Month: September 2023

Religious News Service: Few persecuted Christians find refuge in US, new report finds

Bob Smietana of the Religious News Service has an important story today about the sharp decline in the numbers of Christian refugees seeking religious asylum that are being accepted into the United States.

A migrant family, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America en route to the United States, run away from tear gas in front of the border wall between the U.S and Mexico in Tijuana, Mexico November 25, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The reduced numbers began during Trump’s presidency but have continued under Biden. It’s a bipartisan problem linked to the “anti-immigrant” hysteria heard so often on network news reports.

Some of those immigrants now being shut out of this country are Christians fleeing religious persecution.

Below is a brief excerpt:

Fewer Christians fleeing persecution in their native countries have found a safe harbor in the United States in the past half decade, according to a new report from a pair of Christian nonprofits, which cites the effects of the pandemic and the dismantling of U.S. refugee resettlement programs during the Trump administration.

The report, titled “Closed Doors,” found the number of Christians coming to the U.S. from countries named on a prominent persecution watchlist dropped from 32,248 in 2016 to 9,528 in 2022 — a decline of 70%. 

You can read the entire story here:

MAGA Pastors Hear More False Teaching from Eric Metaxas

This summer Charlie Kirk hosted another Turning Point USA conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, targeting Christian leaders, especially

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk introduces Brazil’s right wing ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, at a TPUSA event at Trump National Doral Miami, Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

MAGA pastors. Although, one would be hard pressed to find anything explicitly Christian about this gathering.

Below is the conference mission statement taken from the conference website:

“Turning Point USA empowers citizens of all ages to Rise Up against the radical Left in defense of freedom, free markets, and limited government. Join millions of patriotic supporters to Save America.”

Aside from the fact that Mr. Kirk would undoubtedly categorize me among “the radical left” he is fighting against, even my wildest imaginations cannot conceive of one Biblical argument requiring me to include free markets, limited government and saving America (from what? from myself?) as goals for Christian discipleship in the kingdom of God.

What does any of this have to do with Christian leadership? I’ll give you a hint: Nothing.

One of Kirk’s favorite speakers is Eric Metaxas.

Since writing his biography about the German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Metaxas has doubled down on styling himself as an American prophet following in Bonhoeffer’s footsteps, warning us about the imminent destruction of our nation.

Supposedly, just as Bonhoeffer resisted the Nazis on behalf of Christ, Metaxas (and his followers) are called to combat their political opponents for the sake of God’s kingdom.

In his most recent book, Letter to the American Church (which I reviewed here), Metaxas implicitly encourages Christians to resort to violence, if need be, as they fight to restore a godly America.

Godly, that is, insofar as Eric Metaxas understands godliness.

Furthermore, never in a million years would Bonhoeffer have said that he was resisting Hitler in order to restore a godly Germany. He was far too good a theologian to have deceived himself in that way.

Metaxas tells us that American Christians are now called to engage in spiritual warfare more than ever. Today’s American scene somehow making godliness and truth “many times more important than it was ten years ago.”

Really? Are you telling me that the contemporary relevance of God’s kingdom is determined by the ephemeral phases of human politics?

Are you kidding me?

Below is a clip of Metaxas’ Turning Point address where he exhorts Christians to pick up their weapons for holy war as did Bonhoeffer.

What Metaxas continually fails to tell his listeners, however, is that Bonhoeffer did not die because of his Christian witness.

No. That’s not what caused the Nazis to seal his fate.

Bonhoeffer was arrested and finally executed because he participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.  Bonhoeffer did not die for Christ, though he certainly did live for him — faithfully and unfaithfully, as we all do.

Bonhoeffer died for attempted murder. Something that no Christian should boast about.

Ironically, in valorizing Bonhoeffer as he does; in stirring Christians to “fight” in “spiritual warfare” as he does, Metaxas is encouraging the American church and its MAGA pastors to repeat Bonhoeffer’s final failure.

And I suspect that this is exactly what Metaxas intends to say.

This is leading unthoughtful people to repeat the error of Esau, who gave up his rightful inheritance in exchange for a bowl of soup.

In much the same way, Eric Metaxas is asking us to betray God’s peaceable, eternal kingdom for the inconsequential rumblings of political skulldugery.

Don’t be deceived. Metaxas is a false prophet, a false teacher, who now points people away from the crucified Jesus.

Read About an Excellent Book, Gay Girl, Good God, by Jackie Hill Perry

A book review of Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been (B & H, 2018), 193 pages; $16.99.

Author, Jackie Hill Perry

Seldom have I read a book with a more poignant story about the sovereign power of God’s amazing grace to save someone who was not looking for him. The author provides us with a beautiful memoir that should become a popular classic in the American tradition of A Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God.

