Our American government is increasingly hostile to Christianity. Just look at the news.

• No room for religious opposition. The Equality Act is again before Congress.[1] In 2020, the same bill was called the “Criminalizing Christianity Act.”[2] Once enacted, you’ll be denied the right to oppose abortions on religious grounds. You’ll also have to accept the transgender lie that men are women if they say they are.

• No room for contrary speech. If you write something that the “woke” crowd doesn’t agree with, it’s called lies, hate, or “disinformation.” What you say doesn’t deserve free speech protection.[3] Your books will get banned,[4] and your web sites will go dark.[5] Cable channels had better toe the “progressive” line or they will get unplugged.[6]

• Christian culture must be smashed. Government employees[7] and teachers[8] are learning to apply Critical Race Theory in their daily work. Critical Race Theory claims that the dominant culture in a nation is by-definition racist.[9] This means that America’s largely Christian culture can’t be redeemed and must be replaced – but with what?

In the face of this emerging hostility, Christians have the instruction of Romans 13, where Paul tells us “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities.” Does this mean that Christians must go along with whatever our government tells us to do? We’re not the first believers to ask this question. Consider Germany in 1550.[10]

• Martin Luther’s personal protector, Fredrick the Wise, has been defeated in battle by the Emperor Charles V.

• There is no longer any effective military opposition to the Emperor.

• Charles V now demands that Lutherans in Magdeburg give up believing in “salvation by grace.” If they don’t then they’ll be imprisoned or killed.[11]

Did these Magdeburg Christians have only these choices? Or is there more to the doctrine of subjection than the words of Romans 13:1-2? This article explores:

• The God-given purpose of government, and its intended limits.

• What the Bible says about subjection, both to God and to government.

• How Christians, responding to crises, developed theories of “government under God” that are the foundation of our American republic.

• How we can use this collected experience to guide our actions in today’s crises.

Synopsis

These concepts summarize this very long article:

• Having government is a good idea. There is no place for anarchy.

• Government is to provide a just and peaceful social place. It must discourage evil doers.

• Government has limits to its authority. It must render justice as God defines it.

• A government that does, or encourages, evil has acted beyond its commission.

• We need not submit to evil commands. This outcome is from Romans 13:1-6.

• Individuals can resist tyranny through petitions, flight, and civil disobedience.

• States and counties should defend you from federal overreach.

• States, and maybe counties, can act to nullify federal law.

• States and counties are authorized to use militia for armed resistance.

This is a long article so it can be both compelling and comprehensive. Misunderstanding Romans 13 has led us to passively accept social overthrow. But after examining the Bible, and perusing what our spiritual forefathers have written, we see that there are numerous acceptable ways to defend our faith and our Christian-based society. We must submit to government, but also must resist its evil acts.

God instituted the concept of human government

God instituted three social structures for mankind’s benefit:[12]

• Family, the ministry of education.

• Government, the ministry of justice.

• Church, the ministry of grace.

Of the ministry of government, the evangelist Michael Oh has summarized its goal. “God instituted government to establish ordered and peaceful social space where not only is judgment carried out, but good is recognized and encouraged.” [13]

Let’s separate this discussion of government into two parts. There is the idea, or institution, of government. This concerns what a government ought to accomplish. Then there is the implementation, or the style of government and the actual people elected to its seats of power.

The institution of government is needed because we’re all sinners. We aren’t all able to treat each other with love and compassion, so we need to recognize and accept a common source of authority, a dispenser of justice. Consider the alternative, where we each get to say “he’s not my President,” obeying leaders only when we agree with their policies and decisions. That pretty much defines anarchy, which soon devolves into strongman rule.

The Bible tells us that human government has these basic attributes:

• God reserves to the government the right to punish murder (Leviticus 24:17, Deuteronomy 21:1-9).

• God demands that rulers and judges be impartial, not favoring the rich or the poor (Exodus 23:1-3; Leviticus 19:15; Ps 82:1-4).

• Government must defend the people against brigands and foreign invaders. Sometimes the king had a standing army (I Samuel 8:10-22), but ancient Israel and Judea relied on mustering its people with whatever weapons they already had (Judges 6:34-35; I Samuel 11:1-11).

The need for just government is so great that a new king of Israel was to make his own copy of the law of Moses. This personal copy would guide his rule, so that he fully understood the difference between right and wrong, and could rule with justice (Deuteronomy 17:18-20; II Kings 22:8-13).

Limits on human government

You shall not move your neighbor’s boundary mark, which the ancestors have set, in your inheritance which you will inherit in the land that the LORD your God gives you to possess. (Deuteronomy 19:14)

God instituted three ministries,[14] each with its own role. That means they stick to their own knitting, not expanding to do the tasks of the other ministries. For example, if government, the ministry of justice, expands into parenting duties then it warps society. It moves a boundary marker, changing the expectations of how society should operate. It enlarges its own field and steals unwarranted power for itself. Such overreach has happened before, combining government and religion:

• The Roman emperors demanded worship.[15] Loyalty to the empire included affirming the emperor’s deity by offering a pinch of incense to Caesar. Christians refusing to do this, because there is only one God, were considered atheists and guilty of treason.[16]

• The Pope, leader of the Catholic Church, and for centuries considered the head over all Christendom, also directly governed large parts of Italy. He ruled these Papal States from the 800s through the 1870s.[17]

Admittedly, “three ministries” is a derived concept, a simplification of many Bible verses. But you can see how government overreach either directly violates Scripture, or prevents others from doing their biblically blessed tasks. These violations affirm that there are indeed Bible-based boundaries to government. Let’s look at examples.

Public schools arranging secret student abortions. A student gets pregnant but is afraid of what her parents would think. Instead of attempting reconciliation with her parents, the counselor arranges for an abortion and tries to hide the act from the parents.[18] How is this overreach?

• The student is taught that it’s OK to kill (Deuteronomy 5:17) The government is to avenge murder, not commit it.

• The student is taught to not honor her father or mother (Deuteronomy 5:16). Rather than reinforce the parents in their ministry, the government school is providing contradictory advice, competing with the parents for the child’s affection.

• The government school is claiming rights of parenthood, and denying these rights to the actual parents. It effectively is stealing the child – a form of kidnapping.

 

Public schools teaching that wrong is right. There are many social issues for which state schools have taken opinionated stands. Rather than reinforcing the parents, and adopting the community’s standards, they’re championing social change.[19] The schools actually revel in this attitude, claiming that the students need these differing opinions.[20] So the students are force-fed homosexuality, encouraged or forced to support transgender behavior, and learn that “white people” are the source of all racism in America.[21] How is this overreach?

• Usurping the parents’ right to train their children (Proverbs 22:6). The state school doesn’t reinforce the parents, but competes with them to train the students.

• Teaching that wrong is right (Isaiah 5:20). They’re complicit in forcing fractures in American society by championing new and divisive concepts as morally right.

• Teaching children to tolerate evil, to even celebrate it, deadens them to wanting to do what is right (Proverbs 30:20; Matthew 18:5-6). After all, God instituted government for our good as He defined it (Romans 13:3), and not to teach doing evil.

State takes over raising children. Some claim that the government has a vested interest in raising children.[22] They even say that the parents oppress the children by imparting their values to them. [23] In the early years of the Soviet Union, its officials implemented Marxist ideas of abolishing families, removing children to what amounts to orphanages. The parents could visit the children if they so wished, but not instruct them.[24] How is this overreach?

• Removal of children from their parents is kidnapping under color of law (Exodus 21:16).

• Parents are responsible for how children turn out (Deuteronomy 4:9-10; Proverbs 22:6; Hebrews 12:7, etc.).

Government will treat us with equity, not equality. Government will abandon equality, which is equal treatment under the law. Replacing it is equity, a planned unequal treatment to address perceived wrongs.[25] After a half century of civil rights progress striving for race-blind laws, America would now legalize and promote discrimination by race and religion.[26] How is this overreach?

• Judges and officials are to rule with justice, favoring neither the rich or the poor (Exodus 23:1-3; Leviticus 19:15). They’re promoting injustice, the opposite of their commission.

• Judges and officials are servants to do God’s will, not to fight against God (Romans 13:1,4,6).

Socialism. Whether the topic is climate change or economic inequality, the answer always seems to be socialism. Its underlying Marxism[27] comes out when discussing the New Green Deal and universal basic income.[28] Yet socialism isn’t merely economics. It is an all-encompassing worldview, a religion.[29] How is this overreach?

• Socialism forces people to give or sell their property to the government. The forced part of this makes it theft (Deuteronomy 5:19). Even when disguised as a wealth tax, the goal is still expropriation and thus sin.[30]

• When the government owns everything, the people must look to the government for their daily bread and the clothes on their back. That is not serving the people, but enslaving them (Nehemiah 5:8).

• Socialism sees Christians as dangers to the state, and persecutes both their beliefs and practices.[31] But government is a ministry commissioned by God for good, not meant to snuff out worship and obedience to God (Romans 13:4).

• Socialism rejects religious morals, inventing its own.[32] It repeats Adam’s original sin, asserting its own standards of right and wrong (Genesis 3:5).

• A socialist government denies any God-given limits because it claims that there is no God.[33]

In his article on government in the Bible, Dr. Art Lindsley points out said “Time after time, governments in the Old Testament exceeded their bounds, clearly reflecting the need for government to be limited.”[34] We ourselves can regain limited government in America, but first the voting public must be convinced that it wants it.

When evil men become rulers

We previously divided the concept of government into institution and implementation. We just discussed the institution of government, and its role of justice and protection. The implementation of government refers to:

• Its form, such as a kingdom or a body of elected representatives. Note that the Bible doesn’t say there is a right or wrong form of government.

• Those people appointed or elected to fill the seats of power.

Note that the ruler isn’t the government itself. Rather, he is a temporary occupant of that government seat. It’s quite possible to approve of a kingdom and yet declare “The king is a fink!”[35]

Some rulers and leaders shape their duties to seek justice, as the Bible defines the term. Others, such as Rep. Jerry Nadler, don’t think government should care what God thinks. He recently said:

…what any religious tradition describes as God’s will is no concern of this Congress.[36]

But whether these leaders have good intentions or not, the Bible says that God establishes, or affirms, all of them. Yes, even Jerry Nadler, as a sitting Congressman, is affirmed by God as one of our officials. In this God didn’t make any mistakes. Consider:

• Pharaoh ruled over the slave Hebrews, and did evil to them through oppressing them (Exodus 1:8-14) and killing their children (Exodus 1:15-22). Yet God told Moses to acknowledge Pharaoh’s rule over Egypt, and that God was using Pharaoh to demonstrate God’s deliverance and glory (Exodus 9:15-16).

• In the book of Judges there were cycles of Israel falling away from God, being oppressed by neighboring kingdoms, repenting, and being delivered from these kingdoms. In their oppressions, God allowed the Midianites and Philistines to have authority over Israel. The oppressions, and their durations, were certainly determined by God. Israel was under King Cushan-rishathaim for eight years (Judges 3:8), and under King Eglon for eighteen years (Judges 3:14). Perhaps if Israel repented faster, these oppressions would have been shorter?

• With the Babylonian army threatening Judah, the prophet Jeremiah told King Zedekiah that Nebuchadnezzar, with all of his faults and terror, was God’s chosen leader for the moment. By special dispensation, He was installing Nebuchadnezzar over Judah and the whole region (Jeremiah 27:1-2).

• In thanks for granting him a revelation, Daniel says “It is He who changes the times and the epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings.” (Daniel 2:21)

• In his conversation with Pontius Pilate, Jesus tells him “you would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11).

If God established invaders like Nebuchadnezzar, then He certainly honors our election of unrighteous officials, even those who steal elections[37]. Evil leaders can come about even without supernatural intervention. Their rise might be a natural preference of a society which believes that “God’s will is no concern.”

God endorses rulers, but it doesn’t mean He approves of all their acts. Both good rulers (II Samuel 11; II Samuel 24) and evil can overstep the bounds of their offices. And all rulers, whether of Israel or not, Old Testament or New Testament, are themselves judged by God.

• Although God promised Canaan to Abraham’s descendants, He told Abraham to wait. Eventually the iniquity of the Canaanites would be enough for God to act and dispossess them (Genesis 15:16).

• God sent Jonah to preach Nineveh’s doom because of their evil ways (Jonah 1:1-2).

• Nebuchadnezzar was punished for his pride, and for being ruthless. After a spell of suffering the king was allowed to repent (Daniel 4:27-37).

• His descendant Belshazzar also was punished for his pride (Daniel 5:24-30). That famous disembodied hand declared God’s judgment and authority over the king and kingdom.

• John the Baptist tells tax collectors and soldiers to be honest, not shaking down the people (Luke 3:12-14).

• God slew King Herod for his pride (Acts 12:21-23). Herod thought that he was a self-made man, worthy of praise and adoration.

God will eventually judge America’s leaders. In the meantime, they’re our endorsed officials. They were confirmed into office by the standards of our times. John Calvin agrees with this assessment. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion he wrote this:

We need not labour to prove that an impious king is a mark of the Lord’s anger, since I presume no one will deny it, and that this is not less true of a king than of a robber who plunders your goods, an adulterer who defiles your bed, and an assassin who aims at your life, since all such calamities are classed by Scripture among the curses of God. But let us insist at greater length in proving what does not so easily fall in with the views of men, that even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honour, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has by his word devolved on the ministers of his justice and judgment, and that, accordingly, in so far as public obedience is concerned, he is to be held in the same honour and reverence as the best of kings.[38]

Competing subjections make for hard choices

There is no doubt that everyone, whether a believer or not, is subject to God’s rule and judgment (Psalm 110:1; John 12:47-49, Philippians 2:10-11). We also know that God endorses human government, to whom we must also be subject (Romans 13:1-7; I Peter 2:13-14). This means that we might get conflicting demands for obedience.

It is evident that human government is never a substitute, or an intermediary, for God’s own authority. If government really was “God on Earth” then a leader might issue a law that conflicts with the Bible, and we’d have to obey this law as though God had contradicted Himself. No, since all human government subject to His rule, and never authorized to act as God’s regent, it is always subordinate, or inferior, to God’s authority.

This superior/inferior relationship between authorities means that when forced to choose between God and government, we must choose to obey God, the higher authority, who can render eternal judgments (Matthew 10:28). The church in Jerusalem figured this out right away. Witness Peter and the apostles, who were banned from preaching and replied that “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Romans 13:4 notes that the civil authority is a “minister of God to you for good.” This means a a ruler’s commands for evil are out of bounds, not intended to do good, and not endorsed by God.

When there are conflicting demands for obedience, then at least one authority will be disappointed, perhaps sanctioning the disobedient people. It can be rather costly to disobey a government law. After all, “it does not bear the sword for nothing” (Romans 13:4), even when trying to advance evil laws or concepts. If a Christian believes a government command would mean disobedience to God, what shall we do?

• Obey the command because you don’t think you, or those who depend on you, can’t afford the disobedience.

• Obey God and suffer whatever the authorities choose to do to you and yours. From the ruler’s viewpoint, you’re a lawbreaker and possibly a revolutionary stirring up trouble.

Ungodly obedience or martyrdom – are these really our only legitimate options? Our fathers in the faith also had to deal with conflicting claims for obedience. They studied the Bible and found solutions that satisfied their pressing needs obey God, to be subject to human authorities, and yet defend themselves against government overreach. Their answers shaped European and American history. Let’s look at some situations:

• Biblical examples of authority, subjection, and rebellion

• 1550: The siege of Magdeburg

• 1637: Scotland rebels over religious hijacking

• 1776: King George III vs the rights of Englishmen

Biblical examples of authority, subjection, and rebellion

A study of subjection to authority benefits from looking at Bible stories. We seek instances of subjection, and of resistance, that can illustrate discussions of Romans 13.

Disobedience to government overreach. If your ruler commands of you something you know is evil, do you comply? To disobey could cost you your life.

Hebrew midwives lie to Pharaoh. Pharaoh told the Hebrew midwives to selectively kill newborn male babies (Exodus 1:15-21). This is government overreach because babies aren’t criminals or invading soldiers. These midwives lied to Pharaoh’s agents and saved the babies’ lives. Their faith in God is commended, and nobody ever complains that “they shouldn’t have lied to Pharaoh.” 

Saul’s soldiers refuse to kill the Levite priests. After Saul discovered that the priest Ahimelech gave to David the sword of Goliath, Saul got offended and ordered that Ahimelech, and his father’s household, be slaughtered. But Saul’s guards refused to do strike God’s priests. Only the non-Israelite spy, Doeg the Edomite, would do this task (I Samuel 22:6-19). We don’t know what else happened to these faithful soldiers, who wouldn’t strike the Lord’s anointed.

Nebuchadnezzar’s idol. King Nebuchadnezzar set up an idol for all to worship, but Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego refused to do so, solely worshipping God instead. They’d rather die instead, but God rescued them from their intended fiery death (Daniel 3:8-27). It’s government overreach because government is about justice and protection. And since God judges all the kings by His standards (Genesis 15:16), they aren’t to be preventing people from worshipping the one true God. 

Nebuchadnezzar’s pet lions. King Nebuchadnezzar’s counselors had it in for Daniel, and devised a scheme to persecute Daniel for praying to God. Daniel knew of the scheme and deliberately kept praying to God. In the end, God saved Daniel from the den of lions (Daniel 6:6-27). As before, this is overreach because government is discouraging the worship of God. 

