An amazing thing is happening in the 2024 presidential campaign. Religious beliefs and hostility toward religion are playing bigger roles than in any election in modern times.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz represent the anti-religious ticket. Their past actions and current statements communicate clear opposition to, and disdain for, religion in ways which would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
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Back during the 2008 presidential race, then-Sen. Barack Obama paid a heavy political price when he mocked Americans he claimed were clinging to “guns and religion.”
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A new study has found that as many as 104 million people of faith are unlikely to vote this election season. Within that segment, as many as 41 million born-again Christians (as defined by their beliefs) and 32 million self-identified Christians who regularly attend church are expected not to vote.
These findings highlight the alarming number of projected uncast votes from religious Americans, whose participation is crucial this election. A September Pew Research survey indicates that 61 percent of Protestant voters support Donald Trump, whereas 37 percent of Protestants support Kamala Harris.
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Millions of Christians in the United States indicated in a study released on Monday that they are not likely to vote in the upcoming election this November, signaling a potential problem for the Republican Party.
Just over half of interviewees (51%) in a Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University study, who identified as “people of faith,” responded that they are likely to vote in the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The “people of faith” label is given to those who identify with a recognized religion, such as Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism or Islam.
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A new report says that Nigeria has been systematically persecuting Christians, including executing thousands, in an “unrelenting…time bomb.”
As Fox News reports, the claims come from Open Doors International, a faith-based non-profit which focuses on raising awareness of persecutions across the world. Open Doors says that Christians, as well as “Christian communities, their livelihoods, faith leaders, and places of worship” are being “deliberately targeted” in the African nation. It has gotten to the point where Christians are “an endangered species” in Nigeria, Open Doors stated.
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Christian evangelist Franklin Graham criticized the “Evangelicals for Harris” group for using his father in a political ad.
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We’ve all heard the rhetorical attacks on Western Civilization—often centered on Christianity, capitalism, or colonialism, and often on all three. Among radical leftists, the consensus is that these elements are evil, but given that each is currently or historically integral to civilization as we know it, it’s worth examining the data to determine whether they deserve to be so despised.
First, Christianity. A 2018 study found that religion was “the decisive background factor” determining how much human rights were respected in any given country. And not all religions had the same impact. The percentage of Christians in the population was closely associated with a nation upholding human rights, whereas the percentage of Muslims was the opposite—that is, Muslim countries were less likely to uphold such rights. Another study reached similar conclusions about the effects of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam on nations’ ranking in the Good Country Index. (The index measures countries’ “contributions to global prosperity in domains such as peace, climate and health.”)
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Those who would abolish religion and prohibit the free exercise thereof, are themselves religious. Those who would replace religion with the cult of reason, and sacrifice the soul before the altar of science, are unreasonable in the extreme: they are political extremists whose religion is politics.
This religion, with contempt for one nation under God, is in opposition to our civil religion. This religion, with contempt for the idea of God, that God exists, that God is true, that God is just, is without mercy. This religion, with contempt for the sons of Abraham, and of all who are children of God through faith, is a declaration of war against Jews and Christians
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Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.
Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.
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Nearly 70% of registered voters believe that Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead, and more than 70% plan to celebrate Easter this year, a new poll finds.
A Scott Rasmussen National Survey poll, conducted March 20 and 21 among 1,000 registered voters, found that 73% of respondents will celebrate Easter this year. When asked whether they would celebrate the holiday primarily as a religious holiday or as a secular holiday, 56% of participants responded with religious, 16% said secular, and 27% said both secular and religious equally.
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You may not get any chocolate bunnies this Easter, but you’re bound to stumble across an article or meme suggesting that the story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is just a reincarnation of some pagan myth. Whether it’s Ishtar, Osiris, or Attis, these claims are tantalizing but devoid of scholarly content–much like the sugar rush of the chocolate bunny, with its deficit of actual nourishment.
Claims like these are at least as old as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, published in 1890. However, they circulate routinely in new packaging. Unfortunately, the public tends to remain ignorant of the results of alternative scholarship. Sensationalism (like sex) sells. So does controversy. And when the sensation or the controversy revolves around beliefs that millions believe in whole-heartedly, sorting fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult.
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Christians around the world will commemorate the most important event in our faith’s history this Sunday, but the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just important to those who believe a Nazarene who walked the earth 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. The secular world’s history also turns on this pivotal event, which inspired so much progress that we take for granted today.
Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.
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Ash Wednesday is—oddly perhaps—a day I have long associated with bushfires, better known in the American hemisphere as wildfires.
I come from the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where on Ash Wednesday in 1983, catastrophic bushfires, driven by 70-mph winds and fueled by years of drought-ravaged eucalyptus forest, tragically claimed 28 lives. In the neighboring state of Victoria, even more lives were lost under similar conditions. In total, 75 Australians perished and 3,000 homes were destroyed in what were the nation’s deadliest bushfires up to that point.
