Category: Christianity
Ted Nugent’s loud protest is the wake-up call Western elites want to ignore
Ted Nugent is known for many things. Subtlety isn’t one of them.
This is a man who treats volume knobs the way toddlers treat bedtime: with open defiance. So when a mosque in his Michigan town began broadcasting the early-morning call to prayer over loudspeakers, Nugent reacted in the way only Nugent would. He turned his back yard into a launchpad for a one-man rock assault.
You don’t need to be religious to see the problem. You only need to have ears.
Excessive? Perhaps. But it tapped straight into a frustration millions feel but rarely voice — not loudly, anyway.
The early-morning Islamic call to prayer echoing through American suburbs isn’t “diversity” or a charming cultural detail. It’s noise — loud, sudden, inescapable noise. It jolts families awake, spooks pets, startles infants, and demands that the entire block adapt.
Nugent’s counterattack may have been a little over the top, but beneath the distortion pedals sits a simple point: Public peace matters. In a free country, quiet hours come first. And no imported custom, however sacred to some, earns an automatic exemption.
Richard Dawkins once called the Islamic call to prayer “hauntingly beautiful.” This from a man who spent decades explaining that God doesn’t exist. It’s a strange kind of aesthetic tourism: Romanticize a religious ritual while rejecting the very religion that produced it. Dawkins was wrong about the existence of God, and he is equally wrong about the Islamic call to prayer.
The call to prayer wasn’t designed as background music, and it wasn’t conceived for multicultural suburbs where everyone keeps different hours and believes different things. It was forged in a seventh-century society where faith and authority were fused, where religion structured public life down to the minute, and where submission — literal, explicit submission — wasn’t merely encouraged but expected.
Islam’s founding worldview assumed a unified religious community, a shared legal and moral order, and a sharp distinction between believers and nonbelievers. That distinction shaped status, obligation, and allegiance.
In the Muslim context, the adhan makes perfect sense. It is a public summons for a public faith, a declaration of dominance over the rhythm of the day, and reminder that life moves according to Allah’s schedule — not yours. It reminds everyone, believer or not, that the community’s obligations take precedence over the individuals’ preferences.
But transplant it into America (or any predominantly Christian society), and it makes zero sense. The operating systems and expectations are different. The very idea of a faith dictating the morning routine of people who don’t share it runs directly against the grain of Western life.
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This is the part Dawkins missed entirely when he praised the adhan.
It’s easy to romanticize a sound when you encounter it on holiday, filtered through distance, novelty, and sand-warm nostalgia. It’s quite another when it is broadcast at 5 a.m. into a neighborhood that never agreed to have its eardrums shattered before the coffee even brews.
Dawkins hears melody, but he ignores meaning. He praises the tune while overlooking the text, which was never written for pluralism. It was written for a social order in which Islam set the terms — and nonbelievers either complied or faced the consequences.
You don’t need to be religious to see the problem. You only need to have ears.
The adhan doesn’t float gently on the breeze. It is projected through megaphones with the explicit purpose of commanding attention. It is designed to override the soundscape of daily life. Barking dog? Buried. Garbage truck? Drowned. Your alarm clock? Irrelevant. The Islamic call to prayer cuts through everything because that is precisely what it was built to do.
And that is where the first collision occurs. In America, no foreign religion should be granted the right to reorder everyone’s routine. Christianity, which most readers know intimately, offers a useful contrast. Church bells ring, yes, but briefly and symbolically. They don’t deliver multi-minute recitations meant to summon or correct anyone.
But with fewer bells ringing, other sounds inevitably move in to fill the void. These include ones far louder, far longer, and far less rooted in America’s traditions.
There’s a difference between freedom of religion and freedom to dominate the public square.
In a predominantly Christian society, faith is personal, chosen, and interior. Prayer happens inside churches, inside homes, inside hearts — not broadcast across rooftops as compulsory ambience. The Western idea of worship is reflective and voluntary. The call to prayer, by contrast, is commanding and public by design.
Sound, as Ted Nugent knows well, is anything but neutral. A community’s soundscape shapes its psychology. People become anxious, irritable, exhausted, and far more prone to accidents when their sleep is disrupted. After all, we prosecute noisy neighbors for far less.