We must preach about Jesus. The Jewish leaders of Jerusalem demanded that the Christians stop preaching about Jesus. Peter famously refused to accede to their demand, saying “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:27-29). Ditto Paul (Acts 18:13).

These are familiar incidents. They also show that no matter how sweetly you explain your obedience to God, rulers still don’t like getting crossed. By disobeying them, you might suffer for doing the right thing (Matthew 5:10-12; Acts 5:40-42).

Rebellion to overreaching, or to unrighteous rule. When oppressed by conquerors, or by your own evil rulers, is there justifiable cause to push back?

Moses and Pharaoh. Moses told Pharaoh that the Hebrew people must travel to Sinai to worship God (Exodus 5:1-9). This request is actually a challenge to Pharaoh’s authority, and presages Pharaoh’s struggles against God. Each step of this challenge is ordered by God, and backed up by His actions. It’s a great story of faith, but because of the direct intervention by God it isn’t a normal pattern for confronting human government.

Israel’s judges vs. Canaanite conquerors. After settling into the Promised Land, Israel lapsed into cycles of apostasy, being conquered, revival, and then deliverance. The book of Judges tells of a dozen such cycles.

Some of Israel’s conquerors were actually raiders, such as the Midianites of Gideon’s time who would steal everything that wasn’t bolted down (Judges 6:1-6). Other conquerors ruled over Israel to a limited degree (Judges 3:8,14; I Samuel 13:19-22), but apparently for tribute and subduing Israel’s military threat.

Because Israel didn’t recognize the Canaanite kings as their rulers – Israel’s first king was still in the future – the issues of Romans 13 can’t be applied to the book of Judges. Ditto for when Saul raised an army of revolt (I Samuel 11:5-8; 13:2-4).

David and his war band. After David finally decided that Saul would surely kill him, he fled to the wilderness. There he collected people who were in distress, in debt, etc. He became captain over them (I Samuel 22:1-2). You don’t become captain unless there is an army to lead. David used this band to fight some of Israel’s enemies, but didn’t defend himself against King Saul (I Samuel 24:1-7; 26:6-11). Nonetheless, David’s band of soldiers was a military threat that Saul had to account for.

Rehoboam and Jeroboam. After the death of his father King Solomon, Rehoboam was ready to become king over all of Israel. Yet most of the tribal leaders went home, without accepting Rehoboam as king, because he planned on continuing the oppressive taxation and conscription policies of his father (I Kings 12:1-19).  Rehoboam tried to raise an army to bring these tribes into line, and accept him as their king. However, a prophet warned him to stop this, because this rebellion was of God (I Kings 12:21-24).

Rehoboam didn’t have his kingship stripped from him, but rather only became king over two tribes. This doesn’t touch on the question of whether a king can be removed from office.

Uzziah and the priests. After a long period of personal and political success, King Uzziah became full of himself and decided to offer incense to God, bypassing the priests. The Chief Priest, with eighty other priests, opposed the king. Uzziah was furious, but to no avail, because the Lord instantly afflicted Uzziah with leprosy (II Chronicles 26:16-23). These priests, called “valiant men,” opposed the king’s overreach into religious duties.

In these examples we see:

• Revolts commanded by God (Moses, the judges, Saul) or condoned by Him (Rehoboam).

• David prepared for defensive war by collecting a band of soldiers, a personal army.

• Immediate opposition to King Uzziah’s overreach.

The examples of David’s war band, and of King Uzziah as priest, show that you can honor the ruler, per Romans 13, but still oppose actions of that ruler.

Preventing rebellion by killing your opposition. A recurring historical theme is that kingly succession can be messy. If the vacant throne has many people aiming for it then the losers tend to plot at ways to get a second chance at it. A favorite way of preventing these plots is to kill the competition. Even the Bible has accounts of this.

Solomon vs Adonijah. These two were sons of King David. Adonijah preemptively claimed the kingship (I Kings 1:5-10), leading Solomon’s camp to get King David involved (I Kings 1:11-40). King Solomon pardoned his brother Adonijah, who then sought another way to become king. Solomon stopped this constant scheming by executing Adonijah (I Kings 2:13-25).

Queen Athaliah. After her son King Ahaziah died in battle, she had everyone from the royal household killed so that she could rule. She failed to get the infant Joash, and his protectors soon got back at the queen (II Kings 11:1-16).

As a contrary example, David was promised the kingdom. But he refused to kill, or perhaps murder, King Saul through ambush (I Samuel 24:1-7; 26:6-11). Rather, he waited for God’s time, when Saul died in combat with the Philistines (I Samuel 31:1-6).

Killing your opposition is still done in modern times, such as with communist regimes. Progressives in America already would ban[39] or “re-educate” political or social opponents.[40] Can they stop at that? Or are we in for more political violence?

1550: The Siege of Magdeburg

In 1550 the city of Magdeburg is besieged, surrounded by forces of the Duke of Saxony, an ally of the Emperor Charles V. [41] The city must either withstand the besiegers, be destroyed, or accept the terms of the Augsburg Interim, which essentially banned Lutheranism.[42] How did things come to this pass?

The writings of Martin Luther, some of which we’ll consider later, challenged the teaching and practices of the Catholic Church. Luther’s followers displaced the Catholic Church’s role both in spiritual life and in everyday society. Church leadership responded to this by seeking to suppress Lutheranism, hoping to return matters to their pre-Luther conditions. The people of German cities and states began choosing sides and suppressing their opponents. Local rulers were quick to pick up on this, either to restore civility or to gain advantage against other rulers.

Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (mostly Germany),[43] king of Spain, and lord over Austria and the Netherlands, allied with the Pope to end this strife in the empire through armed might. In 1548 the Diet of Augsburg wrote the Augsburg Interim, terms that Lutherans must abide by – or else.[44] Faced with this threat, most cities complied. But the city of Magdeburg defied the Interim, so Charles’ armies attacked it. To complete this tale, the siege ended when Duke Maurice of Saxony[45] cut a deal with the city, where it did NOT have to abide by the Interim. And in a few years this round of religious civil strife was resolved by treaties, where each state would be Lutheran or Catholic according to a decision of each ruling prince.

If Romans 13 asserts that we should be in subjection to the authorities, then by what arguments did the elders and pastors of Magdeburg justify disobeying the Emperor’s decree? The Magdeburg Confession explains their reasoning. It builds on prior works by Luther, so we’ll review these works before discussing the Confession itself.

1523: Temporal Authority.[46] Writing to Duke John of Saxony, Luther is probably responding to contemporary anarchist and Anabaptist teaching, which claimed that secular government itself is illegitimate. In this letter Luther affirms that human government is a blessing from God, and lays out its hierarchical nature. Luther claims that that resistance to authority, even by lesser magistrates, was not legitimate. You’ll soon see how Luther changed his mind.

1523: On Secular Authority.[47] In 1522 Duke George of Saxony[48] banned the possession of the German New Testament, which Luther translated from the Greek. Luther responded with On Secular Authority. In it he affirms that secular government has authority, but not to command matters of conscience. Luther advised that Christians weren’t obligated to give up their Bibles.

My good Lord, I owe you obedience with my life and goods. Command me what lies within the limits of your authority, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe, or to surrender my books, I will not obey. For then you [will have] become a tyrant and overreach[ed] yourself, commanding where you have neither right or power. [49]

1530: Torgau Declaration. The Elector John of Saxony had asked for guidance. He was protecting Lutherans against the will of Emperor Charles V, who himself had authority over the prince. Yet Charles insisted that Lutheran church practices be abandoned.[50] What justification was there for him to resist the Emperor’s demands? Legal scholars and religious leaders, including Luther, in 1530 delivered that justification, the Torgau Declaration.

This document confined itself to the constitutional construction of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor was “elected” to his role by certain designated princes – hence the title “elector” – and his authority was constrained by a constitution. The scholars argued that matters of religion didn’t fall within the emperor’s jurisdiction. [51]

Luther was wary about condoning resistance to higher authority. But in this circumstance the need and right to resist was already built into the legal system, and was thus acceptable to him.

Render unto the Emperor, what is the Emperor’s. And it is the Emperor’s right, that he must be resisted in matters of notorious injustice. . . . All that the Emperor has established, that is, the law of the Emperor, is to be observed. But that law determines, that one must resist him in such a case. [52]

1550: Magdeburg Confession.[53] With armies approaching to attack Magdeburg, its pastors and leaders drew up a document explaining why they’re resisting, and pleading for support from princes and other towns. The Magdeburg Confession covers these concepts.

We’re not rebelling, but merely principled. The city isn’t rebelling against the Emperor or his princes. The commentary quotes the Confession:

“Just as the Church is an ordinance of God, in which God wants there to be an order of teachers and learners, so also politics and economy are truly ordinances of God, in which He likewise wants there to be an order of superiors and an order of inferiors who are ruled by laws and precepts that agree with reason and are not at variance with the Word.”[54]

Unrighteous commands or laws need not be obeyed. From the Confession:

“. . . just as subjects necessarily owe obedience to their magistrates; and children and the rest of the family, to their parents and masters, on account of God; so on the other hand, when magistrates or parents themselves lead their charges away from true piety and uprightness, obedience is not owed to them from the Word of God. Also, when they professedly persecute piety and uprightness, they remove themselves from the honor of magistrate and parents before God and their own consciences, and instead of being an ordinance of God they become an ordinance of the devil, which can and ought to be resisted by His order for the sake of one’s calling.”[55]

Romans 13 requires that the government proactively do good. Romans 13:3 says “For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.” The Magdeburg pastors believed that this meant:

Authority is an ordinance of God to honor what is good and to punish what is evil (Romans 13[:3]). Accordingly, if authority presumes to persecute what is good and promote what is evil, then it is no longer an ordinance of God but an ordinance of the Devil, and whoever resists such evil is not resisting God’s ordinance but the ordinance of the Devil.[56]

After all, Romans 13:4 continues with “…for it is a minister of God to you for good.” If the authorities are doing bad, forbidding worship of God or taking away Bibles, then they’re doing the opposite of good, and are out of their authority. The quote insists that resisting this command means not just passive activity, but proactive resistance.

The Lesser Magistrates are to protect us from tyranny. The Confession lists four levels of government tyranny. The fourth, and most radical of them, requires active opposition by the people, both by magistrates and, as you’ll see later, private individuals:

It is when tyrants begin to be so mad that they persecute with guile and arms, not so much the just persons of inferior magistrates and their subjects, as the right itself, especially the right of anyone of the highest and most necessary rank; and that they persecute God, the author of right in persons. . . . and if he himself defends and prosecutes this law with force and arms, so that certain death is laid down as the penalty of those who resist or fail to conform – in such a case, doubtless, no clear-thinking person would have any hesitation about the divine right and commandment that such a leader or monarch ought to be curbed by everyone in his most wicked attempt, even by the lowest magistrates with whatever power they have.[57]

These lower or lesser magistrates – for example, a state or county official when faced with an overreaching federal request – are to resist the imposed tyranny without any guilt, for the request isn’t legal. With each layer of government responsible for doing good, these wouldn’t be doing their work if they let stand unrighteous commands of their superiors. From the Confession:

Therefore, when the highest prince himself not only does not render to God the things that are God’s, but also snatches divine honor from others on the pretext of his power, and claims it for himself by the sword, then there nonetheless remains among men this very power ordained by God, to vindicate the honor of God.[58]

Helping Magdeburg is part of your Christian duty. The authors note that giving aid, even taxes, to those who are suppressing their city is wrong.

It is obvious that no pious or Christian person can bring aid to our enemies either by military means, or by giving plans, money or other things by which our enemies are armed. . . . Therefore, whether you be a magistrate or a subject in any way involved in this war or in the carrying out of proscription, consider to what you are lending your counsel, money, work, body, and even your very life and soul; and to what allies. Is it not to the enemies of Christ and His word?[59]

In summary, the Magdeburg Confession has these main points:

• We acknowledge that human government is needful. We agree that submitting to authority is important and right.

• However, we insist that you don’t have the authority in this particular instance, to force us to abandon our religion. This doesn’t violate the commands of Romans 13.

• We’ve exhausted all prior attempts to reason with you, and you still insist on your unconstitutional overreach. Your request actually attacks God-fearing religion.

• Our Christian duty, that of other Christian subjects, and the duties of government subordinates under you, is to resist your command. We will defend ourselves against your enforcement actions.

1637:  Scotland rebels over religious hijacking

On a Sunday in 1637, worship service is about to begin in Edinburgh. The minister starts reading from a brand-new liturgy, promoted by King Charles. [60] But instead of worship a riot breaks out over opposition to the liturgy, which is seen as an attempt to re-assert ‘popery’ in Scotland. The king won’t give up his plans to dominate the Scottish church, and invades Scotland in the Bishops’ War.[61] The king loses, and the fallout from this war shortly leads to the English Civil War. Was the king’s new liturgy that offensive? To the Scots, most certainly.

Scottish worship in the early 1600s was largely Protestant and Calvinist. This is the result of Protestant preaching, and battles to drive out French and royalist armies defending Catholicism.[62] But King Charles’ promotion of “Laud’s Liturgy” [63] was seen as re-introducing Catholic rites and sacraments. It seems that the Anglican form of worship differed little from that of Catholicism.[64]

A second issue was that the liturgy, and the 1636 Book of Canons,[65] promoted “the divine right of kings.”[66] It said that King Charles is answerable only to God, not subject to any review or check by any person on earth, and that God requires of the king’s subjects complete submission and obedience to the king. What is more, Charles is installed as the head of the Scottish Church, and its bishops are to be mere subordinates to the king. In 1638 King Charles declared as traitor anyone who opposed his changes to church doctrine.

This was quite a bit to swallow, as the Scots confess only Jesus as the king of the church. So immediately, from all over Scotland, people converged on Edinburgh to sign the National Covenant.[67] Signing this put them in open rebellion to King Charles, and war preparations began on both sides.

Scottish Christians had to find satisfying answers these questions:

• Does King Charles have God-given absolute power over his subjects?

• May the people resist the king? And if so, what forms of resistance are biblically acceptable?

Samuel Rutherford rose to the task with his book Lex Rex,[68] which means “the law is king.” In 44 chapters, or “questions,” he addressed these issues from many angles. The following sections summarize Rutherford’s “satisfying” responses.

There is no “divine right to rule.” You might be born a prince, but the crown isn’t your birthright. You must be elected, or affirmed, as king by the people. Rutherford said (question 10) “If David durst not take the right of government actually on him, then divine unction made him not king, but only designed him to be king: the people’s election must make the king.”[69]

Being told “you’re chosen by God to become king” doesn’t make you king. As Rutherford says it, the king isn’t made by God by His direct action (“immediate”). The covenanting (“mediate”) action of the people is needed. See these Bible examples:

• Saul was anointed as king by Samuel (I Samuel 10:1), but didn’t become king until Israel acclaimed him (I Samuel 10:24-25; 11:15).

• David was anointed as the next king by Samuel (I Samuel 16:1, 12-13), but didn’t become king over Judah until after Saul died and Judah agreed he was king (II Samuel 2:4). The rest of Israel initially chose Saul’s son Ish-bosheth as their king (II Samuel 2:8-11). These other tribes only accepted David as king after Ish-bosheth was murdered (II Samuel 5:1-5).

• Unlike Saul or David, Rehoboam had no anointing from a prophet. Even though he was the crown prince, to become king he had to negotiate a covenant with the tribes of Israel. The negotiations failed, and Rehoboam became the king only of Judah (I Kings 12:1, 13-20).

Since the throne isn’t the king’s property, Charles must act within the bounds of the covenant made when he was crowned King of Scotland. Says Rutherford (question 14):

5. Both king and people shall find the revenging hand of God against them, if they fail in the breach of their oath; every one, king and people, by the oath stand obliged to God, the king for himself, and the people for themselves, but with this difference, the king oweth to God proper and due obedience as any of the subjects, and also to govern the people according to God’s true religion, (Deut. xvii.; 2 Chron. xxix.;) and in this the king’s obligation differeth from the people’s obligation; the people, as they would be saved, must serve God and the king, for the same cause. (1 Sam. xii.)[70]

The king is expected to keep his covenant. Once past the installation ceremony, the king isn’t free to do has he pleases. He must work to perform the contract he made with the people. As Rutherford says (question 14):

Arg. 2.—Hence our second argument. He who is made a minister of God, not simply, but for the good of the subject, and so he take heed to God’s law as a king, and govern according to God’s will, he is in so far only made king by God as he fulfilleth the condition; and in so far as he is a minister for evil to the subject, and ruleth not according to that which the book of the law commandeth him as king, in so far he is not by God appointed king and ruler, and so must be made a king by God conditionally: but so hath God made kings and rulers, Rom. xiii. 4; 2 Chron. vi. 16; Psal. lxxxix. 30, 31; 2 Sam. vii. 12; 1 Chron. xxviii. 7–9. This argument is not brought to prove that Jeroboam or Saul leave off to be kings when they fail in some part of the condition; or as if they were not God’s vicegerents, to be obeyed in things lawful, after they have gone on in wicked courses; for the people consenting to make Saul king, they give him the crown, pro hac vice, at his entry absolutely. There is no condition required in him before they make him king, but only that he covenant with them to rule according to God’s law.

