Category: Blaze Media
Sierra Club embraced social justice, DEI after being ‘flush’ with cash — and then destroyed itself: NYT
A New York Times report documents how the environmentalist Sierra Club group imploded after trying to maneuver into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the last few years.
The report included many firsthand accounts of how racial activists were brought into the fold and then colonized the environmental mission, leading to the downfall of the organization.
‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice, and inclusion?’
The Sierra Club was one of the foremost influential environmentalist groups before it allowed social justice proponents to hijack its agenda, the report suggested. The result was a drop in donations and membership and a rise in layoffs.
A tax filing analysis showed that the group consistently brought in tens of millions of dollars more every year than it spent from 2015 until 2019. In 2020, it was about even, but the expenditures far exceeded revenue in 2022 and 2023.
“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” read a letter to the leadership from a group of managers.
The Sierra Club had about four million members and supporters in 2019 but has lost a whopping 60% of those since, the report claimed.
The report said the organization pivoted to expand its focus during President Donald Trump’s first term to include racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, and other causes. That experiment failed so badly it had to fire Ben Jealous as executive director, whose previous job had been heading up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
On the way there, the group aliened many of its dedicated volunteers.
It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.
The Sierra Club also issued an “equity language guide” that warned employees against using problematic words, including “vibrant,” “hardworking,” “lame duck session,” and even the word “Americans.”
One Sierra Club director objected to a budget that paid for only two full-time employees to fight Trump’s policies on the Arctic refuge while funding the equivalent of 108 full-timers on DEI. They passed the budget despite his protest.
After former President Joe Biden won the election in 2020, the report said that the Sierra Club lost supporters over a public argument about making Israeli divestment an environmental issue. The group backed off on the issue but not before damaging support.
RELATED: Wisconsin mom who criticized ‘woke, White’ social justice coordinator beats defamation lawsuit
One anecdote included in the report was a staff member’s response to an ecologist volunteer who opined that Sierra Club should seek more protections for the wolf population in Colorado.
“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice, and inclusion?’” she recalled.
The Colorado chapter responded: “No one was investigated or accused of values misalignment on the basis of wolf conservation efforts.”
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Did science just accidentally stumble upon what Christians already knew?
A new study titled “Architecture of Near-Death Experience Spaces” has caught the attention of both the empirics and the eternalists, because it’s not often that a study about dying reads like a map to heaven.
The researchers asked participants who had clinically died and been resuscitated not to describe their near-death experiences in words, but to draw them. What emerged were recurring shapes — cones, ellipses, radiant fields — across people from entirely different cultures.
As the apostle Paul wrote, ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly.’ And science, for once, seems to glimpse the flicker of eternity.
But here’s the kicker: These weren’t the random doodles of oxygen-starved brains. They were geometric symphonies, ordered and elegant. It was as if consciousness, freed from the flesh, had glimpsed the very scaffolding of creation itself.
For a Christian, this is profound. Scripture has long told us that creation is not chaos but design. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” wrote the psalmist (Psalm 19:1), and here, perhaps, the dying do, too. When the heart stops and the veil lifts, what appears before the eyes of the departing may not be fantasy but revelation — a structure that feels deliberate, like architecture drawn by divine hands.
Dr. Jeffrey Long has spent decades collecting such glimpses. An oncologist by trade and founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, Long has catalogued over 5,000 accounts from people who claim to have died and returned. His findings echo the new study’s quiet suggestion: There’s order here.
Across cultures, creeds, and continents, the same themes recur.
Consciousness separates from the body. A light appears — intelligent, loving, unthreatening. A panoramic life review follows, often described as instantaneous yet complete. Time dissolves and peace floods in. And then, inevitably, a choice or command to return.
These aren’t vague platitudes. They are astonishingly consistent. Whether the subject was Christian, atheist, or vaguely spiritual, the pattern is the same.
RELATED: Science’s God-denying narrative just got crushed again
Pobytov/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Long’s data also reveals what happens after the return. Many report their faith deepening not from glimpses of pearly gates, but from meeting something that made sense on a cosmic scale. Others who had never believed before find themselves suddenly convinced that life does not end in nothingness. Across thousands of testimonies, moral clarity re-emerges like a melody.
Long told me his work has been called everything from pseudoscience to prophecy. But to him, the evidence points to something beyond the brain. When the same story emerges from a Buddhist in Nepal and a Baptist in Tennessee, argument starts to feel like denial.
When I reached out for comment about the link between near-death experiences and religious faith, Long directed me to his archive of testimonies — hundreds of raw, personal accounts from people who have stood at the edge of eternity and come back changed. They speak of a presence no doctrine can fully capture and a peace that science could never explain.
It’s the same paradox Christ left us with: The kingdom of heaven, near enough to touch, yet utterly beyond our comprehension.
Long shared with me four short lines from his archive, chosen because they capture what even theology struggles to say.
- “They said the energy of love is a good reason to return,” wrote Galadriel K, who described her experience with a calm certainty that makes disbelief feel naive.
- “It’s an unconditional love. I know Him. I met Him. … I met Jesus,” said Sharlene S, her words somewhere between testimony and awe.
- “When I got close enough to the Light, I felt unconditional love and time stopped,” recalled Judy G, as if describing an emotion too large for language.