Yet Western elites recoil at the idea that a religious practice might be subject to the same standards as the guy who revs his motorcycle at midnight. If anything, a more intrusive and more extended ritual deserves more examination — not less.
Although I truly dislike what Islam represents, this isn’t about hatred. It is about the delicate, daily compromises a pluralistic nation depends on. When one group insists on broadcasting its obligations to everyone else, the common ground cracks, the social contract comes apart, and people start to feel like strangers on their own streets.
The call to prayer has no place in polite society. There’s a difference between freedom of religion and freedom to dominate the public square. One belongs in America. The other never will.
Hollow Sanctuaries: When Churches Become Mosques
On certain Sunday mornings in America, you can still hear a church bell toll across an otherwise silent neighborhood. The…
Joe Rogan stuns podcast host with wild new theory about Jesus — and AI
Comedian Joe Rogan praised Christianity as a faith that really “works,” calling biblical scripture “fascinating” during a recent interview.
Rogan also touched on what he thinks the resurrection of Jesus Christ would look like, a viewpoint that was met with criticism by host Jesse Michels.
‘You don’t think that He could return as artificial intelligence?’
On an episode of “American Alchemy,” Rogan cited the Bible when he spoke about how easily knowledge could become mysterious, conflated, or unbelievable when passed down through generations.
“We’ll tell everybody about the internet. We’ll tell everybody about airplanes. We’ll tell everybody about SpaceX; as much as you can remember, you’ll tell people, but you won’t know how it’s done. You won’t know what it is. And I think that’s how you get to, like, the Adam and Eve story,” he said.
After adding that he believes biblical stories are “recounting real truth,” the podcaster brought up a question he had clearly been pondering for a while: “Who’s Jesus?”
Rogan prefaced that many will disagree with his perspective, but then asked about the possibility that Jesus could be resurrected, in a sense, through artificial intelligence.
“Jesus is born out of a virgin mother. What’s more virgin than a computer?” Rogan began. “So if you’re going to get the most brilliant, loving, powerful person that gives us advice and can show us how to live to be in sync with God. Who better than artificial intelligence to do that? If Jesus does return, even if Jesus was a physical person in the past, you don’t think that He could return as artificial intelligence?”
The host, however, did not accept Rogan’s theory.
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First, though, Rogan clarified, indicting that he doesn’t believe artificial intelligence would actually be Jesus but instead that it would serve as the return of Jesus in terms of affect and capability.
“Artificial intelligence could absolutely return as Jesus. Not just return as Jesus, but return as Jesus with all the powers of Jesus,” Rogan said. “Like all the magic tricks, all the ability to bring people back from the dead, walk on water, levitation, water into wine.”
In response, Michels said Rogan’s description sounded like an unwanted “dystopian” future.
Still Rogan argued that the prerequisite for a Jesus-like being could come about due to the human need to improve.
“It’s only dystopian if you think that we’re a perfect organism that can’t be improved upon. And that’s not the case,” he rebutted. “That’s clearly not the case based on our actions, based on society as a whole, based on the overall state of the world. It’s not. We certainly can be improved upon.”
While the host accepted that perhaps humans could improve morally and ethically, he said that attempts at improving by means of a computer “seems destructive.”
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The conversation flowed smoothly into Rogan’s love of Christian scripture, with the 58-year-old saying how joyful his experience has been at his new church.
“The scripture, to me, is what’s interesting; it’s fascinating,” he said. “Christianity, at least, is the only thing I have experience with. It works. The people that are Christians, that go to this church that I go to, that I meet, that are Christian, they are the nicest f**king people you will ever meet.”
Rogan gave examples about the polite society he has found himself immersed in, hilariously citing the church parking lot as an example.
“Everybody lets you go in front of them. There’s no one honking in the church parking lot. It works,” he said.
What Rogan hammered home throughout the conversation was that he finds real truth in what he has read in the Bible. Still he isn’t sold on having predictions provided for him about the future; but he is certainly open to it. He described biblical stories positively as an “ancient relaying” of real history and events.
But about the book of Revelation, Rogan said of his pastor, “There’s no way that guy telling you that knows that. … He’s just a person. He’s a person like you or me that is like deeply involved in the scripture.”