…

If, then, the people make a king, as a king, conditionally, for their safety, and not for their destruction, (for as a king he saveth, as a man he destroyeth, and not as a king and father,) and if God, by the people’s free election, make a king, God maketh him a king conditionally, and so by covenant; and, therefore, when God promiseth (2 Sam. vii. 12; 1 Chron. xxviii. 7–9) to David’s seed, and to Solomon, a throne, he promiseth not a throne to them immediately, as he raised up prophets and apostles without any mediate action and consent of the people, but he promiseth a throne to them by the mediate consent, election, and covenant of the people; which condition and covenant he expresseth in the very words of the people’s covenant with the king, “So they walk as kings in the law of the Lord, and take heed to God’s commandment and statutes to do them.”

In this passage Rutherford makes these points:

• The king has a commission, a covenant, to act for the good of the kingdom. He is a minister for good (Romans 13:3-4).

• In God’s eyes (Romans 13:1), the people must obey the king in all things lawful.

• Wicked commands aren’t lawful. In them the king is acting not within the office of the king, what he was crowned to do. Rather, in these the king is acting as a minister of evil. The people need not obey the king in unlawful things.

• The king retains the throne even if he issues wicked commands. He need not be perfect.

And earlier (question 9) Rutherford underscores that oppression, such as preventing Christian worship, is not in the authority of government.

I lay down this maxim of divinity: Tyranny being a work of Satan, is not from God, because sin, either habitual or actual, is not from God: the power that is, must be from God; the magistrate, as magistrate, is good in nature of office, and the intrinsic end of his office, (Rom. xiii. 4) for he is the minister of God for thy good; and, therefore, a power ethical, politic, or moral, to oppress, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power; and is no more from God, but from sinful nature and the old serpent, than a license to sin.[71]

Self-defense against the king’s wickedness is allowed. From Rutherford (question 28):

Arg. 6.—If the estates of a kingdom give the power to a king, it is their own power in the fountain; and if they give it for their own good, they have power to judge when it is used against themselves, and for their evil, and so power to limit and resist the power that they gave.[72]

And later (questions 28 and 29), Rutherford definitively addresses whether the lesser magistrates, and the people, can war against the king:

1. 2. The powers (Rom. xiii. 1) that be, are ordained of God, as their author and efficient; but kings commanding unjust things, and killing the innocent, in these acts, are but men, and sinful men; and the power by which they do these acts, a sinful and an usurped power, and so far they are not powers ordained of God, according to his revealed will, which must rule us. Now the authority and official power, in abstracto, is ordained of God, as the text saith, and other Scriptures do evidence. And this politicians do clear, while they distinguish betwixt jus personæ, and jus coronæ, the power of the person, and the power of the crown and royal office. They must then be two different things.

1. 3. He that resisteth the power, that is, the official power, and the king, as king, and commanding in the Lord, resisteth the ordinance of God, and God’s lawful constitution. But he who resisteth the man, who is the king, commanding that which is against God, and killing the innocent, resisteth no ordinance of God, but an ordinance of sin and Satan; for a man commanding unjustly, and ruling tyrannically, hath, in that, no power from God.

1. 4. They that resist the power and royal office of the king in things just and right, shall receive to themselves damnation, but they that resist, that is, refuse, for conscience, to obey the man who is the king, and choose to obey God rather than man, as all the martyrs did, shall receive to themselves salvation. And the eighty valiant men, the priests, who used bodily violence against king Uzziah’s person, “and thrust him out of the house of the Lord,” from offering incense to the Lord, which belonged to the priest only, received not damnation to themselves, but salvation in doing God’s will, and in resisting the king’s wicked will.

1. 5. The lawful ruler, as a ruler, and in respect of his office, is not to be resisted, because he is not a terror to good works, but to evil; and no man who doth good is to be afraid of the office or the power, but to expect praise and a reward of the same. But the man who is a king may command an idolatrous and superstitious worship—send an army of cut-throats against them, because they refuse that worship, and may reward papists, prelates, and other corrupt men, and may advance them to places of state and honour because they kneel to a tree altar,—pray to the east,—adore the letters and sound of the word Jesus—teach and write Arminianism, and may imprison, deprive, confine, cut the ears, and slit the noses, and burn the faces of those who speak and preach and write the truth of God; and may send armies of cut-throats, Irish rebels, and other papists and malignant atheists, to destroy and murder the judges of the land, and innocent defenders of the reformed religion, &c.,—the man, I say, in these acts is a terror to good works,—an encouragement to evil; and those that do good are to be afraid of the king, and to expect no praise, but punishment and vexation from him; therefore, this reason in the text will prove that the man who is the king, in so far as he doth those things that are against his office, may be resisted; and that in these we are not to be subject, but only we are to be subject to his power and royal authority, in abstracto, in so far as, according to his office, he is not a terror to good works, but to evil.

1. 6. The lawful ruler is the minister of God, or the servant of God, for good to the commonwealth; and to resist the servant in that wherein he is a servant, and using the power that he hath from his master, is to resist the Lord his master. But the man who is the king, commanding unjust things, and killing the innocent, in these acts is not the minister of God for the good of the commonwealth;—he serveth himself, and papists, and prelates, for the destruction of religion, laws, and commonwealth: therefore the man may be resisted; by this text, when the office and power cannot be resisted.[73]

Those who oppose the king, for the sake of righteousness, are right to do so. But they do have tricky tasks to accomplish.

• They claim to support and uphold the king.

• They also stand with force of arms to oppose the evil designs of the king. They’re vigorous, armed versions of Naaman’s counselors (II Kings 5:8-14), seeking to preserve the king from damaging his kingdom and bring him to his senses.

• By their very stand the king regards them as rebels, even traitors. The king will oppose them with all possible energy.

• On the issue, there might be very little room between the stances of passive non-compliance and armed resistance. Both stances arouse the ire of the king.

• If you choose armed resistance, you have to determine what the difference is between defending your rights and gaining military victory. What are your aims? How do you know if you’ve won?

As events played out, there were several border wars with the mobilized Scottish nation. Combined with activity in the English Parliament, this ignited the English Civil War.[74] King Charles I was captured, and then executed by the English Parliament. Oliver Cromwell assumed the role of an English dictator, but later the monarchy resumed with King Charles II, son of the executed king. This just proves again that you can start a war, but you can’t predict its end.

In summary, Lex Rex has, among its other arguments, these points relevant to our study:

• The king has limits on what he can rightfully do. These limits come from God (Deuteronomy 17) and from the covenant between the king and his people.

• God requires the people to honor the king, and to obey him in all lawful things. But we must not obey the king in unlawful things.

• Lawful things are what the king does, or commands, within the bounds of the covenant, and which promote good acts and restrain wickedness (Romans 13:3-4).

• Unlawful things are what the king does, or commands, that work against “doing good.” The tyrant king can’t legitimately use his crown as authority to command evil.

• God allows us to defend ourselves against the king’s unrighteousness. We can even organize armies and wage war to restrain the king’s evil.

1776:  King George III vs the rights of Englishmen

In July 1776 the Second Continental Congress[75] published the Declaration of Independence. This document proclaimed that they were no longer British colonies, but would instead “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”[76] This wasn’t the result of some hotheads declaring something radical and looking for a swell of popular support. Rather, the authors were delegates of colonial governments, acting in their authority.

The Declaration justifies itself through a list of grievances. These can be summarized as:

• Our right to local self-government is being denied.

• Our rights as Englishmen are being systematically violated.

• We have the right, and the responsibility, to protect our society. We’ll do this by breaking with the king.

The Declaration didn’t start anything, but acknowledged current events. Its issues had been smoldering for over a decade, while actual fighting had started the previous year. In fact, British armies were about to engage the Continentals for control of Brooklyn and the Port of New York.[77] What the Declaration did do was to define an endgame, to know when to stop fighting. What were these complaints which inspired people to fight, and even die? And why would Christian colonists think that this resistance, this rebellion, was justified before God?

Local self-government. The American colonies were founded between the years 1606 (Virginia) through 1732 (Georgia). The colonies were to be largely self-governed. After all, governing them from England is impractical. With England being seven weeks away by ship – once you find one going your way – getting a simple question answered could take over three months.[78]

One consequence of being far away from the mother country is that your people develop a different tack on government and personal rights. For example, in 1772 Samuel Adams said:

The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.

…

The absolute rights of Englishmen and all freemen, in or out of civil society, are principally personal security, personal liberty, and private property.

…

The supreme power cannot justly take from any man any part of his property, without his consent in person or by his representative. [79]

This agrees with the English Bill of Rights,[80] but is different in that it even denies Parliament the right to unilaterally tax the colonists – they weren’t local, and didn’t consider the colonists’ interests in the least. The colonists had no representation in Parliament, and Adams contended that it could even be harmful to the colonies to even have such representatives:

…but if the breath of a British House of Commons can originate an act for taking away all our money, our lands will go next, or be subject to rack rents from haughty and relentless landlords, who will ride at ease, while we are trodden in the dirt.[81]

The world-wide Seven Years War,[82] which touched America as the French and Indian War,[83] added vast new tracts of North America to Britain’s control, along with a tremendous war debt. To help pay down this debt Parliament now tried taxing the colonies (Stamp Act, etc.). But the Americans rejected these taxes, on grounds of “no taxation without representation,” and that because of their colonial charters Parliament had no right to tax them.[84]

Over time, many taxing and punitive acts were passed. One result that the king and Parliament more or less shut down colonial self-government.[85] The colonial assemblies still met, but the king refused to affirm their laws.

Englishmen with rights, or the king’s serfs? Over time the English developed the concept of “the rights of Englishmen.” It meant that the king, his judges, and other officials couldn’t treat the common man as ciphers. Rather, they had to be treated fairly in at least these ways:

• Right to a jury trial, no excessive bail, no cruel or unusual punishments.

• Right of habeas corpus, which means officials can’t spirit you off to jail forever. You must be given a hearing before a judge.

• The government won’t maintain a standing army in time of peace.

• Right to not quarter troops, supposedly of that standing army.

• Right to own and bear arms.

• Right to representative government (Parliament, assemblies).

• Freedom of speech in Parliament.

• Right to petition the king without punishment.[86]

Many of the original charters expressly reassured the colonists that they retained their English rights. [87] The other charters merely assumed this. The colonists didn’t lose their rights of Englishmen simply because they emigrated to America. And when the king converted the corporate charters to royal charters, it didn’t mean that the colonists lost their rights.[88]

Yet the king’s officials were ignoring the peoples’ rights as they pleased. Some of the complaints of the Declaration were:

• At many times, ignoring the right to a jury trial. You might say “but it wasn’t ignored all the time,” but it is a pattern of tyranny.

• Spiriting people overseas to stand trial. This amounts to denying habeas corpus, as the prisoner is incommunicado for the duration, and certainly separated from counsel, witnesses, and other legal aids for his defense.

• Keeping standing armies. With no external threats, a standing army implies that they mean to keep you in line.

• Forced to quarter troops. When you must feed and provide beds for unwanted troops at your own expense, in your own home, besides the imminent threat of the troops you are deprived of your property for your own purposes. They’re like police spies in your living room.

• Abolishing the right to representative government.

These actions lead to distrust of the king, of Parliament. If your rights are repeatedly ignored, are you truly Englishmen? Or have you been reduced to serfs, property of the king?[89]

Self-defense through independence. By 1776 matters had devolved from petitioning the king, who ignored the colonists, to open war. But some colonists still thought that a compromise could still be worked out. Was that being realistic? What in their history with King George suggested that the colonists could work with him, or that he’d keep his word?

Rather than fighting endless rounds of defense against individual acts of tyranny, the colonists preferred to sidestep the tyrant. After all, if the king denied their rights as Englishmen, wasn’t that a sign he denied their English citizenship? Some argue that secession was the colonists’ legal right.[90] So to defend the colonies’ security, liberty, and property, the Congress declared:

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved…[91]

Submission, resistance, and separation. It’s a long way from “always submit to the king” to seeking independence. Are the rights of Englishmen worth fighting for, dying for? Having developed their concepts of government far away from their English kin, the colonists came to think so.[92]

Could a Christian endorse this war? And what about an attitude of submitting to government? Those Christians did endorse it, while submitting to their local governments. These acted as “lesser magistrates” in their dealing with the king and Parliament. As far as the reasons for war, both Luther and Rutherford justified defending yourself, your family, your property, and your rights. It was for rights, specifically the right of worship, that Magdeburg and the Scots fought.

Some Christians – up to 20% of the population – didn’t endorse the war, and remained loyal to the king.[93] These loyalists had a variety of reactions, ranging from resisting their colonial government, joining loyalist militia, or fleeing to Canada. These people also acted appropriately when they thought their government – their colonial one – went too far.

A novel feature of the Declaration was independence. Luther and Rutherford never asserted the right to overthrow a king. But the governments of these thirteen colonies weren’t overthrowing King George, but rather seceding from his rule. Luther and Rutherford were silent on this matter, leaving it for the lesser magistrates to resolve.

In summary:

• The colonists, separated from mother England by time as well as distance, had developed their own strain of English life and political thought.

• King George and Parliament weren’t willing to accept the colonials’ views.

• The colonists feared for the future, that letting the king have his way meant the loss of their property, and control over their lives. These were worth defending.

• The petitions, the fighting, and the Declaration were all handled at government levels. It was intercession by more-local government, protecting the people.

• As with the people of Magdeburg, the colonists defended themselves against the king’s unrighteousness. They supported their “lesser magistrates,” which organized armies and waged war to restrain the king’s evil.

The desire to resist tyranny

Our biblical study showed that, with God’s direct help, Moses and Gideon each delivered Israel from tyranny. Our historical studies gave other examples of resisting tyranny:

• For the sake of religious belief, the city of Magdeburg resisted a besieging army for a year, and prevailed. Their resistance ended once their rights were affirmed.

• For the sake of religious belief, the Scots defied their king, King Charles I, and prevailed, defeating the king’s army.

• For the sake of English rights, the combined thirteen American colonies defied King George III and prevailed, breaking away from English rule.

Their struggles seem foreign to us. After all, the American Civil war was over 150 years ago. Is fighting, and dying, for religious freedom, mere ideas, worth the pain, the cost, and the grief? For modern American Christians, the idea of suffering, even dying, for Christ has been theoretical. But now storm clouds are gathering, with prospects of a government, and society, hostile to us. As the revolutionary Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”[94]

• Ask the people in Portland, Seattle, or Minneapolis if they invited Antifa to be “mostly peaceful” in their town.[95] Yet Antifa found them.

• Ask the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop if he wanted to be attacked for his Christian views.[96] But anti-Christian activists found him.

• Ask Scottish Christians if they wanted to be spied on in their own homes, then charged with saying the “wrong things.”[97] Yet their government now claims authority to go Big Brother on them.[98]

• Ask Christian parents if they wanted their children trained in Marxism, Critical Race Theory, and anti-science versions of biology.[99] But that’s we all get through inattention.

And we’re promised more than this, a complete transformation of society. How is it that we’re prevented from living our faith? How is it that we’re having our children effectively stolen from us? How is it that we’re getting materially dispossessed? It’s simple: we go around complaining to each other about how awful things are getting, and not actually stopping the awfulness. And we’ll continue to see our rights, and our lives, stolen from us unless we act while we still can.

Self-defense (Exodus 22:2-3; Luke 11:21), the defense of your loved ones (Nehemiah 4:9,14; John 15:13; I Timothy 5:8), and defense of the helpless among you (Genesis 14:13-16; I Samuel 11:1-11; Psalm 82:3-4) is a God-given responsibility. But defense means acting before the evil is complete. Defense also means preventative activity against future evil. Wake up, for a forcible theft of our culture is underway. Now is the time to get up and act.[100]

Civil Disobedience

Suppose you’re arrested for handing out pamphlets opposing homosexuality.[101] Or you’re told that, as a nurse, you must participate in murder, regardless of your religious beliefs.[102] In either case, your religious rights have been infringed. It looks like you’ll need to defend yourself and your religious rights.

Government overreaches when it hinders the practice of religion, or when it dictates changes to culture. Rather than acting against evildoers it instead encourages them. According to what we learned about Romans 13, God doesn’t require us to comply with those commands. What sorts of responses can Christians make?

• Hide your faith and outwardly obey. To avoid trouble you obey the authorities, figuring that you’re still faithful to God in your heart. But Jesus criticizes this choice, saying “But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:33). This is not a good option for Christians.

• Move away. Sometimes you can move to someplace more accepting of your faith. But this course is available only to the very few. Most people have obligations that keep them in their place, or lack the resources to move.

• Challenge the authorities. This is civil disobedience. The aim is to have the authorities recognize why you’re not obeying them, that perhaps they will see the error of their ways. Recognize that in this you might lose your possessions, your freedom, or even your life.

• Defy the authorities. If the authorities are have persisted in their evil, and have refused to listen to all sorts of pleas to do the right thing, then opposing them with force might be justified. Perhaps this opposition will shock the authorities back to negotiating, perhaps not. The use of force is discussed in the next sections.

Much has already been written about civil disobedience. But instead of repeating all that, consider these two observations.

