One of our most popular videos encourages pastors to speak out more on moral and cultural issues. And a poll I recently conducted on Twitter confirmed that congregants want their leaders to be more vocal on cultural and even political issues. But what is a proper balance? What should our priorities be as preachers of the Word and shepherds of the flock?

Most pastors would say, “My calling is to preach and teach the Scriptures, not to be a cultural commentator.”

To a certain extent, that is true. But it is also overstated. After all, doesn’t the Bible itself comment on culture? Doesn’t God’s Word intersect with society? Didn’t the prophets of old confront the evils of their day?

After speaking at a recent conference, a Black woman who works in the Human Resources department at a large Christian school wanted to speak with me. She and her husband support our ministry and she wanted me to sign my new book on evangelicals and Trump.

She also wanted me to know the tremendous significance of the work we were doing and how critically important it was that, as a ministry, we were addressing the pressing cultural issues of the day, including LGBTQ activism and race issues.

We receive comments like this on a daily basis, indicating that God’s people, the flock for whom Jesus died, need leaders to take public stands and give them practical guidance. Shouldn’t Christian leaders help their people navigate their way through these difficult cultural mazes as well?

To be sure, I do not believe that most pastors and Christian leaders are called to address moral, cultural, and political issues as much as those of us who are called to stand on the front lines of the culture wars. (This would apply to someone like me as a talk radio host and syndicated columnist.)

But certainly, there must be some intersection between the spiritual realm and these other realms. This sliding scale of priorities should prove helpful.

As teachers of the Word and shepherds of the flock, we start with spiritual issues. We start with the nature of God and the will of God and our relationship to God. We focus on the cross and the resurrection, on the significance of the Messiah’s death, on forgiveness of sins, on the Great Commission. This is the center of our bullseye in preaching and teaching, and this is where we begin.

As Paul famously wrote to the Corinthians, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:3).

But Paul didn’t stop there, and through his first letter to the Corinthians, he addressed moral issues as well. In fact, we should strongly question any alleged spiritual experience that does not bring about moral transformation.

As revival scholar James Edwin Orr said, “The only proof of the new birth is the new life.” Or, in the words of Jacob (James), “someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works” (James 2:18).

Virtually every single book of the New Testament calls for a moral response, and if our faith sees no connection between the spiritual and the moral, our faith is a sham. We demonstrate our spirituality by our morality. Anything less than that is called hypocrisy.

This, then, ties in directly with cultural issues. After all, is not abortion a moral concern? Is not sex-trafficking a moral concern? Is not the destruction of the family a moral concern? Is not racism a moral concern?

As we asked in the aforementioned video (which was released November 2018 and was not attempting to be “woke”), “Looking back on history, how do we feel about pastors and leaders who chose not to speak out during the days of slavery in America? Don’t we question their integrity and their courage? Don’t we wonder how they could have nothing to say in the light of such evil?

“What about those who had no problem with segregation, yet preached from the Scriptures every Sunday morning about God’s love and God’s goodness? Something just doesn’t line up.

“What about pastors and leaders who chose to remain silent during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed in cold blood? How do we feel about their silence today? And don’t we commend leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who refused to compromise their convictions for the sake of safety and career?”

So, just as the spiritual and moral intersect, so also the moral and the cultural intersect. And that leads us to the last category: political.

Let’s say you are the parents of a six-year-old girl who comes home from school crying and confused. Her friend Johnny now believes he is a girl, and he just started using the girls’ bathroom at school.

Or let’s say you are the parents of a thirteen-year-old girl who comes home from school embarrassed and upset after being exposed to the new sex-ed curricula, which is nothing less than sanitized porn.

In both cases, you decide to make appointments to speak with the school administrator who tells you that this is the policy throughout the county. Only the school board can change this.

But the school board consists of radical liberals, with not a single committed Christian among them. So you start a movement in your church community to enlist candidates to run for the school board. You have now become political.

But you took action because the spiritual intersects with the moral which intersects with the cultural which intersects with the political. (With reference to our previous illustrations, can issues like slavery or segregation or the Holocaust be divorced from the political realm?)

What does this mean for pastors and preachers? We must always remember that the people we minister to live in a real world, and they need guidance from the Scriptures in all areas of life. Teaching them to pray is essential. But teaching them how to love their spouses or raise their children is essential too. (For the record, I’m also an ordained minister and began preaching in 1973. Ministry of the Word remains a central focus of my life.)

On a practical level, if we will work from this paradigm, using the scale of SMCP. I believe we will keep our priorities straight. (Shall we call it “SMaCuP” – pronounced Smack-Up – for short?),

We are not primarily political in our ministries, but we address political issues as needed. Nor are we primarily cultural in our emphasis, but cultural issues must be addressed because they intersect with our daily life. And a biblical faith without morality is not a real faith, nor can a moral code bring transformation unless it starts with relationship with God.

So, we focus first on the spiritual, then from there the moral, then the cultural, then the political. If we do this, the Lord will be glorified and our people will be equipped.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to be lazy sometimes?

Or distracted?

Or preoccupied with “important” things?

Or forgetful of our values and what really matters?

I was thinking about parenting recently, and it struck me that it’s easy to talk about how vitally important Christian parenting is in a broad, general sense, but then get lazy in our day-to-day practice.

In other words, it’s easy to say how important good parenting is, then act as if we don’t believe it.

My guess is that just about any sincere Christian parent will agree that being a good Dad or Mom is important to them. They’ll agree that a lack of good parenting hurts kids and is bad for our society as a whole. We would agree that we need a return to good, solid, Biblical parenting.

We agree with all of that in principle. Say any of those things from a pulpit in America and you’ll probably get some nods and “amens” from the congregation.

But none of those things matter only in a theoretical, big-picture sense. They matter in daily practice. And they matter today.

I want to focus on that word today.

See, God doesn’t want us to believe in the importance of our parental role only in theory. He wants us to act on that belief. He wants us put it into practice.

In other words, we need to believe not just in the vital importance of Christian parenting in general, but in the vital importance of being a good parent to our children today.

Not tomorrow.

Not next week.

Not sometime when it’s easier, simpler, or more convenient.

Today.