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To its credit, the London-based tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail recently carried a story most corporate news outlets have been avoiding: The Indian Residential School Graves hoax.
The paper, whose article titles are characteristically long and descriptive, leaves little mystery in the scandalous story’s headline: “Nearly ONE HUNDRED churches across Canada have been torched or damaged after activists lied that 200 indigenous children were buried under Catholic schools.”
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For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16 (KJV)
We thought about and were well on the way to drafting a much different column for this Christmas – Biden Outdoes The Grinch seemed apropos to this season of economic distress and discontent. But in looking through past Christmas columns we ran across one of our columns from 2019, entitled “The Gift of Christmas is Fulfilled at Easter” and we were brought back to the recognition that no Christian should be bitter on Christmas, because if there is one day of the year that is to be dedicated to hope it is Christmas and the anniversary of the birth of Our Savior.
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Anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe have risen by 44 percent in just one year, with far-left groups behind a majority of the attacks, according to a shocking new report.
Published in October, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe’s Annual Report detailed a wave of violent attacks, church arson, and rising extremism battering Europe’s historic Christian communities.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence has long been a standard bearer for the evangelical Christian movement in American politics.
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After the horrific massacre in Nashville, the Democratic Party is hellbent on feeding the malignant narcissism of the “trans community,” in which they see a reliable, perpetually aggrieved voter base and a tool with which to terrorize society.
This isn’t “Christian nationalism.” Virtually every institution is sending a message that murderous violence toward Christians is acceptable, or at least less bad than exposing the “trans community” to obloquy. Law enforcement is obstructing the release of the manifesto. Merrick Garland won’t call it a hate crime, and neither will Joe Biden, who apparently thinks this is all a big joke.
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A Republican congressman is calling on the State Department to intervene on behalf of Chinese and American Christians detained by Thai police currently facing imprisonment in China, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Thai police arrested 63 members of the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, also known as the Mayflower Church, for overstaying their visas during an early morning raid in Pattaya, Thailand, on Thursday. They are now preparing to deport the Chinese congregants, along with two women from Texas who’d been visiting church members, back to China, where they face imprisonment and likely torture, ChinaAid, a Christian human rights group, told the DCNF.
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Influential members of Congress and top human rights advocates in Washington are urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to ensure the safety of a group of Chinese Christian dissidents and two Americans detained by Thai authorities Thursday.
The group of refugees, including 35 children and 28 adults, fled China in 2019 to escape persecution. They initially sought refuge in South Korea and then Thailand while seeking emergency asylum in the United States. But the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security have declined to grant the church members emergency asylum, as it has done for many others, including tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their war-ravaged countries, and the first group of Afghans airlifted into the United States amid the chaotic U.S. evacuation in August 2021.
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For the Catholic Church and many other Christian denominations, the Sunday before Easter marks the beginning of the most important week of the year – “Holy Week,” when Christians reflect on central mysteries of their faith: Christ’s Last Supper, crucifixion and resurrection from the dead.
Palm Sunday commemorates the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem shortly before the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to the Christian Gospels, people lined the streets to greet him, waving palm branches and shouting words of praise.
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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censored, fined, politically indoctrinated and forcibly disappeared Chinese Christians in 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit ChinaAid Tuesday.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) reportedly employed a range of new methods to persecute Chinese Christians in 2022 including fabricating charges of fraud as well as criminalizing the legal international travel of church leaders, the report states. China’s crackdown on Christianity reportedly intensified in the run-up to the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in October 2022, during which time General Secretary Xi Jinping secured a third term as the communist nation’s supreme leader, according to ChinaAid.
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Christians are facing genocide in several countries as the persecution of followers of the religion has increased in at least 18 nations, according to recent research.
The Catholic group Aid to the Church In Need released a report earlier this year titled, “Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report On Christians Oppressed For Their Faith 2020-22,” which highlighted “human rights violations” against Christians in 24 countries.
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For many Christians around the world, celebrating the Nativity, or the birth of Jesus Christ, is the most important part of the Christmas season.
Among the most common Christmas traditions are small sets of figures depicting Joseph, Mary and Jesus that are displayed in individual homes, and live reenactments of the manger scene in communities and churches. While Nativity sets focus on the holy family, they can also include an angel, the three wise men bringing gifts, shepherds or some barnyard animals.
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For millions of Christians around the world, the official religious Christmas season kicked off this week with a renewed sense of normalcy – an abundance of colorful lights, parades and processions, family and church gatherings, and even fireworks in some areas.
Many believers in countries where Christians are religious minorities such as China and India are embracing the festivities with new enthusiasm. Early December marks the first time annual public and private advent gatherings have been allowed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Only 54 percent of Christians aged 18–35 attend church once a month or more. Meanwhile, Christianity is rapidly declining in the American population, especially in the younger generations.