• When you resist, what do you want to achieve? Once into the struggle you’ll likely have opportunities to strike deals. Perhaps you can win in the important parts of your issues, and leave room for the politicians to “save face” when they back off.

• Community response is needed, for the government is coming for you next. The first victim of the authorities is just a test of how far they can go. Religious harassment must be opposed early, lest it become accepted law. The Christian community must gather to support that first victim. This means pooling money, labor, and other resources to defend his rights, and all of our rights, against government intentions.

For successful examples of a community asserting its rights, look to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Here are some instructive incidents.

Montgomery bus boycott. [103] In 1955 the Montgomery bus system had rules for seating, segregating white people to the front of the bus and black people to the back. One day Mrs. Rosa Parks refused a command by the bus driver to get out of her seat in the “colored” section so a white person could sit in her place. She was arrested by police for disobeying the bus driver’s orders. The black community asked the bus company for changes, but it claimed that city laws prevented it from changing this seating arrangement.

To encourage change, the black community promoted a boycott of the bus system. They organized alternate transportation, and many people took to walking long distances to work. Up to 90% of black patrons stopped riding the buses. They also filed suit in federal court, claiming 14^th Amendment violations of their rights. This boycott was maintained for about a whole year, until the Supreme Court ordered that this segregation must end. [104]

Nashville lunch counter sit-in. [105] The Nashville black community leaders sought to desegregate public accommodations. In February 1960 they decided to start with department store lunch counters. (Remember when retail stores also served food to shoppers?) Activists would buy things in the store, and then sit at the counter for food service. The counter staff ignored them, so they just stayed there, waiting to be served, for as long as possible. Eventually police hauled away these activists, but replacements soon arrived to resume the sit-in protest. The lunch counters lost business and the protest was making news.

Then someone threw a bomb at the house of the black community’s lawyer. This act got the community leaders an audience with the mayor. They shamed, and convinced, him into supporting desegregation. In May 1960 a plan was implemented that gradually integrated seating at the lunch counters. It all went peacefully after that.

The tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr.[106] Among his deeds, Dr. King organized non-violent protests and marches in Birmingham in 1962. Well, at least his marchers were non-violent. The local police drubbed the protesters and threw many of them, including Dr. King, into jail. While in jail Dr. King wrote a letter that described his goals and his tactics in his Birmingham activity. He described the point of the confrontations:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Dr. King realized that one goal of civil disobedience is to change the political climate on an issue. He sought maximum sympathy for his cause. His participants were to be as inoffensive as possible – no fighting or rock throwing, but quietly marching. But the audacity of marching at all was socially aggressive, daring the authorities to do something rash. The march, and official response, would promote a change in public opinion, pressuring officials to submit to the protesters’ demands. This tactic won’t work everywhere, such as against the Chinese. But it worked in Birmingham, and might still be useful today.

These civil rights incidents show that success was obtained through community cooperation, training, and sacrifice. They realized that this was the issue of their day, and now was the time for the fight. Government restriction of religious rights certainly affects individuals, but effective opposition requires community action.

Lesser Magistrates

The United States divides its governance into greater and lesser political units. The federal government is meant to handle issues of national concern, while the states handle their internal issues. Likewise, the states have counties, the counties have cities, etc.

The rulers and judges of these lesser jurisdictions are themselves genuine leaders, not mere mouthpieces of the greater jurisdictions. As such, they are responsible to God to be just rulers, not respecting people because of power or wealth. The 1530 Torgau Declaration claims that these lesser jurisdiction leaders must protect their people from injustice, from the tyranny of greater jurisdictions. This is the “lesser magistrate” doctrine.

Simply put, the lesser-magistrate doctrine declares that – when a magistrate, who is lower in authority than another higher authority, opposes and/or resists the unjust orders or laws of the higher authority, he is justified in doing so and his actions are morally right, proper, and legitimate.

For example, if Congress or the President makes an unjust or immoral edict, a state legislature or the governor could stand in defiance of their unjust edict and refuse to obey or implement it. They could in fact actively oppose it. Or for that matter, a city council or mayor could act in defiance or opposition of an unjust edict by a higher authority. [107]

Can a state or county use interposition to protect its citizens against what amounts to revolution through federal legislation? Perhaps so. There are these avenues of approach.

• Federal courts. File federal suits claiming that the government doesn’t have the right to do what it claims in the objectionable law, executive order, or bureaucratic regulation.

• Through state action, assert that the federal government has overreached, and that its law or regulation has no authority in this state.

Using the federal courts to protect your citizens. Lawsuits can be used to object to actual or proposed federal actions, claiming violation of rights, or lack of authority to do the action. But lawsuits are an expensive and lengthy process. By the time you get satisfaction it might be years too late to benefit from the judgment.

The legal approach also assumes that the courts are sane and reasonable. Relying on the federal courts to protect you from federal law is much like asking a man to bite his own hand. For example, the Supreme Court said that the Commerce Clause, dealing with interstate commerce, can be used to prevent you from growing grain for your own personal use.

For most of our history, the Courts foiled congressional attempts to use the “Commerce Clause” to sabotage the clear meaning of the Constitution, particularly the Ninth and 10th Amendments. The courts began caving in to congressional tyranny during the 1930s. That tyranny was sealed in 1942, by a little known U.S. Supreme ruling in Wickard vs. Filburn.

Filburn was a small farmer in Ohio. The Department of Agriculture had set production quotas. Filburn harvested nearly 12 acres of wheat above his government allotment. He argued that the excess wheat was unrelated to commerce since he grew it for his own use. He was fined anyway. The court reasoned that had he not grown the extra wheat he would have had to purchase wheat — therefore, he was indirectly affecting interstate commerce.[108]

In a similar vein the Supreme Court split hairs and insisted that the government can fine you for not buying “Obamacare” health insurance.[109] There are also threats to add justices to the Court to ensure partisan rulings.[110] Alas, we can’t rely on justice from the Supreme Court when it is deliberately filled to rubber stamp Congress.

State nullification of federal law. The idea of that a state can declare federal law null, and having no jurisdiction in that state, comes from the “supremacy clause” of the Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2).

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. [111]

If a law is made that is thought tyrannical, was it “made in Pursuance” of the Constitution? Who gets to decide? Through the Marbury v. Madison case, [112] it’s argued that only the Supreme Court can make this judgment. But some contend that the states themselves also have that authority.[113] In short, nullification is civil disobedience for the state.

Can a state nullify a federal law? Some say yes,[114] some no.[115] It really hasn’t been tried. For example, the oft-cited 1828 Nullification Crisis was over tariffs. [116] But since tariffs are clearly a role of the federal government, this wasn’t an appropriate battle for nullification.[117] The federal government now wants to force rules on us about transgender rights, restricting religious freedoms, etc. Various amendments in the Bill of Rights say that they have no authority to do these things. These are appropriate topics for testing state nullification.

Nullification requires preparation

Nullification means more than passing a law at the statehouse. If federal officials show up in your state to enforce an odious law, the governor will have to prevent them from doing their jobs. Otherwise, your nullification is just play acting. Your state sheriffs will block the federal marshals, and there’s a standoff.

What happens if your state’s nullification is seen instead as rebellion, even treason. Merely hinting at nullification causes people to quote the Insurrection Act,[118] with threats to use troops against your state. If your state’s nullification is to be made good then you need a defending force. The idea is not military victory, but to make the political cost of attack too high for the federal government to bear. The state’s force buys time for political compromise.

Your state can’t rely on its National Guard. That is merely the U.S. Army on loan. It might even be called up to attack your state. Rather, your state needs an active, revived militia.

Militia is still a thing

The militia is a local army, made up of the locality’s able-bodied men. They come when called by the militia’s commander, and they fight with whatever weapons they already have. For example, in Israel’s time these were repurposed farming implements (Isaiah 2:3-4; Joel 3:10; Micah 4:3). Because they’re just people called at need, they really aren’t a match against trained professional soldiers. But if you need some sort of fighting force right now, the militia is what you have.

In the 1770s, the American colonies had both state and county militia.[119] Some units even had cannon, perhaps taken from arsenals storing weapons of the French and Indian War.[120] Capturing cannon was the purpose for the British trip to Lexington and Concord in April 1775.[121] So much for limiting 2^nd Amendment to flintlock muskets. Instead, perhaps every town’s militia ought to have machine guns, mortars, and anti-tank rockets.

The Constitution doesn’t create militia, but assumes that it already exists and could be useful for national defense.[122] This goes hand-in-hand with the 2^nd Amendment, for unarmed militia is useless. But the real reason for the 2^nd Amendment is that militia is a safeguard against the federal government itself! The 2^nd Amendment isn’t about shooting squirrels, but about blocking federal tyranny.

The Second Amendment does, however, reinforce the rule of law and anti‐tyranny structure of the US Constitution, by ensuring the government cannot disarm the people. In the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, all nine Justices agreed that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for service in the militia. (The justices disagreed about whether the right includes other purposes, such as personal self‐defense or hunting.) Why did the founding generation believe that a well‐regulated militia was necessary? One reason, observed Justice Antonin Scalia: “when the able‐bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.”

Explaining the proposed Second Amendment, Madison’s ally Tench Coxe, a delegate to the Continental Congress for Pennsylvania, wrote: “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow‐citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” Madison thanked Coxe for the newspaper essay.

Democratic Vice President and Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey, the congressional leader of the civil rights movement, expressed a similar sentiment nearly two centuries later. For three decades after World War II, he was the embodiment of a liberal Democrat. In 1960, Humphrey wrote: “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”[123]

The Founding Fathers figured that, in the event of federal tyranny, the states would call up their militia to oppose the federal army. James Madison wrote that the numbers of the militia would always outmatch the numbers of a standing army.[124] But there are any number of famous, decisive, battles where small disciplined armies overcame huge less disciplined ones. Militia leaders know that they can’t match up against formations of professional troops. Even showing up at the same place with them isn’t advised. What militia can provide the state are:

• A force to provide an initial check to federal invaders. The federal leaders have to decide whether to negotiate – a win for the state – or to go big and fight, occupy, and arrest.

• A semi-organized resistance force, having many military veterans, that can disrupt the supply and equipment of the occupiers.[125] This amounts to guerilla war, and should give the federal military leaders pause.

• An incident to rally around, perhaps a “Lexington Green” moment. The hope is that the nation will have had enough of federal bullying, and that matters will improve in a hurry.

But perhaps nothing goes right for the state. Its nullification gets squashed, its militia locked up, its towns locked down, and the federals prove that they can do whatever they please. Or perhaps everything goes right for the federals, except that their deeds trigger widespread disregard for federal authority (“To your tents, Israel! Now look after your own house, David!”). There arises civil conflict resembling that of the Spanish Civil War.[126] As noted about the English Civil War, you are never sure of the eventual outcomes.

Some people join private or ad-hoc militia. Any number of people can get together and call themselves a militia group. But if they don’t have authorization from the state, county, sheriff, etc., then what happens to them if they actually shoot or detain someone? Militia needs the cover of government sponsorship.

An interesting use of private militia was in the Battle of Athens.[127] In 1946, the political machine in Athens, Tennessee was fixing to steal the sheriff’s election. The locals, including many returning GIs, decided that this time the election would be honest. Hundreds of ex-soldiers gathered into an ad-hoc militia and besieged the city jail, where some of the ballot boxes had been taken. They soon took the jail and held the ballot boxes until they could be officially, and honestly, counted.

But whatever the future may bring, you can’t use militia if you don’t have it. Its organization has been forgotten in many states, but activists are working nationwide to re-establish both state and county militia.[128]

Conclusion

Our study of the Bible and history has shown these things:

• Human government is a good thing to have.

• Romans 13 says that government is to encourage good acts and punish evil ones.

• If government officials command us to do evil acts, or prevent us from doing good things, then Christians aren’t bound by God to obey their evil commands.

• Resisting government evil can encompass both civil and armed disobedience.

We’re told that “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” mean that everything we know must be torn down. This is merely a hatred of Christianity, with American culture as its focus. Their wish for change means destroying what we have, but they’ve nothing to replace it with except socialist strongman rule.[129]

Our American system of government is a good thing. Its federal and state layers, the Constitution, the limits on authority, can work well together and are worth preserving. We must defend ourselves, and our way of government, not by overturning things but by resisting their abuse.

Author note: Also available at https://fixthisculture.com/freedom/american-christians-tyranny-and-resistance/

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Footnotes:

[1] Anderson, Ryan, Biden’s Equality Act is a danger to women’s and conscience rights, New York Post, February 21, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/02/21/bidens-equality-act-is-a-danger-to-womens-and-conscience-rights/

[2] Newman, Alex, “Equality Act” Would Unleash Federal Persecution of Christians, The New American, May 8, 2019, https://thenewamerican.com/print/equality-act-would-unleash-federal-persecution-of-christians/

[3] Editorial, The Government Censors Are Here, Issues & Insights, February 24, 2021, https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/24/the-government-censors-are-here/

[4] Kaminsky, Gabe, Digital Book-Burning: Amazon Bans Scholar Ryan T. Anderson’s Book On Transgenderism, The Federalist, February 23, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/23/digital-book-burning-amazon-bans-heritage-scholar-ryan-t-andersons-book-on-transgenderism/

[5] Chris Mills, Rodrigo, GoDaddy reviewing websites for links to Capitol insurrection, The Hill, February 23, 2021, https://thehill.com/policy/technology/540156-godaddy-reviewing-websites-tied-to-capitol-insurrection

[6] Abrams, Rachel, House Democrats Press Cable Providers on Election Fraud Claims, New York Times, February 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/business/media/disinformation-cable-television.html

[7] Stepman, Jarrett, Critical Race Theory Infiltrates Government, Classrooms, The Daily Signal, January 12, 2021, https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/12/critical-race-theory-infiltrates-government-classrooms/

[8] Skurk, Krystina, Critical Race Theory in K-12 Education, Real Clear Public Affairs, July 21, 2020, https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2020/07/16/critical_race_theory_in_k-12_education_498969.html#

[9] Butcher, Jonathan and Gonzalez, Mike, Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America, The Heritage Foundation, December 7, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/civil-rights/report/critical-race-theory-the-new-intolerance-and-its-grip-america

[10] Serry, Gic, The Magdeburg Confession, Faith & Heritage, November 30, 2015, https://faithandheritage.com/2015/11/the-magdeburg-confession/

[11] Augsburg Interim, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg_Interim

[12] Benefield, Rev. Timothy, God’s Three Institutions, Patterson Irrigator, June 8, 2017, https://www.ttownmedia.com/patterson_irrigator/community/faith/god-s-three-institutions/article_5dbcc146-4bd6-11e7-9721-c3dfc9ec6de1.html

[13] Oh, Michael, The Purpose and Role of Government, English Standard Bible Online, https://www.esv.org/resources/esv-global-study-bible/the-purpose-and-role-of-government/

[14] Benefield, Rev. Timothy, God’s Three Institutions

[15] Long, Phillip, The Roman Cult of Emperor Worship, Reading Acts, April 2, 2010, https://readingacts.com/2010/04/02/the-roman-cult-of-emperor-worship/

[16] Ibid.

[17] Snell, Melissa, The Origin and Decline of the Papal States, ThoughtCo, February 11, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/the-papal-states-1789449

[18] Michelle-Hanson, Susan, School counselor who helped teen get hidden abortion can’t be fired, court says, Live Action News, April 9, 2016,  https://www.liveaction.org/news/school-counselor-helped-teen-get-abortion-cant-fired-court-says/

[19] Cochran, Matthew, How Schools Quietly Indoctrinate Your Kids On Abortion And Transgenderism, The Federalist, May 3, 2018, https://thefederalist.com/2018/05/03/schools-quietly-indoctrinate-kids-abortion-transgenderism/

[20] Bartholet, Elizabeth, Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection, Arizona Law Review, Volume 62, Issue 1 [2020] page 78, https://arizonalawreview.org/pdf/62-1/62arizlrev1.pdf

[21] Butcher, Jonathan and Gonzalez, Mike, Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America

[22] Lowry, Rich, MSNBC: Kids Don’t Belong to Their Parents, Real Clear Politics, April 9, 2013, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/09/why_msnbc__the_left_resent_good_parents_117868.html

[23] Dwyer, James, Parents’ Religion and Children’s Welfare: Debunking the Doctrine of Parents’ Rights, pages 1373-1374, William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository, Faculty Publications, January 1994, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1167&context=facpubs

[24] Kollontai, Alexandra, Communism and the Family, published in The Worker, 1920, collected in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, 1977, found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

[25] Gonzalez, Michael, Biden’s embrace of ‘equity’ means he’s abandoned the quest for equality, New York Post, January 31, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/01/31/bidens-embrace-of-equity-means-an-abandoned-quest-for-equality/

[26] Pandolfo, Chris, House passes the Equality Act, sweeping anti-discrimination legislation that threatens religious liberty, Blaze Media, February 26, 2021, https://www.theblaze.com/news/equality-act-anti-discrimination-legislation-that-threatens-religious-liberty

[27] Perry, Oliver, To Know Socialism is to Hate It, Illinois Family Institute, February 13, 2019, https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/uncategorized/to-know-socialism-is-to-hate-it/

[28] Green New Deal Reads Like a Social-Marxist Manifesto for America, Net Advisor, February 8, 2019, https://www.netadvisor.org/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-reads-like-a-social-marxist-manifesto-for-america/

[29] Perry, Oliver, Socialism is Also a Religion, Illinois Family Institute, September 21, 2018, https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/uncategorized/socialism-is-also-a-religion/

[30] Perry, Oliver, Wealth Tax: the envious enabler of American Socialism, Fix This Culture blog, September 11, 2019,https://fixthisculture.com/socialism/wealth-tax-the-envious-enabler-of-american-socialism/

[31] Perry, Oliver, With Socialism only crazy people believe in God, Fix This Culture blog, June 20, 2019, https://fixthisculture.com/socialism/with-socialism-only-crazy-people-believe-in-god/

[32] Perry, Oliver, Socialism is Also a Religion

[33] Ibid.