Because in a very real sense, today—this moment—is all I have.

Let me give you an analogy.

Many of us want to lose a few pounds. We know we should. We know it would do us good. We know it would improve our health and the quality of our lives. We see the importance. And so we decide to start dieting and exercising—tomorrow.

As I remember my mother once observing, however, we never really live a “tomorrow.” Tomorrow is just another today that hasn’t arrived yet. And when it gets here, it’s not going to feel any easier, simpler, or more convenient to make good choices than it does today.

We always have reasons (excuses?) for why today isn’t a good day to begin. I’m meeting friends for coffee. There’s leftover birthday cake on the counter. It’s supposed to rain so I can’t go for a walk. Tomorrow will be better.

If we’re not careful, we can take the same attitude with our parenting. We’ll be late if I take time to deal with the tantrum now. I’m too tired to sort out another squabble. I just need to finish sending this text.

We get lazy. Complacent. Distracted. Preoccupied. It’s not that we’ve stopped believing in the importance of being a good parent; we just don’t want to put in the effort to be a good parent right now.

I’m talking to myself here as well. How many times have I missed opportunities to be the Dad God wants me to be because I was too lazy, distracted, or preoccupied?

The truth is, we can’t embrace our calling tomorrow. We can only do it today. I can only be a good Dad moment by moment, decision by decision. If I lack the character to overcome my natural laziness and apathy and be the involved Dad God wants me to be, it’s not going to be magically easier tomorrow.

So how about it? Will you join me in asking God to help you believe in the vital importance of being a good parent today? And if—like me—you know you need to grow in your own character so you can be the Dad or Mom He wants you to be, will you join me in asking God to bring that change?

Because after all, Christian parenting is important.

And it’s important today.

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After two decades of hearing the virtues of tolerance and diversity, American society has become increasingly intolerant, and because of that, less diverse when it comes to the ability to offer opinions in public and private discourse.

A startling new poll has found that more Americans than ever before are self-censoring their views out of a fear of sharing an opinion that does not fit the cultural narrative. Not surprisingly, those with traditional or conservative beliefs are the most likely to self-censor their views when they speak to others.

The new Cato Institute/YouGov national survey finds that overall 62 percent of Americans say that today’s political climate prevents them from saying what they believe.

Strong liberals stand out as the only political group in which a majority feels that they can freely express themselves, with 6 out of 10 saying this.  In contrast, 77 percent of Republicans say that they self-censor their views out of fear of the culture. Self-censorship spans all ethnic groups, with 65 percent of Latino Americans, 64 percent of white Americans, and 49 percent of African Americans saying they have political views they are afraid to share.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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In their pursuit of replacing culture with anti-culture, the spanking new 21st Century culture Reformers are going to be very busy. Rather than nailing 95 theses on a church door, they’re going to tear down 950,000 monuments and place names honoring imperfect and altogether yucky colorless people and replace them I guess with the names of perfect colorful people. This provides yet more evidence of the silliness of Barack Obama’s out-of-context quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It also provides evidence of the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King‘s use of the quote, first spoken by 19th Century pastor Theodore Parker:

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated with [Christ’s] name. Yes, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Neither Theodore Parker nor Dr. King was making the point that history moves always and ineluctably toward justice. They were making the point that ultimately Christ will redeem history. Christ has already won. It’s interesting that leftists have adopted BCE and CE in order to no longer refer to Christ. No matter, Christ still wins.

In the meantime, the devil roams the earth lying and destroying.

Now, after decades of canceling conservatives through a thousand tiny cuts and an occasional deep slash, the Reformers smell all that yummy human blood and are mercilessly cannibalizing their own.

The cannibals at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art forced out their curator, Gary Garrels, “[c]onsidered one of the country’s most prominent curators,” for the sin of saying he “would not stop collecting work by white men lest the institution take part in ‘reverse discrimination.’” The cannibals leapt on him. First, he tried futilely to stop the attack by groveling, saying,

I want to offer my personal and sincere apology to every one of you. I realized almost as soon as I used the term ‘reverse discrimination’ that this is an offensive term and was an extremely poor choice of words on my part.

His groveling delayed their devouring by seconds. The Cannibal Reformers responded, yum yum eat ‘im up. He’s gone, baby, gone.

The Cannibal Reformers have been noshing on Lin-Manuel Miranda, the beloved leftist author of the beloved musical Hamilton, for being insufficiently Reformed.

Homosexual, slightly conservative and now former New York magazine writer Andrew Sullivan was nibbled on for writing in ways about the protests that “triggered” “sensitive junior editors.” He resigned before being eaten alive.

And on social media and in her former place of business, writer Bari Weiss, who describes herself as  “center left on most things … and … socially liberal,” was gnawed on mercilessly. When the Cannibal Reformers, with blood dripping from their ghoulish mouths, paused to catch their breath, Weiss fled and used her best weapon to try to stop the cannibalization. She wrote and posted a resignation letter that exposes the intolerant, bigoted, ideologically non-diverse work environment at the New York Times:

[T]he lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. …

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist. … Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned. …  [S]ome coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are. …

[T]he truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. … Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Weiss’s resignation echoes what leftist journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in June:

It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

I worked with such Robespierres and experienced firsthand their bigotry and hypocrisy at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore. Ironically, some of the most vicious bullies were those who most vigorously claimed to honor all voices and to value diversity even as they promoted only one set of assumptions on how to think about race, sex, and erotic attraction. All views with which district oppressors disagreed were designated “hateful” and  their imperious judgments justified silencing—through bullying if necessary—all dissenting voices. While proclaiming that everyone should “Speak” their “Truth,” they ostracized anyone who expressed truths they hated.

Seeing the cannibals eating their own, ethics (or panic) seized 153 men and women who work in journalism, academia, and the arts—mostly leftists—and penned an open letter in Harpers in which they “raise their voices against” the “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” The signatories include Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, Garry Kasparov, Damon Linker, Steven Pinker, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Jonathan Rauch, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Randi Weingarten, Garry Wills, Matthew Yglesias, and Fareed Zakaria.

After first taking potshots at conservatives, as is their wont to do, they wrote this:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. … [C]ensoriousness is … spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. … the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.

