Religion in America

Vigorous Defense, Getting Serious About DOMA

March 21, 2011March 22, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Chuck Colson –

As I have told you, the President and the attorney general will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts. It’s outrageous, it’s disingenuous, but it’s not the end of the story. As a co-equal branch of government, Congress has a stake in seeing that the laws it enacted are enforced and defended in the courts. The question is “Are they serious about doing so?”

Federal law requires the attorney general to notify the House if he decides not to defend the constitutionality of a federal statute. Federal law also authorizes the Senate and the House of Representatives to intervene in litigation over the constitutionality of a federal statute. What’s more, the House can hire outside counsel to represent its interests in the litigation if that’s the best way to defend the law. [Read more…]

Neutering God

January 14, 2011January 16, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Mark Tooley – It’s a wonderful mercy that much of the more extreme elements of radical feminist theology in the churches peaked in the 1990s and have since faded. The high tide of radical feminist theology was the 1993 ecumenical Re-Imagining Conference, endorsed by nearly all the Mainline Protestant denominations or their women’s agencies, where speakers condemned traditional Christianity as patriarchal and instead acclaimed ancient feminine deities like Astarte, Isis, and Athena. God was also commonly called “Sophia,” based on the Greek word for wisdom. There was a special altar call for lesbians, not for repentance, but for acclamation. A milk and honey ritual replaced the traditional Eucharist. [Read more…]

Civic Courage Then and Now, Bonhoeffer and Barmen

January 8, 2011January 16, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Chuck Colson – July 27, 1945. London is still slowly recovering from six years of war with Germany. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers are dead. British cities are in ruins. As newsreels expose fresh horrors from the Nazi death camps, the British people wonder, “Is there no end to German atrocities?”

Thus, it was not surprising that many Brits recoiled when they heard about a memorial service at London’s Holy Trinity Church—not for England’s war dead, but for a German. The service would be broadcast on the BBC. Many wondered: Could there be such a thing as a good German, worthy of such an honor?

The answer was emphatically yes. The service was for Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis three weeks before the war’s end. Bonhoeffer is often remembered for his resistance to Hitler, in fact taking part in the plot to kill him. But Bonhoeffer is also celebrated for his role in a significant event in the life of the Church—the drafting of the Barmen Declaration. [Read more…]

Happy Holydays

December 6, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

Saint Nicholas - Bishop of Myra, Defender of Orthodoxy

12/6/2010 – Lisa Fabrizio –
The conclusion of Thanksgiving, originally a day of solemn acknowledgement that all that we have that is good is a gift from God, brings us to the celebration of the greatest gift from our Creator: the incarnation of our Savior, Jesus Christ. And just as many have seen fit to ignore the giving of thanks to God on Thanksgiving Day, so too have countless others deigned to divorce the birth of Christ from Christmas.

The reasons for this disturbing disconnect vary, but the main one seems to be that the worship of the deity recognized by the great majority of those in this country might be the cause of offense for a few; God himself excepted of course. And so in a few weeks we will commence the season of attempts at discrediting Christianity and its founder while distancing Christmas from any connection with him.

One of the most common ploys will be to claim that the date itself is nothing more than a pagan observance. Most scholars have agreed that the date of December 25 derived from pagan Rome’s celebration of the Natalis Invicti; birth of the deity, Mithra, the Sun God. But this should not, as has become fashionable, justify the notion that Christianity is an offshoot of paganism, even though Scripture is filled with literary allusions to the Sun of God. [Read more…]

God, Liberals and Liberty

October 26, 2010September 11, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most God-centered.

Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).

Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.

America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [Read more…]

Is Obama’s Position on Religious Freedom ‘Mosque, Yes; Cross, No?’

October 11, 2010October 20, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

Mojave_Cross_covered_02_md 10/10/2010 – Margaret Calhoun Hemenway –

It would be unimaginable for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to pursue the removal of thousands of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery, situated so near the seat of the federal government in the nation’s capital and where so many of America’s veterans and honored heroes are laid to rest. Likewise, it would be seemingly unthinkable for the ACLU to try to sue to eliminate the Senate and House chaplains (both of whom are of the Christian faith), who, in accordance with longstanding tradition, open with a prayer the upper and lower chambers each day that Congress is in session.

