Kanye West’s new album, Jesus is King, has literally taken social media by storm! Kanye’s recent conversion to Christianity has caused a buzz in both the Christian and non-Christian worlds.

Perhaps his most controversial track on the new gospel album is a song called “Closed on Sunday,” (see lyrics) which Kanye performed recently on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

This line in the song has offended many people, especially those in the LGBTQ community:

Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade

Many media outlets including Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, FoxNews and others have written on how Kanye is promoting a fast-food brand, and one that has a strong connection to Christianity. LGBTQ activists are outraged that he would recommend a “homophobic” restaurant that does not celebrate their lifestyles.

It always surprises me how much outrage a Christian-owned chicken sandwich company can generate. But they aren’t the real story here.

In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Kayne used the term “closed on Sunday,” in the context of his family life.

“I have to protect and take care of my family and make sure with the power that God has put in my hands that I do everything that I can, as the father, to provide the best chance (for them to be) the maximum success they can be.”

I believe the term, “Chick-fil-A,” in the song is simply a metaphor for a larger context. In the corporate world, the restaurant chain has surprised business analysts by choosing to close one day out of seven, in honor of the Bible’s admonition. Honoring God has paid off in huge financial dividends for the company.

Kanye takes that analogy and applies it to the responsibility a father has in stewarding his home (in the same way a CEO must steward a corporation). Tough decisions need to be made. Can a family take time away from digital and social media in order to focus on God and each other? Can we learn to take a Sabbath from the constant pull from the screens in our pocket?

Hold the selfies, put the ’Gram away
Get your family, y’all hold hands and pray

He is referring here to Instagram (the social media of choice for many teens). He suggests that our time could be better spent looking to the Lord, rather than pictures of ourselves.

He also warns of the dangers that lurk in the world and the need for fathers to protect their children.

When you got daughters, always keep ’em safe
Watch out for vipers, don’t let them indoctrinate

Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave

As a father of ten, I resonate with these words. This is my desire as well.

In the interview mentioned above, he also described the devastating impact a life-long pornography addiction has had in his life. From his first exposure when he was only five, he said his addiction fueled most of his decisions throughout his life and career. As a Christian man now, he is battling back. As fathers, we all know the temptations that exist for our families. Being intentional and making tough decisions to honor God above our flesh, will result in spiritual health for us, just as Chick-fil-A has experienced business and financial success. In 1 Samuel 2:15 we are told, “Those who honor Me, I will honor.”

Speaking to this issue of temptation, Kayne says, “Jezebel don’t even stand a chance.”

Realizing the parallel Kanye is making by using the “Closed on Sunday” metaphor, and applying it to our need as families to shut things down and re-prioritize, the song shifts from being a cheap advertisement for a company, or a confusing mishmash of random concepts, to a brilliant apologetic for fathers to fight for their families and make hard decisions to honor God and do what is right. The media has this all wrong. This song has nothing to do with chicken, and everything to do with family.

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A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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Once upon a time in America, society demanded civility and honored women and motherhood.

But honor seems to have been tossed by the wayside in this modern era and exchanged for a cheap view of the female sex.

What happened to so utterly change the widespread estimation of the “fairer” sex?

First, we must understand that our nation’s mores were built upon a biblical worldview. We read this in Proverbs:

Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. (Proverbs 31:30)

He who finds a wife finds a good thing,
And obtains favor from the Lord. (Proverbs 18:22)

The Founders — many of whom were devout Christians and the rest of whom believed in a Creator and respected biblical Christianity — envisioned a country of free men and women and families devoted to one another, worshipping freely.

During the years when Americans adhered to the original worldview of the first settlers and Founders, individuals were treated with respect. Each person was acknowledged as created by God and thus intrinsically valuable.

Women were protected and honored. Pregnant women were protected and honored. Mothers were respected and honored.

But with the twentieth century came some wholly destructive changes.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942, and ushered in the radical notion that babies in the womb had no intrinsic worth. Their worth was determined by their usefulness to society.

Sanger convinced many women that motherhood was not a blessing and that some people by virtue of their mental abilities or race were not worthy of life. This was a monumental lie based on a Darwinist worldview.

Planned Parenthood’s nefarious founder accepted and promoted the philosophical assumptions of “materialism“:

a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

Sanger’s philosophical beliefs contributed to the erosion of the view of mankind as the height of God’s creation, replacing it with a “utilitarian” viewpoint. Utilitarianism deems people worthy of life based on their capacity to contribute to society.

In the span of twenty years many Americans were persuaded that people were not intrinsically valuable because God created them, but rather, a person’s value was dependent upon their utilitarian value.

Next came Hugh Hefner and Second-wave feminists like Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem who persuaded men and women that sex apart from marriage and procreation was fine and dandy. Throw off the chains of old thinking and embrace your sexuality!

Helen Gurley Brown convinced several generations of women to engage in sex outside the safety of a loving marriage. Ms. Brown taught young women, enamored of Cosmo and the free love mantras of the day, that the sole goal of sex was orgasm and pleasure.

