season, she would wear a hijab, the traditional head-covering required of Muslim women when in public. Hawkins viewed this as an act of “embodied politics, embodied solidarity” as opposed to what she deems “theoretical solidarity.” Wandering around America wearing a hijab was Hawkins’ rather peculiar application of James 2:26: “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”

Hawkins also strangely believes that her claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is not a theological statement. Perhaps she didn’t intend it to be a theological statement, but it quite definitively is.

In a justifiable attempt to discern how closely Hawkins hews to the Statement of Faith that all Wheaton faculty sign, she was asked to clarify her theological beliefs and subsequently to clarify her murky “nuanced” clarification (Her clarifying theological statement has a curious explanation of the Eucharist), at which point Hawkins took umbrage, arguing that her annual signature on the Statement of Faith is sufficient. She has been suspended, and Wheaton is under attack from within and without the Wheaton College community.

Poisonous allegations have emerged from those who detest the biblical orthodoxy of Wheaton and the cultural beliefs that emerge from it that Wheaton administrators and/or trustees are treating Hawkins unfairly because of hidden or not-so-hidden racism. Less poisonous but problematic nonetheless are complaints that the culture of Wheaton restricts academic freedom and limits diversity.

Hawkins’ suspension and the debate about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God reveal a troubling fissure created by a handful of Wheaton faculty members who tilt leftward on both theological and so-called “social issues.” This divide needs to be more comprehensively and clearly exposed to all Wheaton College stakeholders, including alumni donors.

With dancing-on-pinheads complexity, Wheaton urban studies associate professor Noah Toly, Princeton systematics professor Bruce Lindley McCormick, and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf have all assured the nation that there are strong (though abstruse) arguments to defend Hawkins’ theological view of the sameness of the god of Islam and the God of the Bible. But then there are others, like president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Dr. Al Mohler, Moody Bible Church pastor Dr. Erwin Lutzer, theologian Peter Leithart, and Christian apologist for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Nabeel Qureshi, all of whom, though acknowledging the complexity of the theological issue, argue that the god of Islam and the God of the Bible are not the same.

What is most interesting about the debate is that those Wheaton professors most ardently supportive of Hawkins’ liberal-ish theological views are also those professors most ardently liberal on social issues. Coincidence?

Two of the most prominent defenders of Hawkins are also likely sitting port-side on the flagship Wheaton: Michael Mangis and Brian Howell.

Professor Michael Mangis

Dr. Michael Mangis is a psychology professor who on Monday, the first day of the new semester, shivered around campus and to his classes wearing his academic regalia (i.e., cap, gown, hood) to signify solidarity with Hawkins and to show his commitment to “learning,” which he asserts Wheaton has lost as evidenced by their effort to ensure that Wheaton faculty affirm theological orthodoxy:

The academic robe has long been a symbol of learning. And learning requires humility and a willingness to be changed….[The] college as an institution is refusing to learn. I’m going to wear this robe as a reminder and a call to us to return to learning.

I wonder if Mangis is open to learning and willing to change.

Christian parents of Wheaton students, Wheaton donors, trustees, and administrators should be deeply troubled by the comment that Mangis left under Hawkins’ initial Facebook post: “If you get any grief at work give me a heads-up because I’ll be leading my spring psychology of religion class in Muslim prayers.” Even liberal supporter Mangis could see the problematic nature of Hawkins’ theological claim even before the imbroglio began.

A young pastor and friend who attended Wheaton for both undergraduate and graduate school asked the question that parents, trustees, and administrators should be asking: “In what universe should Christian instruction include Muslim prayers?”

In an interview about the controversy, Mangis shared that he’s volunteered to teach about “white privilege” at a student-organized “teach-in.” No need for Wheaton students to travel to the annual White Privilege Conference when they’ve got ever-learning, ever-changing psychology professor Mangis right there at Wheaton.