[34] Lindsley, Dr. Art, What Are the Biblical Warnings about Government?, Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics, February 7, 2018, https://tifwe.org/biblical-warnings-government/

[35] The Wizard of Id, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Id
In the comic, The Lone Haranguer keeps heckling the king with these words.

[36] Funke, Daniel, Says Jerry Nadler said “God has no authority in the House of Representatives”, Politifact, February 26, 2021, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/26/facebook-posts/jerry-nadler-didnt-say-god-has-no-authority-house-/

[37] Should Christians Honor Biden’s Election?, The Coming Tribulation, December 25, 2020, https://thecomingtribulation.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/should-christians-honor-bidens-election/

[38] Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 20, Calvin’s Institutes, Page 2650 of the web site, https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.vi.xxi.html

[39] Harsanyi, David, AOC and other progressives have a new goal: Silence the press, New York Post, January 13, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/01/13/aoc-other-progressives-have-a-new-goal-silence-the-press/

[40] Huston, Warner, Top California Democrat Wants Trump Voters Put in Re-Education Camps, Great American Politics, November 20, 2020, https://greatamericanpolitics.com/2020/11/top-california-democrat-wants-trump-voters-put-in-re-education-camps/

[41] Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

[42]Augsburg Interim, Wikipedia,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg_Interim

[43] Holy Roman Empire, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

[44] Kilcrease, Dr. Jack, The Augsburg Interim, Lutheran Reformation, May 16, 2016, https://lutheranreformation.org/history/the-augsburg-interim/

[45] Successor to Duke George of Saxony. See later endnotes.

[46] Luther, Martin, Temporal Authority: To What Extent it Should Be Obeyed (1523), Center for Security Studies, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125470/606.pdf

[47] Luther, Martin, On Secular Authority: how far does the Obedience owed to it extend? (1523) (excerpt), York University, http://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3020pdf/Luther.pdf

[48] Saxony was split into Ernestine Saxony, having Duke John, and Albertine Saxony, having Dukes George and Maurice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electorate_of_Saxony

[49] Luther, Martin, On Secular Authority

[50] Phillips, Matthew, Widerstand: Luther, Issues in Christian Education, Concordia University, https://issues.cune.edu/enlightenment-liberty-vis-a-vis-christian-liberty/widerstand-luther-and-the-freedom-to-resist-unjust-authority/#_ftn10

[51] Bowman, Cynthia Grant, Luther and the Justifiability of Resistance to Legitimate Authority (1979), Cornell Law Faculty Publications, Paper 151, page 10, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/151

[52] Bowman, Cynthia Grant, Luther, page 11

[53] Serry, Gic, The Magdeburg Confession, Faith & Heritage, November 30, 2015, https://faithandheritage.com/2015/11/the-magdeburg-confession/

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Whitford, David, The Duty to Resist: The Magdeburg Confession and the Reframing of Romans 13, published in Caritas et Reformatio by Concordia Academia Press 97-118, 2002, https://www.academia.edu/22653504/_The_Duty_to_Resist_The_Magdeburg_Confession_and_the_Reframing_of_Romans_13_In_Caritas_et_Reformatio_Essays_on_the_Church_and_Society_in_Honor_of_Carter_Lindberg_on_his_Sixty_fifth_Birthday_edited_by_David_M_Whitford_St_Louis_Concordia_Academic_Press_2002_97_118

[57] Serry, Gic, The Magdeburg Confession

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Charles I of England, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England

[61] Bishops’ Wars, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishops%27_Wars

[62] The Scottish Reformation, c.1525-1560, The Scottish History Society, 2016, https://scottishhistorysociety.com/the-scottish-reformation-c-1525-1560/

[63] Laud`s Liturgy – the Book of Common Prayer (1637), The Reformation,  https://www.thereformation.info/lauds-liturgy/

[64] What is the Anglican Church, and what do Anglicans believe?, Got Questions, https://www.gotquestions.org/Anglicans.html

[65] Book of Canons (1636), Reformation History, http://reformationhistory.org/bookofcanons.html

[66] What is the divine right of kings?, Got Questions, https://www.gotquestions.org/divine-right-of-kings.html

[67] National Covenant, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Covenant

[68] Rutherford, Samuel, Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince; a Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People, Portage Press, 2013, http://www.portagepub.com/products/caa/sr-lexrex17.html

All page numbers come from this typeset version of the book.

[69] Ibid., p.77

[70] Ibid, p.101

[71] Ibid., p.62

[72] Ibid., p.261

[73] Ibid., pp. 264-265

[74] English Civil War, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

[75] Second Continental Congress, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Continental_Congress

[76] Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

[77] Battle of Long Island, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Long_Island

[78] Staff Writer, How Long Did It Take to Get Across the Atlantic in the 1700s?, Reference, March 26, 2020, https://www.reference.com/history/long-did-across-atlantic-1700s-aaa802df642b99a3

[79] Adams, Samuel, The Rights of the Colonists (1772), Hanover Historical Texts Project, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/adamss.html

[80] Bill of Rights 1689, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

[81] Adams, Samuel, The Rights of the Colonists (1772)

[82] Seven Years’ War, Wikipedia,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War

[83] French and Indian War, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War

[84] Flynn, C. Aaron, American Constitutional Thought: Colonial Charters and Early State Constitutions, presented at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics, Graduate Student Conference, University of Virginia, April 7, 2011, https://www.fortthomas.kyschools.us/userfiles/363/Classes/10174/Colonial%20Charters.pdf

[85] Further Impositions: The Quartering Act and the Townshend Duties, sparknotes, https://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/prerevolution/section7/

[86] Bill of Rights 1689

[87] Drayer, David, Why did American colonists have the rights of Englishmen?, Socratic Q&A, July 11, 2017, https://socratic.org/questions/why-did-american-colonists-have-the-rights-of-englishmen

[88] Swindler, William, “RIGHTS OF ENGLISHMEN” SINCE 1776: SOME ANGLO-AMERICAN NOTES, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 124, Number 5, May 1976, https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=5001&context=penn_law_review

[89] Caivano, Dean, THE FEAR OF DOMINATION: RESISTANCE AGAINST TYRANNY, Journal of the American Revolution, July 7, 2020, https://allthingsliberty.com/2020/01/the-fear-of-domination-resistance-against-tyranny/

[90] Garris, Zachary, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, REBELLION, AND THE LIMITED ROLE OF GOVERNMENT (ROMANS 13:1-7), Knowing Scripture, September 3, 2019, https://knowingscripture.com/articles/civil-disobedience-rebellion-and-the-limited-role-of-government-romans-13-1-7

[91] Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

[92] Edwards, David, The Ancient Rights of Englishmen, Libertarianism, March 27, 2019, https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/ancient-rights-englishmen

[93] Loyalist (American Revolution), Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)

[94] Trotsky, Leon, Quotable Quote on War, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/152853-you-may-not-be-interested-in-war-but-war-is

[95] Widburg, Andrea, ‘Mostly peaceful’ Antifa and BLM protesters almost beat a man to death, American Thinker, August 18, 2020, https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/mostly_peaceful_antifa_and_blm_protesters_almost_beat_a_man_to_death.html

[96] Cunningham, Joe, The Continued Persecution of Masterpiece Cakeshop, RedState, March 24, 2021, https://redstate.com/joesquire/2021/03/24/the-continued-persecution-of-masterpiece-cakeshop-n349385

[97] McLaughlin, Mark, Hate crime bill: Hate talk in homes ‘must be prosecuted’, The Times, October 28, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hate-crime-bill-hate-talk-in-homes-must-be-prosecuted-6bcthrjdc

[98] Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four), Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four)

[99] McDonald, Kerry, These Parents and Teachers Have Had Enough of Woke Classrooms and Critical Race Theory, Foundation for Economic Education, April 19, 2021, https://fee.org/articles/woke-classrooms-prompt-more-parents-teachers-to-speak-out-against-critical-race-theory/

[100] Vieira, Edwin Jr., No second American revolution is necessary, News With Views, August 9, 2016, https://newswithviews.com/no-second-american-revolution-is-necessary/

[101] Keenan, Jeremiah, Canadian Bus Driver Arrested For Criticizing Homosexuality, Faces Up To 2 Years In Prison, The Federalist, June 28, 2018, https://thefederalist.com/2018/06/28/canadian-bus-driver-arrested-two-years-later-criticizing-homosexuality/

[102] Flanders, Nancy, ‘A club to punish dissent’: The Equality Act would force Americans to participate in abortion, Live Action News, February 24, 2021, https://www.liveaction.org/news/dissent-equality-act-force-americans-participate-abortion/

[103] Cornish, Stephanie, Ala. bus boycott costs $3,000 daily, AFRO News, December 1, 2015, https://afro.com/ala-bus-boycott-costs-3000-daily/

This article is a reprint from the Baltimore AFRO-American, of Dec 13, 1955

[104] The Montgomery Bus Boycott, National Park Service, April 5, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/articles/montgomery-bus-boycott.htm

[105] Vivian, C.T and Fiffer, Steve, The Nonviolent Sit-Ins That Desegregated Nashville’s Lunch Counters, The Daily Beast, April 18, 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-nonviolent-sit-ins-that-desegregated-nashvilles-lunch-counters

[106] King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963), Letter from Jail website, https://letterfromjail.com

[107] Trewhella, Pastor Matt, The Lesser Magistrate Doctrine: A Sword Against Unjust Edicts and Tyranny, Mercy Seat Christian Church, http://www.mercyseat.net/pdfs/lessermagistrate.pdf

[108] Williams, Walter, Commerce clause abuse, Townhall, November 5, 2003, https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2003/11/05/commerce-clause-abuse-n968530

[109] Constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_challenges_to_the_Affordable_Care_Act

[110] Walker, Scott, Biden and Dems’ Supreme Court packing an undemocratic power grab, The Washington Times, April 22, 2021, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/22/biden-and-democrats-supreme-court-packing-an-undem/

[111] Nelson, Caleb and Roosevelt, Kermit, The Supremacy Clause, National Constitution Center, https://www.constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/article-vi/clauses/31

[112] Marbury v. Madison, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

[113] Martinell, TJ, The Myth of Marbury v Madison, Do Not Comply …Nullify, July 18, 2019, https://nullify.us/the-myth-of-marbury-v-madison/

[114] State Nullification: What Is It?, Liberty Classroom, https://libertyclassroom.com/nullification/

[115] Pulliam, Mark, Is Nullification an Option?, Law & Liberty, April 2, 2021, https://lawliberty.org/is-nullification-an-option/

[116] The Nullification Crisis, Bill of Rights Institute, https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-nullification-crisis

[117] U.S. Constitution – Article 1 Section 8, U.S. Constitution, https://usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html

[118] Insurrection Act of 1807, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807

[119] This is a sample of references to county militia:

https://www.phmc.pa.gov/Archives/Research-Online/Pages/Revolutionary-War-Militia-Cumberland.aspx

https://www.chesco.org/4780/Revolutionary-War-Militia-Company-Maps

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~tqpeiffer/genealogy/Documents/MILITARY%20%20Vets%20-%20Units/Military%20Units/Source%20Documents/Augusta%20Co.%20Militia/VirginiaMilitiaintheRevolutionaryWar.pdf

[120] Schenawolf, Harry, History of Early Colonial Militias in America, Revolutionary War Journal, January 9, 2015, http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/militias-in-colonial-america/

[121] Gage, General Thomas, Orders to Lieut. Colonel Smith, 10th Regiment ’Foot (April 18 1775), Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/orders-from-general-thomas-gage-to-lieut-colonel-smith-10th-regiment-foot/

[122] U.S. Constitution – Article 1 Section 8

[123] Kopel, David, Why the Anti‐Tyranny Case for the 2nd Amendment Shouldn’t Be Dismissed So Quickly, Cato Institute, August 22, 2016, https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-anti-tyranny-case-2nd-amendment-shouldnt-be-dismissed-so-quickly

[124] Madison, James, The Federalist Papers: No. 46, The Avalon Project of Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp

[125] Burkhead, David, “The Government has Cruise Missiles”, The Writer In Black, April 1, 2021, https://thewriterinblack.com/2021/04/01/the-government-has-cruise-missiles/

[126] Spanish Civil War, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War

[127] Jacobs, Sam, Battle of Athens: The Forgotten History of the Tennessee Rebellion Against Local Government, Ammo, https://ammo.com/articles/battle-of-athens-forgotten-history-tennessee-rebellion-against-local-government

[128] Martin, Lisa, Modern-Day Militias Rise in Virginia, The Crozet Gazette, October 2, 2020, https://www.crozetgazette.com/2020/10/02/modern-day-militias-rise-in-virginia/

[129] Perry, Oliver, To Know Socialism is to Hate It

Does voting matter anymore? Does it really matter whether I contact my elected representatives? You probably have considered these questions many times.

Paul Johnson, in his excellent book Modern Times, recounts the 1960 Presidential election where John F. Kennedy squeezed out a victory over Richard M. Nixon. Kennedy supposedly won by only 120,000 votes out of nearly 69 million total votes cast. This victory was clouded by questions concerning the vote count in Alabama and in Illinois, thanks to the Daley machine.

Johnson states that Nixon did not challenge the result of the election because he thought it would damage the presidency and so America.

Does this sound familiar?

There is no doubt that the 2020 election also had a lot of fishy elements to it, probably even more than the 1960 election.

What if concerned citizens in our nation had said in 1960, it doesn’t matter if I vote anymore? What if concerned citizens had said that in 2016? Not voting would have been a disastrous decision. Yes, we know that there are many conspiracies, irregularities, and the like, but we cannot abandon our duty as concerned citizens.

Consider the results of the Georgia race for U.S. Senate in the 2020 election.

On November 3, 2020, the results for David Perdue (R) vs. Jon Ossoff (D):

Perdue: 2,462,617

Ossoff: 2,374,519

Perdue received 88,098 votes more than Ossoff, but since Perdue did not receive a majority of the votes, there was a runoff.

What happened in the runoff?

Perdue got 247,638 fewer votes.

Ossoff 104,596 fewer votes.

And guess what, Ossoff won the election.

The greatest voter fraud in Georgia in my opinion is the 247,638 voters who didn’t bother to show up for the runoff and vote again for David Perdue. Ten percent of the people who voted for Perdue in the first election did not bother to vote the second time.

These 247,638 voters said it didn’t matter. How well did that work out for us?

A similar travesty was seen in the special election between Raphael Warnock (D) vs. Kelly Loeffler (R).

I have no doubt that during the 2020 election wicked men and women did everything they could to subvert the results.

I would still argue that, on the whole, the greatest source of voter fraud is when Christians fail to vote or, even worse, vote for the wrong candidate.

Someone has stated (we don’t know who) that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Some people would say this statement now applies to voting. The results are cooked already. It is insanity to expect a different outcome.

This logic is faulty in terms of the voting process and the effectiveness of voter participation. First of all, the above quote relates to situations where you have the power or ability to change something. Second, when we go to the polls there are numerous races. I don’t think it is accurate to say that every single race has been rigged. Have we reached the point where elections are a total farce? I don’t believe so, and thinking this way will inevitably only encourage those that stand against us.

Believing you will escape the insanity by sitting out the entire process is just a different color of insanity.

So, we don’t trust in ourselves. While we acknowledge we cannot control our own destiny and future, disengagement is not the solution. Until our vote is taken from us or the system is entirely rigged, we must fulfill our duty. We must not give into discouragement and fatalism.

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Written by Dr. David J. Ayers

When I visit my family physician, he starts by checking my vitals. It’s amazing how critical are simple things like blood pressure, temperature, and pulse.

We social scientists know that vital signs matter in organized religion, too. There are a lot of details we can look at, but basics such as how many people identify with churches, whether they attend services regularly, or apply their faith to their daily lives, are awful important. Here is what we know: the vital signs of American Christianity are in serious decline.

Recently, I compared crucial vital signs for Americans aged 18 to 44, surveyed in the respected National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). I compared the data released in 2013 to the same survey released just six years later, in 2019. Here’s what the data show:

For both males and females, membership in Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, and historically Black Protestant churches declined a lot. Meanwhile, those professing no religious faith—called “Nones” in sociological circles—rose sharply: from 26 percent to 38 percent among males, and from 22 percent to 28 percent among females. Within each of these three divisions of Protestantism, the percentages of both males and females who reported attending church every week or more declined quite a bit, while those who attended rarely or never increased. The percentages of both males and females who claimed that their faith is “very important” in their daily lives also sank in each of these Protestant groups.