Some of the most bloodthirsty cancel culture cannibals live and move and have their anti-being in the “trans” cult, and when Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said men can’t be women, the Cannibal Reformers came for her with bared fangs and unsheathed drag queen talons. Fortunately, Rowling has an impenetrable armor made of gold bricks. Unfortunately, few Americans have such armor. Maybe AOC, Bernie, and Biden can provide some to each and every American—oh, and while they’re providing free stuff, I’d like my fair share: a Martha’s Vineyard mansion just like the Obamas’.

While this letter is a good start in undoing the damage done to the Republic by leftists, seeing the name of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, undermines trust in the sincerity of the signatories in that teachers’ unions are at the forefront of leftist politicking, including using schools to advance their leftist ideology.

Not surprisingly, when the letter was published, the Cannibal Reformers lost what was left of their minds, beginning with Todd VanDerWerff, whose “trans” alter ego is “Emily” VanDerWerff. To be clear in the miasmic ontological fog created by the noxious exhalations of the “trans” cult, “Emily” is a biological man—forever.

He, like Harper’s letter signatory Matthew Yglesias, is a writer at Vox, and VanDerWerff laughably claimed that upon seeing Yglesias’ signature near the signature of J.K. Rowling, he felt “less safe working at Vox.” And the Cannibal Reformers were off and terrorizing.

Leftist stormtroopers unaccustomed to pushback kicked up a Twitter storm, and fearing for their professional lives, a handful of Harper’s letter signatories bailed. Three days later, a racist counter letter appeared, griping that many of the Harper’s letter signatories were “white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms.” Of course many were wealthy and endowed with massive platforms because only those with wealth and massive platforms can survive the Cannibal Reformers’ Purges.

What we need now is massive pushback against ideological Robespierres, storm troopers, and Cannibal Reformers. Don’t let their tactics intimidate you. Don’t be manipulated. Don’t be deceived. Don’t hold your fire. And don’t send your kids to their re-education camps.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Leftists-Canceling-and-Cannibalizing-Their-Own_audio.mp3

Please consider a gift to the Illinois Family Institute. As always, your gift to IFI is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated!

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Despite the clever marketing and the dishonest media propaganda surrounding the group, Black Lives Matter is not actually about black lives or racism. Instead, it is a dangerous organization founded by self-proclaimed Marxists that seeks to dismantle the nuclear family and the market system. If BLM gets its way, black Americans and everyone else will suffer enormously.

One does not need to dig deep to learn the truth about Black Lives Matter. In fact, BLM leaders brag about it. “We are trained Marxists,” boasted BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors speaking about the group’s “ideological frame” in an interview with The Real News Network. “We are super, uh, versed, um, on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Another BLM co-founder, self-proclaimed “queer” feminist Alicia Garza, cited convicted cop-killing terrorist Assata Shakur as the inspiration for the group. “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement,” Garza explained in a piece about the origins of BLM.

The organization itself also openly promotes Marxism in its public statements. For instance, while BLM routinely paints Trump as a racist dictator, it has a bizarre affinity for the late mass-murdering Communist dictator who enslaved Cuba, Fidel Castro. When he died, BLM expressed an “overwhelming sense of loss,” praising “El Commandante” for protecting Shakur, “who continues to inspire us.”

On its website, under the headline “What We Believe,” BLM hits all the Marxist talking points — especially the modern gender-bending LGBT extremism that seeks to smash the family. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the statement of beliefs explains, calling for “villages” to take charge of child rearing. The group also boasts of fostering a “queer-affirming network” that will “dismantle cisgender privilege.”

Despite the unhinged extremism, or perhaps because of it, Black Lives Matter now has an incredible array of corporate sponsors that includes some of America’s biggest businesses. Even before BLM came together as a formal organization, powerful financiers including billionaire atheist George Soros, who has a bizarre affinity for the murderous regime ruling Communist China, were pouring money into the movement.

In a 2015 report from Open Society Foundation U.S. Programs Board, the Soros machine boasts of spending $650,000 to “invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.” The goals included the “dismantling of structural inequality” supposedly caused by “local law enforcement,” and also to “create a national movement.”

According to an investigation by the Washington Times that relied on Soros foundations’ tax filings and interviews with key players, the far-left billionaire poured some $33 million in one year into organizations fomenting the unrest surrounding the killing of Michael Brown. The Marxist co-founders of BLM were also working closely with Soros-funded groups before founding BLM.

In addition to Big Business and major foundations such as the Ford Foundation and Borealis, even the Russian regime appears to have had a hand in backing BLM. According to CNN, which admittedly is not a reliable source, a Kremlin-controlled “troll farm” bought BLM ads aimed at Baltimore and Ferguson. The goal was to sow discord and chaos in the United States, CNN “intelligence” sources said.

In short, despite being funded by America’s premier “capitalist” corporations and money men, the BLM is a Marxist organization hostile to all that is good about America, and it does not even bother to hide that fact. Incredibly, due primarily to ignorance among leaders, even many churches and pastors have jumped on the bandwagon, discrediting their witness and supporting an organization that is anti-Christian to the core.

Indeed, Marxism is not just incompatible with Christianity — it is basically its antithesis. Where God commands respect for private property rights with “thou shalt not steal,” Marxism claims private property should be abolished. Where God established the nuclear family with a father, mother, and children, Marxism calls for women to be held in common. Marxism turns biblical principles upside-down.

In the book Marx and Satan, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured for almost a decade by Marxist barbarians in a Romanian prison, uses Marx’s own poetry and writings to make a powerful case that the ideologue was not an atheist, as is commonly believed. Rather, according to Wurmbrand, Marx hated God and was on a demonic mission to destroy mankind and all that God has ordained.

If Black Lives Matter were truly interested in dismantling anything with a “legacy” of racism and white supremacy, it might start by targeting the Democratic Party. As documented at Illinois Family Action last month, the party has a long and grotesque history of supporting slavery and racial terrorism in the face of America’s constant efforts to better itself — efforts that were unprecedented in human history to advance the biblical ideal that “all men are created equal.”

