Even a cursory search of modern European Mosques reveals a stunning plethora of enormous and profusely ornate buildings, ominously spreading like weeds throughout the continent. Meanwhile, the great cathedrals that had once defined Christendom in general, and Europe in particular, now stand nearly empty and are falling into ruin. It was barely eight decades ago that they were vibrant and filled to capacity. So what could explain this total collapse of everything Christian in Europe, where the presence of the faith of Christ had dominated in one form or another over the previous nineteen centuries?
The words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pictured here, give the most accurate and painful explanation. He warns that when Christians cease standing against evil, they ultimately stand with evil. In his lifetime, he saw a distressing willingness among seemingly devout Christians to not only refuse to speak out against the nightmarish horrors of the Nazis, but in many cases to openly embrace them.
In contrast, he appeared increasingly “extreme”, as a consequence of his own refusal to endorse the evils of the Reich, whether by actively condoning them or by tacitly supporting them through the silence that was demanded of him. Like pallbearers carrying a coffin, if each party does not bear his own portion of the weight, that which must be born by the others increases. In the end, a lone adherent risks being overwhelmed by the load, as others look on in disdain and denigrate him for his awkwardness and inability to accomplish the task at hand. So It was that Dietrich Bonhoeffer died alone in April of 1945, hanged by the Reich for his “crimes.”
German Christians of the 1930s, as well as those throughout much of Europe, rather than standing resolutely against the obvious evils in their midst, chose instead to concoct creative ways of ducking the firestorm. In the process, they proved that their ultimate faith was not in the God of righteousness and justice, but in themselves and their supposed ability to cry “peace” where there was no peace.
One of the most poignant episodes of this era comes from a man who, as a child, attended a Bible believing Christian Church, which was located near train tracks where Jews were being transported to the concentration camps. The Church members were distressed by the anguished cries for help from those Jews on the trains. The response of the Church was to sing their hymns louder as the trains passed by, in order to drown out the screams of terror and agony coming from the trains. Perhaps in the minds of some of those Christians, this display may have even appeared to be a greater “praise” to God. But to all who understood what was it actually represented, it was the most flagrant denial of Christ, and total perversion of anything “Christian.”
It would be worthwhile to hear the torment in the voice of the man recounting this episode in his young life, as he ponders to this day just how abominably he and his fellow parishioners misrepresented the love of Christ. What those doomed passengers on those trains saw was not a Christ of unshakable strength and courage, but one of fear and hiding. No less detestable was the message sent to the secular world throughout Europe during this time. They saw no refuge for the helpless nor any promise of restoration for those who might have fallen into the evils of the age, but total indifference and a pretense that it didn’t even exist.
If we believe we can dodge the difficult issues, in order to reflect only the “love” of Christ, we redefine our “faith” in our own image. But as we retreat from the modern secular worldview, we can be assured that it will only continue to advance and further encroach upon us. And despite our efforts to repackage Christianity in a seemingly “more palatable form,” we have not succeeded in fooling the world around us. Only ourselves. Ultimately, what we deem to be “non-judgmental love” is actually indifference, and the world will respond to us with its own indifference. That is why, in modern Europe, the looming nightmare of Islam and sharia is widely perceived as representing something more enduring than all of those crumbling Gothic church edifices.
Bio
Christopher G. Adamo is a lifelong conservative from the American Heartland. He has been involved in grassroots and state-level politics for many years, seeking to restore and uphold the Judeo-Christian principles on which our Nation was founded. He is author of the book, “Rules for Defeating Radicals,” which is the “Go To” guide for effectively confronting and overcoming the dirty tricks of the political left. It is available at Amazon.
]]>Whether it is accurate or not, many on the left consider evangelical Christians to be Donald Trump’s most hardcore supporters, and church buildings are the most visible representation of the evangelical movement. Since church buildings are not guarded most of the time, they are easy targets, and they are being attacked at a frequency that we have never seen before in the entire history of this country.
According to a report that was released by the Family Research Council, church attacks in the United States have risen 800 percent during the last six years…
While the Biden administration cracks down on the Christians Democrats and the press smear as extremists, church attacks are up 800 percent in the last six years, according to a new report from the Family Research Council (FRC).
In February, the conservative group published the report, “Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States.” It identified 915 acts of hostility against churches between January 2018 and November 2023.
There is so much talk in the mainstream media about “right-wing extremism”, but it is actually the left that has been committing acts of terror over and over again.
In particular, the number of church attacks absolutely exploded in the year following the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade…
The report found hostile church incidents more than doubled in 2023 compared to 2022, with 436 counted a year after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision returned abortion lawmaking to state legislatures. The number of attacks in 2023 was more than eight times greater than those reported in 2018.
These attacks are not about what happens on Sunday mornings.
