In 1629, the first American balloting for an election occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. The issue? Choosing a minister and choosing a Christian teacher for the colony. “Such is the origin of the use of the ballot on this continent; [Samuel] Skelton was chosen pastor and [Francis] Higginson teacher.”  So writes George Bancroft, an early American historian, on this first election on American soil in Volume I of his 6-volume, History of the United States of America (1882).

Historian Paul Johnson writes in his 1997 classic, A History of the American People: “In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start.”

And Christians in America have been voting ever since.

Founding father Samuel Adams once said, “Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”

However, there has arisen a feeling among some professing believers that somehow it is spiritual to not participate in something as earthly as politics.

As the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, noted pastor and author, once said: “A Christian said to me, ‘You don’t really believe that Christians should get active in politics do you?’ And I said, with tongue in cheek, ‘Why, of course not, we ought to leave it to the atheists. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have anything to complain about. And we’d really rather complain than do something, wouldn’t we?’”

But today we find ourselves in such a mess in America that the very least Christians could do is vote, and vote our Biblical values.

Some people have written off elections because they think it’s all rigged. They look at some of the anomalies that have occurred in recent balloting, and they think, “Why should I even bother? My vote won’t count.” Well, if you don’t cast a vote, your potential vote certainly won’t count.

With great understatement, Gary Bauer notes in his End of Day Report (10/28/22), “We know unhinged leftists are not constrained by the basic teachings of Judeo-Christian civilization. They feel justified in doing anything and everything necessary to win.”

But if Christians show up in great numbers, we can overcome the potential for cheating because the Christian conservative voting bloc is huge.

About a decade ago, Alveda King, the niece of MLK, made some interesting observations about Christians and voting in an interview for television.

Alveda told me, “I hear remarks from both sides of the aisle. You know, ‘God’s not a Republican’ and ‘God’s not a Democrat.’ And so, we as God-fearing people don’t need to try to lock in a position to a political party, but certainly our votes must always follow our values.”

One of those values is against abortion and for life. Meanwhile, the left is embracing abortion to the hilt. When we vote Biblical values, we obey what the Lord would have us do.

Writing for the Washington Times (10/30/22), Everett Piper, a former president of a Christian college, opines on how far to the left the left has gone these days because of things like the castration of children and pornography in the schools: “The Democrat party is now so extreme that no serious follower of Christ can align with it. There is no longer any such thing as a ‘Christian Democrat.’”

The aforementioned Dr. Kennedy once declared that it is indeed a sin not to vote. His proof-text was from the passage in the Gospel, where Jesus said that we should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s (Mark 12:17).

On the issue of voting, he said: “For non-Christian Americans, voting is a privilege and responsibility; for Christians, it is a duty demanded by God that we should fulfill.” [Emphasis his]

It has been said that in America, we get the kind of government we deserve.

Historically, Christians in America applied their faith to virtually every sphere of life, including their politics. While the founding fathers were not all Christians, the vast majority of them were, and more importantly they had a Biblical worldview.

So, for example, they divided power, since they knew man is sinful. James Madison, one of the key architects of the Constitution, noted: “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” This is a Biblical perspective. Sometimes people complain that the Constitution limits the amount of power any one single branch may have. That was by design.

The only poll that counts is the one you cast at election time. Don’t sit this one out. As the late Bishop Harry Jackson once declared, “Too many people died for the right of all people in the nation to vote.”

With a bang of a gavel in 1973, 63 million fellow Americans were condemned to die. And the number keeps growing.

Now if the U.S. Senate confirms Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, another pro-abortion justice will be added to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last week, Judge Jackson, nominated by Biden to the U.S. Supreme Court, faced four days of hearings in the U.S. Senate. South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham raised an intriguing point to her: “Every group that wants to pack the court, that believes the court is a bunch of right-wing nuts who are going to destroy America, that considers the Constitution ‘trash’—all wanted you picked. That is all I can say. That so many of these left-wing radical groups who would destroy the law as we know it…supported you is problematic for me.”

Jon Schweppe of the American Principles Project noted, “On abortion and religious liberty, it’s clear where she stands. Jackson co-authored an amicus brief for the Massachusetts NARAL chapter characterizing pro-life sidewalk counselors as ‘indisputably harmful’ and supporting the notion that they should not be allowed anywhere near an abortion clinic.”

He adds, “Why would leftist groups like American Atheists, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association and the Southern Poverty Law Center push the White House to nominate Jackson and the Senate to confirm?….Ketanji Brown Jackson is a woke Trojan horse, as the preponderance of evidence suggests.”

When asked to define what a woman is, Judge Jackson declined, claiming she’s “not a biologist.” When asked when human life begins, she said to Louisiana U.S. Senator John Kennedy: “Senator, um… I don’t know.”

Gary Bauer responded to her answer: “Of course, this well-educated, Harvard graduate knows life begins at conception. The problem is that she’s all in on abortion on demand.”

