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IO 67: Outlawed Christianity
History Is Going Backwards
While being reassured by the “progressives” that we are moving forward to a new day of utopian human transformation, in fact, all roads are leading backwards— to pre-Constantine pagan Rome. During that period, the Christian faith was outlawed and officially persecuted [see the first four chapters of my book, Capturing the Pagan Mind], but in AD 313, the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of his realm, and from then on, the State rigorously sought to promote the Christian faith and eliminate all vestiges of paganism. The rest, as they say, is [Christian] history— until now.
Now, in “Christian England,” says journalist Melanie Phillips: “Terrifying as this may seem, the attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain appears to be gathering pace.” The wind is blowing in the opposite direction. Rather than protecting and promoting biblical truth, the State now seems hell-bent on criminalizing it. Phillips cites the May 1st, 2010 case of Dale Mcalpine, a Christian open-air evangelist in the UK who happened to state that homosexuality was a sin according to the Bible. The insensitive chap found himself carted off by the police (one of them “gay”), locked up in a cell for seven hours and charged with using “abusive words and behavior.”
Everything is tolerated except “intolerable” Christian moral standards. The Nanny State’s new civil religion of pansexual liberation and interfaith polytheism will tell you it is okay to pray to any god, but not to a god in particular. Inmates at the Ed Young Senior Citizens Center near Savannah, Georgia can “say” grace with a moment of silence but may not audibly thank the One Who created food, now that their meals are provided by money from the federal C[ae]zars.
This civil religion is intolerant of any beliefs but its own. On May 6, 2010, the Rev. Franklin Graham prayed in the Pentagon parking lot. As honorary chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, Graham was to have led a prayer for the U.S. military inside the federal building, but at the last minute he was disinvited, apparently on orders of the Commander-in-Chief. For affirming the classic Christian belief that Jesus is the only savior, Graham was out on his ear. In her article, journalist and théologienne extraordinaire, Kathleen Parker (Washington Post) had no problem imposing her view of religion, which she considers better than Rev. Graham’s: “[we need to] transcend the notion that only some prayers are the right ones,… [this idea] might get us closer to the enlightenment we seek.”
The police will surely not be inactive on this side of the pond when President Obama’s corresponding pansexual agenda is eventually made law. His 2009 Proclamation declaring June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month,” congratulated the LGBT community for “strengthen[ing] the fabric of American society.” The President expressed a patriotic goal: “The [nation’s] promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled” until “the full spectrum of equal rights [is brought] to LGBT Americans.”
The President promised practical measures: “enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions…outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security.” Note: programmatic anti-creational sexuality will “strengthen” both the nation and the armed forces.
You have been warned! Sooner or later this anti-biblical agenda, often masquerading as “Christian,” will come into direct conflict with the opposing worldview of Scripture. One side can only allow Jesus to be one of many spiritual gurus, while the other sees him as the only divine Savior; one side promotes pan-sexuality as strengthening the fabric of society (as in pagan Rome), while the other calls it an unnatural perversion that is tearing apart the fabric of normative heterosexual human identity, made in God’s image.
With more and more radicals committed to a “living Constitution” and sexual entitlements now appointed to courts and federal agencies, with even “apple pie” Laura Bush on Larry King Live speaking out in favor of abortion and gay marriage, Bible-honoring Christians may (will?) soon be treated as un-American “scofflaws,” their spoken witness outlawed as hate speech. Ironically, though the President signed this Gay Pride proclamation (as the old text quaintly puts it) “in the year of our Lord two thousand nine,” in fact, faith in “our Lord,” the God of Creation and Redemption, is being progressively stamped out and outlawed in the USA as in Britain.
We are not going forward. We are going back—to the time of powerful Roman paganism, when the persecuted Christians declared with boldness to a hostile State:
…this Jesus Christ of Nazareth…has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:10-12).