Rather, these attacks are all about what is happening in the political realm.
When a crazed woman walked into Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church and started shooting, it wasn’t because she hated his preaching…
A woman who walked into a popular Texas megachurch Sunday afternoon with a long gun and her 7-year-old son opened fire before she was killed by law enforcement officers on scene. The gunfire left the child in critical condition and another man injured, officials said.
Authorities are now probing the shooting at televangelist and pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church – roughly 6 miles from downtown Houston.
The woman, identified in a search warrant as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, entered the church shortly before 2 p.m. wearing a trench coat and backpack and opened fire, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said in a Sunday afternoon news conference.
According to ABC News, when authorities recovered the AR-15 she used during the shooting, there was a sticker that said “Palestine” on it.
She was a pro-Palestinian radical that hated evangelical support for Israel.
Sadly, these sorts of incidents are becoming way too common.
We have reached a stage where every single church in America needs an armed security team, and things will inevitably become even crazier during the months ahead.
As I have warned my readers numerous times, we are entering the most chaotic election season in U.S. history.
The Lincoln Project is already releasing ominous videos warning that Trump will become a dictator, and hordes of liberal pundits are breathlessly telling us that another Trump presidency will be the end of America as we know it today.
There are millions of leftists that are deeply internalizing this messaging, and if Trump wins they will be ready for action.
A recent New York Post article explained that if Trump is able to get back into the White House “some portion of the left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country”…
And if Trump emerges victorious and the alleged dictatorship is underway in earnest?
Certainly, the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by comparison.
If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extralegal means of resistance are justified.
At least some portion of the left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country.
I wish that I could tell you that such claims are exaggerated.
But the truth is that leftists are already buzzing about a “revolution” all over social media.
And politicians on the left are certainly not helping matters. For example, Bernie Sanders insists that another Trump presidency will mean “the collapse of American democracy”…
A second Trump presidency would be much more extreme than the first. “He’s made that clear,” says Sanders. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them – what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”
We are so deeply divided, and a movie entitled “Civil War” is about to be released as the upcoming presidential election looms over our nation…
The upcoming release of A24’s Civil War during a contentious presidential election year comes amid worry about the prospect of an actual civil war — or, at least, real-life political violence — and has some questioning the movie’s timing.
Talk about predictive programming.
The film is about an alliance of states that rebels against an authoritarian president that is abusing his powers.
Many are questioning the wisdom of releasing such a movie at this particular moment in our history…
“The idea of another American civil war happening today actually keeps me up at night,” wrote one reader on an American Civil War subreddit. “This is a movie that I want to keep far away from. Even if it’s based on a political scenario so far removed from our own. I just do not want to entertain the notion of something so horrible.”
“A movie about a second American Civil War in an election year in which the second American Civil War is a serious concern among law-enforcement and rational people alike?” wrote another.
I think that it would have been wise for those in charge of this film to delay it until 2025 at the earliest.
But of course people like you and I do not get to make those kinds of decisions.
For many on the left that do not worship God, politics is essentially their religion.
And to them, the worst thing that could ever possibly happen would be for Donald Trump to become president again.
I realize that may sound really bizarre to you, but this is how they actually see the world.
So if Trump wins the election in November, we are going to witness a nationwide outpouring of negative emotion that will be unlike anything that any of us have ever experienced.
Needless to say, they won’t be satisfied with just protesting in the streets.
We could potentially see civil unrest on a scale that many would consider to be unimaginable right now, and that would set the stage for so many of the things that I have been warning about all these years.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
]]>In fact, that particular condition can be laid at the feet of those of us who have attended church all those years, but did nothing to counter God being kicked out of schools, government and, indeed, sometimes even churches. Many of us have an affinity for religion, which is oh, so much more predictable than God. It is actually easier after attending churches for so long to prefer having a set of rules to obey, rather than to consult the Bible directly, or even more worrisome, the Holy Spirit directly, for guidance.
Some of us may also have made the common mistake of jumping ahead in the Bible to Revelation, the last book. As with any book, sometimes you can find all you need in the last chapter; and sometimes not. God is the biggest subject there is, ever has been, or ever will be. Surely, He is worthy of our careful study and the revelation knowledge the Holy Spirit sometimes downloads to us if we ask Him.
I do know, however, from my own experience, that the Church Age seems to be missing a few of the bells and whistles that I was expecting. The Bride, rather than being excited about what she has accomplished in partnership with her Beloved, seems to have traveling to distant lands more on her mind than being the hands and feet of her Beloved during the preparation time of “making herself ready.”
It does seem that the Bridegroom may have expected more than regular church attendance prior to returning for a Bride without spot or wrinkle. The Bridegroom gave his Bride his Great Name to use in her efforts to make the world more to His liking. He gave her covenant nations to assist her in her efforts. He gave her other members of His Body with which to partner while he was away. He left her with some number of talents, whether money or abilities, and the parable of the talents seems to indicate that the Bridegroom will expect to see increase from what he gave her, upon his return.