The U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) established by judicial fiat a right to abortion. Thus abortion, said Judge Jackson, is “settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a pregnancy. They established a framework the court has reaffirmed.”

One Constitutional authority had some criticisms of Roe v. Wade as a legal opinion. She said that Roe “tried to do too much, too fast—it essentially made every abortion restriction in the country at the time illegal in one fell swoop—leaving it open to fierce attacks. ‘Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped…may prove unstable.’”

Who was this radical anti-abortion activist that would dare criticize the left’s most beloved decision? It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg–before she became a justice on the high court who did everything in her power to preserve Roe v. Wade.

Writing for Lifenews.com, Micaiah Bilger observes that Judge Jackson has called peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors at abortion clinics “hostile, noisy and in your face” people.

Bilger added, “Jackson has the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which advocates for abortions without limits up to birth…She also ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the billion-dollar abortion chain Planned Parenthood, and she clerked for pro-abortion Justice Stephen Breyer when he issued an opinion against the partial-birth abortion ban.”

I believe abortion is the single most important political issue of our time. It’s not complicated. Abortion takes a human life every time.

When judges rule in favor of abortion, they are playing God. I find it amazing that the left constantly decries bullying, yet they favor abortion rights. What could be more bullying than dismembering a defenseless, unborn child limb by limb because it is perceived as somehow inconvenient?

Some critics on the left, like Bill Maher, say that the only reason conservatives oppose Judge Jackson is because she’s black. But people need to remember that the founder of the nation’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was Margaret Sanger, who spoke at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. She wrote a letter to one of her board members (Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, 12/10/1939): “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” No wonder the majority of abortion facilities are in urban areas—to this day.

In our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, our founders said that our rights come from the Creator—and first among these rights is the “right to life.” Indeed, if you’re dead, how can you enjoy any other right?

The U.S. Constitution, which is predicated on the Declaration, notes in the preamble that one of its purposes is: “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Our posterity? That is, the yet to be born.

To paraphrase Dr. D. James Kennedy, Judge Jackson should get down on her knees and thank God that her mother wasn’t “pro-choice.”

If you get abortion wrong, you tend to get everything else wrong too.

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Jerry Newcombe

After President Donald Trump named Vice President Mike Pence last week to lead nation’s battle against the coronavirus, many in the media decried the choice because supposedly Mike Pence “doesn’t believe in science.” How could he? He’s a Christian. So the logic goes.

They mock along the lines of: Maybe he just wants to pray the virus away.

The late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped, “Why is Mike Pence in charge? What is his plan to stop the virus, abstinence?”

Writing for mediaite.com (2/26/20), Reed Richardson noted,

“President Donald Trump’s decision to task Mike Pence with heading up the federal government’s coronavirus response triggered an immediate backlash as critics noted the vice president’s record of doubting scientific evidence and his role in exacerbating an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor.”

Richardson argues that Pence allegedly did a poor job in quelling the HIV outbreak in Indiana because for two days, he cancelled a needle exchange program and supposedly during those two days, the HIV “infection rates exploded.” After praying about it, Pence relented. An explosion of new cases in just two days?

Meanwhile, Richardson has compiled many comments from those criticizing Trump’s choice of Pence for this fight. Included in the criticisms is that he doesn’t believe in “climate science.” Why should he? Man-made catastrophic climate change is a hoax.

Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted against the choice of Pence: “Trump’s plan for the coronavirus so far:…Have VP Pence, who wanted to ‘pray away’ HIV epidemic, oversee the response…Disgusting.”

Another socialist, Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented:

“Mike Pence literally does not believe in science. It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic.”

One critic tweeted:

“America is a driving force in fighting epidemics, and now the director of that fight is Mike Pence, a guy who’s [sic] scientific knowledge consists of how many times you have to pray before you’re cured of being gay.”

An M.D. remarked,

“Trump names Mike Pence as the Coronavirus Czar rather than CDC Director Robert Redfield or Surgeon General Jerome Adams. A physician should be in charge of the nation’s coronavirus response, not some dude who quarantines himself from other women when dining out.”

It seems like most of the criticisms are that Pence is unqualified to head up this task force because he is a devout Christian. Therefore, the same people who argue that a man can give birth  are pro-science, while because of his Christianity, Mike Pence is supposedly anti-science.

The canard that Christians are somehow anti-science is astounding. After all, Christian invented modern science. As the great astronomer Johannes Kepler put it, the scientist is a priest of the Most High God, “thinking His thoughts after Him.” A rational God had created a rational world, and it was the scientist’s job to try and discover God’s laws in nature.

The founder of every major branch of science was created by a Bible-believing Christian of one stripe or another. I highlighted this in a previous post. As the great evangelical thinker, Dr. Os Guinness, once told me, “Actually, many of the earliest, and some of the very greatest of scientists have been people of enormous faith.”