Growing up in East St. Louis, MO, Ms. Hill Perry had known that she was gay for as long as she could remember. She had only every been attracted to girls and young women. Except, there was one problem. Having been raised in the Christian church, she was familiar with all the biblical teaching that condemned her sexual proclivities.

She didn’t believe any of it, of course. But she remembered it. All of it.

She writes about the confusion she eventually felt over how God could possibly be unhappy about the same-sex love affair that filled her with so much joy:

“As much as I wanted to believe God grinned when He thought of my life, I knew He didn’t. My conscience spoke to me throughout the day. In the morning, it reminded me of God. A few minutes before the clock brought the noon in, it brought God to mind, again. Night was when it was the loudest. On the way to sleep, my head lay relaxed on my pillow surrounded by the natural darkness of night, I thought about God. If being intrigued by Scripture and reading it to cure boredom had done anything, it had made me aware of a truth about me and Him that I couldn’t shake even if the earth moved. I was His enemy (James 4:4). How could I, an enemy of God, have sweet dreams knowing that He sat awake throughout the night? . . . It was maddening to try and sleep with so much noise in the room” (59-60).

Eventually, she would come to understand that God was not calling her to become heterosexual. He was calling her to become holy, like Him. Again, Ms. Hill Perry writes:

“I know now what I didn’t know then. God was not calling me to be straight; He was calling me to Himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness was not synonymous with heterosexuality. . . (God was) after my whole heart, desperate to make it new. Committed to making it like Him. In my becoming Holy as He is, I would not be miraculously made into a woman that didn’t like women; I’d be made into a woman that loved God more than anything” (69).

But in learning this she also knew that a holy life would mean turning away from her gay lifestyle.

After surrendering herself to Jesus while laying alone in bed, her first task was to break up with her longtime girlfriend — a heartwrenching decision movingly described.

She now understood that living to please her Lord Jesus, the Savior who died to free her from all of her sin, was the most important thing she could do with her life.

After telling the rest of her story, all of which is worth reading as an exemplary instance of what it means to follow Jesus through thick and thin, the author concludes with several chapters offering solid, biblical advice to people who either struggle with “same sex attraction” themselves, or are talking with someone who does.

You can’t go wrong by reading this book by Jackie Hill Perry yourself and then passing it along to a friend, whether gay or straight.

Chris Hedges: The Pedagogy of Power

[Headline image: Plato and Aristotle debate in the school of Athens]

Chris Hedges’ latest article at ScheerPost offers a great explanation of why we need to strengthen liberal arts education in this country, not gut it as is currently happening everywhere.

All across America, history, English, and philosophy departments are being downsized or eliminated altogether.

Conservatives want to reduce higher education to streamlined vocational training, while liberals want to sift it through the latest, reductionistic filter of identity politics. Both are equally ruinous.

Thomas Jefferson is purported to have said that democracy’s survival depends on having an educated populous. Truer words have never been spoken, as the current state of American politics attests.

Check out this excellent essay at SheerPost written by Chris Hedges about the foundational significan of education for a functioning democracy:

Here is an excerpt:

Plato

The ruling classes always work to keep the powerless from understanding how power functions. This assault has been aided by a cultural left determined to banish “dead white male” philosophers.

I am standing in a classroom in a maximum security prison. It is the first class of the semester. I am facing 20 students. They have spent years, sometimes decades, incarcerated. They come from some of the poorest cities and communities in the country. Most of them are people of color. 

During the next four months they will study political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli,  Friedrich  Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Locke, those often dismissed as anachronistic by the cultural left.

It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others. They often defended patriarchy, could be racist and in the case of Plato and Aristotle, endorsed a slave society.  

What can these philosophers say to the issues we face — global corporate domination, the climate crisis, nuclear war and a digital universe where information, often manipulated and sometimes false, travels around the globe instantly?  Are these thinkers antiquated relics? No one in medical school is reading 19th century medical texts. Psychoanalysis has moved beyond Sigmund Freud. Physicists have advanced from Isaac Newton’s law of motion to general relativity and quantum mechanics.

You can read the entire essay here.

Time to Support the One Democratic State Solution for Israel

Even though western pundits continue to promote the old idea of a “Two State Solution” for Israel-Palestine, the facts on the ground (as Israeli politicians like to say) buried this possibility long ago.

In the wake of the disastrous Oslo Accords, with 700,000 or more Jewish settlers entreanched in the many illegal settlements scattered throughout the West Bank (what Israel calls Judea and Samaria), the old idea of a two state solution has become a blind man’s fantasy.

That’s why men (and women) like Jeff Halper are promoting a new vision called the One Democratic State Campaign. A program for Israel’s truly democratic future where all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, throughout the whole of the land — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — would have the same citizenship status with equal rights.

It’s the only “solution” that can bring real justice to Israel-Palestine. And justice is the necessary precursor to lasting, genuine peace.

Take some time to listen to Jeff Halper explain how this could work: