From Jerusalem, a prayer for America



Every Fourth of July, I think about the country where I was born — a nation built on faith, courage, and the belief that every person is created in the image of God.

Independence Day is about fireworks, parades, and time with family. But it is also a reminder of the miracle of America and the values that have shaped this nation for 250 years.

From Jerusalem to every corner of the United States, may this Independence Day be a celebration of gratitude, unity, and hope.

As an American-Israeli, this holiday carries special meaning for me.

I grew up in the United States, where freedom is woven into daily life. Today, I raise my children in Israel, a country whose very existence is a miracle of biblical proportions. Each year on July 4, I am reminded how blessed I am to belong to two nations rooted in faith, resilience, and hope.

America and Israel are different in many ways, but their foundations are strikingly similar.

Both nations were built by people who believed in something greater than themselves. They trusted God, longed for freedom, and sacrificed for a better future.

America’s founders risked everything to establish a nation where liberty could flourish. Israel’s founders rebuilt a homeland after 2,000 years of exile, guided by ancient promises and unshakable faith.

Both nations understand that freedom is never guaranteed. It must be protected, nurtured, and passed to the next generation.

And both nations know that a country’s greatest strength lies not in its power, but in its values.

On Independence Day, I often think about the men and women who have served in the U.S. military — those who fought in World War II to defeat evil, those who stood against tyranny in the decades that followed, and those who continue to defend freedom around the world.

As a Jewish woman, I will never forget that American soldiers helped liberate the concentration camps. They brought hope to a world drowning in darkness. They saved lives — not only the lives of Jews in Europe, but the lives of my own family members.

Both my grandfather and my father-in-law survived the Holocaust, thanks in no small part to the sacrifice of American service members. Their courage is part of the reason the Jewish people are alive today.

As an Israeli, I see that same spirit of courage in the young men and women who serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

America and Israel both understand the cost of freedom. Both nations honor those who protect it. And both nations know that not every hero comes home.

Living as both an American and an Israeli has taught me that miracles are not only ancient. They are happening right now.

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America is a miracle: a nation founded on biblical values, where people of every background can pursue their God-given purpose.

Israel is a miracle: a nation reborn from ashes, thriving against all odds, and standing as a beacon of hope in a troubled region.

To belong to both is a privilege I thank God for every day.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, this Independence Day feels especially meaningful. It is a moment to reflect on the values that built this nation — faith, freedom, courage, unity — and to rededicate ourselves to living them.

These are the same values that sustain Israel. The same values that bind Christians and Jews together. The same values that light the way forward in uncertain times.

This Fourth of July, my prayer is simple:

May God bless America with peace and protection. May He strengthen the families who build this nation every day. May He guide its leaders with wisdom and humility. And may He remind all of us that freedom is both a gift and a responsibility.

From Jerusalem to every corner of the United States, may this Independence Day be a celebration of gratitude, unity, and hope.

Happy Fourth, America.

America is squatting in its own ruins



Modern people tend to see knowledge as something humanity achieves collectively and then keeps forever. Once a scientific advance or moral truth is discovered, we assume it becomes part of the species’ permanent inheritance.

That is false.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline.

Truth may be eternal, but our knowledge of it is not. Knowledge can be lost when a civilization stops practicing it. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we must understand that remembering our traditions and values is not enough. To keep them alive, we must embody them in what we do.

Ancient Rome is remembered as one of the most powerful civilizations in history and also one of the most technologically advanced. The Romans developed special concrete and engineering techniques that allowed them to build extraordinary structures and civic infrastructure.

When Rome fell, those techniques still existed in one sense. They had been discovered. But they were lost to time because the people who possessed the knowledge could no longer practice it or pass it on. The scientific truth remained objectively real, but without the civilization that had maintained it, the knowledge faded as if it had never existed.

People lived in the ruins of ancient wonders, taking shelter in buildings they could not build or maintain. Without the continuity of tradition, science had no practical meaning.

Moral truth faces the same danger.

The Old Testament shows a repeated cycle of Israel receiving divine revelation and then forgetting what had been handed down by God Himself. Again and again, the nation falls away from the commandments of the Lord until a prophet pulls an old scroll from its rack and reminds the people of what they once knew.

The Israelites cry out and rend their garments in repentance. They practice the truth for a time. Then, the practice fades, and knowledge fades with it.

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Despite receiving direct divine revelation, Israel — and humanity itself — could not maintain the practice of God’s truth. That is why the Lord sent his Son as a perfect example and living sacrifice, an eternal embodiment for all nations to see what the righteous life looks like in practice.

This weekend, America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. But saying that we honor our traditions and culture is not enough.

Most Americans have spent little to no time reading what the founders actually wrote. Their understanding of our national traditions comes from a heavily curated version of history they learned in school. There will be plenty of talk about celebrating the country’s past. What we need is a revival focused on living that tradition in the present.

Sentimentality is nice. It will not save the country.

Today, most Americans, including many conservatives, say the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment means Muslims cannot be prevented from moving here and building entire cities dedicated to their way of life. The average American believes Hindus have a First Amendment right to immigrate and build giant statues of their demonic gods in Texas.

This is absurd.

States often required public officials to be professing Protestant Christians well into the 1840s, decades after the Bill of Rights was adopted. Even Catholics were often considered too foreign to hold office. None of this was viewed at the time as a violation of religious liberty. The idea that religious liberty was intended to allow Muslims or Hindus to control the public square is a lie.

The entire “tradition” of religious liberty many people think they are honoring is false.

The Supreme Court recently provided another example by ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments added to the Constitution after the Civil War to address the legal framework for freed slaves.

Its purpose was to clarify that people born into slavery became citizens once they were free. That intent was made clear by the people who authored the amendment. It did not create citizenship for American Indians, for example, or other groups added later through law and policy.

The idea that birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is some grand American tradition is entirely false. Yet a conservative Supreme Court just enshrined it in the Constitution.

This is what happens when a people inherit words without preserving the practices and assumptions that gave those words meaning. They recite “religious liberty” and forget the civilization it was meant to protect. They invoke “equal citizenship” and forget the specific injustice the 14th Amendment was written to remedy. They honor the shell while abandoning the substance.

A nation does not preserve itself by remembering slogans once a year. It preserves itself by forming children, families, churches, neighborhoods, and leaders who know what those slogans demand when they collide with power, fear, comfort, and fashion. Otherwise, July Fourth becomes pageantry without inheritance.

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A tradition no longer practiced becomes decoration. A truth no longer defended becomes trivia. A people who forget how to live their inheritance eventually become squatters in their own ruins. That is us.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline. It is a set of habits, loyalties, judgments, and practices that must be taught, defended, and lived.

As we gather with family and friends this weekend, we should enjoy the patriotic festivities. Fireworks, barbecue, and loud renditions of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are all fantastic, and we should embrace them fully.

But we should also commit to learning the true history and traditions of our nation and living them in our daily lives.

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with your children. Read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Read George Washington’s Farewell Address and the letters of the founders.

Most important, live these traditions by becoming the virtuous people those men believed the country could not survive without.

The 250th anniversary must be more than a nostalgic celebration. It must become a renewal of our covenant as Americans.

Trump 2.0 puts religious liberty back on offense



One underreported achievement of President Trump’s first administration was the support the Justice Department provided to religious-liberty litigants.

During those years, the federal government filed statements of interest and friend-of-the-court briefs defending conscience rights at a pace unmatched by either of Trump’s immediate predecessors. Cases involving memorial crosses, conscience protections, ministerial autonomy, and the rights of religious schools all reflected a broader shift in posture from the Obama administration.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The federal government no longer treated religion merely as a tolerated private exercise. It treated religious liberty as a constitutional good worthy of affirmative protection.

That shift has only strengthened under Trump 47.

At the time, critics dismissed many of the administration’s actions as symbolic or temporary. What looked then like a change in tone now appears to have been the beginning of an institutional realignment.

The Justice Department’s recently released report from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias suggests that the second Trump administration intends not merely to defend religious liberty episodically, but to embed those protections throughout the administrative state.

The point is not simply the report’s conclusions, significant as they are. The point is the scope of the undertaking.

Drawing participation from 17 federal agencies, the report catalogs hundreds of pages of examples in which religious Americans — Christians in particular — faced adverse treatment from the federal government because of their views on life, sexuality, education, parental rights, and medical conscience. The report and its 1,200 footnotes present reams of evidence to support its central argument: During the Biden years, religious exercise was often treated less as a constitutional guarantee than as an obstacle to the ideological objectives of a political machine.

A major development of Trump’s second administration has therefore been the construction of infrastructure around religious liberty itself. The White House Faith Office, the Religious Liberty Commission, agency faith liaisons, and now the Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias all reflect an effort to institutionalize protections that previously depended too heavily on presidential discretion.