Daniel Lapin is an author and an orthodox Jewish rabbi. He once told me in an interview about the impact of Christianity on the world, “Sir Isaac Newton wrote far more on faith, theology and religion than he wrote on gravitation. And there is a reason for that. Once we are given a clue, wait a second, ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,’ then that tells me that one way I can get to know God better is by studying heaven and earth. And that’s why, until relatively recently, all the great scientists were also great Christians.”

Lapin also said, “If you look at the last thousand years…ninety-eight percent of all the major technological scientific medical advances took place again, let’s face it, under Christendom: they were in Christian countries.”

As D. James Kennedy and I noted in our book, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?: “Both Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) have stressed that modern science was born out of the Christian world view…..Whitehead [in his 1925 book, Science and the Modern World] said that Christianity is the mother of science because of ‘the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.’”

The arguments that Mike Pence is disqualified from serving as the top executive to fight the spread of this virus because of his Christian commitment makes no sense.

Pence has a good record of mobilizing people to work together for the common good—and to do so in a humble attitude of “servant leadership.”

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

As a Wikipedia editor, I’ve made many edits and updates over the years to the American Civil Rights Union’s Wikipedia page without interference.

So, imagine my shock when I was alerted this past Monday that someone had made the page revert to a very old version with content deleted and outright errors inserted. I went online and corrected a couple of things, but my corrections were instantly undone. Then, it got worse.

On Wednesday, another editor removed a lion’s share of the content describing the ACRU’s activities and issues. Gone were entire sections on election law, environmental regulation, gun laws and religious freedom.

Some of the worst damage was done to the personnel section. Judge Robert Bork, who died in December 2012, was updated as a current ACRU Policy Board member. So was James Q. Wilson, the celebrated political scientist who died in March 2012.

On Friday, another editor restored the severely outdated issue sections but left the personnel errors. Earlier, an editor “nominated” the entire ACRU page for “deletion.”

What might seem at first like a trivial nuisance is indicative of the power those hostile to liberty have over those who defend it. To a new generation, Wikipedia is Britannica, but without factual safeguards.

Virtually all of the updates I added over several years were deleted. According to the site history, the revisions by several “editors” began this past April and continued right up through this week.

When I contacted a Wiki administrator who was listed as one of the revisers, I was told that because of my ties to the group (I am an ACRU Senior Fellow) I have a conflict of interest and could not fix anything myself. Instead, I should review a complicated procedure for suggesting edits, which may or may not be made. My request to restore my previous edits in order to correct the many errors was flatly denied.

This is very serious business. It amounts to sabotage.  When people want to learn about an organization or person, they often go straight to Wikipedia. While it’s bad form to cite Wikipedia as a sole source, it’s an excellent starting point for research on any topic. Millions of people access it daily, making it one of the top six websites in the world.

If viewers see an absurdly outdated, sloppy page, it could deeply affect an organization’s ability to get out its message. Frustrated by the intransigence, I looked up Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy, which is murky and geared toward preventing hostile edits that are defamatory or false, or self-serving inaccuracies, not edits of an entirely factual nature, such as listing current personnel or programs.

One of Wikipedia’s cardinal rules is: “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it (boldface in original).”  In the essay, “Wikipedia: Ignoring all rules – a beginner’s guide,” it states, “Perhaps the spirit of the rule could be said in an even better way: Use your common sense over anything else.”

Common sense tells me that fixing blatant errors is something that Wikipedia should appreciate.

There is no guarantee that certain administrators will even make suggested edits if they have an ideological axe to grind, as indicated by many of the changes and deletions to the ACRU page even before the big purge.

The editing history reveals these:  “Environmental and property-rights litigation: rename to ‘Environmental regulation’”… “Second Amendment and gun litigation: rename to ‘Gun control.’”

What’s wrong with the previous entries? Ah, one mentions property rights, and the other cites the Second Amendment. The progressive Left prefers they not be mentioned, or even known to younger Americans.

The question is: After years of being left alone, why did the ACRU page suddenly come under such attack? And, have Wikipedia editors subjected other pages of nonprofit groups to this kind of micromanagement? This is beginning to smack of the Obama IRS’s targeting of the tea parties.

Could this have something to do with the fact that the ACRU has been fighting vote fraud by forcing counties to clean up their inaccurate voter rolls and has a case pending in federal district court against high-profile Broward County, Florida?

The malicious trashing of the ACRU’s Wikipedia page is not unlike the damage done to Christian charities by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s false designation of them as “hate groups,” which the charity index GuideStar affixed to these groups’ entries. One of them, D. James Kennedy Ministries, is suing the SPLC for defamation. Good for them.

In May 2016, a report by the website Gizmodo accused Facebook editors of intentionally suppressing articles with conservative content, a practice long suspected by many conservative activists.

Last Monday, PragerU, a nonprofit educational website run by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, filed a lawsuit accusing Google and its subsidiary YouTube of censoring more than 30 of its videos as “inappropriate.”

As fewer and fewer companies control the flow of information, we must be increasingly vigilant for attempts to silence conservative voices.

Wikipedia is supposed to be “self-correcting.” Let it be so.

Article originally posted at Townhall.com.