The good news right now is that He is about to release financial talents that the Bride can use to make the world more pleasing to the Bridegroom upon His Return. He doesn’t expect her to squander these talents on her own comfort and entertainment. He expects her to do as He would under the same circumstances.
In the Song of Solomon, the young man pursuing the young maiden, refers to her in this strange manner: “My sister, my Bride.” He is at once making her equal with himself. If He thinks of and treats her as an equal, surely He is justified in expecting great things from her upon His Return.
The bulk of the church is not ready for Jesus’ Return. We haven’t made ourselves ready. We haven’t expended our time and talents on that which we know He loves.
Yes, He is helping us to overcome the cabal. But do not be surprised at the delay between the fall of the cabal and the return of the Bridegroom, while He watches the Bride to see if she is making herself ready for the marriage. Once the talents have been distributed, the courtship begins in earnest. There is nothing the Bride cannot accomplish, if she calls upon her Beloved for help. He expects increase upon his return, as the parable of the talents tell us. We will be given everything we need to make what we rule over, “On Earth, as it is in heaven.”
Don’t bury that talent you have been holding so tightly. He expects to see increase upon His Return. Let His church demonstrate to the Bridegroom that we were worthy of the terrible price He paid for our freedom! Expect to see what you will need to make the hopes and dreams you once had for serving others materialize. A Bride who has made herself ready will remake the Earth to her Beloved’s standards. Go in peace and be about His work!
Armageddon Story, Earth’s Final Kingdom Vol. IV, by Craige McMillan
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
]]>This extremely comprehensive investigative journalism by John Murawski will hopefully work as an eyeopener for those who still think most American churches are on the right track. There are good teachers and bad teachers, and a growing number of pastors in America and across the globe are leaning bad. Here’s John’s article…
Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:
- A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
- The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
- At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
- And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.
These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized – such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon – where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16 — this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal – and at times pornographic – imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power.
“They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.” Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures – two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy – God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: “The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored.”
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.
“Thus queer theology is a call to return to a more fully realized anticipation of the Kingdom,” states a 2007 overview, “Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.” The queer theology movement has been likened to a “a rehearsal for the end times,” and a “new Pentecost” that allows the Holy Spirit to “blow where it chooses,” according to “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theory,” a 2011 book.
Linn Marie Tonstad, professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School who for the past decade has taught the nonsectarian divinity school’s first queer theology class, has no patience for conventional, outmoded assumptions about sex and gender.
“Like, if you think that, I’m fine with you doing your thing and calling that Christianity,” Tonstad said on a podcast. “You are allowed to live your life in a way that I think is deeply misguided and incredibly sad.”
For Tonstad, queer people and queer culture are where the future lies.
“I think if you’re lucky enough to be queer – Wow! Yes!” Tonstad said on the podcast. “I understand that there are some poor cis-straight people, and I sympathize with their plight in life. Like, that must be so boring. It must be awful. … I wish them all the best.”
Queer theology is an outgrowth of academic queer theory and Latin American Liberation Theology, a Marxist movement advocating for peasants, indigenous groups, and other oppressed classes, and builds on earlier social justice movements, such as radical feminism and gay rights. LGBTQ-friendly churches are typically at the forefront of progressive causes seen as united in “shared struggle,” such as immigration, climate change, and Black Lives Matter, said Heather White, an assistant professor of religious studies and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.
“It is very anti-establishment because it is the establishment that produces the marginalization,” White said. “And it especially works to identify and deconstruct how societies define what is normal and not normal.”
Bill Heming, a pastor in Washington state, recalls his first exposure to queer theology in conversations with fellow students at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he began his divinity studies in 2004 and first heard the word “queer” a few years later used not as an antigay slur but in the positive activist sense common today. This was during a time debate was heating up among Presbyterians over homosexual ordination.
“Queer theology says: We’re queer, we have something unique to offer to the church, so we should be received as prophets,” Heming said.
To the young Heming, queer advocacy looked less like theology and more like the next skirmish in a never-ending social revolution. He asked activist students what the end point of their justice advocacy would be, when they would be satisfied, and the best answer he could get was “when everyone is free to be themselves.”
“At their core, they believe there must be this continual unfolding of liberation – which really is libertinism,” Heming said in a phone interview. “There always has to be another horizon, another battle, and you always have to go looking for it.”
Heming, who left the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination and joined the more traditional Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is now a pastor at Parkway Presbyterian Church, in Tacoma, Wash.
Academic practitioners are prone to spin verbal confections around queerness being “an identity without an essence,” unstable and ever-transitioning, defined by opposition to normativity, in defiance of power hierarchies – thus always on the right side of Eternity.