Another natural target, if BLM was really hoping to stop racism, would be Planned Parenthood, the tax-funded abortion behemoth founded by Margaret Sanger, a vile racist and eugenicist who sought to remove “undesirables” from the gene pool. Still today, Planned Parenthood sets up shop in minority neighborhoods and slaughters unborn black babies by the millions, far out of proportion to the number of black Americans in the population.

Instead of focusing on those legitimate targets, or on the destroyers of the black family, the BLM focuses on undermining the family, the free-market, and the United States itself. That should tell everyone everything they need to know about what is happening. Worse, the establishment media knows everything contained in this article. And yet they choose to conceal these facts from Americans.

This is a war on America and Christianity, and most Americans and Christians still don’t have a clue.

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Dating back to 2016, I have been urging Christian conservatives and other people of conscience to distinguish between the important affirmation that black lives do matter and the BLM movement.

The statement that “black lives matter” should be shouted loudly and clearly, since through much of our history, black Americans have felt that their lives did not matter to white Americans.

As for the BLM movement, it should be exposed for what it is. As I tweeted on July 6:

Here’s what we know about the BLM movement, especially when we dig a little deeper into their “What We Believe” statement.

When you start to connect the dots, you’ll understand why I described BLM as “dangerous” and “anti-Christian.” In fact, at the end of this article, I’ll connect the BLM movement with the J word – as in Jezebel. (Do I have your attention?)

BLM was founded by three black women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi.

The first two identify as queer and the third as “a transnational feminist.”

Speaking of Cullors, a website celebrating “lesbians who tech” states that, “When Patrisse was 16-years-old she came out as queer and moved out of her home in the Valley.”

The official BLM site describes Garza as a “queer Black woman” who states that “we must view this epidemic through a lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

That’s why a June 21, 2020 article on ABC news declared that, “From the start, the founders of Black Lives Matter have always put LGBTQ voices at the center of the conversation. The movement was founded by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of whom identify as queer.”

On a certain level, reading through the official BLM statement, being queer is as much of an issue for the movement as being black.

Accordingly, there are multiple references to “trans,” as highlighted here: “We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

“We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.”

Even more forthrightly, the statement reads, “We foster a queer-affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”

Thus, the only references to heterosexuality are negative, as in “cisgender privilege” and “heteronormative thinking,” meaning the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm.

So, BLM is not just fighting against white privilege but also heterosexual privilege. Make no mistake about it.

That’s why the statement also goes out of its way to include people of “actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression.” The leaders have made themselves abundantly clear.

But there’s more, and this has often been missed in commentary on BLM beliefs.

While there are references to “mothers” and “parents” in their statement, there is not one single reference to fathers. Not one. (Contrast this with the multiple references to queer and trans and gender identity, etc).

As for mention of “men” or the idea of a male-led household, these are only found in totally negative contexts.

Specifically, “We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered” (my emphasis). Oh, those terrible, evil men.

And this: “We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work” (again, my emphasis).

Yes, that oppressive, husband-wife, male-female union, that outdated, outmoded patriarchal dinosaur. It must be dismantled. (And note the assumption that if something is “patriarchal” it is unfair to women. A truly fair relationship would have the husband home with the kids while the wife is out doing “public justice work”).

This is the language of radical feminism in unabashed, undisguised form. This too is part of the queer, trans-affirming spirit.

As for the third founder, Opal Tometi, she is also described as “a student of liberation theology.” And there is now the widely circulated quote from Cullors that she and Garza “are trained Marxists.”

As for the connection between liberation theology and Marxism, especially in this context, Prof. Anthony Bradley, himself black, has pointed out that, “Black Liberation Is Marxist Liberation.”

So, without question, the official BLM movement is Marxist-based, queer-affirming, trans-activist, traditional-marriage degrading, radical-feminist promoting and more. In a certain sense, it is fatherless as well.

That’s why I said that “the BLM organization is dangerous, anti-Christian, and should be avoided.”

Now, let’s also remember that Cullors is on record saying that their goal is to remove Trump from office: “Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now. Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so, what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out.”

And this leads me to one last important point. When you connect all the dots, the spirit of the official BLM movement is downright Jezebelic, thus in direct conflict with the Alpha Male Trump.

This article originally posted at Townhall.com

During my Bible reading the other day, I came across 2 Timothy 2:24: “And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient . . .”

This verse wasn’t written directly to parents, but it certainly has plenty of application for us! Paul was writing to Timothy who was leading a local church, and these words of wisdom were meant for him. But the four instructions found in this verse—one negative, three positive—are ones that all parents would do well to heed—myself included!

The first instruction—and the only negative one—tells us that “the servant of the Lord must not strive.”

It can be easy to strive with our children—especially some of them! My interactions with one of our sons in particular can easily stray into arguing. He’s generally not meaning to be disrespectful, but he’s young and hasn’t learned yet that he doesn’t have to say everything that’s on his mind. In moments of training and instruction, he’s prone to keep talking about and explaining (and often rationalizing!) whatever just happened. Frankly, it can sometimes (okay, often!) get a bit exasperating, and I can find myself slipping into an argument instead of avoiding one. We’re not shouting at each other, but the intensity level is a notch or two higher than it ought to be. I’m guessing you can relate.

That’s not God’s plan for dealing with our relationships. Paul says clearly in this verse that the servant of the Lord must not strive. (Other verses speak about living peaceably, which is largely the same thing.) We’re not to be argumentative and engage in verbal brawls. Discussions are fine, but our goal should be to avoid letting a discussion turn into an argument.

This leads directly to the second instruction, which is a contrast with the first: “but be gentle unto all men.”

The context here indicates that striving and gentleness are on opposite ends of the relational spectrum. If we’re striving, we’re not being gentle; if we’re being gentle, we’re not striving.

It’s easy to let gentleness slip when we’re in the midst of correcting or instructing our children. Practicing gentleness means we won’t deal with our children in harshness or anger. I believe gentleness is a quality in our spirit that emanates from a heart of love for our child and a genuine concern and interest in their wellbeing.

Of course, being gentle with our children doesn’t mean we’re not firm. It doesn’t mean we don’t have rules and standards and administer consequences when those standards are violated. But gentleness does mean that even in the midst of our teaching and discipline, we’re going to demonstrate love rather than anger, kindness rather than harshness.