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The West is terrified of reality — but this Christian priest says it out loud
Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne is one of the few priests in Ireland with the courage to say what others won’t.
Week after week, he tells the truth that the rest of public life tiptoes around: Ireland, like Britain and much of the West, is being reshaped by two forces at once — an aggressively secular culture that mocks belief, and a rising influx of people whose values come from religious traditions deeply at odds with Christianity.
This is the part the West refuses to face: A culture without God doesn’t stay neutral.
Both currents weaken what remains of Ireland’s Christian foundations. One breaks it down. The other builds something else in its place.
Kilcoyne doesn’t simply call for “legal immigration” — the safe line politicians repeat to sound reasonable — but he goes farther.
He calls for Christian-only immigration, not as a provocation but as a survival strategy for a civilization that once took the gospel for granted. In a country where faith once shaped the architecture of daily life, he argues that if people must come from abroad, they should be people who can carry that faith forward.
He’s right. It’s the only sane path left.
I know this to be true from experience. Ireland hosts thousands of Filipino workers, many of them nurses and care staff. They are some of the warmest people I have ever met. In many ways, they remind many Irish people of an older Ireland — devout, hardworking, grateful, family-centered.
My mother works closely with a Filipino woman in her home-nursing work. She describes her as one of the kindest souls she has ever known. This isn’t some abstract argument about cultural cohesion. Instead, it’s something I’ve watched play out in real life. Their Catholic faith shapes their character, their sense of duty, and their reverence for life. Wherever they go, they make the place stronger.
Contrast that with what just happened in the U.S.
Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old Army specialist, was shot and killed in Washington, D.C. The alleged gunman, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, came into the country after the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. One can’t pretend cases like this exist in a vacuum, any more than one can pretend the grooming-gang scandals in Britain came out of thin air.
These tragedies sit inside a larger pattern. The West has opened its doors to people with radically different expectations about women, law, authority, violence, and faith — and then acts stunned when those differences surface in the streets.
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In America, Islam is on track to become the second-largest religion by 2040, outpacing Judaism and mainline Protestantism. That shift isn’t driven by conversion but by immigration patterns and birth rates.
Let that sink in. A country built on Christian memory and Christian morals is heading toward a religious landscape its founders would barely recognize. None of this is speculation. It’s demographic math.
This matters because religions aren’t interchangeable. They shape law, culture, expectations for public life, attitudes toward authority, dissent, forgiveness, and the value of the individual. A society shaped by the Sermon on the Mount will never think or function the same as one shaped by Islam’s foundational texts.
The two traditions couldn’t be farther apart.
One formed cultures around decency and love of neighbor. The other arose in an age of conquest, tribal loyalty, and rigid obedience. These differences aren’t cosmetic but civilizational. And with Christianity in the West losing its fighting spirit, it’s not hard to see which force will fill the vacuum. Islam is not a private spirituality, but a complete system of life — legal, social, political — built on the expectation that it will shape the society around it.
Again, this isn’t speculation. It’s written into its earliest texts and confirmed by its history, which raises the obvious question: What kind of West emerges when the religious balance tips this far?
Kilcoyne’s message isn’t aimed at Ireland alone. It applies to any nation whose culture was built on Christianity — meaning most of Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
A society can’t function without shared belief and shared boundaries. Christianity once provided both. It shaped civic standards, festivals, art, manners, and the meaning of freedom. Remove it, and the God-sized space is claimed by something else immediately, like nihilism, resentment, and ideologies far more savage and unforgiving.
While being Christian doesn’t automatically make people decent, it does mean they’re far more likely to share the values that hold a society together.
This is the part the West refuses to face: A culture without God doesn’t stay neutral. It slides into something far less humane. And a country that imports large numbers of people who follow a religion with no respect for Christian norms doesn’t stay stable. It absorbs that religion’s worldview whether it wants to or not.
If immigration is necessary — and in many aging nations it is — Kilcoyne asks why we wouldn’t welcome those whose faith strengthens, rather than weakens, the society they enter.
Why not bring in people who see children not as burdens but blessings, who honor marriage, who take charity seriously, who treat the elderly with care, who believe suffering has meaning, and who know the world is more than appetite and impulse?