In a biased Chicago Tribune “news” story yesterday, Mangis whined about lack of diversity at Wheaton:

We have been entrenched in a white male evangelical groupthink for so long….We need to get out of that. It has come by bringing fresh voices and new perspectives. But when you have those fresh voices, you can’t say you don’t sound enough like a white male evangelical. [Hawkins] was not sounding enough like the old school way of doing things.

Yeah, you wouldn’t want any old-school, white, male perspectives on the nature of God to interfere with political science professor Hawkins’ fresh perspective on it.

But wait. I’m confused. Those arguing that, yes, indeedy, Christians and Muslims worship the same God explained that such a perspective is old, very, very old, and espoused by a boatload of men, many of whom had the distinct misfortune of being white.

It is true that the ideological diversity of faculty members is limited by Wheaton’s intellectual and moral commitments, just as the ideological diversity of faculty members at colleges that formally espouse liberal intellectual and moral commitments regarding homosexuality and gender dysphoria is limited. What liberals really desire is the eradication of institutional places for orthodox theological views and conservative moral views to be taught. If one exists, they seek to regulate it out of existence or infiltrate it and change it from within.

Professor Brian Howell

Mangis wasn’t alone on Monday. With his solidarity snazzily embodied, anthropology professor Dr. Brian Howell also sashayed about campus in his academic regalia. Howell first came to my attention following the resignation last July of Julie Rodgers, Wheaton College’s most recent and notable bad hire. (Interesting side note, Rodgers was standing behind Hawkins at her recent press conference.)

Rodgers is well-known for her self-identification as a “celibate gay Christian.” She was hired in the Fall of 2014 as a ministry associate for spiritual care in the Chaplain’s Office to counsel students experiencing same-sex attraction. When she was hired many people who love Wheaton College were deeply troubled because of Rodger’s perspective on and seeming flippancy about homoerotic attractions as revealed in statements like this:

When I feel all Lesbiany, I experience it as a desire to build a home with a woman that will create an energizing love that spills over into the kind of hospitality that actually provides guests with clean sheets and something other than protein bars…. This causes me to see the world through a different lens than my straight peers, to exist in the world in a slightly different way. As God has redeemed and transformed me, he’s tapped into those gay parts of me that now overflow into compassion for marginalized people and empathy for social outcasts

A year later, in July, 2015, Rodgers wrote that she had evolved and no longer opposes homoerotic relationships:  “I’ve quietly supported same-sex relationships for a while now. When friends have chosen to lay their lives down for their partners, I’ve celebrated their commitment to one another.” Rodgers then rightly resigned.

After her resignation, president of the Manhattan Declaration and Wheaton College alumnus Eric Teetsel wrote on his Facebook page that Wheaton College owed Wheaton students, their parents, and alumni an apology for hiring her. Howell arrogantly and hostilely replied both to Teetsel and to other commenters:

Eric, you are being a jerk here. Wheaton does not need to “apologize” for Julie. She did not “affirm” or counsel students into same-sex relationships. She SAYS, if you will READ it, that she assumes some, in their desire to follow Jesus, will find themselves in same-sex relationships. I knew this would happen. People who make a living stoking the fires of the culture war would throw this down. “See, told you so! Gay people! It’s how they are!” I just wish you could be better than that.…

Sometimes bad behavior needs to be called out, and this sort of culture warring is un-Christian and reprehensible. I’m not impugning [Eric’s] salvation. Yes, he is a Christian. I just don’t think he’s acting like it right now….[Eric’s] post is just a smug little victory dance and is, well, jerky.

…

For the record, Eric was a student of mine (for one class) when he was at Wheaton, so, yes, I may take a condescending tone, but I will always see him as a younger brother and former student. That’s just how it goes.

As a parent of two Wheaton grads (who married Wheaton grads), I wholeheartedly agree that the Wheaton administration owed students and their parents an apology for such a terrible hire. The problematic nature of Rodgers’ ideas about homosexuality was clear before Wheaton hired her.