The next instruction tells us that we should be “apt to teach.” Clearly this is an important one for parents! As I’ve written before, children need to be taught pretty much everything—from who God is, to how to tie their shoes, and everything in between.

There are many things we know it’s our responsibility to teach our children. When they’re small, we teach them how to dress themselves, how to brush their teeth, how to use the bathroom, and many other simple life skills. If we don’t teach them these things, who will?

Unfortunately, we sometimes don’t take our children’s spiritual training as seriously as we do those simple skills. We’re more willing to delegate that to someone else. But God wants us—not someone else—to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to our children’s spiritual education. We need to be “apt to teach” in this area above all others.

As we look at this verse, it’s interesting the way Paul’s four instructions fit together. We’re not supposed to strive; instead, we should be gentle. We’re supposed to teach, and there’s no doubt that gentle teaching is better than harsh instruction. We’re supposed to be patient, because without patience, there’s no way we’ll fulfill the other three commands. Put together, these instructions define an attitude or spirit of genuine love as applied to those under our charge.

If you’re like me, you probably find yourself struggling in some of these areas. The good news is that God wants to help us be the parents He’s called us to be. Let’s not forget to ask for His help!

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In a cowardly effort to lick the jackboots of Black Lives Matter, the NFL is reportedly going to have every NFL game during Week 1 open with the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” long known as the “black national anthem,” followed by the American national anthem, the “Star-Spangled Banner.” According to the Associated Press, the NFL is also “considering putting names of victims of police brutality on helmet decals or jersey patches.” (Maybe the NFL wants to tackle another serious societal problem and allow players to put the names of victims of domestic abuse committed by professional athletes on their helmets or jerseys. #LogInTheirEye)

African American James Weldon Johnson wrote the lyrics to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in 1899, and his brother John Rosamund Johnson composed the music. It was first performed by 500 black students at a segregated school on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday. In 1919, the NAACP adopted it as their official song. It is a moving and inspiring hymn to God, deeply meaningful to the black community. But is it an appropriate song for sporting events that bring together diverse peoples from all over the world for some diversionary entertainment?

Is a song that emerged from and reminds listeners of the most grievous historical sin of this great country a fitting song to start an event that is intended to entertain? And why now? Why when racial discrimination is at historic lows should we use sporting events for this purpose? When slavery and Jim Crow laws are long gone; when we have had a black president; when we have black congressmen and congresswomen; when we have blacks serving and performing at the highest levels of every institution and profession in the country; and when we have interracial children, families, churches, and friend groups, why begin a diversionary bit of entertainment with a song about the “blood of the slaughtered” blacks killed by whites?

Of what other historical sins or political causes should we use sporting events to remind attendees? How about a Chinese anthem reminding Americans of their treatment when they built the transcontinental railway? How about a song at the start of entertainment events reminding Americans about the internment of the Japanese during WWII? How about reminding Americans at sporting events of the anti-Semitism that has percolated throughout American history? How about a song reminding Americans about the ongoing slaughter of the unborn? How about a song about the grievous and systemic/institutional injustice done to children by divorce and/or their fathers’ abandonment?

Sin and injustice mar the story of every country and institution that has ever existed because sin is the state of man. But America has been a marvel in the annals of history as a place in which racial, ethnic, and religious diversity can flourish. That’s why emigrants from around the world continue to come.

Our national anthem should be one like the third verse of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (a verse that leftists likely detest) that places God first in leading us to a better place—a place in which we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It should express the foundational principle that we are all created by God and endowed by Him with unalienable rights and that out of many, we become one as American citizens. I’d say this does the job quite nicely:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
…
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

If the NFL pursues this controversial political act—an act which will result in yet more lost revenue—let’s pray the third verse of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is sung to Lord:

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-NFL-and-the-Black-National-Anthem_audio.mp3

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Statues depicting prominent figures in U.S. history have been coming down across the nation. The actions of those portrayed are being reevaluated through the eyes of some who feel their past bad deeds outweigh any of the good they accomplished, with no regard given to the common mores of past centuries. Someone living four centuries ago is held up to 21^st century standards.

Some statues have been removed by local municipalities, while others have been pulled down  or even decapitated and dragged into a lake. Such was the case with Union Civil War Colonel Hans Christian Heg’s statue. The statue of the abolitionist, who was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga, stood on the grounds of the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison. In other cases, when statues were targeted for removal, it was a little more understandable – they portrayed Confederate generals and other military leaders. The removal of Heg by a violent mob made little sense. One of the mob leaders cleared up the confusion, telling the Chicago Tribune that the statue was removed because it portrayed Wisconsin as racially progressive, when slavery had never really ended but rather continues in the state through the prison system.

Viewing the protest-turned-mob leader’s words through the lens of history, one can’t help but be reminded of the Russian and French Revolutions, and even of events out of Mao’s little red book. Activists may say that suggesting such comparisons is alarmist or dramatic, but the proverbial slippery slope is there for a reason.

Now Illinois’s beloved President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, is one of the historical revisionists’ targets. Lincoln, born February 12, 1809 in Kentucky, lived in Indiana from ages 7-21, then moved to Illinois. In 1831, at age 19, he made his first flatboat trip to New Orleans. Historians believe that it was on that or another trip to the Crescent City that he witnessed a slave auction. What he saw forever changed him. Lincoln is first recorded as publicly speaking out against slavery as a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1837.

Lincoln went on to become president and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, with the Civil War beginning just over a month later on April 12. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, which stated that if the Confederate south did not cease its rebellion by January 1, 1863, the executive order would go into effect. When it failed to do so, 3.5 million African-American slaves held in the Confederacy were freed. Lincoln then endorsed the passage of the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the country as a whole.

The great orator and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass was a free black man who had escaped slavery. He met with Lincoln at the White House at least four times, but some historians believe the number was much higher. In his personal papers, Douglass said that the two men had different agendas when they first met and would argue, but they grew to be good friends. After his first meeting with the President, Douglass said to a group of abolitionists in Philadelphia, “I will tell you how he received me – just as you have seen one gentleman receive another, with a hand and a voice well-balanced between a kind cordiality and a respectful reserve.”