These are the qualities that once made the West strong. And while being Christian doesn’t automatically make people decent, it does mean they’re far more likely to share the values that hold a society together.
Sarah Beckstrom is dead. A young woman who trusted her country, trusted its leaders, trusted the system that put her in uniform. If America had been more serious about value-based immigration — if it had prioritized people who share its creed and its cultural instincts — she might still be alive. Her death shouldn’t be treated as another tragic headline to scroll past.
If anything, let it mark the moment the country finally admits that immigration policy isn’t a paperwork issue but a question of national survival in the most literal sense. Let her death mean something.
Let it push America toward choosing people who lift the nation up — not those who drag it into the abyss.
How pro-life leaders betray the one truth they can’t afford to compromise
Many pro-abortion activists brazenly say that abortion is health care. Anti-abortion Christians must respond to such falsehoods by rejecting the premise, instead affirming that abortion is murder — the unjustified taking of a human life made in the image of God.
But here is a widespread problem in the pro-life movement: While pro-life groups broadly reject the claim that abortion is health care, they undermine their own position when they support laws to regulate abortion as health care rather than criminalize abortion as murder.
They should instead agree with the truth of God concerning abortion and work toward criminalizing abortion as murder.
The most recent examples of this sorrowful trend are Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue, two of the leading pro-life groups in the state of Ohio, and their support for House Bill 324, known as the “Patient Protection Act.”
This legislation, according to a press release from the Center for Christian Virtue, would require “in-person exams, clear disclosure of risks, and follow-up care for drugs that cause serious adverse effects” in more than 5% of patients. Ohio Right to Life similarly said that any woman who wants to murder her pre-born baby would first be “required to make an in-person visit to her doctor and be informed of the dangerous side effects before taking the abortion pill.”
House Bill 324 would indeed create an indirect way to target mifepristone — one of the two major substances used in the typical abortion pill regimen. Because a recent study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center asserts that 11% of women who take abortion pills experience “serious adverse events,” the legislation purports to restrict abortion pills because of dangers to women who want to murder their own babies.
There are some unfortunate methodological questions about the study, which likely overstates the extent to which abortion pills actually harm women, a reality that will jeopardize House Bill 324 if eventually passed into law. But in any case, the actual text of House Bill 324 does not even directly mention abortion.
The legislation would require that any “dangerous drug” that causes “one or more serious adverse effects” in more than 5% of “patients” mandate an “in-person examination” and scheduling for a “follow-up appointment.”
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House Bill 324 does not prescribe any criminal penalties for distributing or taking abortion pills, but instead asks the “director of health” and the “state board of pharmacy and state medical board” to maintain a list of dangerous drugs meeting the requirements of the legislation.
Beyond the flawed legal case for House Bill 324, the entire project surrenders all anti-abortion moral high ground to the pro-abortion side.
When anti-abortion groups say that abortion is murder, then functionally treat abortion as less than murder in the laws they support, those groups erode their own moral witness to the culture and the elected officials of their states.
The very decision of choosing the “Patient Protection Act” as the name of the legislation asserts that women who murder their own babies with abortion pills are patients to be protected instead of perpetrators to be penalized.
House Bill 324 explicitly treats abortion as health care — and by regulating the practice of murdering a pre-born baby with abortion pills, the effort merely legitimizes abortion in state law.
If this legislation passes, then using abortion pills in Ohio would be treated in the law much like removing an appendix or a wisdom tooth rather than murdering a pre-born baby.
Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue claim to reject the premise that abortion is health care. But actions speak louder than words — and that includes their refusal to support legislation in their state that actually treats abortion as murder.
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Another piece of anti-abortion legislation called House Bill 370, known as the “Ohio Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” would affirm that “the sanctity of innocent human life” created in the image of God must be “equally protected from the beginning of biological development.”
The legislation would protect pre-born babies starting at “the moment of fertilization” simply by extending Ohio state laws against murder and assault that already protect born people.
House Bill 370 is also the only legislation that meaningfully challenges the abortion amendment in the Ohio Constitution by invoking the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because the highest law of our land requires states to establish equal protection of the laws for all persons, the abortion amendment in Ohio should be treated as null and void.