The secularization of society is evident wherever we turn, and it will only worsen as young people continue to turn away from Christianity. To survive, the church needs to continue through the generations and get young people back in the pews.
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Christians may become a minority in the United States within the next several decades, according to a projection from Pew Research Center.
As of 2020, 64% of Americans identified as Christian, 30% were religiously unaffiliated and 6% were another religion.
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An opinion piece published in The Battalion, a student-operated newspaper at Texas A&M University, recently argued that the Christmas season is a time when conservative Christians “perpetuate their martyr dreams of being ostracized.”
“Winter is Coming,” penned by Abbie Beckley, is an opinion piece that takes a deeper drive into Christmas’ purported true meaning.
According to the author, the commercialization of the holiday is not necessarily a bad thing as she attributes that trend to the expansion of inclusivity.
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In The Devil’s Dictionary, the writer Ambrose Bierce offered this definition of History: “An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Before you dismiss Bierce’s cynical perspective, remember that historians are mortals. Some are very good at what they do, others are quite bad at it, and most fall somewhere in between. Even the best of them may find their way to the wrong conclusions. They may over-emphasize some factors while under-emphasizing others or allow their personal biases to color what they write.
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Facebook has been courting partnerships with religious groups in hopes of becoming their virtual home, the New York Times reported in late July. Experts and religious leaders told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the social media platform’s interest in shaping the future of religious experience should be closely monitored to protect religious freedom.
Though it is unlikely that a virtual religious experience will replace in-person religious services, the Times acknowledged, Facebook’s partnerships with religious groups expose Facebook’s plans to shape the future of the religious experience — as it has done with both political and social life.
“I just want people to know that Facebook is a place where, when they do feel discouraged or depressed or isolated, that they could go to Facebook and they could immediately connect with a group of people that care about them,” Nona Jones, a nondenominational minister and Facebook’s director for global faith partnerships, told the Times.
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The University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School hosted a panel event called “Decolonizing the Stacks,” which provided examples of eliminating bias and discrimination from its library systems.
The event was part of Penn Carey Law’s thirteenth annual public interest week, dubbed “Reforming the Nation: Working Towards Racial Justice.”
Amanda Runyon — moderator of the panel and Associate Dean and Director of Biddle Law Library — opened the discussion by defining “decolonizing libraries” as “the process of de-centering whiteness and being more inclusive to voices of color and voices representing diverse perspectives.” She encouraged fellow librarians to consider the impact of their “centering of White, Western norms.”
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In a rare nearly-unanimous decision, the Supreme Court sided with a Christian college student whose right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion were initially silenced by his college campus in Georgia, as reported by ABC News.
The 8-1 decision was led by Justice Clarence Thomas, with Chief Justice John Roberts being the sole dissenting vote. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas said that Chike Uzuegbunam, an African-American Evangelical Christian, can seek nominal damages from Georgia Gwinnett College, after officials at the school told him he was not allowed to hand out Christian literature on the campus’s “free speech zone.” This comes even after the school reversed course from its initial restrictions, and after Uzuegbunam ultimately graduated.
“It is undisputed that he experienced a complete violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him,” Thomas wrote. “Because ‘every violation [of a right] imports damage,’ nominal damages can redress Uzuegbunam’s injury even if he cannot or chooses not to qualify that harm in economic terms.”
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Just as soon as the Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse came to the aid of overwhelmed New York City officials and sick residents struggling to combat the effects of COVID-19, New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson decided the diverse, “tolerant,” progressive city had enough of its assistance, due to its Christian foundation, and effectively kicked the charity out.
While it’s usually Christians who are scolded for their so-called intolerant beliefs that are rooted in centuries-old religious traditions, here it seems like it’s progressives who aren’t so tolerant of other people embracing views that are different than theirs—even if those very views inform their acts of charity and medical care.
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The American Association of Evangelicals (AAE) is warning about progressive wolves in Christians’ clothing. The AAE on Monday released an explosive three-minute video, “Soros’s Rented Evangelicals” exploring the George Soros network’s funding of “evangelical mascots” and a “Rent-an-Evangelical” tactic to confuse and divide the Christian vote for the pro-faith, pro-life…
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by Anders Hagstrom Chinese pastors claim officials are closing churches, burning bibles and crosses, and forcing pastors and congregations to sign papers claiming they’ve renounced their faith, The Associated Press reported Monday. Chinese pastors and the U.S.-based group China Aid report that Chinese Communist Party officials forcibly shut several…
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Despite his claims to be a different kind of Democrat who will work with President Donald Trump when it helps Tennessee and oppose the partisanship that divides Washington DC along political lines, Phil Bredesen continues to align himself with the most partisan and extremist elements of the Democratic Party. Bredesen…
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by CHQ Staff The establishment media has done its best to ignore or step on the story of the magnificent work President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did to gain the release of three American Christians grabbed-up as hostages by North Korea. In a statement as…
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