Was Lincoln recorded as having said things that sound racist to our ears today? Yes, he was. We know when he lived and we know he wasn’t perfect. We also know that he was leaps and bounds ahead of many in his day. He was a good man and a good president who freed the slaves. He was assassinated by the then-well-known actor John Wilkes Booth for freeing the slaves and defeating the Confederacy.  Lincoln, along with 450,000 white and 40,000 black Union soldiers, gave their lives to end slavery.

Now, students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison want to remove President Lincoln’s statue from campus because of things he said that they disapprove of and a homesteading act he signed that gave Native American land to white settlers and designated it to become the campus of their university. In Washington, D.C., protests continue to call for the removal of the Emancipation Memorial Statue in Lincoln Park. The statue, dedicated April 14, 1876, was paid for by an association of former slaves. The dedication speech was given in front of President Ulysses Grant by Frederick Douglass.

In his speech, Douglass described Lincoln’s assassination as an act of “malice” that had “done some good after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.”

Although he developed some mixed feelings about Lincoln in the years following his death, Douglass went on to say that “no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him – but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is double dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.”

Much has been said about the position of the freed slave positioned next to the standing Lincoln. A reporter interviewed Marcia Cole, a member of the Female Re-Enactors of Distinction (FREED) as she stood near the statue in Lincoln Park. Cole portrays Charlotte Scott, an African-American woman from Virginia who gave the first $5 she earned towards the statue. Cole told the reporter that she was there to speak on behalf of Miss Charlotte, who would not want the statue removed.

“People tend to think of that figure as being servile, but on second look, you will see something different, perhaps. That man is not kneeling on two knees with his head bowed. He is in the act of getting up. And his head is up, not bowed, because he’s looking forward to a future of freedom.”

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Democrats in California have passed a resolution to tear down a statue of John Wayne and to remove his name from the airport where it stands. The reason they say that they are doing this stems from a 1971 interview Wayne gave in which he was asked about white supremacy. (I believe they dislike John Wayne because he truly loved America.) His answer was unclear. It seemed to me he was trying to say if differing groups want to be supreme, they need to act that way. It was not a good answer, but it was just words.

No one condemning Wayne has seemed to notice that his actions betray what he may, or may not, have meant to say 50 years ago. John Wayne had three wives during his life. All three were of Mexican descent. His family adamantly insists that he never mistreated anyone due to race. The Duke wasn’t much of a white supremacist in his daily life, but having said the right politically correct words is all that matters today. . . Just ask Mike Pence.

Over the weekend the Vice President stood strong in refusing to repeat the slogan “Black Lives Matter” during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation.  When pressed to say what the left wants, instead Pence said:

“All my life, I’ve been inspired by the example of the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. . .  I cherish the progress that we have made towards a more perfect union for African-Americans throughout our history. . .  And as a pro-life American, I also believe that all life matters, born and unborn.  

“But what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police, that would tear down monuments, that would press a radical left agenda. . .

“I really believe that all lives matter, and that’s where the heart of the American people lies.”

I would caution people not to post the Black Lives Matter slogan. Everyone knows and supports the words, but not the connotations it carries. It is the same reason why I would not encourage people to say, “every child a wanted child.” Should all children be loved and wanted?  Yes, of course! But that is a slogan of the abortion industry which has worked to kill millions of babies under the banner of that compassionate sounding slogan.

While black lives certainly matter, the organization supports the disproportionate killing of black unborn babies, the destruction of the traditional family, and the radical LGBT agenda, and it holds racist views toward Jews and Israel.

Regarding what to say, a recent Rasmussen Poll found that by a two-to-one margin Americans support the phrase “All lives matter” more than “Black Lives Matter.” Even among black voters, 47 percent prefer “All Lives Matter” compared to 44 percent who prefer “Black Lives Matter.”

Read more: Exposing Black Lives Matter

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

The headline to this article is not sensationalistic. It is not click bait. It is truth. Shocking truth. Yes, Instagram has designated videos of live worship on the streets to be in violation of community guidelines, calling the content “harmful.” Let the outrage be felt and heard.

Sean Feucht is a worship leader and songwriter who recently ran for political office in California. He is also a conservative Christian.

On June 23 he tweeted, “This is what we’ve come to in America!

“Instagram is now classifying my WORSHIP videos as ‘harmful or false information’

“Religious Liberty? Freedom of Speech? Big Tech censorship?”

Included in the tweet was a screenshot from Instagram, explaining that the company had removed his video post because it was violation of Community Standards. (Oh, those dread community standards again!)

Specifically, Instagram stated, “Story removed for harmful or false information.”

What on earth does this mean? What can it possibly mean?

Feucht’s tweet got the attention of Missouri’s U.S. Senator Josh Hawley who tweeted, “Cancel culture meets #BigTech. Now @instagram is censoring a Christian worship leader who wants to post videos of praise and worship from places where there has recently been unrest. And that doesn’t meet ‘community standards’? Can’t wait to hear the explanation for this.”

A few years ago, I repeatedly challenged Facebook for censoring some of my posts for alleged violation of community standards, exposing the rank hypocrisy of their decisions.

For example, my factual, fairly-worded post dealing with LGBT issues would be deemed hateful, while the most blasphemous, unimaginably profane, anti-Christian Facebook pages were allowed to operate without restriction. Seriously?

Thankfully, in most cases, with the help of an internal contact, Facebook reinstated my posts (or, restored my status). But other colleagues of mine did not fare so well, having their pages permanently shut down for alleged violation of the dreaded (and oh so ambiguous) community standards.

It seems that “hate” meant one thing for one group and something entirely different for the other. (For a recent video exposé, see here.)

When it comes to YouTube and Google, the battle continues, with large channels like Prager U still experiencing discrimination and unequal treatment. (Where are all the social justice warriors calling for equality? Somehow, they don’t seem to be raising their voices for Prager U.)

In my own experience, after having over 1,000 of my channel’s videos branded unsuitable for advertising in a single stroke (!), YouTube has actually been fair with me, even surprising me at times by what it approves for monetization. At the same time, we know that the other shoe could drop at any moment and suddenly, we could be banned.

