Tag Archives: Religious Liberty

Commentary

Pastor Matt: Christian apologists should care about the loss of religious liberty

2 Comments

From Pastor Matt Rawlings‘ blog. First he summarizes a couple of religious liberty cases – Brendan Eich and Elane Photography.

Excerpt:

[…][F]ew seemed to pause and ask about the ramifications of a nation incrementally losing the religious freedom it has long enjoyed. I would argue this is an issue that committed Christian thinkers should take very seriously.

First of all, the loss of religious freedom (along with the growth of centralized government) is historically dangerous for all people.  The loss of one freedom often serves as the domino for the loss of others.  We are a people called to love our neighbors (Matt. 22:37-40) and standing by while persecution may be inching toward many certainly does not count.

Second, some have argued that if we lose our freedom it will help the church grow or at least “separate the men from the boys.” This is a romantic notion that persecution is good for the church but it too is a failure to love our neighbors and is not entirely accurate.  For example, see Acts 9:31, which reads, “Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace and was strengthened. Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.”  Moreover, great revivals like the First and Second Great Awakening and the immediate post World War II boom took place in times of religious freedom.

Third, true rational discourse in true marketplace of ideas depends on true religious freedom. One cannot arbitrarily exclude certain ideas from public debate because it strikes certain segments of the culture as offensive. If any person believes that open dialogue is a key to truth then that person should fight for any voice to have his or her say.

I’ll skip to his conclusion:

So, we need to graciously and intelligently contend for our freedom by supporting Christian legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and, of course praying for God’s continued grace.  We also need to train ourselves in public and practical apologetics including why it is that traditional marriage is good for a country (and it is).  In the meantime, be sure to go to Speak Up Church and gather resources on how to help protect your church from the current attacks on religious freedom.

Read the whole thing. This is a great post, and one you ought to click through and read.

Now before my remarks, I wanted to produce the biography of one of the ADF lawyers I heard in a recent podcast.

Douglas Napier bio:

Douglas H. Napier serves as Senior Vice-President-Legal for Alliance Defending Freedom at its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he leads a litigation team of approximately 40 attorneys and legal support staff at offices in District of Colombia, Arizona, Kansas, California, Georgia, and Tennessee. Before joining Alliance Defending Freedom in 2007, Napier practiced civil trial law in Iowa for 16 years. He earned his J.D. from the University of Iowa College, with distinction, and is a fellow of the Iowa Academy of Trial Lawyers. Napier is admitted to the bar in Iowa, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and has been admitted pro hac vice to several federal courts across the nation.

I’m glad that some Christians are making the plans to get these law degrees that allow them to do something about threats like this.

My thoughts

When I posted this on Facebook earlier on Monday, I was surprised to see a bunch of people posting Bible verses and talking about how persecution might not be such a bad thing. And this always annoys me, because I wonder if these people really understand what persecution looks like, in different times and places. It looks like murder, torture, imprisonment, fines, trials, sickness, disease, loneliness and despair. It’s not something you wish for. It’s certainly not something you want for others. We have a threat to religious liberty. That threat should be met with law degrees from prestigious universities – and life plans that allow you to get those degrees. We need to be making life plans to either get the degrees that can counter the threat, or to support those (financially) who are getting them or who already have them. I’m in the latter group.

News

Good news: Christian conservative professor wins discrimination case

1 Comment

From the ACLJ.

Excerpt:

Late last month a federal jury in North Carolina found that the University of North Carolina-Wilmington retaliated against conservative Christian professor Mike Adams when the university denied him a promotion to full professor. Rather than evaluating his work on the merits, the university denied his promotion in a process that was chock-full of deception, discrimination, and disorder.

The jury’s verdict was for liability only, with the judge to determine the lawful remedy. This afternoon, the judge ruled – holding that Dr. Adams was entitled to receive the promotion he was wrongly denied, the pay increase he was entitled to, and back pay to compensate him for lost income.

This ruling sends a message to public universities: academic freedom isn’t just for the Left, it’s a constitutional right for all professors — even Christian conservatives.

The ACLJ represents Dr. Adams, along with Alliance Defending Freedom Attorney Travis Barham.

This is not the ACLJ’s only case in defense of conservative professors’ rights to academic freedom. We’ve also filed suit against officials at UCLA after they fired longtime Professor James Enstrom for blowing th whistle on junk environmental science and academic fraud.

The battles continue, and we remain committed to defending our fundamental freedoms – on campus and off.