New language produces new genders, creating new worlds: “The rapidly evolving languages of trans groups encourage new imaginings of gender through dazzling blurs, ironic negations, or wild escapes into brave new worlds,” Harvard theologian Mark Jordan effused a few years ago in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
Still, in a society where queerness is rapidly becoming a personal status symbol and Pride a marketing slogan for many corporations, queer theologians are beginning to ask how queer theology can maintain its relevance at a time when drag queens, nonbinary pronouns, and gender fluidity are no longer outré.
In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin piece, Jordan remarked, “I once complained at a national meeting that we had written the same book dozens of times.” Now the time is opportune for queer theologians to seize the moment and push the envelope further so that queer identities are not merely accepted but revered – “I await the moment when genders and sexes beyond norms are accepted as sites of divine revelation.”
Tonstad, one of the leading figures of the movement today, said in a podcast that queer theology will need to exist only as long as the world is organized to marginalize and stigmatize “unimpeachable bodily practices.” Thus a task for queer theology is to validate these amatory practices by offering a vision of “what church would become if it was going to be a place where you could live like this.”
One emerging area that shows promise for queer theologians is polyamory, which refers to non-monogamous relationships involving three or more people. It’s already an emerging legal and moral issue and a potential culture war, now that some municipalities and states are beginning to pass anti-discrimination laws that expand parenting rights and housing rights to multi-partner unions. Within queer theology circles, God is sometimes described as polyamorous and polyamory is seen as consistent with the Bible. The Metropolitan Community Church denomination, formed in 1968 and ministering to queer congregants, offers itself as a “spiritual home” to polyamorous unions.
But even as the Lutherans elected a transgender bishop two years ago, it’s an open question whether progressive Protestants who adore drag queens and kneel to the Great They/Them will ever be ready to ordain a poly pastor or marry off their kids in polycules.
Within queer theology, the tyranny of sex and gender is often the organizing principle of colonialist, heterosexist global domination. If this reporter’s month-long immersion in the books, writings, commentaries, and podcasts of this movement makes anything clear, it’s that queer theology scholarship is an affirmation of all things sensual, sexual, lusty, and intemperate, a literature accentuated with allusions to anonymous hookups, communal sex, leather clubs, and sadomasochistic practices.
This wouldn’t be the first time that religious zeal scoffed at sexual norms as obstacles to holiness – the history of free-love communes and orgiastic rites offers plenty of case studies. Early Christians believed that grace and faith freed believers from observing the strictures of Jewish law, an idea called “antinomianism.” This idea historically reappears in extreme forms to make the controversial claim that breaking the earthly bonds of sin and death requires obliterating sexual taboos.
The late Marcella Althaus-Reid, an Argentine who taught theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, raised that point in her 2003 work, “The Queer God,” which stated that queer theology embraces sadomasochists, leather folk, genderfuckers, and transvestitism in an apocalyptic birth pang every bit as libertine as Marquis de Sade. “Genderfucking” is the culture of challenging, or fucking with, conventional gender norms.
“Holiness is a Queer path of disruption made by curious amatory practices,” she wrote. “We may say that there is no possibility of justice in love unless law is transgressed. … Disruption then, fulfills the law.”
The ultimate authority for these claims is not in secular or empirical knowledge, but in the very nature of God, whom Althaus-Reid described as a Sodomite, polyamorous, omnisexual, a divinized orgy. “Queerness is something that belongs to God,” and “people are divinely Queer by grace,” she wrote.
Tonstad amplified these theological insights in her 2018 book, “Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics,” which stated that “Christ’s body is symbolically multigendered.”
“Christianity, rightly understood, is about the transgression of boundaries,” Tonstad wrote. “Christians believe in a God whose love undoes every binary.”
As goes the binary, so does the law.
“All the laws are negated, including the law of contractual sexuality, that is, marriage,” Tonstad wrote.
Tonstad is a living embodiment of her faith. In a 2022 online magazine profile that features photos of Tonstad resembling the flamboyant Elton John of the 1970s, Tonstad describes her scholarship as a “deliberate misreading” of past theologians. “To ‘queer’ Christianity, she believes, is to ‘reframe reality,’ a project which — if undertaken with care and rigor — can orient one’s life toward progress and social justice.”
The daughter of a minister and New Testament scholar, Tonstad was brought up by Seventh Day Adventists, read the Bible cover-to-cover at age 9, and at least as of last year identified as a “queer dyke.” She is “now a staple of the New York rave scene,” the online profile states, describing Tonstad at her absolute queerest: “wearing a safety pin dangling from her septum,” pulling all-nighters in dance clubs, comparing God’s infinite love to impersonal oral sex through a “glory hole,” and writing exuberantly of “divine freedom and bliss.”