Leftist arrogance is on display when Howell claims that “this sort of culture warring is un-Christian,” while apparently believing his sort of culture-warring is Christian. Howell’s implicit accusation that Teetsel is stoking the fires of the culture war is absurd. It’s pyro-“progressives” who started the fires and unashamedly fuel them. Every politically engaged conservative I know sincerely desires for the cultural conflagration to be extinguished posthaste but not at the cost of sacrificing marriage, truth, and the eternal lives of those trapped within false religions or destructive ideologies.

“Progressives,” on the other hand, seem to want the fires to die down only after they’ve engulfed the entire culture. They would like theologically orthodox men and women to pipe down while children, teens, and adults become entangled in deception and confusion. Far too many theologically orthodox Christians have been silent in response to the pernicious ideas torching the earth.

I spent some time on Howell’s Facebook page to see if I could figure out which “sort of culture-warring” is  Christian:

• He’s glad about InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s controversial invitation to a representative from the far Left, homosexuality-affirming Black Lives Matter organization to speak at a recent conference.
• He wants America to stop talking about building a fence on the border with Mexico.
• He wants Nevada to go solar.
• He wants more persons of color in academia (I haven’t seen any posts yet about the dearth of conservatives—both colorless and colorful—in secular academia).
• He supports Bernie Sanders’ position on student debt.
• He opposes palm oil plantations that harm rainforests.
• He supports more government regulation of guns.

Since Howell posts a lot about injustice, I was eager to read his posts about the most egregious ongoing injustice in America—the genocide of the unborn—which became a huge national debate following the release of undercover videos that exposed the reality of abortionists’ view of humans in utero. I managed to find one post by Howell on this unspeakable American horror. He posted a piece from liberal Jesuit magazine America that he described as “a very careful and balanced perspective.” The article is an extended criticism of the Center for Medical Progress for what the writer believes is unfair, selective editing. The following day after intense criticism, the writer added a clarification that he opposes abortion. Howell posted his recommendation of the article prior to the clarification.

So, other than opposing unfair, selective editing of the undercover videos, Howell is silent on the legalized slaughter of the unborn.

Perhaps I overlooked them, but I also couldn’t find any posts about the gross injustice represented by the Obergefell travesty that imposed same-sex faux-marriage on the entire country—a decision with grave implications for children’s rights and the First Amendment.

I did notice a couple of Howell’s Facebook “likes” that are difficult to reconcile with theological orthodoxy. He “likes” Wild Gender, “an online art space born out of gratitude for the gift of full expression. Who would we be without those who walked so wildly before? As such, WG strives to provide a space for  queer and gender-variant art makers and purveyors to share work and praxis, aiming to amplify those with intersectional identities.”

He also “likes” Rainbow Moms which invites “Proud Rainbow Moms [and] parents of LGBTQ kids! We are proud of our kids, and we are here to support each other in our new community! What is NOT welcome: Intolerance, Religious rhetoric, Anti LGBT speech or links.”

While Wheaton is under scrutiny for the doctrinal beliefs of a faculty member and cultural application of those beliefs, perhaps it would be a good time to hear with clarity what Mangis, Howell and all other Wheaton faculty members believe about issues upon which theology directly appertains, like abortion, homosexuality, and gender dysphoria.

What is really revealed through this controversy is not hidden racism, white privilege, academic provincialism, or an institutional resistance to learning. What is revealed is spiritual warfare. The nature and intensity of the criticism directed at this small private college, which stands courageously for Christ and His Kingdom in the midst of an ocean of colleges and universities that stand arrogantly in opposition to Christ and truth, exposes nothing other than old-as-the-hills spiritual warfare. Make no mistake, doctrinal fidelity at Wheaton College matters.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington. Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Written by Rev. Dr. Eric M. Wallace, PhD.