This development is especially visible inside the Justice Department. During the first Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued welcome guidance for federal prosecutors handling religious-liberty matters and established the Place to Worship Initiative to address violence and discrimination directed at houses of worship.

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The current report builds on that framework. Rather than focusing only on isolated incidents, it argues that anti-Christian bias — and therefore hostility to religious liberty — became embedded in regulatory enforcement itself, especially when religious convictions conflicted with prevailing doctrines on sexuality, gender identity, or pro-life Christian opposition to the progressive sacrament of abortion.

The report points, for example, to enforcement disparities under the FACE Act. Pro-life activists received aggressive federal scrutiny, while attacks against churches and pregnancy resource centers received comparatively limited attention. Even when political pressure left the Biden administration little choice, its enforcement of the FACE Act against actual vandals went only as far as necessary to stem rising public complaint.

The report goes further, identifying conflicts involving military chaplains, foster-care providers, health care workers, religious schools, and federal employees who sought accommodation for sincerely held religious beliefs.

Whether one agrees with every characterization in the report is almost beside the point. The broader constitutional question remains unavoidable: Can government remain neutral toward religion while treating orthodox religious belief as presumptively discriminatory?

Historically, the answer has been no.

Religious liberty in the American tradition has never meant mere freedom of inward belief. The founders protected religious exercise because they understood that belief inevitably shapes action: education, charity, worship, speech, commerce, and public participation. The First Amendment restrains government not because religion is politically useful, but because conscience stands beyond the state’s authority.

That understanding has often been obscured in recent decades by a truncated vision of religious freedom — one that permits worship inside sanctuary walls while treating religious conviction outside those walls as suspect. Many of the conflicts cataloged in the Justice Department report arise from that narrowing impulse. The fight is no longer over whether Americans may privately believe traditional religious teachings, even explicitly Christian ones. The fight is whether they may live according to them publicly.

Judging by this report and other promising signs, the latest version of the Trump administration recognizes this reality more clearly than any administration in modern memory.

Critics argue that these initiatives privilege Christianity or collapse the distinction between church and state. But that has always been their schtick. Trump’s direct confrontation and dismissive rhetoric have exposed many modern assumptions about the “separation of church and state” as political slogans rather than constitutional arguments.

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The more important legal question is whether religious Americans — Christians and all people of faith — may participate fully in public life without surrendering core convictions as the price of admission. This report focuses on bias against a majoritarian religion. But imagine the damage if the state focused its ire on minority faiths. Religious liberty belongs to all Americans.

The administration’s trajectory is unmistakable. The president’s Religious Liberty Commission has been assigned with developing long-term recommendations for protecting religious exercise across education, health care, public funding, parental rights, and federal policy. The Justice Department report, which will continue to expand into 2027, serves as both justification and road map for that effort.

Critics will insist these measures are unnecessary because religious believers already possess constitutional protections. Only a cynic could look at the mountain of evidence in the Justice Department report and claim nothing happened. Those constitutional protections existed during the last administration, too, but we now know that officials chose political ideology over the foundational principles of the First Amendment.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The most important question, then, is not whether Trump personally embodies religious devotion. He plainly does not fit conventional expectations of religious statesmanship. The more consequential question is whether his administration understands the structural importance of religious liberty within the constitutional order.

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

For religious Americans, Christians in particular, who spent much of the last decade defending themselves against the coercive power of administrative agencies, that distinction matters a great deal.

MLB’s Pride police strike out against Christian players



For years, June looked like the American Ramadan: an entire month dedicated to the state religion of LGBTQ politics, complete with mandatory observances across every major institution.

Gay men exposed themselves to children at parades while police looked on. Transgender activists went topless on the White House lawn while Joe Biden declared that transgender youth “shape the soul of America.” The spectacle was grotesque, but the LGBTQ movement kept winning, and its radicals assumed they could do whatever they wanted without consequence.

For too long, conservatives pretended the state could remain neutral while the left captured every major institution. That fantasy is over.

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory shocked the cultural radicals who expected the country to keep swallowing the agenda. Trump did not end wokeness, but his mandate signaled a limit to what the public would tolerate. Movies and television still push woke pieties. Democrats still advance insane views on child transition. But the most outrageous excesses of Pride Month have begun to recede. This June, far fewer institutions seemed eager to signal total loyalty to the rainbow regime.

Professional sports remain among the stubborn exceptions.