Here is the bio for Barham:

Travis Barham serves as litigation staff counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom at its Regional Service Center in Georgia, where he litigates to preserve religious freedom and freedom of speech on college and university campuses across the nation. Barham joined Alliance Defending Freedom in 2006 and is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the 4th, 7th and 11th Circuits, and the state of Arizona. He is also admitted to federal district courts in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Barham has practiced law since 2006 and earned his J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law, where he graduated summa cum laude.

David French is no longer with ADF and is now with ACLJ. He has his JD from Harvard Law School, and taught at Cornell Law School, too.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is my favorite legal group for defending religious liberty. They seem to have a lot of lawyers with degrees from top universities. It’s encouraging for me to see Christians work so hard to be able to make a difference for us all. The ADF is also defending Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court, and doing a great job by all accounts!

Commentary

Muslims drag 25-year-old Coptic Christian woman from her car and murder her

7 Comments

From CNS News.

Excerpt:

Eyewitnesses have given a harrowing account of the murder in Cairo of a young Coptic Christian woman, hauled out of her car and beaten and stabbed to death by a Muslim mob, apparently targeted because of a cross hanging from her rear-view mirror.

The incident occurred in the Cairo suburb of Ain Shams after mosque prayer services on Friday, when police clashed with Muslim Brotherhood supporters angered by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s decision to run for president.

An eyewitness appearing on “90 minutes,” a program on the al-Mehwar satellite network, said 25-year-old Mary Sameh George was attacked in her car near a church, where she planned to deliver medicine to an ill and elderly woman.

Protestors climbed onto her car, collapsing the roof, then hauled her from the vehicle, beating and mauling her – to the extent, he said, that portions of her scalp were torn off. She was stabbed multiple times, her throat was slit and when she was dead, the mob torched her car.

One Coptic outlet said that according to the health ministry, the young woman had been stabbed at least a dozen times.

The death of Mary Sameh George received little coverage in Egyptian newspapers.

Keep in mind that the Muslim Brotherhood was supported by the Obama administration.

Here’s a story from David Limbaugh about those two women who were imprisoned in Iran in 2009 for their Christian faith. (H/T Frank Turek)

Excerpt:

On Sunday, two remarkable Christian women, Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh, spoke at our church, describing their harrowing tale of imprisonment by the Iranian regime because of their Christian faith.

Both were raised in Muslim homes in Iran but never embraced Islam. As young adults, they became Christians and met each other while studying theology in Turkey in 2005. When they returned to Iran, they began evangelizing together for several years, covertly distributing Bibles to some 20,000 people and starting two secret house churches. In March 2009, they were arrested in Tehran for promoting Christianity, which is punishable by death.

The regime officially charged them with apostasy, anti-government activity and blasphemy, and they were sentenced to execution by hanging. Before being cleared of all charges and released in 2009 as a result of worldwide prayer and international pressure, they endured 259 days in Evin prison. Thereafter, they moved to the United States and wrote a book together describing their horrendous experiences, “Captive in Iran.”

In Evin, which is notorious “for torturing, raping and executing innocent people,” they experienced brutal and humiliating treatment, poisoning and illness. They each endured solitary confinement and were interrogated once a week for eight or nine hours at a time. All the while, whether together or separated, they prayed for each other.

The first week, they were horrified and prayed to be released. But soon, they came to see their presence in prison as an opportunity to witness to other prisoners, many of whom were prostitutes and addicts and “so hopeless and sad.” Maryam and Marziyeh prayed for them and saw God work in their lives as they cried and confessed their sins. It became “like a church for us,” said Marziyeh.

[…]At any time, they could have secured their own release by simply renouncing their Christian faith, but they each emphatically refused, saying, “We will never renounce our faith.” Marziyeh told one Muslim prisoner who said they were “silly” for not renouncing their faith: “Our insistence on our faith is not out of stubbornness. … I have lived with God for many years. … He is my all. We are inseparable. My life has no value without him. I love God so much that denying him would be denying my own existence. How could I ever deny something that is in every cell of my body? I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison if that’s what it takes to stay close to him. I would rather be killed than kill the spirit of Christ within me.”

I blogged about them way back in July of 2009. Nice to see that there is a happy ending here, but not without costs.

Most young Christians that I speak to who come from a church background seem to have this idea that all religions are basically the same because the main goal of religions is to make people “nice”. Well. Maybe instead of having their heads stuck up their butts, they should be reading stories like this to inform themselves about the real differences between Christianity and Islam in places other than their safe Western suburbs. The content of the beliefs matter, and the contents of beliefs are different between religions. Christians would rather be killed than deny their faith, and Muslims would rather kill and imprison others who have a different faith. It’s not the same thing, is it?