Mainline Protestantism, especially, is on life support. In this survey and age group, the numbers went down one-fifth, and were only 12 percent in the latest NSFG. Among mainliners, only 20 percent of males and 28 percent of females went to church every week, 28 percent of males and 18 percent of females said they that they never go to church, and only 28 percent of males and 40 percent of females considered their faith to be very important. Optimistically, this means that less than 5 percent of Americans from 18-to-44 are actively committed to a Mainline Protestant church.

This is a double decline whammy. The numbers are dropping, and the commitment of those who remain is also falling among our young and early middle-aged adults. The future of American Protestantism is in steep decline.

What about Catholics? Their percentages have declined for males but not females, and they are holding at a little under one quarter of those 18 to 44. However, their church attendance levels edged downward for both males and females. In the last NSFG, less than one in five Catholic males, and a little over one in three females, attended Mass weekly. Those never or rarely going to Mass increased. And while the percentage of Catholic women in this age group who consider their faith “very important” has held steady at about half, males have declined somewhat in this category and are now down to less than one in three.

So, every major wing of American Christianity declined just in this latest six-year period. To make matters worse, these were the alarming vital signs well before the COVID-19 tsunami. By all accounts, church involvement has plummeted enormously since Spring 2020, and will struggle to revive to even close to these dismal 2019 levels. The only question is how much steeper the ongoing decline will be because of the pandemic, not whether there will be one.

This is not a problem that will only impact the survival of churches representing most of American Christianity. Committed religious faith has long been associated with numerous goods in American life, such as higher marriage and fertility rates, lower divorce, more charitable giving, and the vitality of religious organizations serving their local communities.

This is a loss for all of us.

The patient is gravely ill, but she is not dead. Many of us know, and are even part of, flourishing churches. Most of us are not “Nones” yet, and most of us who are not are professing Christians.

Churches should certainly be doing outreach, but more than that, we need to do a lot more “in-reach.” That is, we need to aggressively reach out to those who claim to be part of our church families but lack commitment, to gather with the church week by week, and to live consistently with the faith we profess. If our commitment is lackluster, how can our churches recapture the Nones? Why would they even want to join us?

Now is a great time to start. Go to church this Sunday, connect with the people, approach God in prayer and worship, soak up the sermon, reach out to your brothers and sisters, encourage them by your presence and care. Do what faithful Christians have done for over 2,000 years.

See you in church.

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This article was originally published by the Institute for Faith & Freedom, where Dr. David J. Ayers is the Fellow for Marriage and Family. His latest book is “Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction.”

It’s a curious phenomenon that racists rarely see their own racism—the plank in their own eyes. That was true during the long, torturous days of slavery. It was true during the long torturous days of Jim Crow laws. It was true during the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s true now. No, it’s not conservatives who are spreading racism while remaining blithely blind to it. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and BLM who are spreading racism like manure throughout our cultural system. And it’s racist Ibram X. Kendi who sees himself as “anti-racist” and wrote,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And like racists of yore, they profit handsomely from their efforts to encourage Americans to judge people by the color of their skin.

Leftist change-agents posing as “diversity educators” have captured the wills of corporate executives. Now Big Business is in the business of not only selling goods and services but also in repackaging racism as “antiracism” and browbeating employees into pretending they believe it.

Prior to capturing the wills of corporate execs—not known for their familiarity with or investment in arcane academic theories or for steely-spined moral integrity—leftist change-agents in sullied ivory towers captured the wills of teachers and administrators—not known for independent or “critical” thinking, or for commitments to diversity, inclusivity, or tolerance. In my experience, will-capturing of yellow-bellied teachers and administrators is an almost effortless task. All it takes is a bit of name-calling topped by a dollop of mockery, and the spineless among us bend like paper straws dipped in a Big Gulp.

Now states are requiring ongoing critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination for staff and faculty. Schools are forcing white students to engage in exercises designed to make them feel shame for their skin color (goodbye self-esteem movement).  And schools are racially segregating students in what are euphemistically called “affinity” groups. “Separate but equal” has returned with a vengeance thanks to vengefully regressive “progressives.”

That probably explains why administrators and faculty said next to nothing when the increasingly woke, decreasingly conservative evangelical Wheaton College held a racially segregated pre-graduation ceremony for colorful people on May 8, 2021, which was advertised as “RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY” (all caps in original) and held in the campus chapel. While it was created “Especially for undergraduate students, staff, and faculty of color,” the school provided “limited seating” for colorless people. I wonder if those seats were way in the back.

One Wheaton faculty member who likely loves Wheaton’s embrace of re-segregation is associate professor of philosophy and critical race theorist Nathan Cartagena who was recently interviewed for leftist Christian Jim Wallis’ Sojourners’ magazine. In this interview, Cartagena explained how he sussed out Wheaton’s friendliness to CRT by delivering a visiting lecture on controversial critical race theorist Tommy Curry during the interview process:

I wanted to see: Is this a place that would welcome such reflection? I received a warm welcome from the students, my department, etc., so I thought “OK, this is a place where I can do this.”

And by “do this,” Cartagena meant, not expose students to the debate on CRT, but to promote CRT:

I taught a reading group my first year at Wheaton that involved one of the important texts in the critical race theory movement, Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. The following year I asked if I could teach a half-semester class on critical race theory—I got a full thumbs up.

Derrick Bell is another controversial figure in the critical race theory movement “whose writings on ‘critical race theory,’” conservative African American economist Thomas Sowell explains “promoted an extremist hostility to white people.”

Sowell described the academic transformation of Bell, attributing it largely to his scholarly inadequacy at Harvard:

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was … surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. …

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Cartagena openly admits the cunning way he gets his students to accept CRT:

When I was first teaching on CRT, I was very explicit about when something was a CRT essay or quote. Now, one of the things I do is I present CRT literature without telling students that it’s CRT literature. Then I ask them what they think about it. The overwhelming response from the students is: “Wow, this essay is so rigorously researched, so clear, and so well-argued. Even if I don’t agree with every claim, I learned so much,” etc. Then, after they’ve sung a little praise song, [laughs] I tell them they’ve read a piece by a critical race theorist. You can see a look of disillusionment set in — this part gets really hard, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s a healthy destabilization. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of my students are racialized white folks. If they’re not now going to say that everything they just said was false, how do they reckon with believing there are things to learn from critical race theorists while knowing that the stakes, in some of these communities they’ve been a part of, are so high that to say such is to find themselves ostracized?

While this tactic appears to be a means to enable students to approach ideas objectively, with a mind decluttered and “decolonized” by the detritus of white privilege and systemic racism, educators know it’s a tactic that can be used to propagandize. Presenting students with an interpretive lens beclouded by jargon, ambiguous language, assumptions, and subtexts with which students have no familiarity doesn’t educate; it indoctrinates.

At least as offensive is Cartagena’s evident pleasure in “destabilizing” his students and emotionally manipulating them by manufacturing cognitive dissonance.

Enquiring donors and parents considering sending their children to Wheaton may want to know if Cartagena spends equal time having students study any of the many works of criticism of CRT like Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone or Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine, and contributing editor at Crisis Magazine, opposes the teaching of CRT in schools:

The problem is that the schools shouldn’t be teaching any “theory” of human behavior at all, for two principal reasons. First, the students do not have anything close to the learning or the broad human experiences that would serve as evidence for checking the theory. For the same reason why it is pointless, and perhaps destructive, to teach literary theory to young people who have hardly begun to read literature at all, because they have no evidence or experience from which to judge the theory, and they will instead be prone to force what literature they do encounter to fit the predeterminations of the theory, so it is pointless, and probably destructive, to teach some theory of human behavior to children who need first to have the experiences, personal or vicarious, that the theory purports to explain.

But the second reason … is more grave. It is that human behavior does not admit of that kind of theory at all. I am not talking here about moral philosophy, or about anthropological observations, or about history and its more or less reliable guidelines. All “theories” of human behavior are necessarily ideological and reductive: whether it’s from Skinner or Marx, it doesn’t matter. The simplest things we do in a given day are steeped in so many motives, passions, thoughts, physical exigencies, and moral commitments, we dare not simply paste a label on them to explain them away and have done with them.

There are glimmers of hope that Americans on both the right and left may be approaching their limits with the racist “antiracism” movement. Virtually everyone on the right and increasing numbers of people on the left are fed up with the ubiquitous manifestations of critical race theory. Americans see CRT is corrosive and divisive. They see CRT is being used to control discourse. And they see that “progressives” are passing CRT off as inarguable, objective truth. “Progressives,” in control of most of the levers of power and influence, feel no obligation to debate CRT’s arguable assumptions. Nor will they acknowledge that CRT is arguable as they use hard-earned tax dollars to promulgate it in government schools. And hoo boy, are they promulgating.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CRT-at-Wheaton-College.mp3

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Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!

There was a troubling recent story in Christianity Today that reveals many churches are failing the call to be in the world, but not of the world. It seems that most young Evangelical Christians now embrace cohabitation, living together before marriage. Most Evangelicals under the age of 45 have cohabited, or plan to do so in the future, or are open to the possibility.

A 2019 Pew Research survey found that 58 percent of white Evangelicals say they believe that cohabiting is acceptable if a couple plans to marry. In fact, a 2012 survey found that only 41 percent of evangelicals ages 18 to 29 disagreed with the claim that cohabitation was morally acceptable even if the couple had no express intent to marry. In other words, like the Pew survey, this General Social Survey found that 59 percent of Evangelicals were okay with living together for any reason, even if marriage is not imminent or a consideration.

While 84 percent of those with no religious affiliation cohabit before marriage, compared to 54 percent of evangelical protestants, most people who cohabit never make it to the altar. For example, among Evangelicals, only 49 percent ended in marriage. Some research shows that overall, only about 1 in 4 couples who cohabit make it to the altar. For those that do, the news is not much better. Far from being a “trial marriage” their rate of divorce is much higher than those who did not live together before marriage.

There is more than a practical problem here for people of faith. Living together before marriage is not something God approves of according to scripture. This is not an abstract teaching, or something only mentioned in passing. Sexual purity as an expectation, and the importance of marriage, is easily found throughout the Bible and a concept widely held in Christian circles for centuries.

You can read articles about what the Bible says here or here and lists of verses here.

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This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

At first glance someone viewing Bloomington, Illinois’ Hope United Methodist Church’s Sunday morning worship service online might chuckle about the 1980s style “big hair” worn by the redheaded woman addressing viewers on April 11. But looks can be deceiving. That particular Sunday was Drag Queen Sunday, and the person speaking was Ms. “Penny Cost,” the drag alter ego of Isaac Simmons, Hope Church’s director of operations.

In the message, Simmons, as Ms. “Penny Cost”—a sacrilegious play on the word “Pentecost”—describes the service which followed Palm and Easter Sundays as, “Our way of celebrating and uplifting the voices of drag artistry within the church.” And this was not the first time Simmons has appeared as his drag persona before the church. Other videos of him speaking on various topics can be found by searching the church’s website.

Earlier this year Simmons was unanimously certified as a ministry candidate by the Illinois Great Rivers Conference’s Vermillion River District Committee on Ordained Ministry. He is the first openly gay candidate to be certified by the conference and the first known drag queen to be certified by the United Methodist Church. Simmons told Religion New Service (RNS), “It is mind-boggling simply that it’s 2021 and I’m the first, but also it’s incredibly humbling.”

In addition to his position at the church, Simmons is a student at Illinois Wesleyan University studying Business Management and Religious Studies.

In his daily podcast, The Briefing, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, commented on Simmons statement:

This man says that he is shocked, and of course that means offended and disappointed, that his particular move and the move of this Methodist group in certifying for ministry, an undeniably openly gay drag queen. The fact is what we’re looking at here is a revolt against the Christian tradition.

Mohler noted the growing division within the Methodist Church:

Just to state the obvious, you’re looking not only at two different positions, as we will understand, you’re looking at two different religions and those two different religions cannot possibly continue to exist in one church or in one denomination.

He continued,

And also understand this. Once conservatives are out of the picture in the United Methodist Church, this is only the start of where things will go in the future. And yes, right now, much of it is unimaginable, but it won’t stay unimaginable for long.

In the United Methodist Church General Conference, traditional and progressive churches are struggling for control of the global denomination. In the U.S. many of the clergy have given their support to LGBTQ causes while clergy in African churches continue to support conservative biblical theology. Churches on both sides have been leaving the denomination, while, a group of traditional leaning churches has discussed breaking away to form its own denomination.

Following biblical and traditional Christian theology, churches are to welcome all people including those in the LGBTQ community. However, they are not to affirm behavior that the Bible teaches is sinful. Hope Church not only welcomes those who identify as “LGBTQ” but also affirms sinful behaviors.

According to its website,

First and foremost: we at Hope UMC wish [to] vocalize the fact that all identities, orientations, and bodies are created in the image of the Divine. We are here to affirm, support, and empower you to live your true and authentic life. You are holy. You are loved. You are simply amazing!

The text goes on to indict other Christians and the church for following what the Bible teaches:

For decades, religion and faith has been utilized as a tool of oppression against LGBTQIA+ individuals. This is a vial and evil use of power that should be denounced by institutions of love and grace. We also recognize that the path of unpacking the past and rebuilding new understandings of faith is hard and tiring.

Commenting on the division, Mohler stated,

This is open revolt, and of course, you’re going to see a division between those who are appalled by it, deeply troubled by it, deeply concerned by it and opposed to it on the one hand, and those who celebrate it and say that it’s arrived far too late on the other hand.

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A comment from Tish Harrison Warren writing in and for the increasingly disappointing Christianity Today on Jan. 7, 2021 merits revisiting now that the damage Donald Trump voters predicted if Joe Biden were elected is becoming a reality. Warren wrote,

The responsibility of yesterday’s violence must be in part laid at the feet of those evangelical leaders who ushered in and applauded Trump’s presidency. It can also sadly be laid at the feet of the white American church more broadly.

So, should responsibility for the violence in the streets in 2020 and 2021 be laid in part at the feet of evangelical leaders and/or white Christians who support BLM and the teaching of Critical Race Theory in government schools?

Should the violence in Planned Parenthood abattoirs be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who voted for Biden, who supports abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, or who voted for any Democrat in the past 50 years?

Should the use of taxpayer funds for the slaughter of tiny humans be laid at the feet of white Christians who voted for Biden?

Should the catastrophe of overcrowded plastic pods of unaccompanied migrant children be laid at the feet of every evangelical who voted for Biden?

Should the destruction of the black family caused by sixty years of Democrat policies be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who supported those social welfare policies?

Should the sexual integration of women’s and children’s private spaces be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who ushered in and applauded Biden’s presidency?

Should the diminution of speech and religious free exercise protections for theologically orthodox Christians be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who have supported Democrats for the past 20 years?

Should the legal recognition of homoerotic relationships as “marriages,” which robs children of mothers or fathers be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who have supported Democrats?

Should the responsibility for closing Christian adoption agencies that won’t place children in the homes of homosexuals in part be laid at the feet of evangelical leaders and white Christians who voted for Democrats?

Should responsibility for drag Queen story hours and the proselytizing of children into the “trans” cult be laid in part at the feet of evangelical and white Christians who support Democrats?

The answers to my questions are obviously yes. I would add, however, that responsibility for the facilitation of any of these grievous sins that harm our neighbors knows no skin color.

In absolutist terms, Tish Warren criticized Trump for alleged ethical deficiencies:

For more than four years, Trump has shown that he is more than willing to say any lie, ignore any standard of decency, and bring any amount of violence and division to shore up his own power.

Really? Trump would say “any” lie, ignore “any” standard, and bring “any” amount of violence and division to shore up his own power? How would Warren even begin to prove such absolute claims?

What does Warren think about Biden’s willingness to lie, ignore standards of decency, and foment division to shore up his own political power for—not four years—but four decades? Surely, Warren knows about Biden’s repeated plagiarizing, and about the whoppers he told about his college career, law school performance, and fictional arrest in Soweto, South Africa.

What does Warren think about Biden’s infamous divisive and deceitful 2012 claim that a Romney administration would “put y’all back in chains”?

An “insurrection” is “an act of rising in open rebellion against an established government or authority.” Is Warren troubled that Biden condemned the Capitol riot as an “insurrection” but did not condemn attacks by BLM and Antifa on police officers, police precincts, police vehicles, and court houses–which are symbols of established government and authority–as “insurrections”?

What standard of decency did Biden apply when he lied to the American people during the campaign, falsely claiming he knew nothing about his ne’er-do-well son’s sordid influence-peddling business deals with America’s foremost enemy?

What standard of decency did Biden—who professes to be a Christian—apply when he reversed his opposition to federal funding of human slaughter?

What standard of decency did Biden apply when he learned and kept secret that the Russia collusion story was a DNC/Hillary Clinton hoax  concocted to distract the public from revisiting Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal during the 2016 campaign?

What standard of decency did Biden apply when he reneged on his commitment to support President Reagan’s nomination of the extraordinary Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court?

And what standard of decency led Joe Biden to suggest falsely on multiple occasions that the truck driver whose truck hit and killed Biden’s daughter and first wife was drunk when it appears Neilia Biden caused the collision:

[C]overage in the newspapers at the time made clear that fault was not in question. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn’s truck coming down a long hill.” She had a stop sign and Dunn did not.