Hockey and baseball teams still drape their social media in rainbow colors and hold Pride nights at their stadiums. On the surface, this makes little sense. Sports audiences tend to be male, more conservative, and far less interested in radical LGBTQ propaganda than the professional class that runs these leagues. Pride branding does not attract these fans. It alienates them.

So why keep doing it?

Because the point is not profit. The point is domination.

The leagues maintain their public worship of homosexuality because it irritates their middle-American audience. Hollywood did something similar with “Joker.” The first film made a fortune, but elites hated that disaffected young men embraced it. So the sequel humiliated and destroyed the main character. The studio cared more about punishing the audience than pleasing it.

Sports owners increasingly behave the same way. They despise the people who make them rich and would rather lecture them than serve them.

San Francisco is hardly a conservative stronghold, so no one should be surprised that the Giants held a Pride night and required players to wear LGBTQ-themed uniforms. The team redesigned its logo in rainbow colors and placed it on player caps, as it has done before.

This time, a few players found a way to resist.

Pitchers Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker wore the required Pride caps but wrote “Genesis 9:11-16” beside the logo. The passage refers to God giving mankind the rainbow as a sign of His promise never again to flood the earth.

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It was a clever protest. The players wore the mandated symbol of the regime. They did not directly attack LGBTQ activists or the Pride agenda. They simply recontextualized the rainbow, turning a celebration of homosexuality into a reminder of God’s love, covenant, and dominion. The shift was subtle but devastating. It seized the frame and subverted the intended message.

Activists were predictably outraged. They could not tolerate faithful Christians finding a tactful way to register dissent. They demanded punishment, claiming the players had “politicized” the event.

That complaint sounds absurd until you understand the real rule. This is not hypocrisy. It is hierarchy.

Pride night itself is political. Professional athletes routinely wear political messages for approved causes such as Black Lives Matter. Leagues have no problem turning games into ideological performances when the message serves the left. The issue is not whether Major League Baseball should remain neutral. The issue is that only one form of politics is allowed.

The warning to the Giants pitchers was an assertion of raw power over players and fans. It told Christians that they may be forced to wear the symbol, but they may not interpret it according to their own faith. They may participate in the ritual, but they may not confess a higher authority.

Major League Baseball understood its dilemma. The protest was too careful to cast easily as hateful. The players had worn the required uniform. A severe punishment would look vindictive. But the league also needed to placate activists who treat every Christian objection as heresy.

So the league chose the worst possible middle ground. It reportedly warned the three players that they had violated a rule and could face consequences if they did it again. Fans and Christians will see the warning as a bigoted attack because that is what it is. LGBTQ activists will see it as insufficient punishment for disobedience.

The decision may also bring legal trouble. Major League Baseball operates in Florida and is subject to that state’s law. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier noted on social media that the policy appears to show religious discrimination by the league. He warned that Major League Baseball would be hearing from his office soon.

Good.

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This is why conservatives must obtain political power and use it. Progressives will not stop discriminating against Christians. They will not leave believers alone. They will demand submission, call it inclusion, and punish anyone who remembers that the rainbow belonged to God before activists turned it into a corporate loyalty oath.

For too long, conservatives pretended the state could remain neutral while the left captured every major institution. That fantasy is over. Someone will dictate the culture. Someone will decide which beliefs are honored, which are tolerated, and which are punished.

Christians should not seek persecution as proof of virtue. They should seek victory as the proper end of political life. If corporate sports leagues want to conscript players into Pride rituals and punish faithful dissent, they should face lawsuits, investigations, and political consequences.

The rainbow is not theirs. It never was. It’s ours. The lesson should be obvious by now: Neutrality never survives contact with a militant faith. If Christians refuse to defend their symbols, the regime will gladly steal them and demand gratitude for the theft next June too.

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Foreign aid should offer resources, not liberal ideology



When news breaks that foreign aid programs are being paused or restructured, many Christians understandably fear the world’s most vulnerable will be left behind.

It is a fair concern. But it also raises a harder question: What if some of what we have called “help” was not helping in the way we thought?

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

Imposed values

For decades, American foreign assistance has done real good in many places. But too often it has also come with expectations that placed struggling nations in an impossible position. Funding was tied to adopting policies on family life, sexuality, and bioethics that did not reflect the values of the communities receiving that aid. Governments that resisted those conditions risked losing support their people depended on.

From a Christian perspective, that should give us pause. Care for the poor is a moral calling. But care that requires communities to compromise their deepest convictions is not compassion. It is pressure, even if it is delivered in the language of progress.

Scripture calls us to love our neighbor, not to remake our neighbor in our own image.