Rather than supporting House Bill 370, the leadership of Ohio Right to Life explicitly opposes the effort — even calling the legislation “out of bounds” and “inappropriate” — and the Center for Christian Virtue has publicly declined to offer its support.
In other words, two of the leading pro-life groups in Ohio have chosen to reject the “Ohio Prenatal Equal Protection Act,” which is the only legislation in the state that would treat abortion as murder. Instead, they have functionally conceded the malicious pro-abortion falsehood that abortion is health care.
There are thousands of pre-born babies murdered every single year in Ohio. While the abortion amendment in the Ohio Constitution is an unfortunate obstacle, pro-life groups will certainly not advance their cause with morally and legally confused legislation.
They should instead agree with the truth of God concerning abortion and work toward criminalizing abortion as murder — fighting to establish equal protection of the laws for all pre-born babies and thereby laboring to abolish abortion once and for all.
How a man hated for facts found the ultimate truth — and the godless can’t deny it
For most of his career, Charles Murray carried a strange sort of notoriety.
He never asked for it, and he certainly didn’t enjoy it, but it clung to him all the same. He was the man who pointed out differences in IQ across groups — differences supported by mountains of data — and was promptly told he was a monster for noticing.
It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief.
To the elite commentariat, acknowledging uncomfortable facts is far more dangerous than denying them. Murray learned that lesson the hard way. The label “racist” followed him for the simple sin of looking at the world as it is, not as fashionable minds say it must be.
Now, in his new book “Taking Religion Seriously,” he commits a second and perhaps even more impermissible offense: He takes God seriously. And in our age of brazen unbelief — when Richard Dawkins still preaches that matter explains everything and Sam Harris speaks of spirituality while denying the Spirit — this is the ultimate rebellion.
Murray has joined an unexpected migration of thinkers who once rejected faith but now find themselves drawn to it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once firmly planted in the New Atheist camp, shocked her old colleagues in 2023 when she publicly embraced Christianity.
Murray’s turn is quieter, more measured, and unmistakably his own. But he is walking down the very same path.
Faith beyond reason
The book is a quick read, but it echoes for days.
Murray writes not as a preacher but as a man who has spent a lifetime studying human behavior at its highest and lowest extremes. He knows what happens to communities when faith vanishes. He tracked it in “Coming Apart” long before religion reporters noticed. When church attendance drops, families weaken, neighborhoods suffer, and loneliness settles like dust over entire towns.
For years, Murray called for a “cultural Great Awakening” — a return to shared habits and values without requiring belief itself. Even then, the idea looked doomed, like trying to spark a flame in deep space. And now, finally, he seems willing to concede the obvious.
This book is Murray’s attempt to understand that missing ingredient. It’s the story of an agnostic who found himself slowly pulled toward the transcendent.
His wife, Catherine, became interested in faith. Murray followed her questions, then his own. He approached classical arguments for God not as trophies to be displayed but as puzzles worth pondering. The unmoved mover. Fine-tuning. The strange universality of the moral compass. And he reads C.S. Lewis with the care of a man who knows he may be wrong and wants to be right.
This humility gives the book a sense of clarity. Murray doesn’t pretend to have been struck by lightning. He jokes that he has yet to feel the “joys of faith,” comparing himself to a child outside a bright window, watching a celebration he longs to join. It is one of the loveliest passages in the book and one of the most honest.
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To his credit, Murray confronts the fear that haunts the secular mind: the fear of looking foolish.
His mention of the “tribe of smart people” lands less as pride and more as an admission that he was shaped by a previous paradigm in which intellect stood in for conviction. And he knows exactly how that tribe behaves. Terminal lucidity? Near-death experiences? To the self-appointed high priests of materialism, such things must be dismissed before anyone dares examine them. They carry their disbelief like a badge of honor.
Murray refuses to play along. If the evidence points beyond matter, he says, follow it. Even if the clever people frown — and especially then.
It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief, not with anger or sarcasm, but with a steady hand and a willingness to face what many prefer to ignore — and hope we ignore too.
Truth conquers data
For Christians, the most moving aspect of the book is Murray’s recognition that religion can’t be divorced from the heart of who we are. A society can’t thrive on secondhand virtue. It must grow from living faith, not admiration from a distance.