There are many Christians for whom Trump was the last choice during the 2015 primary. But when Trump was the last man standing to oppose the morally corrupt  Hillary Clinton whose policies would have wreaked havoc on the unborn, children, women, families, and religious liberty, many Christians chose Trump.

In so doing, not only were better policies passed and better judges appointed but also the depth and breadth of the wickedness of the left in Congress, the press, corporate America, and Big Tech were exposed.

Many Christians voted for Trump in 2016—not because they worshipped him—but because they love God and their neighbors—including the neighbors we will never meet because they will be killed in their mothers’ wombs. Many Christians voted for Trump despite the hatred, scorn, and mockery of the world.

And many voted for Trump in 2020 for the same reasons. Many Christians knew that Biden is not only ethically vacuous but also that he would promote policies that would increase human suffering and diminish fundamental civil liberties.

Many conservatives who dreaded and worked tirelessly to prevent a Biden win are seeing their worst fears realized and then some.

The Biden administration free from commitments to God and truth and led around by nose and leash by an angry horde of racists, anarchists, and sexual revolutionaries free from commitments to God and foundational American principles are destroying America from within.

The Horde has been lurking unmolested for over half a century in Ivory Towers, spreading their brain-eating critical theories into young minds, thereby growing the Horde’s next generation.

Late last spring the younger Horde rampaged through our streets battering, burning, and burgling, while screeching Newspeakian lies about equity and justice.

Horde justice has just been meted out, but a pound of Derek Chauvin’s flesh cannot satisfy the blood and power lust of the fascistic horde.

Justice for the Horde has nothing to do with holding individuals accountable to a fixed legal standard. It’s about mob retribution exacted on anyone who represents the alleged oppressor group for crimes committed by others decades or even centuries ago.

Horde justice is not colorblind, and it’s not just.

BLM activist Kim Brown unabashedly proclaimed her support for Horde justice:

Let me just say for the record, I support … looting the damn Dollar Tree. I support … looting the Advanced Auto Parts. I remember last year they looted Target. I support all that sh*t. Loot all that sh*t. You know why? Because black people, and marginalized and oppressed people could loot every store in this whole f*cking country for 200 f*cking years, and it would not even come close to the debt America owes us.

Which party produces the likes of Kim Brown and the Horde?

Christians like Tish Harrison Warren claim that Christians who voted for Trump undermined their Christian witness. Just curious, does voting for Biden—the titular head of the party that supports the anti-American 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, the family-destroying BLM, taxpayer-funded abortion, same-sex faux marriage, a de facto version of the Chinese social credit system, and erosion of religious liberty and speech rights—undermine one’s Christian witness?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Christians-Who-Undermine-Their-Christian-Witness.mp3

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The story has been told of a foreign visitor who was being given a tour of Washington, D.C. by an American friend of hers. She was amazed at the size of the monuments, the buildings, and so forth. Then she gazed upon the U.S. Capital building.

“My, that’s an incredibly large building!” she remarked. “Yes, it’s pretty big, alright.” said her friend. “About how many people work in there?” she asked. Her friend responded, “Oh… about half.”

As Christians, we have the wonderful privilege of going to the throne room of God and lifting up our nation and its leaders to Almighty God.  His Word highlights the importance of doing so. First Timothy 2:1-6 instructs us,

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.  This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

God’s Word tells us to pray for all people. But God wants to be more specific here:  for kings and all who are in high positions (verse 2). The godless Emperor Nero was on the throne at that time, and yet the Apostle Paul instructed believers to pray for him.

The same applies to us today in 2021.

Hey look, I get it, it’s easy to air our disgust with the current political/cultural rot on social media. It’s easy to muddy Twitter, Facebook and other platforms of our disappointments in our politicians. But what if we took that same energy and brought it before the King of kings?  What if we went to the One Who truly has the power to change things?  What if we went into the Throne room of God and intervened for our leaders?

Please Pray

• Pray for righteousness to prevail. Proverbs 14:34 says, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”  We need to pray for more leaders who will stand for the sanctity of life. We need to pray for more leaders who will stand for Biblical marriage.  We need to pray for more leaders who will stand for religious liberty. We need more leaders who will stand for righteousness.

• Pray for the leaders who are in office. Pray that they will truly seek the Heart of God as they govern and lead. Ask the Lord to surround them with godly advisors.

• Pray for their salvation. God’s word specifically connects praying for our leaders to their salvation.  “…who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (Verse 4) Can you imagine the radical change we would see if our nation’s leaders got saved and decided to live and breathe for Jesus?

• For those in authority: Once again, we are asking the IFI Prayer team to pray for specific political officials, some of whom have been in office for a long time. Of course, at the top of our list we must pray for the Biden administration on the federal level, and the Pritzker administration on the state level. We also ask you to pray for the following:
  • U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois)
  • U.S. Representative Marie Newman (D-Chicago)
  • U.S. Representative Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro)
  • State Senator Elgie Sims (D-Chicago)
  • State Senator Neil Anderson (R-Moline)
  • State Representative Deb Conroy (D-Villa Park)
  • State Representative LaToya Greenwood (D-East St. Louis)
  • State Representative Jay Hoffman (D-Belleville)
  • State Representative Randy Frese (R-Quincy)
  • YOUR Local County Board President

Is praying for our nation and our political leaders important? You betcha! As Christians we should be the best citizens around. Let’s do our part to see and do God’s will here on earth… as it is in heaven.

Pray for Religious Liberty

• “….for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” (Verse 2)
• We should pray for a government and rulers that would simply leave us alone and let us live as Christians so that we don’t become a stumbling block to others as we strive to serve the Lord.

• We should pray for our government leaders that they will govern well and provide Christians a peaceful environment to fully serve the True King.

Pray for Families:

• Student welfare: Government schools are not simply failing to educate students, they are corrupting them morally, spiritually, and, in some cases, harming them physically and mentally. Radical ideologies and lies are being taught to impressionable young children. Children will be sexualized beginning in kindergarten if several sex ed bills and the so-called “Responsible Education for Adolescent and Children’s Health” act become law. Hate, racism and division are being taught in many schools as Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and BLM activism are promoted. Pray fervently that God would make a way for parents to remove their children from these indoctrination camps.

• Parents and grandparents: Pray that both parents and grandparents would understand the threats to their children and grandchildren. Pay that they would take steps to provide a way for their children and grandchildren to escape the radical extremism in government schools in order to follow Ephesians 6:4b, which exhorts us to “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

• Families as salt and light: Pray that families would strive to follow the Deuteronomy 6 model of discipling their children:
  

  These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. And you shall repeat them diligently to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. You shall also tie them as a sign to your hand, and they shall be as frontlets on your forehead. You shall also write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Pray for Police Officers and Law Enforcement Agencies:

• Police officers: Pray for the physical, mental and spiritual protection of the men and women who protect and serve our communities and often rush toward danger. May God use them for good as they face urgent situations and deal with the worst elements of society. Pray that God would give them wisdom and discernment to deal with dangerous situations.

• Families of police officers: Pray for strength for the families of police officers as they deal with the stress of knowing their love one is not only dealing with emergencies throughout the area, but are also targets of left-wing ideologues.

• For justice to prevail: Pray that truth and justice prevail in our land. Pray that myths, lies and incomplete narratives by the media are exposed. Pray that the state’s attorneys, judges and judicial system in general would be serious about upholding law and order. Pray that all of our elected, appointed or hired officials within the judicial branch of government be men and women who are of strong moral character and they are truly knowledgeable of the U.S. Constitution and of the Holy Scriptures. Pray that they are able to make decisions that are fair and just and that they be free from the bribes or the influence of those who seek to corrupt.

“May the name of God be blessed forever and ever,
For wisdom and power belong to Him.
It is He who changes the times and the periods;
He removes kings and appoints kings;
He gives wisdom to wise men,
And knowledge to people of understanding.
It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things;
He knows what is in the darkness,
And the light dwells with Him.
To You, God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise,
For You have given me wisdom and power;
Even now You have made known to me what we requested of You,
For You have made known to us the king’s matter.”
~Daniel 2:20-23~

If you are a God-fearing, concerned Illinoisan, you likely have considered leaving the state or wondered what you can do about our corrupt state of affairs if you choose to or must stay.

The wicked legislation coming out of Springfield, the promotion of abortion, and the takeover of education can feel overwhelming. It is difficult trying both to keep up on all that is going on and figure out how to effect positive change.

It is impossible to do everything. It is impossible to keep abreast of every issue; be in regular contact with local, state, and federal legislators; keep your church, family, and friends up to date with what needs to be done; and still raise your family and keep your job. It is just too much.

Often accompanying this sense of being overwhelmed is a feeling of paralysis, so consider what Scripture says about this.

First, being overwhelmed and brought to the brink of despair is not uncommon for those who truly desire to serve King Jesus.

David lamented both his own sin and external troubles:

For innumerable evils have surrounded me; My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to look up; They are more than the hairs of my head; Therefore my heart fails me. (Psalm 40:12)

The Apostle Paul described the incredible challenge of ministry in Ephesus and the province of Asia:

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. (2Cor. 1:8)  

God does not promise His people endless ease in this life. The more you are focused on serving the Lord, the more you may encounter troubles, burdens, and suffering.

Second, you must focus on what you can do. You can’t do everything, but you can do something. You cannot be in contact with your legislators on all issues, but this doesn’t mean you can’t reach out by phone, email, or letter on important matters.

Focus on what you can do as a witness of God’s truth and the message of the gospel.

Third, we must continually remind ourselves that the power is not in us but in our great God. Our great God alone can change the hearts of Illinois citizens. Only God can bring about the change that we desire. And this becomes a test of faith.

God has not promised us if we just pray enough and do what He calls us to do that everything will be wonderful. The promise is His presence, peace, and power.

Prayerfully, patiently, and purposefully seek the Lord and consider what you can do to strengthen your witness for the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of Scripture.

And they overcame him [the devil] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. (Rev. 12:11)

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In a previous article, I focused on an important poll that IFI and other groups commissioned, which surveyed 600 registered voters in Illinois.

Reflecting on this poll, I want us to consider why we are where we are as a state.

We often lament how this great state is so stupid. You likely have friends and family that have abandoned ship before it sinks, moving to states much more friendly to sanity, reason, and freedom.

In the midst of so much foolishness and folly, it is good to consider that even though our state is on the decline in many ways, we still are an important state. According to Wolfram Alpha, Illinois has a population of 12.67 million. This is equal to the total population of Iowa, Indiana, and half of Wisconsin. The GDP of Illinois is $863.5 billion which is almost equal to the combined GDP of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana ($904 billion).

So why are in such a moral and fiscal mess?

Well, according to the recent poll, only about 1 in 3 registered voters in Illinois attends church weekly or more than once a week.

This translates to less than 1 in 3 residents and citizens of Illinois who hear the Word of God faithfully proclaimed and are part of the public worship of the only true God. When we are not hearing God’s Word, what is going to happen to a society? Given this lack of worship of the true God in our state, why would we expect things to be different? God has given this state what we want and the consequences that are part of our rebellion.

Those consequences include a year in which we were gripped by fear of COVID-19 and controlled by our leaders. We now have a public education system that is increasingly at war with God and His truth. And, even though our state is stagnant in terms of population growth, the number of abortions performed in Illinois increased by over 4,000 from 2016 to 2018.[1] That is over a 10 percent increase when our population did not increase by the same amount. We rightly mourn the loss of lives from COVID-19 and other diseases, while the deaths of over 116 babies by abortion is just a statistic too many.

There are no quick and easy answers to the mess we face as a state. For the sake of life, we must stand against changes to laws that would facilitate more teenagers getting abortions. We must, for the sake of our Christian witness, be part of a church that is faithfully preaching the message of the gospel and seeking to spread the good news of salvation. And Christian parents must ensure that their own children are being trained in the fear of the Lord.

Humble yourself often before the Lord and do His will.

Read More:

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time (Gallup)

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Footnote:

[1] 2018 is the last year data has been provided.

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Written by Trevor Grant Thomas

I have bad news: I’m dying. I have worse news: so are you. Whether sick or healthy, young or old, Christian or not, conservative or liberal, democrat or republican, each of us has an inevitable date with the moment in which we will depart this world. Most of us have a bit of trouble with this. In fact, of all the things that scare us, for most, death is the ultimate terror.

As the book of Genesis reveals, it was not supposed to be this way. Death was not part of the picture “in the beginning.” We were always supposed to live forever in glorious and perfect splendor with our Creator. To live “happily ever after” is the fitting ending to so many fairy tales—and movies, TV shows, novels, and the like—because this is the way things are supposed to be.

Death was the tragic consequence of wanting to rule our own world. But thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus and His resurrection, death does not have the final say in the lives of those who have put their trust and hope in the One who died for our sins, and who was raised to life on the third day. As one scans history, no other date put such a mark in time as when Jesus Christ shed His grave-clothes and departed the tomb.

Of all the religions of the world, only Christianity claims an empty tomb for its founder. The physical resurrection of Jesus is the cornerstone of Christianity. British theologian Michael Green said it well when he noted, “Without faith in the resurrection there would be no Christianity at all.” Noted biblical scholar, professor, and author Wilbur M. Smith said that, “The resurrection of Christ is the very citadel of the Christian faith. This is the doctrine that turned the world upside down…” Indeed it did.

C.S. Lewis notes that, “In the earliest days of Christianity an ‘apostle’ was first and foremost a man who claimed to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection,” or more accurately, a witness of the resurrected Christ. He adds that, “to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection.” And preach they did.

The transformation of the disciples of Jesus is one of the greatest evidences of His resurrection. For decades following Jesus’ death and resurrection they preached His “good news.” Biblical references and strong extra-biblical sources have almost all of the disciples dying martyrs’ deaths. James, the son of Zebedee, according to Scripture was, “put to death by the sword (probably beheaded).” According to early church historians Peter was crucified in Rome, and Paul (of course not one of the original 12, but an apostle nonetheless) was beheaded there. Strong church tradition has Thomas, the “doubting” disciple, being run through with a spear.

The faith of Jesus’ Apostles spread to thousands upon thousands in a relatively short period of time. As the “good news” of Jesus spread, many of the early believers suffered intense persecution. Fulton Oursler, in The Greatest Faith Ever Known, notes that “Thousands of these men and women would die themselves in the arena, burning on pitch-soaked pyres, crucified, they would die for Jesus Christ, and for the Faith, the Church that Christ founded.”

The persecution of the church continued for centuries. Nevertheless, Christianity endured, and the number of Jesus’ followers continued to multiply. After Constantine’s conversion in the year 312 the church passed from persecution to privilege. Councils were called, the Scriptures were translated into various languages, and faithful missionaries carried the gospel to ever farther reaches of the world.

The impact of the resurrection of Jesus extends far beyond religious institutions. The influence that Christianity has had on the world can be measured in practically every facet of life. Everything from the family, to science, government, medicine, art, literature, business, and so on, has felt the impact of the message of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The world’s first university, birthed in 1088, was The University of Bologna in Italy. It was founded to teach canon law. The second oldest university, The University of Paris, grew out of the cathedral schools of Notre-Dame and soon became a great center for Christian orthodox studies. Dr. Alvin J. Schmidt, in his book Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, points out that every college established in colonial America, except the University of Pennsylvania, was founded by some denomination of Christianity. He adds that, preceding the Civil War, 92 percent of the 182 colleges and universities in the U.S. were established by some branch of the church.

By around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg had nearly perfected his printing press. Making use of movable metal type, Gutenberg’s press was the world’s most efficient means of large-scale printing. This process of printing remained virtually unchanged for four centuries. The first major work mass-produced on Gutenberg’s press was the 42-line Bible (or “The Gutenberg Bible”). This magnificent work ushered in the age of the printed book, and the era of mass communication. Soon, millions of homes, schools, and churches had their own copies of God’s Word, and news of the resurrection of Jesus now spread faster than ever before.

Many of the greatest artists in history—Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Donatello, Da Vinci, Salvador Dali—were followers of Jesus. This is evident in that many of the great works they produced were scenes or characters from Scripture. Beethoven, considered by many to be the world’s greatest composer, wrote some of the most profound Christian masterpieces of history. Johann Sebastian Bach was, as one scholar put it, indeed “a Christian who lived with the Bible.”

Some of the most famous and influential founders of what is considered “modern science”—Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Pasteur—were Christians who operated from a strict biblical worldview. For example, in 1595, in Kepler’s first major work, he thought that he had discovered “God’s geometrical plan for the universe.” As a Christian, Kepler believed that the universe was designed by a Creator and thus should function in a very logical fashion. He went as far as to define his view of “science” as “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

Isaac Newton is considered by many to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. He is most famous for his laws of motion and universal gravitation. On gravitation he noted that, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”

Recognizing that “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it…” and knowing that we are merely stewards of the Creator of all things, those who follow Jesus are the most generous people on the earth. Take note of the number of influential charities inspired by Christianity. Among them are The Salvation Army, Campus Crusade, Feeding America, Catholic Charities, Compassion International, Samaritan’s Purse, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, and the YMCA.

The first hospital in North America, the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno (the “Hospital of Jesus of Nazareth”), was founded by Cortés. With the aid of Benjamin Franklin, the first hospital in the U.S, Pennsylvania Hospital, was founded by a Quaker, Dr. Thomas Bond. The Catholic Church alone operates over 1,100 hospitals and long-term health care facilities in the U.S.