Part I exposed the motives and ideology of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) founders. Part II explores further why BLM is problematic for theologically orthodox Christians and how the church should respond to it.

The Danger of BLM

One of the dangers of BLM is that it pulls on the heartstrings of those who really care about life—both blacks and whites. Ironically, those who claim concern for black lives ignore the abortion of black babies and the killing of black boys by other black boys in gang violence. While focusing almost exclusively on race as the source of injustice and harm, BLM engage in the politics of racial grievance.

The politics of racial grievance trigger an emotional response that ultimately shuts down logical inquiry or debate, rendering people vulnerable to emotional manipulation. It is designed to exploit whites and blacks alike. In whites, it creates guilt for segregation, Jim Crow laws, and slavery even though systemic racism was defeated decades ago. The politics of racial grievance is intended to make whites feel guilty so that they’ll make concessions to black leadership, funding the programs and activities sanctioned by black leaders.

The politics of racial grievance works on black people too. It galvanizes black solidarity behind a cause, including causes unworthy of black allegiance. The idea is that if anyone should be “down with the cause,” black people should, and if you’re not, you’re a sell-out, an Uncle Tom. Black people are expected to support black causes, period. No questions asked.

This is not a new phenomenon. Booker T. Washington identified people in his day that used the politics of racial grievance to manipulate blacks:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

The dubious goal of the politics of racial grievance exploited by BLM and others is to finance their causes. Thus, in order to advance their agendas, they have to come up with a negative narrative regardless of its veracity. The story must pull on the heartstrings of blacks to ensure solidarity and of whites to keep them feeling guilty and compliant. Hence, the false narrative that “Blacks are being gunned down by white cops” excites those who have been conditioned to accept the claim regardless of its factual accuracy.

Black solidarity is often at odds with the truths of God’s Word. It pulls black Christians away from their solidarity with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For an example, in 1995 Louis Farrakhan and purportedly Christian ministers called on black men to travel to Washington D.C. for a day of atonement for their sins and individual and collective signs of reconciliation to their families and community. On the surface such an appeal appears reasonable and even praiseworthy. Those who take the Bible seriously, however, understand that the work of atonement was made through Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection:

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.  (Heb. 10:10-14)

Hebrews 10:26 says, that there is no other sacrifice for sin. Therefore, it is impossible for us to find any other atonement other than what Jesus did for us at Calvary. Neither the Nation of Islam nor Islam understands or adheres to this theology.

Furthermore, Christians should not be following people who don’t understand who Christ is and what He did. The Million Man March gave legitimacy to Farrakhan who neither understands nor affirms Christian theology. I would speculate that neither did the many ministers who were involved in this charade, which birthed nothing and made a mockery of Christianity. It is the people of God—committed followers of Jesus Christ—not the Nation of Islam or BLM, who must take a stand for true reconciliation and repentance.

Loyalty to the King

We can’t allow people who have no loyalty to Christ and His Kingdom to move us to disloyalty simply by appealing to the color of our skin. The call to follow Christ means leaving racial solidarity behind, especially when it conflicts with our identity in and solidarity with Jesus. Racial solidarity, apart from Christ, is idolatry.

In Matthew 10:37 Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

He repeats it again in Matthew 16:24: “‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’”

The forsaking of familial relationships also applies to racial and ethnic allegiances. Allegiance and honor to Christ must always be first.

Response of the Church

Matthew 5:13 tells us that as members of the Kingdom of Heaven and disciples of Christ, we are the “salt of the earth”—the preservative and seasoning agents of the earth. Verse 5:14 also calls us the “light of the World.” As Christ followers, our purpose is to bear light in the world, so that our good works will be seen by others and give glory to God. The question is, does Black Lives Matter meet these criteria? It depends on how you understand “good works.”

Just before these verses are found the Beatitudes where Jesus teaches about the foundations of righteous living: those who are poor in Spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted because of righteousness. Jesus, the righteous King, calls upon his disciples to be righteous: doing what God commands us. By doing so, we act as salt and light to the World.