It is a big mistake to put our trust in Big Tech.

What happened with Instagram, though, seems even more bizarre and extreme. What on earth were the all-powerful censors thinking?

There are endless videos on Instagram showing disturbing clips from the recent protests and riots, all of them somehow in conformity with community standards. (Right now, over on Twitter, I’m watching a video of the “CHOP” call from Seattle, with specific reference to guillotines. I imagine similar videos can be found on Instagram.)

But when a video is posted showing Christian worship in the midst of these protests, it is removed for alleged “harmful or false information.”

Since there is nothing “false” about the video, then it must be considered “harmful” – hence the headline to this article.

Is this actually what Instagram meant? Could they possibly be claiming that worshiping the Lord on the streets of our divided cities is harmful?

If so, I would encourage every worship leader and every worship team to hit the streets of their own communities, posting similar videos and sharing them as widely as possible, starting on Instagram. (Hey, it’s a great thing to do anyway and just what America needs.)

If Instagram has made a mistake, I hope they own up to it and say, “We totally blew it! There is no excuse.” Otherwise, this means spiritual war.

So, no hatred. No carnal aggression. No fleshly anger. And, of course, of course, of course, no violence.

But lots of prayer. Lots of worship. Lots of preaching. And lots of standing up and being heard. If not now, then when?

Ironically, as if to drill the point home, as I as writing this article, I spotted another tweet from Sen. Hawley from a few hours ago. He wrote, “Now @Twitter is actively censoring Bible verses? Seriously? Why?”

Hawley retweeted another tweet from Sean Feucht, stating, “Not only is big tech blocking worship videos, now they’re blocking Bible verses about PEACE!

“RT if you believe social media needs more peace, more worship, and less censorship of Jesus followers.”

Feucht included a screenshot of tweets from Beni Johnson, then using the handle @prayfor5, which at present is not appearing on Twitter. Her tweets, posting Bible verses, were blocked, with the note, “This Tweet may include sensitive content.”

So, worship is deemed “harmful” and Scripture verses about peace are deemed “sensitive content.” Really?

Let us, then, flood Big Tech with the Word and worship. And let us report and challenge every unjust infraction about the practicing of our faith.

It’s beyond time.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

According to an old adage, there are things people should avoid discussing with friends, at dinner, at work, or just about anywhere else – politics, religion, and money. Lately, however, politics and religion have been issues people can’t seem to steer away from; they keep popping up in every almost every area of life. Politics, once held at a distance from the church and religion, is now co-mingling with congregants in the pews.

Dr. Bruce Ashford believes religion and politics cannot be separated. In a recent online event, Ashford, an author and professor of Theology and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., described politics as “the art and science of persuading one’s fellow citizens for the common good.”

Ashford said, “If you want to find someone’s religion, find whatever they have elevated to the level of a deity… How could it not affect your politics? Once you get one false god on your throne how could it not affect the other?”

Most Christians are familiar with the often-quoted passage from Matthew in which the Pharisees tried to trip Jesus up by engaging him in a debate that was both political and theological.

“’Whose image and inscription is this?’ they asked them.

‘Caesar’s,’ was the answer.

Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give, then, to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ When they heard this, they were amazed. So, they left him and went away” (Matthew 22:20-22).

It didn’t trip up the Son of God then, but it trips people up today. Those passages may not always be applied accurately in sermons, but Ashford said they’re an example of God’s design for how to deal with politics.

“I believe in the separation between church and state,” Ashford shared. “The church teaches that their ultimate allegiance is to God. The government teaches to bring justice.

“We don’t want the church to try to coerce the state or the state try to control the church.”

Ashford also talked about the current political climate in the United States and the Coronavirus pandemic. Looking at lessons learned from history, he noted, “Whenever a nation is deeply divided it usually takes something cataclysmic to bring a nation back together… God has people’s attention. People are paying attention.”

He also discussed what would happen if people stopped fighting and began to work together, asking, “What if God were to reweave the social fabric of our denominations that are fighting with each other? What if God were to reweave the fabric of our nation?”

If such a thing were to happen, he predicted it would begin happening at a local level and work its way up. He said that the key is to reach across lines of division. One of the best ways to do it starts with diffusing the anger that may be present. “When people express their views, they often express them in a really over the top, angry way,” he suggested. “You can diffuse that by expressing a common concern. At least 50 percent of the time you can have a really good conversation with someone who’s been really angry.”

He cautioned, “Don’t go into it hoping to persuade them. Ninety percent of the country can’t be persuaded right now.”

In the end, no matter our political feelings, it’s our belief in Christ that unites us and will take us into eternity.

When we die one day, Ashford said, “We will meet God as Americans, it is one identity of which you’ll give account.” However, he noted, we will meet him with a greater identity, that of a Child of God. “As a Christian we can look death in the face,” he declared.

From the discussion “Politics & Christian Witness in a Secular Age.”

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The ideology of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other “social justice” organizations teaches that all whites are racist oppressors, thereby justifying verbal attacks on people who are deemed inveterate racists and justifying riots to destroy everything that has emerged from an allegedly irremediable racist system. In promoting an explicitly racist ideology, BLM and other “social justice” organizations institutionalize racism, and we are suffering the fruits of that poisonous ideology.

In the hell-bent quest by America-hating revolutionaries to destroy America by destroying its institutions and history, 60 monuments have been removed, ordered removed, defaced, or torn down. In addition, according to Reinsurance News,

While no estimates of the costs of the damage is available yet, a look back at the costliest U.S. civil disorders shows that there’s potential for claims from the current riots, which are in multiple cities, to have easily run into the billions of dollars already.

Worse still, this BLM-led revolution has resulted in 25 deaths, hundreds of injuries—including injuries to 700 law enforcement officers—and the establishment of a rogue nation in the midst of downtown Seattle with the blessing of the incompetent mayor who called the squalid, uninhabitable, and dangerous encampment a free-love street festival.

The culture-destroyers are not done yet. Well-known racist activist Shaun King, whose purported racial identity and numerous fundraising projects are questioned by even leftists, recently tweeted,

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.

and

All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.