This great nation—the miraculous United States of America—that we inhabit was founded almost exclusively by Christians and upon Christian principles. On July 4, 1837, in a speech delivered in the town of Newburyport Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, and the 6^th U.S. President, proclaimed,

Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day? [Independence Day] Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth?

The impact of Christ’s resurrection can be seen in individuals and institutions, in art and entertainment, in science and industry, in calendars and carols, in tribes and in nations. All of human history—from Creation to Christmas to the Crucifixion—culminates in Jesus leaving His earthly tomb. As I implied earlier, and as history clearly reveals, the resurrection of Jesus stands aloft every other event the world has ever known. Again, virtually every facet of our lives has been impacted by the empty tomb left by Jesus. Though we may acknowledge Him on our currency, and measure our years from His birth, our only real hope is in His resurrection. In the end, the only things that will matter, the only things that will be truly lasting and good, are the things we did in His name.

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This article was originally published at TrevorGrantThomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America

Written by Joseph Parker

The Bible is a compilation of sixty-six blessed and unique books. Among those books are four we refer to as the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each of these is an account of the earthly life and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ is the key figure in all of the Word of God. He is present in all sixty-six books. Yet again, the four Gospels share specifically about Christ’s earthly life and ministry. 

Each of them shares a unique picture of the life of Christ. Each of them shares stories or instances in the Lord’s life which may or may not be included in one or more of the other Gospels. Yet each of the four Gospels contains the story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Some might ask, “Why do we need four Gospels and why, of all the aspects of his life, does each Gospel make sure to include the story of Christ’s resurrection?” These are important questions to consider. 

Why four Gospels? One very important reason is, each Gospel is an account, a telling of the life, actions, and events of Christ and each author shares his account from his own perspective. No two accounts are just alike. 

A reporter on the scene of an event may receive four very different accounts of the same event from four people he chose to interview. Similarly, the four authors of the four Gospels each share their unique point of view. And none of them tell their story quite the same.

The four Gospels together paint a much fuller, brighter, and more detailed picture of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Each Gospel adds to our view details of Christ’s love, His beauty, greatness, and fullness – Jesus the Messiah, our Savior, the Son of Man, the Son of God – and God. 

So, those who read all four Gospels come away with a much more detailed, fuller, and richer picture of Christ than those who only read one of the four.

Each Gospel tells the story of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Each one gives an account of the events of His passion. They each include details of the times and events that led up to His suffering, humiliation, death on the cross, entombment, and His rising from the dead. 

So, the story of the passion of Christ is told four times through four different accounts. Once again, the question arises “Why tell this story over and over – four times?” It can be difficult to read about Christ’s passion one time. Why should it be told four times over – with all the cruel and heavy details that each particular story reveals? 

Again, the four accounts paint a fuller, richer, and much more accurate portrait of the suffering, torture, and the harrowing treatment Christ endured – all because He loved us just that much. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit loved the world so much that they were willing to endure all of this – so that we could spend eternity with them. 

Each Gospel shares truths that help us better understand God’s amazing love for us as He paints the picture of the love demonstrated in the life of Christ. Each Gospel contributes wonderfully to the full picture we have.

Matthew’s Gospel account of Christ’s resurrection is found in Matthew 28. This chapter includes the resurrection of Christ and the Great Commission. Here, the church of Jesus Christ is told in no uncertain terms what our mission and priority is as the church now that Christ is risen! We are to go and make disciples! 

Mark’s Gospel account of the Lord’s resurrection is in Mark 16. In Mark, we not only hear of Christ’s glorious resurrection, but Christ also reminds us of the power of God that will follow those that believe as we faithfully spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:15-18). 

In the Gospel of Luke, the resurrection story is found in chapter 24. In this chapter, the Lord Jesus has risen from the dead and appears in some unique circumstances to his astonished yet joy-filled disciples. The powerful chapter ends with His ascension into heaven. 

Then in the Gospel of John, the resurrection story of Christ is told in chapter 20. Here the disciples are commissioned by Christ and in chapter twenty-one, (the only gospel to include this particular story) Christ spends some time and teaches His disciples important truths before His ascension.

A fruitful goal for you and your family could consist of taking the time to read through one or all the passion stories in the Gospels. These are found in Matthew chapters 26–28, Mark 14–16, Luke 22–24, and John 18–21.

If you take the opportunity to do this, the activity is its own reward.

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This article was originally published at AFA.net.

Written by Bob Perry

Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross, then resurrected from the dead three days later. It’s not just a fairy tale. Christians believe that the Resurrection is a historical fact. It’s what sets Christianity apart from every other world religion. It is the foundation of the Christian faith. If it’s not true the New Testament is fiction, Jesus is a fraud, and Christianity is a false religion. Anyone would be a fool to believe in it. This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the Apostle Paul’s:

1 Corinthians 15:12-19 — “… if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile … [and you] are to be pitied more than all men.”

None of us wants to be foolish or pitied for our faith. And no one wants to follow, or encourage others to follow, a false religion. So what reasons do we have to believe this story? It turns out there are several.

Impact Events

Just outside the cockpit door of every commercial airliner, there is a telephone handset that allows the flight attendants to talk to the pilots. And inside the cockpit of every commercial airliner is a “Door Unlock” switch on the center console that allows the pilots to open the cockpit door without getting out of their seats.

If a flight attendant had knocked on my cockpit door at 8:45AM on September 11, 2001, and asked me if she could come up front, I would have unlocked the door while I was still on the phone with her. I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. But by 9:15AM that same morning, the passengers of United Flight 93 had already figured out that was a bad idea. They were storming the cockpit of their Boeing 757 over southern Pennsylvania for that very reason.

What changed during those thirty minutes?

We all know what changed. The collective mindset of the entire world changed. It’s called an “Impact Event” — an incident so shocking it has the power to change not just what we think, but the way we think … about everything.

Resurrection – The Cultural Backdrop

In the first century A.D., there were several different kinds of beliefs about life-after-death in the Egyptian and Greco-Roman worlds that surrounded Israel. The Egyptians mummified people with their stuff so they could use it in the afterlife. The Greeks and Romans believed in various forms of an underworld destination. But no one anywhere believed in the idea of a bodily resurrection occurring after a person died.

The Jews weren’t any different. Their views varied by theological sub-group. The Essenes’ views were similar to their neighboring pagan cultures. They believed in a single-stage disembodied immortality — a “soul” that continued on into an “afterlife.” Their view didn’t include any kind of bodily resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in any kind of life-after-death at all. The Pharisees did believe in one form of a “resurrection.” But theirs was a group event that they thought would occur for all God’s people. The righteous would rise bodily together at the end of time.

Not Even In Myth

In other words, there were plenty of different ideas about what happened to people after they died. But the Jews and their pagan contemporaries agreed about one thing — that the idea of a bodily resurrection was complete rubbish.

This basic tenet of human existence and experience is accepted as axiomatic throughout the ancient world; once people have gone by the road of death, they do not return. When the ancient classical world spoke of (and denied) resurrection, there should be no controversy about what the word and its cognates referred to … ‘Resurrection’ was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could work backward. Not even in myth was it permitted.  ~ N. T. Wright, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God

The New Paradigm

Then, suddenly, everything changed. Despite every commonly-held belief to the contrary, one group of people began believing in a bodily resurrection. They were the first-generation Christians. For some reason, a large group of these people turned on a dime. They started saying that a person could be resurrected. In fact, they claimed that someone had done just that. And they described a resurrected person as having some kind of weirdly transformed physical body. These Christians started using the term “resurrection” in ways they had never used the term before. They talked about it in the present tense.

The New Church

The idea of a resurrection had been a tangential doctrinal variant for the Jews. But, for some of them, it morphed overnight into the central tenet of their faith. Opinions about life after death had been all over the map. But suddenly Christians were remarkably unanimous about one thing: The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

And that changed everything else.

Their Jewish religious and Temple worship rites weren’t exempt. They went from practicing animal sacrifice to preaching on Christ’s sacrifice. They claimed that the binding Law of Moses had been fulfilled. That baptism and communion had replaced circumcision as the symbol of their faith. They even changed their weekly day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.

It was like the world had experienced some kind of cataclysmic Impact Event.

Because it had.

The Resurrection is History

These rapid, sweeping changes in thinking and habits are documented history. And that is what makes Christianity so unique. It’s not just a “faith system” or a list of rules for healthy living. And it’s not a self-help program based on having a friendly relationship with God. Christianity is based on an epic story. But the story is true. It’s historically verifiable. And the central event in the story is the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The truth of Christianity lives or dies (pun intended) on the Resurrection. If you want to falsify the Christian story, just prove that Jesus never rose from the dead. That is the point the Apostle Paul was making in 1 Corinthians 15. If the Resurrection of Jesus was not an actual, historical event, you can dismiss us Christians as fools.

But if it was, you should bend your knee to the risen Messiah.

As I’ve discussed many times, the definition of truth is “correspondence to reality.” Does what we believe about something match the way the world really is? If it does, that belief is true. And that means that if we believe the Resurrection is true we should have solid historical evidence for it from the real world. Is there any?

You bet there is.

Evidence Please

The evidence doesn’t depend on your religious point of view. It’s the same kind of evidence mainstream historians use to evaluate any kind of historic event. You take the evidence you have and look for an explanation that takes all of it into account.

The first bit of evidence is the New Testament itself. If you evaluate it in the same way you would evaluate any set of ancient documents, the conclusion is simple. The New Testament documents are historically reliable. This really isn’t even debatable. The evidence is overwhelming. But think about the origins of these documents. Who wrote them, and why?

The answer to both those questions is so obvious it blows my mind that I, as a confessing Christian, missed it for decades.

The New Testament was written by people whose lives were turned upside down by the Resurrection of Christ. Their writings weren’t just fanciful musings. The authors wrote down what they saw. And they wrote those things down because of the Resurrection,

The Resurrection came first. It’s why we have a New Testament.

So, we have highly reliable historical documents. And those documents record an Impact Event unlike any other. Billions of people have died throughout history. But the world has only reset its entire calendar system in honor of one life. That’s the ultimate kind of Impact Event. And it’s powerful evidence for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus.

The Minimal Facts Approach

The New Testament writers experienced the Impact Event and wrote about what they saw. But they weren’t the only ones. Other historians witnessed the effects of the Resurrection too. And their accounts corroborate the New Testament authors’ stories. For that reason, there are several elements of the story that even its critics admit are undeniable. These are mainstream historians who overwhelmingly agree to the veracity of five facts tied to the Resurrection. Dr. Gary Habermas, a world-class PhD Bible scholar, calls these the “Minimal Facts.” And he has popularized an argument based on them.

Here are the five central elements of the Resurrection account that even Christianity’s opponents admit are historically accurate:

1.) Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion on a Roman cross.

2.) Jesus’ disciples believed that he appeared to them after he had died.

3.) Paul, the church persecutor and sworn enemy of Christianity, was suddenly changed into its greatest advocate.

4.) James, the brother of Jesus, suddenly dropped his skepticism and became the leader of the Jerusalem church.

5.) The tomb where they buried Jesus on Friday was empty on Sunday.

Since there is overwhelming agreement to these, Habermas’ “Minimal Facts Approach” simply says that the conclusion we draw about the Resurrection must be based on an “inference to the best explanation” for all these facts.

I’m not going to get into the details of each right now, but here’s the point: The only all-encompassing explanation for all five of these facts is that that Resurrection actually occurred.

A Reason To Believe

The New Testament writers penned their manuscripts for a reason. They believed that something cataclysmic had happened. And it doesn’t make sense to say they conspired to concoct the story. Every single one of them went to his grave without recanting the story they shared. Most of them were executed for that very reason. It strains credulity to say they were willing to suffer and die in defense of a story they knew they had made up.

Taking all this into account, it is perfectly reasonable to say the Resurrection is a historical fact. If you can say that about any historical event, you can say it about this one.

And yes, that means a miracle occurred. So, those who deny that miracles are possible can’t just dismiss the Resurrection as being “religious.” Of course it’s religious. But it’s also historical. The evidence is clear. They can doubt all historical claims. Or they can be reasonable and rethink the presuppositions that led them to reject miracles in the first place.

Here is a short summary of some of the “Minimal Facts” about the resurrection:

… and there is plenty of evidence to support each one of these facts:

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This article was originally published at TrueHorizon.org.

What do you get when you cross a “non-religious” person with an eco-freak? You get a devotee of human composting. And by that, I don’t mean humans who compost. I mean humans who are turned into compost—after death, of course. Lesbian Katrina Spade has been promoting the eco-friendly composting of human remains since 2014 when she founded the Urban Death Project, since renamed Recomposed. Get it? Composting humans is recast as re-composing them, kind of like re-purposing them. What the new name loses in forthrightness, it gains in marketability.

NBC News reported that openly homosexual Washington State Democratic senator Jamie Pedersen picked up this blight idea from composting fanatic Spade and plans to introduce a bill this month to legalize the composting of human corpses. Pedersen also supported the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital homosexual relationships as “marriages” and the legalization of recreational marijuana. Another lawmaker turning a beautiful state into an unlivable place to raise families.

Spade recounts her 2013 composting epiphany in a TEDx Talk—you know one of those smarmy homilies often by people with bad ideas. She was ruminating on what her family might do with her remains when at that very moment a friend called and happened to mention that farmers compost their dead livestock. EUREKA!

Inspired, Spade’s creative juices started flowing, and now she and her fanatic eco-allies have arrived at a solution to the problems of expensive funerals and land-wasting cemeteries:

We’ve created a scalable, replicable, non-profit, urban model based on livestock mortality composting that turns human beings into soil…. In the next few years, it’s our goal to build the first, full-scale human composting facility right here in Seattle.

NBC News explains the process:

The process involves placing unembalmed human remains wrapped in a shroud in a 5-foot-by-10-foot cylindrical vessel with a bed of organic material such as wood chips, alfalfa and straw. Air is then periodically pulled into the vessel, providing oxygen to accelerate microbial activity. Within approximately one month, the remains are reduced to a cubic yard of compost that can be used to grow new plants.

Wise people have been warning for decades that abortion and euthanasia devalue and desacralize the human body. In addition, the resurgence of pagan spirituality and the ancient heresy of Gnosticism exacerbate and accelerate this desacralization.

Writing in The Catholic World Report, Benjamin Wiker, Professor of Political Science and Director of Human Life Studies at Franciscan University, explains that modern Gnostics reject the theologically orthodox view that “[j]ust as Christ was not a pure spirit merely appearing to have a body, we are not souls trapped in bodies. Our essential union of immaterial soul and material body is meant to be by the good Creator God.” Modern Gnostics believe that the “human body itself is the result of blind processes, cobbled together over millions of years of evolutionary meandering,” and, therefore, devoid of any intrinsic value.

John Horvat II, author and Vice President of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, rightly condemning human-composting, describes the esteem for burial humans have historically held:

From time immemorial, people have buried the dead. Sometimes, they even risked their lives to carry out this most basic duty….

The Old Testament recounts the story of the elder Tobias, who, while exiled to Nineveh, observed the Hebrew Law by burying the dead against the wishes of King Sennacherib.

Even ancient peoples like the Greeks felt compelled to pay a final reverence to the deceased. Thus, Sophocles in the play “Antigone” relates the story of a sister who defies the orders of the Greek tyrant Creon, not to bury her brother, whom he had defeated in battle. She proclaims the right to bury her brother came from “unwritten and unchanging laws. They are not just for today or yesterday but exist forever, and no one knows where they first appeared.”

The body is sacred and must be treated with all due dignity and respect. It has always been that way. No one needed to explain why the dead must be buried—until our time.

There is a debate among Christians about cremation. Space does not permit even an outline of that debate, but it’s important to note a critical distinction between cremation and human composting. With human composting, the goal is to use the human body, that is to say, to instrumentalize the body, treating it as if it possesses no more intrinsic worth than fertilizer.

Anticipating the objection “What difference does it make if the person’s final resting place is at the base of a tree rather than laying in a grave,” Horvat responds:

It would make no difference at all if there were no soul. The great accomplishment of the ecologists who created “recomposition” is not engineering the mechanical contraption that turns humans into compost. It is overturning those “unwritten and unchanging laws” embedded in human nature by which people have sensed the need for reverencing the dead from time immemorial.

Isn’t “recomposition” what the “trans” cult believes they can do? Don’t they believe they can recompose male bodies into female bodies?

In a grave tone of voice with not a glimmer of irony, Spade pays lip service (or as Macbeth calls it “mouth honor”) to the natural and deep reverence people have for the bodies of loved ones as demonstrated in the ceremonies that attend their deaths:

Imagine it: part public park, part funeral home, part memorial to the people we love, a place where we can reconnect to the cycles of nature and treat bodies with gentleness and respect.

Hmmm… is that how most people conceive of human-composting?

Human composting will be voluntary at first, but how long will that last? Probably about as long as voluntary euthanasia. Doctors are now performing non-voluntary euthanizations. And what comes after non-voluntary human composting? Mandatory human composting.

How long before cannibalism of recently deceased humans is legalized? After all, why waste all that good meat. Maybe we could call it Soylent Green.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/composting-humans_audio1.mp3

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