So, how do we do that? How do we apply these principles of righteousness in our daily lives?

In Matthew 5:20, we are told that our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. This is not a works-based salvation but, rather, a recognition that Jesus is the fulfillment of all righteousness, the law, and the Prophets (Matt. 5:17). True disciples of Jesus take on His righteous mantel as sons and daughters of God.

In contrast, the scribes and Pharisees are hypocrites who practice “their righteousness” before men.  Jesus warns, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 6:1).

God’s righteousness is different from that of the Pharisees, or in our case the practices of BLM.

1. It must exceed the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law (5:21-48)
2. It must exceed the Pharisees’ motivation (6:1-21)
3. It must exceed the Pharisees’ value system (6:22-34)
4. It must exceed the Pharisees’ relationships (7:1-12)

If our righteousness does not affect our relationships with others, it lacks true fellowship with God.

Conclusion

BLM has created a false image. The BLM movement is interested in promoting a “progressive” social and political agenda—not in truly protecting black lives. They affirm homosexual activity and relationships, illegal immigration, and black liberation. Stories of the indisputably tragic deaths of black people at the hands of white cops are continually propagated while the tragic and senseless loss of preborn black babies’ lives and the lives of blacks gunned down in gang violence receive relatively little public attention.

Unfortunately, instead of uniting voices in an urgent call for righteousness and right relations between people, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, BLM encouraged civil disobedience that became violent. How does that square with what Jesus said in Matthew 5:43-44: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

The church has lost its way. We are suffering the consequences of having far too many church attendees and not enough disciples. After his resurrection, Jesus spoke these words:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matt. 28: 18-20).

It’s high time we focus on what Jesus commands. Indeed, He died and rose again because black lives do matter. However, He calls those black lives and all who would follow Him to a greater righteousness that is only found through life lived in Him. The church has the authority to change our communities for Christ, but it must be done for His glory and not our own agenda. It must be done in a way that glorifies God and does not promote racial division. May God help us to faithfully follow after Him, forsaking all else.

Read Part I here.

Dr. Eric Wallace is the co-founder and president of Freedom’s Journal Institute, and has organized the Black Conservative Summit and a one day conference “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”  Dr. Wallace and his wife Jennifer live in the south suburbs of Chicago.

Support IFI

Please consider helping to support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

or online:

Written by Rev. Dr. Eric M. Wallace, PhD.

In my lifetime I have seen a number of organizations and movements pull at the heartstrings of the African American community. In 1995 it was the Million Man March calling on black men to atone for their failings. Today, it is the Black Lives Matter movement that draws our attention and concern. Who of African descent can disagree with the idea that black lives matter? My mother is black. My father is black. My brother and cousins are black. My wife and children are black. How could I not be interested in this movement? How could we not be concerned about the young black men dying at an alarming rate at the hands of police officers and gang violence?

A few months ago, I reluctantly accepted an invitation to speak on the topic of whether Christians should be involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. The topic was especially timely because of growing racial unrest over the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago (October 2014), the shooting death of Michael Brown (August 2014) and the gang assassination of Tyshawn Lee. It was also timely because in July 2015, our organization, Freedom’s Journal Institute, held a conference titled “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”

The video of Laquan McDonald’s murder had just come to light, and demonstrations were happening in Chicago. These demonstrations were led by people I didn’t necessarily agree with and whose tactics I did not view as glorifying to God. Once I visited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) website, however, I was glad I had accepted the speaking engagement. The BLM website specifically identifies itself with the black liberation movement:

#BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society….It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.

Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.  It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.  It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

The history, leadership, and troubling emphases of the BLM movement–including how it addresses homosexuality and gender confusion–must be exposed.