Murray’s old belief in an underlying, all-encompassing framework without God now strikes him as absurd. The last few years have shown him what many Christians already know: Attempting to build community on the fumes of forgotten belief is folly. The foundation is already dust before the first brick is laid.
Murray now accepts the existence of God. He accepts the reliability of scripture. He accepts the claims of Christ. And perhaps most telling of all, he no longer fears death. A man who once considered suicide at the end of life now finds himself at peace.
That, in itself, is a kind of miracle.
“Taking Religion Seriously” isn’t an altar call. It’s something rarer: the record of a mind long trained to trust data now learning to trust truth. Murray shows that the honest search for meaning will always lead beyond materialism, beyond ego, beyond the boundaries set by those who pride themselves on sophistication but know nothing of the soul.
Leslie Corbly’s Progressive Prejudice Is a Book Every Christian Should Read
Progressive Prejudice: Exposing the Devouring Mother By Leslie Corbly Bombadier Books, 320 pages, $18.99 There are books that inform —…
Violent attacks against Christians spike in Europe; France leading the way with anti-Christian hate crimes: Report
Christians are brutally persecuted the world over. According to the watchdog group Open Doors, over 380 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith, and over 4,476 were killed for their faith in 2024 alone.
While the top 10 worst countries for Christians are all in Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent — Nigeria, for instance, saw over 300 Christian schoolchildren abducted during a raid by bandits on Friday — Christians are also subjected to violent attacks, discrimination, and state suppression in supposedly civilized Western nations.
’15 incidents featured satanic symbols or references.’
The U.S. and Canada have together, for instance, seen thousands of acts of hostility against churches in recent years.
Across the Atlantic, a British court handed a grieving father a criminal sentence last year for praying silently near the abortion clinic that killed his unborn son. In France, Christians were reportedly arrested at gunpoint for peacefully protesting the mockery of their faith during the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. In Spain, a maniac broke into a monastery in November 2024, savagely attacking several people and fatally bludgeoning a Franciscan monk. Farther afield, an Islamic terrorist stabbed an Assyrian bishop on April 15, 2024, in an Australian church.
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, a Vienna-based watchdog group, recently revealed that violent attacks on Christians spiked in Europe and the U.K. last year.
The watchdog noted in its annual report that a total of 2,211 anti-Christian hate crimes were documented by European governments and civil society organizations in 2024.
OIDAC hinted that the actual number of hate crimes may be much higher, as surveys indicate they are grossly underreported. In Poland, for example, nearly 50% of Catholic priests surveyed indicated that they were met with aggression sometime in the past year, yet over 80% failed to report such incidents.
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Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images.
Nevertheless, OIDAC indicated that this reflects a general decrease over 2023 — a year when there were 2,444 reported hate crimes. The decrease is partly the result of a dip in recorded incidents in France but largely the result of “lower figures reported by U.K. police, which noted a change in methodology in its official report,” the report reads.
Of the 516 anti-Christian hate crimes independently recorded by OIDAC last year, the most frequent form of violence was vandalism, at 50% of reported incidents, followed by arson attacks, 15%; desecration, 13%; physical assaults, 7.5%; theft of religious objects, 5.5%; and threats, accounting for 4% of incidents. These figures do not account for burglaries at religious sites, of which there were nearly 900 additional recorded cases.
While reported anti-Christian hate crimes have generally decreased, the number of personal attacks — including assault, harassment, and threats — “rose from 232 in 2023 to 274 in 2024.”
The watchdog indicated on the basis of police and civil society data that the top five European nations most affected by anti-Christian hate crimes last year were, in descending order, France, Britain, Germany, Austria, and Spain.
Among the incidents highlighted in the worst-rated country, France, were the destruction of historic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer by an arsonist on Sept. 2, 2024, and the March 11, 2024, vandalism of a church and desecration of the cemetery in the village Clermont-d’Excideuil, where “Isa will break the cross” and “Submit to Islam” were spray-painted on graves, the war memorial, and the church door.