Counter that with God’s wondrous idea: sexual intimacy was to be the height of oneness between a man and wife, and the means of procreation. Marriage was intended to be a safe place, a refuge, where a loving husband and wife could raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

But indeed, if humans are not wondrously created by a Creator but, instead, are merely biologic units, then sex is no different than any other biological activity.

Hugh Hefner with his slick Playboy magazine indoctrinated decades of men of all ages with the lie that unrestrained sex is a terrific recreational activity and women’s bodies are the intended venue. Playboy perpetuated the view of women as playmates.

If a man believes that women are good for a thrill, like a ride at Six Flags, he is less likely to consider her character and heart important. He becomes concerned only with her body.

Hefner was a proponent of the “if it feels good do it” movement and convinced millions of men to throw off  archaic, puritanical ideas about womanhood and sex.

It was a very short step from nullifying mankind’s intrinsic value to sex with no restraint.

Add to that horrendous mix of immoral indoctrination the radical feminist movement. If Cosmopolitan magazine was the “bible” of free love, sex and orgasm for the single girl, Gloria Steinem was the prophetess of the sexual revolution.

Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1969, which happily harmonized with Cosmo, further disseminating the dogma of free love and sex without the tedious tether of marriage.

The devotees of Brown and Steinem–who were once college radicals burning bras, protesting the Vietnam War, rebelling against parental authority, and belittling the institution of marriage–are now ensconced in America’s halls of academia teaching malleable young minds.

We now know what happens when you teach a nation that people have no intrinsic value, that women are mere means to pleasure, that women should want unfettered sex whenever and however, and that humans in utero are disposable.

Women in 2017 are beginning to realize that they’ve been sold a rotten to the core bill of goods.

In 2017, America has been forced to reckon with the consequences of almost a century of humanistic, unbiblical, immoral ideology. Free “love” is neither love nor free. It’s hedonism and it’s costly.

Women are objectified. Sexually transmitted diseases proliferate. Unwanted pregnancies terminated by abortion result in, not only murdered babies, but severe depression in women. Men, being denied their rightful duty and purpose to protect women and children, are emasculated and devalued.

How can we turn this around? How can we once again teach the amazing worth of each man and woman, boy and girl?

How can we teach men that women are not playmates to use but, rather, persons created in the image and likeness of God?

How can we turn back the clock to a time when men honored women–a time when men would stand when a lady entered a room?

America can change only if we as a nation turn to the principles that first made us great: God’s principles.

America can become a safe place once more for women and babies if we teach the transcendent truth that “all men [and women] are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Americans can realize the great heritage of our nation if we repent and acknowledge the words of the Psalmist:

Happy are the people whose God is the Lord!

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End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, IFI has a year-end matching challenge to raise $160,000. That’s right, a great group of IFI supporters are colluding with us to provide an $80,000 matching challenge to help support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2018!  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 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

America was founded as a beacon of light, a refuge to those who only wanted to worship the God of the Bible as they saw fit. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, were infused with biblical precepts and a presumption of a Creator and His transcendent Truth.

For over 200 years this experiment in liberty flourished, lighting the world with the light of Truth and Righteousness.

At times during our nation’s history, Americans en masse veered toward the broad path to destruction. And at every departure from upright and moral living, a preacher or prophet of sorts would proclaim the words of God’s inspired Book, people would repent, and our national character would be righted.

God told Israel the truth, which still applies today:

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Deuteronomy 30:19

But in the twentieth century, culture-changers assaulted our society, teaching people to exchange the truth for lies, with cascading and calamitous results. The following have deceived people to choose death, rather than life.

Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), a nurse and proponent of birth control and eugenics, inspired the Nazis with her notions of breeding and forced sterilization to weed out the less than desirable races. “Nurse” Sanger was the Founder and first president of Planned Parenthood.

As I wrote in 2014:

…she formed the organization, American Birth Control League [est. 1921], which would eventually become Planned Parenthood [est. 1952].

And like the modern day organization, cloaking its true agenda in palatable verbiage such as “family planning” and “choice,” Margaret’s goal was far more evil than the respectable facade she presented.

. . .

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

Thanks to Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood has cruelly slaughtered approximately 300,000 pre-born children a year since Roe v. Wade, or about 13.2 MILLION total.

Thanks to Sanger, life has been cheapened, and sexual intimacy divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Sanger pushed America to sow the seeds of destruction and the devaluation of life with abortion and a utilitarian view of human life.

Subsequently we’ve reaped the harvest of catastrophic and crippling depression in generations of women.

Alfred Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was a biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and a sexologist. He is known as the “Father of the Sexual Revolution” and founded the famed Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Kinsey shook the nation with his books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

These books revealed to a shocked and somewhat titillated population things they had never known about themselves: That between 30-45% of men had affairs, 85% of men had had sex prior to marriage, that a staggering 70% of men had slept with prostitutes, and that between 10 and 37% of men had engaged in homosexual behavior.

Alfred Kinsey’s studies, in retrospect, paved the way for hedonistic depravity. And how did Kinsey obtain the findings reported in his books?

Kinsey himself was a pervert and a sex criminal.