In Tonstad’s theology, sexuality and politics and divinity converge. Her first book evokes phallic and clitoral imagery to illustrate that the Trinity has been misgendered and that queering the error points to an “abortion of the church.” It is a dense and cryptic work that scholars giddily praised as “brilliant, angry, and iconoclastic,” “fearsomely rigorous,” “an exhilarating read,” and “remarkably arousing.”
“If we move from dick-sucking to clit-licking in touching God’s transcendence — if we no longer arrange ourselves kneeling around God’s Son-phallus or the priest-theologian’s asymptotic possession of it — we will no longer gag on God’s fullness nor be forced to swallow an eternal emission,” Tonstad wrote. “Instead we may find there already the differences of pleasures ‘outside the law.’”
The point is not merely to titillate, but to use language to break down social structures. She explained her ambitions in a 2017 online discussion with other religion scholars.
“Destroying the modern liberal-Enlightenment subject remains the project of much of the theoretical material I employ,” Tonstad wrote in an online discussion of her book. “That liberal-Enlightenment subject typically has its genesis, and thereby the genesis of the problems of (post)modernity (including racism, colonialism, capitalism and possessive individualism), assigned to Christianity.” Possessive individualism can be understood as selfishness and greed that thrives in heteronormative capitalist systems.
Queer theology traces its origins back to at least 1955 when an Anglican priest, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, published the pioneering historical study, “Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition,” but Tonstad identifies Marcella Althaus-Reid as “the theologian without whom the term ‘queer theology’ would have little content or meaning.”
Althaus-Reid’s breakthrough book, “Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics,” published in 2000, opens synesthetically, awakening all five senses: “Should a woman keep her pants on in the streets or not? Shall she remove them, say, at the moment of going to church, for a more intimate reminder of her sexuality in relation to God? What difference does it make if that woman is a lemon vendor and sells you lemons in the streets without using underwear? Moreover, what difference would it make if she sits down to write theology without underwear?”
Althaus-Reid contends that heterosexuality is founded on a “denial of reality,” and works by creating a Christian culture of secrecy. At every turn, she mocks Catholic purity ideals about Jesus and Mary that she encountered in her native Argentina: “Was Mary’s sexual encounter with God committed love, or a one-night stand with the unknown? Did He or Mary have someone else in their lives at that time? Did she give God a blow job?”
She rejects this colonialist version of Christianity as a European imposition and perversion: “Purity is, like the Western whiteness which represents it, a single-frequency thought.”
Many other queer theologians have developed these themes, as described chronologically in “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology,” published in 2011 by Patrick Cheng, an Episcopal priest, theologian, and lawyer in New York City. Cheng describes one theorist’s “queer theology of sexuality” that focuses on the gift of “promiscuous” or “bodily hospitality” that many gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people exhibit. Another theologian has suggested that “nonmonogamous sex acts — including anonymous and communal sex — can be viewed in terms of a progressive ethic of hospitality,” one of the highest Christian virtues.
According to Cheng, we sin when we hew to sex essentialism and the gender binary, thereby rejecting God’s radical love, which essentially amounts to turning sinfulness into a rejection of queer theology. Cheng says that he is not endorsing total lawlessness – nonconsensual behavior like rape and sexual exploitation fall outside of radical love – but the reality is that those prohibitions are not defined, and thus, according to the precepts of queer theory, definitions are necessarily unstable, ultimately unknowable, open to new possibilities, and always subject to being queered at a moment’s notice.
For Tonstad, the most compelling queer testimony comes not from dispassionate, rational argumentation, but from the heart and body. She is committed to dazzling the world – on the dance floor, in the classroom, and on the printed page – with “a different reality that will have its own seductive power.”
“In a certain sense, to show that there could be another way of being in the world, and that way is better,” she said in a podcast appearance. “It’s more attractive, it’s more beautiful, it’s more interesting, it’s much more challenging, it’s much more dangerous.”
Article cross-posted from RealClearInvestigations.
]]>In the four years before the pandemic, 2016 through 2019, an average of 34% of U.S. adults said they had attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days. From 2020 to the present, the average has been 30%, including a 31% reading in a May 1-24 survey.
The recent church attendance levels are about 10 percentage points lower than what Gallup measured in 2012 and most prior years.
When the lockdowns began, most Americans were forced to attend church services virtually.
Today, most Americans that attend church do so in person, but overall attendance is still significantly lower than it was before the pandemic…
The pandemic had a profound effect on U.S. society, and it continues to have an impact in some ways. Americans have been less likely to attend religious services over the past three years, and at this point, it does not appear that church attendance will revert to pre-pandemic levels. These recent trends have added to the longer-term decline in religious participation that Gallup has documented over the past two decades.
Over the past few years, we have also seen a lot more violence directed at churches.