Pursuing the good

That is why the Geneva Consensus Declaration matters. Today, 41 nations representing more than 2.5 billion people have joined this coalition, affirming that international law does not establish a universal right to abortion and that each country has the authority to determine its own laws on life and family.

These nations were not forced into agreement. Many joined because they were weary of outside institutions attempting to impose agenda-driven frameworks through funding conditions and international pressure. What they were seeking was not isolation, but partnership. They wanted to be treated not as projects to be managed, but as nations capable of shaping their own future.

This reflects a principle Christians should recognize. Human dignity includes moral agency. It includes the freedom of communities to pursue the good, before God, without coercion from more powerful actors.

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The Protego framework

There is also a practical reality the United States cannot ignore. Countries like China are expanding their influence across Africa and Latin America by offering infrastructure and investment with fewer visible conditions. America's advantage lies in offering something China cannot: genuine partnership that respects the nations it serves.

In practice, that means moving from a model of control to a model of partnership.

At the Institute for Women’s Health, we have sought to do this through what we call the Protego framework. Instead of arriving with predesigned solutions, we work alongside national leaders, faith communities, and local institutions to build programs that reflect the values and needs of each country.

In one African nation, this has meant developing a national framework for health and life-skills education with input from across society, including interfaith leaders. It is designed to reach tens of thousands of educators and health workers. The program belongs to that nation. The values behind it are its own. And when the partnership ends, the capacity to sustain it will remain.

This kind of work is slower. It requires listening, humility, and trust. But it reflects something essential to a Christian understanding of service.

Human flourishing

We are not called simply to deliver outcomes. We are called to serve people as people, not as instruments of our own priorities.

Faithful foreign engagement takes seriously the dignity of every nation and every community. It refuses to make care for the vulnerable conditional on ideological agreement. It invests in what supports human flourishing, strong families, healthy communities, and the well-being of women and children, while ensuring that these efforts are shaped locally rather than imposed from outside.

The recent restructuring of foreign aid creates an opportunity. It allows the United States to reconsider not only how much it gives, but how it gives.

For Christians, the goal should not be to defend every existing program. It should be to ensure that our engagement reflects the character of the One we serve. We are called to help the vulnerable. But faithful service cannot be separated from humility, respect, and truth about the human person.

How ‘wet noodle Christians’ surrendered America to Marxists



A particular species of Christian now flourishes in America. I call him the “wet noodle Christian.”

He is easy to recognize. He attends Bible studies, laments the moral collapse of the nation over coffee after church, and speaks with deep concern about the culture. But ask whether Christians should publicly oppose evil or contend for the moral direction of society, and he recoils as though you had proposed human sacrifice.

When Jesus taught believers to turn the other cheek, he addressed personal vengeance, not civilizational surrender.

“Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” he says.

Or: “The world is supposed to get worse anyway.”

Or, with special confidence: “Jesus told us to turn the other cheek.”

He says all this as though Christian ethics can be reduced to the consistency of warm pudding.

This attitude springs partly from biblical illiteracy, partly from a successful Marxist strategy, and entirely from sin.

Biblical confusion

Christians often invoke the crucifixion as though Christ’s death requires believers to become passive spectators while evil marches through every institution of society. That confuses the unique work of Christ with the ordinary duties of Christians.

Christ’s death was the once-for-all atoning sacrifice of the Lamb of God. No Christian is called to redeem the world by offering himself as a substitute for sin. That office belongs to Christ alone. Nor did Christ go unwillingly or by force.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus rebuked sin, denounced hypocrisy, drove money changers from the temple with a whip, and told adulteresses to stop sinning. Hardly the behavior of a celestial yoga instructor murmuring therapeutic affirmations beside a Himalayan stream.

When Jesus taught believers to turn the other cheek, he addressed personal vengeance, not civilizational surrender. The command restrains sinful retaliation. It does not abolish justice, civil authority, or moral responsibility.

The same Christ who taught mercy also stands behind Romans 13, where the civil magistrate bears the sword as a minister of God against evil. The same Jesus appears in Psalm 2 as the enthroned king while rebellious rulers “take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed.”

The biblical picture is one of advance, not retreat.

In the Great Commission, Jesus does not tell Christians to preserve their private religious feelings until death mercifully arrives. He commands them to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that he has commanded.

One searches the text in vain for the line: “Go therefore and quietly lose every institution while avoiding conflict.”

And here the second problem appears: Marxists understood the wet noodle instinct long before many Christians did.