For example, where did he get all of his data on the “sexual behavior of children”? The answer is nothing short of chilling. Dr. Judith Reisman (whose research has since been confirmed time and time again) explained in her groundbreaking work Sex, Lies and Kinsey that Kinsey facilitated brutal sexual abuse to children as young as two months old, to get his so-called research:

Kinsey solicited and encouraged pedophiles, at home and abroad, to sexually violate from 317 to 2,035 infants and children for his alleged data on normal “child sexuality.” Many of the crimes against children (oral and anal sodomy, genital intercourse and manual abuse) committed for Kinsey’s research are quantified in his own graphs and charts.

. . .

The Father of the Sexual Revolution was a sado-masochistic bi-sexual sex criminal who facilitated the sexual torture of infants and children.

Thanks in large part to Alfred Kinsey, sexual deviancy and pedophilia were heralded as normal, and any and all sexual activity divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Kinsey taught America to sow the seeds of depraved sexual activity without the good and protective constraints of the previously held Judeo-Christian worldview.

Subsequently our nation has reaped the harvest of lives ruined, marriages wrecked, and all-time high venereal disease — now called Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

More than two million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported in the United States in 2016, the highest number ever, according to the annual Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Increases in STDs are a clear warning of a growing threat,” said Jonathan Mermin, M.D., M.P.H., director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. “STDs are a persistent enemy, growing in number, and outpacing our ability to respond.”

An epidemic accelerating in multiple populations—impact growing in women, infants, and gay and bisexual men.

Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, drop out” affected a generation of rebellious youth in, for the most part, the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Leary’s disciples turned onto drugs, tuned into sex, rock and roll, and dropped out, in many cases dropped dead, including: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Cole (The Association), Gram Parsons (The Byrds), Tommy Bolin (Deep Purple), Gregory Herbert (Blood, Sweat & Tears), Keith Moon (The Who), Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols), Lowell George (Little Feat), and more.

Thanks to the influence of Timothy Leary, a generation or more of Americans chose to escape life via drugs, and became enslaved by LSD, heroin, barbiturates, and other dangerous substances. Thousands of young Americans followed Leary’s direction into an untimely death.

Timothy Leary cajoled Americans to sow the seeds of escapism and societal anarchy and substance abuse.

Subsequently America has reaped the harvest of crime, ruined lives, and death.

Helen Gurley Brown (February 18, 1922 – August 13, 2012) was an author, publisher, and businesswoman. She pushed women in America to throw off their sexual inhibitions. Brown’s book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962) “encouraged women to become financially independent and experience sexual relationships before or without marriage.”

Brown gained further prominence as the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 – 1997. Continuing her mantra of sex without boundaries, Cosmo under HGB “set itself apart by frankly discussing sexuality from the point of view that women could and should enjoy sex without guilt.”

To this day Cosmopolitan is known for its edgy (aka immoral) sexual agenda and in September of this year alone reached over 32 million readers.

Thanks to Helen Gurley Brown, millions of young women were led to believe that sexual intimacy can and should be enjoyed without the burden of marriage and fidelity.

Ms. Brown deceived teen girls and women to sow the seeds of wanton, narcissistic sexuality.

Subsequently American women reaped the harvest of babies out of wedlock, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and ruined lives and marriages.

Hugh Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He rejected the Christian faith of his parents in exchange for a life of rampant sexual conquest. “Hef” was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Playboy magazine. Wikipedia describes Playboy:

Playboy is an American men’s lifestyle and entertainment magazine. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner’s mother. Notable for its centerfolds of nude and semi-nude models (Playmates), Playboy played an important role in the sexual revolution and remains one of the world’s best-known brands, having grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

After his death in September of this year, many in the world were lauding Hugh, such as frequent Playboy model and one-time Playmate of the Year, Jenny McCarthy, who gushed:

[Hugh was] the most good-hearted, caring, generous, supportive friend, and mentor…his zest for life was contagious

McCarthy tweeted:

But what is the truth?

The truth is that Hugh Hefner disseminated the lies that women are playthings (i.e. Playmates), objects of men’s desires and lust, and tools for gratification.

Contrast that with God’s admonition for love within marriage:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Ephesians 5:25

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:33

Thanks to Hugh Hefner, pornography became commonplace in America and women were stripped, not only of their clothing, but of their intrinsic worth. Thanks to Hef, sex became a meaningless pastime, a means to a few moments of physical pleasure, rather than the height of intimacy between husband and wife and a means of procreation.

God created sex to be beautiful and meaningful. Satan, the great liar who loves to offer counterfeits, twists it into a vile, animalistic act.

Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine led our culture to sow seeds of dehumanizing women, and separating sexual intimacy from the safe, loving environment of true marriage.

And subsequently America has reaped a culture teaming with sexual users and predators. Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and the other users in Hollywood and elsewhere didn’t happen in a vacuum, or by accident.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Galatians 6:7

If we repent, as individuals, and as a nation, we can re-light our beacon. But Americans must follow Truth and Life. We must choose Blessing not Cursing. We must reject the false promises and evil teaching of Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey and Timothy Leary and Helen Gurley Brown and Hugh Hefner and others.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Proverbs 14:12

If Americans choose Truth, then we’ll reap blessing and life and life abundantly.

But only if we choose Truth.

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