In fact, the Family Research Council just released a report that found “a nearly 300% increase in acts of hostility in the first quarter of 2023”…
A report from the Family Research Council (FRC), released earlier this month, is highlighting the sharp rise in acts of hostility against the church in the United States.
The report documented a nearly 300% increase in acts of hostility in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same time frame in 2022. If the trend continues, the report underscored that “2023 will have the highest number of incidents of the six years FRC has tracked.”
The acts of hostility contained in the report include “vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more.”
We have witnessed such a dramatic shift in our culture.
Church attendance is in decline, attacks on churches are becoming increasingly common, and more churches are permanently shutting down with each passing week.
Needless to say, this is taking a toll on the mental and emotional health of America’s pastors…
Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.
Pastors also noted that recent years have taken a toll on their physical health, with 22% describing their physical well-being as poor or below average in 2022, compared to only 7% in 2015. While 24% said their physical health was excellent eight years ago, only 9% said the same last year.
The study also revealed that more pastors are suffering from loneliness, with 7% saying last year they are poor when it comes to having true friends, compared to only 2% in 2015. In 2022, 20% of them ranked themselves as below average with regard to friendship while 10% said the same in 2015.
Meanwhile, those on the other side of the culture war appear to be thriving.
Millions of Americans have turned out for the pride parades that have been happening all over North America this month.
And in some cases, those attending these events are getting more of a show than they anticipated.
As I mentioned yesterday, fully naked men were openly riding down the street during the pride parade in Seattle…
In Seattle, the explicit footage posted by a Post Millennial staffer showed naked men with pride flags painted on their bodies riding down the street and waving to crowds of people, including many children.
Children and their parents can be seen on the sidelines, clapping and cheering for the naked gang.
And in Toronto, there were fully naked men “standing around and riding bicycles in clear view of children”…
Bud Light is serving as an official sponsor of the Toronto Pride parade, where video footage shows naked men standing around and riding bicycles in clear view of children attending the event.
The footage, captured by Beth Baisch of the Post Millennial, shows dozens of attendees riding past a large cheering crowd. The fully naked bikers, some covered in paint or tattoos, wave back at the crowd. One naked man high-fives an onlooker while another peddles a recumbent bike with a gold blow-up swan adorned around his neck.
A second video shows a group of naked men with hats standing in a circle amidst the crowd. Several children walk past the group of men with their families.
Since when did it become legal to expose yourself in front of children? Why wasn’t anyone arrested? I don’t expect to get an answer to either of those questions.
At this point, we are what we are. And nobody can deny it.
If we stay on this path, there is no future for the United States. So I hope that the country will wake up very soon.
Making the right choices leads to positive consequences, and making the wrong choices leads to negative consequences.
Choose wisely America.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
]]>Have you “seen the light” yet? As Christianity has declined in the United States, other faiths have moved quickly to fill the void. In previous articles, I have written about the explosive growth that witchcraft and Satanism have both experienced in recent years. But Christianity’s main rival in the U.S. is neither one of them.
Today, “woke” ideology and the backlash to it are constantly in the news. Our politicians are defined by their adherence to it, virtually all of our corporations are very careful to show public submission to it, many of our entertainers have become rabid proponents for it, and our public schools are being transformed into indoctrination centers for the cause.
As a result, we now have millions upon millions of young people that have a remarkably consistent set of core values. Unfortunately, those core values are pretty much the opposite of the core values of the people that once founded this country.
Throughout much of our history, most Americans derived their core values from religion, and that is still true today.
You see, the truth is that there is much that is “religious” in the “woke” movement. It has its own rituals, practices, flags, songs, mantras, gatherings and evangelists.
Of course there are also heretics, and “cancel culture” has emerged as a way to punish those heretics.
In this new environment, either you will be “awakened” willingly or you will suffer the consequences. I really like how Michael Vlahos described the “new national church” that is now evolving all around us…
What does it mean to be woke? First and foremost, “woke” is a religious signal that you have heard the Good News and Seen the Light. Awakening means both witnessing revealed truth and experiencing spiritual transformation. Today this has taken the form of a collective enunciation: Of a new national church, reformed and transformed, to replace the original American sect, which is wicked and corrupted.
In simple, practical terms, the Church of Woke is pledged to the destruction of Racism, Patriarchy, and Heteronormativity.
We are supposed to be a very tolerant society, but there is no tolerance in this new religion…
In the woke religion, Christian beliefs about justice and truth are supplanted with contemporary doctrines of equality, LGBTQ+, aggressive feminism, anti-capitalism, cultural shame, historical national sin, legacy guilt, claims of privilege, intersectionality, micro-aggression, critical race beliefs, BLM, compelled speech and inclusion of all self-identities; but there’s no tolerance for those who challenge the woke faith. The woke spirit takes a young person who desires to do good and shifts them into a hating machine, an angry, bitter person.