BLM, with whom King was previously associated, is a destructive revolutionary group leading a Maoist-like cultural revolution, and many conservatives don’t seem to understand that. Those who support BLM and its skin-pigment-obsessed divisive, separatist, elitist ideology are de facto racists, no matter their skin color.

In National Review, Kyle Smith describes the white liberal BLM disciples as “the White-Guilt Cult”:

Amidst nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a black man and woman are seated on a park bench while a white woman … takes to her megaphone. “We repent on behalf of, uh, Caucasian people,” she says. A small crowd of white people comes to kneel before the two seated black folks, who are co-pastors of a local church. Some of the kneelers wash the feet of the black people. … Several people start audibly weeping, or keening, as the speaker continues. Roughly a dozen people join in the gesture and kneel before the black couple. “We have put our necks, put our hands, our knees, upon the necks of our African-American brothers and sisters, people of color, indigenous people.” …

The original sin in the White Guilt Cult, the New Church of Anti-Racism, is to be, “uh, Caucasian people.” … If anything, the Great Awokening’s response to the George Floyd killing seems to be bolstering racial barriers rather than eradicating them. By making a religion of anti-racism, white people carry on with the longstanding project of “othering” black folks. … Take the principles of Woke in vain and you invite instantaneous ritual chastisement—the most thrilling, ecstatic element of the woke religion. The techno-narcissistic innovation of the Wokesters is that they have made themselves, as a collective, their own godhead, equipped with the authority to wield and unleash the thunderbolt of righteousness on blasphemers here and now, on their own authority. …

“White silence equals violence” is one new precept gaining currency. …  How exciting it must be to upend the meanings of words in service of the greater cause of smiting one’s perceived enemies, or even whatever suspected counterrevolutionaries there may be among one’s sworn allies. No one dared to be the first to stop applauding a Stalin speech. 

Even Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy has joined the anti-biblical white-guilt Cult, last week calling for white people to pay penance for sinful acts of racism that they never committed by shining the shoes of black people.

The ideology of BLM grows out of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. CRT like that espoused by BLM and scores of other organizations and ideologues emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Those whose worldview has been shaped by CRT–also known deceptively as “social justice warriors,” seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

CRT focuses on race, sex, class, “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity.” It encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics, dividing groups into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Those who are identified as “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. CRT promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals, is the cause of differing lots in life.

“Social justice” activists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic belief that whites (especially males and heterosexuals) are oppressors—a belief that robs minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lots in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through endless confessions of guilt on the parts of the purported oppressors. CRT cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and illegitimate sense of guilt on the parts of whites (or men or heterosexuals).

Finally, social justice theory is distinctly anti-American and hyper-focuses on America’s mistakes and failings. CRT diminishes or ignores the remarkable success America has achieved in integrating virtually every ethnic and racial group in the world and in enabling people to improve their lots in life through economic opportunity and American principles of liberty and equality.

Racism peddlers—including colorless racism-peddlers and profiteers like Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility—disseminate their cancerous ideology everywhere. Many Americans view our colleges and universities as the primary indoctrination centers, but they should look at government middle and high schools, because indoctrinating the next generation begins long before college.

Through “professional development”—which are the teacher training workshops, seminars, and conferences that take place during summer breaks, institute days, and late-arrival days—teachers are being coached and pressured by administrators and colleagues to adopt the beliefs of “anti-racism” and diversity trainers whose hefty fees are paid for by the public.

Teachers are forced to attend these indoctrination workshops, which never include resources or experts that challenge the assumptions of “anti-racism” trainers. Teachers are then expected to incorporate these revolutionary, leftist, and dubious beliefs into their classroom instruction. Our taxes are being used in government schools to teach children to hate America.

The predatory “anti-racism” scammers profit from peddling guilt to whites, shaming them into falsely believing—or pretending to believe—they are racists. The snake-oil salesmen and women do that in two ways. First, they redefine racism. Racism no longer refers to the belief that people with brown or black skin are by nature inferior. Nor does it refer to individual acts of incivility, unkindness, oppression, or violence. It refers to being white in a culture whose power structures used to be controlled by whites. Whites are guilty of racism and oppression based on nothing more than the color of their skin. This repugnant redefinition is the antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for America. It is also unbiblical.

The second way snake-oil salespersons peddle their ugly wares is equally sneaky. They recast all criticism of or opposition to their ideology as something negative, thereby making those who disagree reluctant to express their opposition. Robin DiAngelo insultingly describes the denials of white-skinned people that they are racists as “white fragility.” Those whites who  aren’t racists don’t want to deny being racists because if they do, they’ll then be charged with non-existent white fragility on top of their non-existent racism.

When I worked at Deerfield High School, the district hired expensive racism huckster from California, Glenn Singleton, to teach District 113 employees about their racism. At his first lecture to the entire district, Singleton pre-classified his audience as falling into three categories according to their potential responses to his theories: The first group were those who would agree with him immediately. The second group were those who would be on the fence and need to be convinced. And the third group were those “who are gifted at subverting reform.” Singleton cunningly attempted to prevent criticism by pre-labeling pejoratively those who disagreed with him. This dishonest labeling tactic works because conservatives let it.

Organizations, resources, and profiteers that provide “anti-racism” propaganda to government schools are numerous, but here are some that taxpayers should watch out for:

• The 1619 Project—a much criticized revision of American history by the New York Times and racism-peddler/activist Nikole Hannah-Jones

• Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center

• Deep Equity

• White Privilege Conference

• Pacific Education Group/Courageous Conversation About Race—founder Glenn Singleton

• National SEED Project (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity)

• “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—essay written by Peggy McIntosh

• The People’s History of the United States, a revisionist history written by Howard Zinn

It is not racist to criticize the loathsome and radical BLM that is explicitly committed to “disrupting ” the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure led by a father and mother, and to normalizing homosexuality and “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Such justifiable criticism does not become racist just because leftists shriek over and over and over that it is. Their epithet-hurling is not a magical incantation that turns truth into ugliness. It is a means of intimidation that leftists use all the time because conservatives quake and crumble in its wake.

Snap out of it, conservatives or you feed and strengthen the belching behemoth.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Fomenting-Racism-in-the-21st-Century_audio_01.mp3

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