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Marxist subversion

For roughly 70 years, leftist media, academic institutions, and entertainment industries have carefully catechized Christians into believing that public Christianity is somehow immoral.

Christians were told that bringing moral convictions into public life is divisive. They were taught that the First Amendment requires a functionally atheist public square, though this alleged neutrality somehow never excludes progressive secular dogmas. The Christian could privately believe whatever he wished, provided he kept it quarantined like a contagious disease.

Meanwhile, the left marched through the institutions with all the subtlety of Sherman marching through Georgia.

One suspects many Marxists privately thought: “I cannot believe how easy this is.”

They taught Christians that offending anyone is the supreme moral evil, that strength itself is suspicious, that certainty is oppressive, and that masculinity is toxic. They insisted public Christianity was dangerous, and most Christians agreed to stop speaking publicly.

The remarkable thing is not that Marxists advanced their agenda. The remarkable thing is that so many Christians surrendered before the battle even began.

Part of this surrender also comes from bad eschatology, the notion that Christians should expect inevitable defeat in history. If collapse is certain, why resist anything? Why build institutions? Why fight corruption? Why educate children? Why preserve civilization?

This mentality looks far more like ancient Israel than faithful Christianity.

The Old Testament repeatedly shows Israel absorbing the gods and practices of surrounding nations, surrendering covenant distinctiveness, and then coming under divine judgment. Defeatism was never treated as humility. It was treated as faithlessness. One can almost hear an ancient pagan telling his Israelite neighbor that the Temple sacrifices and the Law of Moses are simply not nice.

The New Testament continues the theme. Hebrews 12 reminds believers that God disciplines his people for their good, though “for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.” Divine chastening does not mean abandonment. It means fatherly correction.

Perhaps America is living through precisely such discipline now.

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Recovering the truth

Many Christians anxiously avoid offending anyone while ignoring Christ’s explicit command to disciple the nations. They have become highly obedient to a command Jesus never gave — be inoffensive at all costs — while neglecting the one he did give.

Christians often speak as though courage belongs to secular revolutionaries, while faith belongs to timid people waiting for evacuation. But biblically, faith grounds courage because faith rests on the certainty of Christ’s victory.

Christ will have the nations as his inheritance. The gospel will go into all the world. Faith lives here and now in light of what we know will be then and there.

The Great Commission is not a suggestion to attempt cultural survival until the batteries die. It is a declaration of conquest grounded in Christ’s authority: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18).

All authority. Not partial authority pending polling data.

The remedy for the wet noodle Christian, therefore, is not anger, resentment, or partisan hysteria. It is the courage of faith.

Christians must recover confidence that truth is true, that Christ reigns now, and that obedience does not become optional simply because it provokes pushback. They must stop confusing passivity with holiness and cowardice with kindness.

Above all, they must understand the strategy that has been used against them. The first step in losing a civilization is convincing its defenders that defending it is somehow unchristian.

The most dangerous country to be a Christian will shock you — here's what's happening



Christians face persecution across the globe — but one country has made it almost impossible for them to practice their faith, threatening torture, imprisonment, and execution simply because they believe in Jesus Christ.

That country is North Korea.

“If you’re even found to be in possession of a Bible, you and your entire family are likely going to be thrown into a concentration camp — a work camp — for the rest of your days, never to be heard of, never to be seen again,” CEO of Open Doors Ryan Brown tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.

“To be identified as a Christian — to be found as a Christian — is the equivalent of a death sentence,” he says, pointing out that in North Korea, the highest authority isn’t God, but the state.


“And so, for Christians, who have a higher authority than the state — Christians are immediately seen as enemies of the state. They’re assumed to be enemies of the state or, in some cases, assumed to be allies of the West,” he explains.

There are also public executions of Christians.

“In many cases, if they feel like, OK, it’s been a little too long; we need to remind people that we’re in charge; we need to remind people what the consequences are,” he says.

However, despite the threat Christians face in North Korea, they refuse to give up.

“There are about 400,000 Christians in North Korea … and it is growing,” Brown says, explaining that Open Doors has set up safe houses across the border where “individuals are able to come be nursed back to physical health.”

“It … humbles me to see that there are men and women that have, in essence, escaped from North Korea, come to these safe houses, been nursed back to health, and their goal and their intent and what they have done is to go back to North Korea so they can continue to minister,” he explains.

“They’ve … taken a posture of ‘How can I be equipped so that I can go back and continue to share the gospel with my friends and neighbors?'" he adds.

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