Let me ask you a question.
If you encounter an angry person in the street demanding that you change your ways, is that individual more likely to be a Christian preacher or a radical “woke” activist? I think that we all know the answer to that question.
Many of those that are “woke” believe their “gospel” with a fervor that would make the most extreme Islamic jihadists blush. If you do not agree with them, you are “evil” and you are part of the problem.
According to Vivek Ramaswamy, we have now reached a point where “wokeness” actually “meets the Supreme Court test for religion”…
“Wokeness” has become so pervasive across America’s institutions from schools to corporations that author Vivek Ramaswamy argues it meets the Supreme Court test for religion.
“Wokeness is a secular religion. It isn’t a religion based on God. It isn’t a religion that offers a path to redemption, but it is a secular religion nonetheless,” Ramaswamy, author of Woke, Inc. tells CBN News.
Meanwhile, the influence of Christianity in our society continues to wane.
According to a brand new survey that was just conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 16 percent of us still consider religion to be the most important part of our lives…
A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that only 16 percent of Americans say religion is the most important part of their lives — down from a fifth a decade ago.
Meanwhile, about a quarter of Americans say they used to follow a different religion to the one they currently practice — a share of the population that keeps growing.
Church attendance has been declining for decades, and the percentage of Americans that identify as Christians “has been steadily dropping”…
The number of Americans who attend church once a week fell from 19 percent in 2019 to 16 percent last year, says the survey of some 6,600 adults across all 50 states.
Only 64 percent of Americans identify as Christian nowadays — that percentage has been steadily dropping.
The share of ‘nones’ — those without any religious affiliation — has meanwhile risen to 27 percent.
What we are witnessing is a shift of seismic proportions.
Over the past few years, unprecedented numbers of Americans have either switched to a new faith or have decided that it is time to walk away from religion completely.
Among those that have made a switch, approximately 30 percent say that it was due to “negative religious teachings about or treatment of LGBTQ+ people”…
About 30% said negative religious teachings about or treatment of LGBTQ+ people forced them to change.
Wow.
Of course support for the LGBTQ+ agenda is one of the core tenets of the new “woke” religion.
And once June starts the entire country will be spending an entire month conducting gatherings, parades and celebrations to show how fervently they support “pride”.
The transformation of America is virtually complete.
Our entire society has been turned completely upside down, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is not going to be a future for our nation.
But at this point the environment in the U.S. has become so extreme that we are not even allowed to have a debate about such things.
There shall be no deviating from the new orthodoxy, and those that attempt to do so are likely to get brutally canceled.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
]]>“It was no wonder they started pushing this idea that religion had to be separated from our country – and they started pulling it out of schools,” he said during the May 9 episode of “Lawfare with Tom Renz” on Brighteon.TV.
“Well, let’s look at what happened. Look at the decline that our country experienced in the decades following. The farther religion has gotten from the school; the farther the schools have gotten from teaching kids to be good people; the farther we as a country have declined.”
He also touched on the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in the Engel v. Vitale case, which ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. According to the high court, school-sponsored prayer violated the First Amendment as “it is not appropriate for the government to endorse any particular belief system.”
Unfortunately, Renz said the ruling began the real push to remove religion from America. He continued that throughout the 20th century, several bad Supreme Court decisions were at the heart of the nation’s decline.
“Our country is failing right now. Why are we failing? Well, because the morons running our country came from schools where there was no teaching of morality of what’s right and wrong. There were no values taught. We didn’t educate our kids or families to be good Christian people, or good any other type of people. Instead, we move up.”
Renz: Christian entities founded oldest US schools
Renz pointed out that the oldest schools in the U.S. were established by Christian entities and continued largely by churches and communities through the 1800s and most of the 1900s. These had a two-fold purpose of teaching people about the Bible and its values, and teaching children to become upstanding people when they grow up.
“It wasn’t to teach them advanced math, computer programming, trades [or] arts. There were no pottery majors or history majors,” he said. “It was primarily, ‘You need to learn to read and write, so you could study the Bible and be a good person.’ They believe that saving their soul was far more important than anything else.” (Related: Book author Vishal Mangalwadi: Church should be at the center of education.)
Until 1867, there was no federal program for schools. However, the Congress of that time created the Department of Education in a four-paragraph bill. Renz said the law was passed to promote the people creating schools in their communities, not the federal or state government.
Moreover, the bill that gave birth to the Education Department promoted the sharing of information so people could create good schools and support education. Churches and schools were on the same page regarding education until the 1960s, when people started working to end segregation in the school system.
Renz ultimately cited the Soviet Union considering an attack on America through its schools. “There has been a huge movement to undermine American schools and the moral fabric of American society, and it seems to be achieving its goals for quite some time now,” he said.