But like the predatory wolf that searches for the lamb at the outskirts of the flock, the ACLU targeted a lone cross — a war memorial — in California’s Mojave Desert, off a desolate highway, perhaps believing it to be an easy target for removal. The ACLU was mistaken. For ten years, a battle has been waged to preserve this solitary Latin cross, first erected in 1934 to honor World War I veterans. In fact, the Mojave Desert War Memorial is our nation’s sole congressionally designated World War I memorial.

A former National Park Service (NPS) official (who now lives in the State of Oregon) objected to the cross memorial and enlisted the ACLU to sue to remove it. [Read more…]

Thieves Hijacking the Language of the Christian Moral Tradition

October 4, 2010October 4, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

10/4/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
What happens then when people leave Christianity and want to promote ideas about morality that violate the moral tradition? They have only one option: Hijack the language. They use the terms of traditional Christianity but mean very different things by them. Words don’t mean what they used to mean. Language gets inverted, turned upside down. Do this long and loud enough, and in less than a generation the new meanings take hold. When hijackers use the language of the moral tradition, they implicitly claim to stand inside that tradition. It’s only a pose of course, but their pose fools many people.

NAPLES, FL. (Catholic Online) – In a recent Catholic Online article (Social Justice: Take Back the Term from the Thieves and Build a New Catholic Action) Deacon Keith Fournier writes about a question he was asked at a recent conference:

…the host of the conference made a suggestion that we get rid of the term “Social Justice” because it is now used by ‘the left”. He asked for my thoughts. I strongly disagreed. I insisted that we take back the phrase from those who have stolen it, either on the “the right” or “the left”. He then suggested the Church does not use the phrase “Social Justice”. An attendee did a “google” search of the Vatican documents on his handheld device and reported it was used thousands of times in the magisterial teaching of the Church.

Fournier is right on two counts: The Christian moral vocabulary properly belongs to Christians, and we should not cede the vocabulary to the thieves. [Read more…]

The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity

August 14, 2010August 16, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

8/13/2010 – Brett McCracken –
‘How can we stop the oil gusher?” may have been the question of the summer for most Americans. Yet for many evangelical pastors and leaders, the leaking well is nothing compared to the threat posed by an ongoing gusher of a different sort: Young people pouring out of their churches, never to return.

As a 27-year-old evangelical myself, I understand the concern. My peers, many of whom grew up in the church, are losing interest in the Christian establishment. [Read more…]

The Evolutionary Scientists: Apostles of a New Morality

July 25, 2010July 27, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

7/25/2010 – Miguel A. Guanipa –

Most evolutionary scientists are unacquainted with the nearly extinct brand of academic deference which comes from a humbling realization that a science degree does not automatically confer a plenary understanding of the vast complexity of the universe. The least diffident ones in the field are not shy about airing their personal grievances against what they view as Religion’s insolent encroachment on the scientific enterprise.

In response, Christians often feel compelled by necessity to point out that these men of science step outside of their boundaries, when they advise the former not to engage in polemics about scientific matters too lofty for their intellects to comprehend. Christians are hence tasked with reminding overzealous scientists that their discipline is more suited to probe the sundry observable schemes that animate our meticulously woven universe, and not to pronounce moral judgments. [Read more…]

An Independent Witness to Marriage

July 16, 2010July 17, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

7/16/2010 – Stuart Koehl –

In the pending court case for overturning California’s Proposition 8, which banned “gay marriage,” two leading conservative legal scholars face off: Charles J. Cooper, taking the classical conservative line that organic social institutions such as marriage have an inherent value and cannot be redefined by legal fiat, and Theodore Olson, taking the more libertarian line that government should simply regulate contractual relationships between individuals and not become involved in private matters. [Read more…]