Since many of the offenders have not been apprehended, the watchdog group could not say definitively what is driving this trend. However, among the 93 cases OIDAC documented wherein the perpetrators’ motives or affiliations could be established, “the most common were linked to radical Islamist ideology (35), radical left-wing ideology (19), radical right-wing ideology (7), and other political motives (11). Additionally, 15 incidents featured satanic symbols or references.”
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When America feared God: The bold Thanksgiving prayer they don’t teach any more
Thanksgiving is an annual reminder of our nation’s Christian roots and our godly heritage. Although Virginia proclaims that the first Thanksgiving was in Jamestown in 1619 — not in Plymouth in 1621 — the Plymouth one became the prototype of our annual celebrations.
George Washington was the first president under the Constitution to declare a national day of thanksgiving, and President Lincoln was the first to declare Thanksgiving an annual holiday.
‘It is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for Benefits received, and to implore such further Blessings as they stand in Need of …’
However, Samuel Adams, with the help of two other continental congressmen, was the first to declare a National Day of Thanksgiving for America as an independent nation.
The time was the fall of 1777. Overall, it seemed that things were not going well for the United States. Americans lost the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, which Dr. Peter Lillback notes was our “first 9/11.”
George Washington saw that the Brandywine defeat meant the impending fall of Philadelphia, our nation’s capital at the time, into the hands of the British.
So Congress had to flee westward, first to Lancaster and then to York, Pennsylvania. Washington and his troops had to flee westward also. They ended up in a place called Valley Forge. The worst was yet to come with the brutal winter there.
Meanwhile, on October 7, 1777, there was a victory at Saratoga, New York. Samuel Adams of Boston, a key leader in American independence, saw that we as a nation could rejoice in this act of divine Providence. So — with the help of fellow Continental Congressmen Rev. John Witherspoon of New Jersey and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia — Samuel Adams wrote our country’s first thanksgiving declaration as an independent nation.
This is what they wrote in that First National Thanksgiving Proclamation, November 1, 1777: “It is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for Benefits received, and to implore such further Blessings as they stand in Need of.”
As humans, as Christians, we should be grateful. They continue, “And it having pleased him in his abundant Mercy, not only to continue to us the innumerable Bounties of his common Providence; but also to smile upon us in the Prosecution of a just and necessary War, for the Defense and Establishment of our unalienable Rights and Liberties; particularly in that he hath been pleased, in so great a Measure, to prosper the Means used for the Support of our Troops, and to crown our Arms with most signal success.”
I think it’s fair to say that Adams, Witherspoon, and Lee were looking for the good news (the Saratoga victory) in a sea of bad news (American setbacks, the latest of which was the defeat at Brandywine).
They continue: “It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES to set apart THURSDAY, the eighteenth Day of December next, for SOLEMN THANKSGIVING and PRAISE.”
And what were the Americans to do during that day of Thanksgiving and praise? To confess “their manifold sins … that it may please GOD through the Merits of JESUS CHRIST, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of Remembrance; That it may please him graciously to afford his Blessing on the Governments of these States respectively, and prosper the public Council of the whole.”
RELATED: That we may all unite in rendering unto our Creator our sincere and humble thanks
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If someone prayed like this in Congress today, people might try to drive him out of town on a rail — like the leftist members of Congress who blew a gasket when California minister Jack Hibbs prayed in the name of Jesus in Congress in early 2024.
Writing on behalf of Congress, Adams, Witherspoon, and Lee continue: “To inspire our Commanders, both by Land and Sea, and all under them, with that Wisdom and Fortitude which may render them fit Instruments, under the Providence of Almighty GOD, to secure for these United States, the greatest of all human Blessings, INDEPENDENCE and PEACE.”
They also prayed for God “to prosper the Trade and Manufactures of the People,” as well as the farmers, for success of the crops. They also asked for God’s help in the schools, which they note are “so necessary for cultivating the Principles of true Liberty, Virtue and Piety, under his nurturing Hand; and to prosper the Means of Religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that Kingdom, which consisteth ‘in Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost.’”
This prayer proclamation is no namby-pamby type of prayer such as we might hear from Congress these days. These are bold proclamations of faith, showing the pro-Christian side of the founding fathers that we rarely hear about these days.
This article is adapted from an essay originally published at Jerry Newcombe’s website.
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