Watch the May 9 episode of “Lawfare with Tom Renz” below. “Lawfare with Tom Renz” airs every Tuesday at 11:30 a.m.-12 p.m. and every Saturday at 12:30-1 p.m. on Brighteon.TV.
More related stories:
- Connecting the Dots with Dan Happel: Education molds students to be workers, not thinkers – Brighteon.TV.
- Carey Woodruff: Deceptive curriculum in education system taking the youth down the wrong path – Brighteon.TV.
- Dr. Steve Hotze blasts GROOMERS disguised as teachers in the public education system – Brighteon.TV.
- Tom Renz rants about widespread promotion of LGBT ideology in school system, social media.
Sources include:
]]>
The Biden administration has been criticized for its treatment of Catholic Americans in recent months, especially after news broke that the FBI was using undercover agents to infiltrate churches, and religious experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation it will likely get worse. The Biden administration has put Catholic individuals and organizations under an unprecedented level of scrutiny by using the FBI and Department of Justice to infiltrate churches and prosecute members, according to experts that spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
President Joe Biden, the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy, has talked about his faith on multiple occasions during his career, saying in 2012 that “my religion defines who I am,” but the president’s political positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues have put him and his administration at odds with the church on several occasions. The administration has been criticized for its attacks on the church, including issuing an FBI memo earlier this year calling traditional Catholics a domestic threat.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project and a fellow at the Institute of Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that the president’s administration has “embraced the thuggery of anti-Catholic bigotry with zeal.”
“Anti-Catholicism has been said to be the ‘last acceptable prejudice,’” Picciotti-Bayer said. “The prosecution of Catholic pro-lifers, FBI witch hunts of attendees of the traditional Latin Mass, the refusal to protect Catholic Supreme Court Justices from grotesque intimidation in front of their homes, pressuring Catholic hospitals to kowtow to the absurd demands of gender ideology, and pulling priestly care from the nation’s top military hospital are just the tip of the iceberg.”
After news broke in February that the FBI had released an internal memo calling members of more traditional churches “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” and accusing them of being an extreme threat to Americans, Biden remained silent on the issue.
This week it was revealed that the FBI had used at least one undercover informant to spy on Catholic churches to obtain information to create the memo. The undercover operation was revealed during Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan’s investigation into the memo and found that the FBI had been trying to get congregations to help them create “new avenues for tripwire and source development.”
Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the DNCF that during his time as a career attorney for the DOJ’s civil rights department under the Obama and Trump administrations, he came across a similar memo to the one leaked this year.
“There was an investigation of a traditional Catholic organization where we were asked to enforce their rights [and] … in the memo, the attorney … cited the religious beliefs as being somehow radical and therefore a reason not to enforce the law,” Severino said. “I saw it with my own eyes and I spoke up and said, ‘You can’t target a religious group and exclude them from religious protection under the law because you dislike their religious beliefs.’”
Church attacks, specifically against Catholics, have also been on the rise in the last two years, according to a report from the Family Research Council (FRC). Churches across the country are set to experience a record-high level of attacks this year after 69 incidents were reported in the first quarter of 2023.
The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center also announced before the Easter holiday that it was issuing a “cease and desist” order for Catholic priests that operated in the hospital. The order ended a nearly two-decade contract between the hospital and the Holy Name College Friary in favor of a secular defense contracting firm, leaving the “largest Defense Health Agency medical center” effectively without pastoral care.
The DOJ offered a plea deal earlier this week with no jail time to a transgender vandal that spray painted “kid groomers” and “woman haters” on a Catholic church, assaulting several members and police officers before being arrested. The plea deal came in stark contrast to the FBI’s treatment of Catholic father and pro-life activist Mark Houck.
Houck was accused in 2021 of assaulting an abortion clinic worker, and as a result, over 15 FBI agents raided his house on an early October morning and arrested him in front of his wife and children. The DOJ charged Houck with violating the FACE Act, which protects health care and abortion clinics by barring “force with the intent to injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person is a provider of reproductive health care.”
Houck was later acquitted of the charges after a jury deadlocked in their verdict, but Meg Kilgannon, FRC’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told the DCNF that she worries about the precedent these types of attacks on Catholics may set for the future.
“The Catholic Church is a target for many reasons, and this has always been the case and sadly will never change, ” Kilgannon said. “Even faithful Catholics who try to live out these teachings find them challenging in the best of times, but always worth it, a continual opportunity to strive to serve Christ. So for a President of the United States to constantly message about the ‘soul of America,’ ‘unity,’ and his ‘devout faith’ while at the same time working so brazenly against the Catholic people, Catholic teachings, and the Church herself – let’s just say it’s a grave scandal and a matter for prayer and penance.”
The White House, DOJ and the FBI did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
]]>