The differences between the Civil Rights Movement and the black liberation movement are significant. While the Civil Rights Movement was led by ministers, many of whom held a biblical worldview and infused their protests with prayer, the black liberation movement was associated with the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and Marxist ideology.  Unfortunately, today’s civil right leaders have largely abandoned a biblical worldview.

The identity of the founders of BLM helps explain the radical underpinnings of the BLM movement. Three community organizer/activist women founded this organization after the death of Trayvon Martin. Two of the three, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, identify as “queer” black women. The third founder, Opal Tometi, executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration, explained in an interview with The Nation that “we are diligently uplifting black trans women and so the work on the ground in many places does reflect that.”

According to Truthout, Tometi, who is the child of parents who immigrated to the United States illegally, explains that BLM was “[n]ever simply a reaction to police violence against African Americans in the United States, Black Lives Matter was always conceived of as a strategic response to white supremacy.”

In an interview with Cosmopolitan Magazine, Ms. Cullors shared that she is inspired by Assata Shakur who was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper and who escaped from federal prison and has been living freely in Cuba since 1984. Shakur was also a member of the former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army.

Christians who take the Bible seriously must not affirm either homosexuality or gender-confusion. In Romans 1:18-32, Paul teaches  that God unequivocally condemns homosexual practice. Paul also made clear in 1 Corinthians that God can bring deliverance from sins—including homosexual practice:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

By affirming what God condemns, BLM stands in opposition to the transformative power of Jesus.

While BLM claims to seek justice for oppressed and victimized persons around the world, they fail to address the genocide of black babies through abortion or the deaths of young African American males from gang violence in their list of social injustices. Apparently, what matters most to BLM is ideology.

Reading the “Herstory” page on the BLM website illuminates the organization’s central concerns:

1. Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.
2. Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention.
3. Black people are deprived of basic human rights and dignity.
4. Black poverty and genocide is state violence.
5. When black people get free, everybody gets free.
6. Black liberation has played an important role in inspiring and anchoring, through practice and theory, social movements for the liberation of all people.

I was surprised to find that with the exception of the last one, I agree with these beliefs. I disagree, however, with the causes of the problems as well as the solutions. What is omitted from the concerns of BLM is the place that both liberal public policy and Planned Parenthood have had in “systematically and intentionally” targeting and destroying the black community. And because BLM gets the causes wrong, it gets the solutions wrong as well.

Whereas BLM sees white supremacy and institutional racism as the causes of the poverty and violence that afflict the black community, conservatives view the causes as bad governmental practices and policies. Most conservatives have long argued that liberal public policies have “systemically targeted” the black family. Blacks have been “deprived of their human rights and dignity” through government largess, which has perpetuated poverty and destroyed the black family. In other words, the “state” has committed violence against black people.

The very liberal social agenda embraced by “progressives” who pursue bigger, more intrusive government continues to harm the lives of blacks. For example, here in Illinois, the economy and public school system, shaped for decades by liberals and liberal policy, are among the worst in the nation. Whose lives are harmed most directly and significantly by our terrible economy and government schools? Black lives.

Worse still, Planned Parenthood (and the abortion lobby in general) has targeted the black community “for demise” since the days when its racist founder Margaret Sanger led the organization. Planned Parenthood continues to commit genocide against black babies.

According to BLM, “black liberation” can be achieved only by reversing the roles of master and slave. The tragic truth is that the policies sought by BLM only serve to keep the black community enslaved. The freedom BLM proposes is not freedom at all. It is slavery under a different master. It calls on black Christians who are already free in Christ to abandon their freedom for black solidarity, which for the Christian is a form of idolatry. The politics of BLM is the politics of racial grievance, a tool used to manipulate both blacks and whites alike.

Read part two HERE.

Dr. Eric Wallace is the co-founder and president of Freedom’s Journal Institute, and has organized the Black Conservative Summit and a one day conference “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”  Dr. Wallace and his wife Jennifer live in the south suburbs of Chicago.

Support IFI

Please consider helping to support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188