- And then there was Charles T, whose final line needs no interpretation: “I knew what the source of that Light was. … It was Jesus.”
There’s something disarmingly simple in those statements — no grand theories, no intellectual gymnastics. Just awe. They testify to a presence that makes earthly distinctions fade. All melt away before the presence that burns through every pretense.
Critics will, of course, roll their eyes. They’ll talk about cerebral starvation, neural fireworks, the brain’s desperate attempt to comfort itself as it shuts down. But these explanations sound increasingly like the dying gasps of materialism. If consciousness were merely chemical, it shouldn’t behave so coherently at the brink of breakdown. It shouldn’t script the same story in so many minds.
There’s a dark humor in watching science stumble, wide-eyed, into what the faithful have always known. The modern world has spent centuries insisting that heaven is a myth, the soul a silly superstition, and death nothing but a switch flipped off.
In an age when every mystery is monetized and every miracle gets fact-checked by faith-phobic bureaucrats, it’s oddly comforting to know there are still places where no human instrument can reach.
Yet now, with the help of MRI machines and EEG scans, researchers are rediscovering the same truths that Sunday-school children sing. Progress, it seems, has come full-circle — proof that even unbelief can only wander so far before bumping into God.
To the Christian reader, these findings are not a challenge but a confirmation. The consistency of these visions, their moral coherence, their geometrical appeal — all resonate with a faith that has always held the visible world to be only the shadow of the invisible.
As the apostle Paul wrote, “Now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). And science, for once, seems to glimpse the flicker of eternity.
Of course, it would be wrong to make doctrine out of data. Faith is built in pews, not in peer reviews. But it’s just as foolish to ignore what so many have seen. In an age when every mystery is monetized and every miracle gets fact-checked by faith-phobic bureaucrats, it’s oddly comforting to know there are still places — perhaps the oldest place of all — where no human instrument can reach.
In that space between pulse and paradise, geometry gives way to grace. People describe radiant fields. But what they really mean is radiance itself — love, light, life. The shapes may differ, but the direction is always the same: toward something higher, brighter, unending.
Maybe that’s what the dying have been trying to tell us all along: that death is not the end of knowledge but the beginning of understanding. And no matter how mighty our machines or how certain our reason, humanity — from Maine to Manila — keeps sketching its diagrams of eternity: cones, ellipses, celestial plains.
Each line is a breath from beyond, proof that what we call death is only design, still unfolding.
BBC execs step down after network accused of deceptive edit of Trump’s January 6 speech
An internal memo has rocked the leadership at the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Last week, another outlet in the United Kingdom revealed that the memo had accused the BBC of deceptively editing footage of President Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
‘We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.’
The Telegraph reported that Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, wrote a dossier on the BBC’s alleged bias before leaving his position in June.
The report accused the BBC of splicing together Trump’s comments on Jan. 6 to appear as if they were made in the same breath, even though the remarks were about 54 minutes apart.
As Blaze News previously reported, the edit in question appeared on the BBC’s one-hour Panorama special, titled “Trump: A Second Chance?”
The documentary featured a clip purporting to show Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In reality, Trump’s actual statement was:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down. We’re gonna walk down, any one you want, but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The edited clip also featured Trump’s words from about 54 minutes later, when he was discussing election integrity.
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I wanna thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight.”
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more,” Trump added.
Now, BBC Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness have both handed in their resignations.
RELATED: BBC allegedly deceptively edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech into riot lie
Tim DAvie. Photo by Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images
Davie issued a memo to his staff on Saturday and claimed that it was completely his decision to step down.
“I wanted to let you know that I have decided to leave the BBC after 20 years. This is entirely my decision,” Davie wrote, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The director said he had been reflecting on the “very intense personal and professional demands” that come with his role and claimed that “in these increasingly polarized times, the BBC is of unique value and speaks to the very best of us.”
Without directly mentioning the video editing controversy, Davie called the BBC a “critical ingredient of a healthy society.”
‘As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.’
Turness, however, was openly self-deprecating in her decision to resign.
“The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love,” she wrote in a memo. “As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me — and I took the decision to offer my resignation to the Director-General last night.”
She added that “in public life, leaders” must be “fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down.”
Still, Turness said despite the mistakes, any “allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
RELATED: The UK wants to enforce its censorship laws in the US. The First Amendment begs to differ.
CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, October 13, 2022 in London, England. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
As the BBC is a government-run institution, the ruling Labour Party chimed in on the controversy.
“I want to thank Tim Davie for his service to public service broadcasting over many years. He has led the BBC through a period of significant change and helped the organization to grip the challenges it has faced in recent years,” said U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
Nandy said the BBC charter, which defines “Object, Mission and Public Purposes” for the organization, will be reviewed to help the BBC “adapt to this new era” and secure its role at the “heart of national life” for the future.
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European Trump derangement syndrome on full display in ‘deviant’ crucifixion spectacle
Liberals have made no secret of their desire to see harm come to President Donald Trump.
A survey conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab revealed in April that 55% of respondents who identified as left of center said that assassinating Trump would be at least somewhat justified.
When asked by pollsters about the September 2024 attempt on the president’s life at his golf course in Florida, 28% of Democrats said it would have been better for Trump to have been slaughtered on the green.
This murderous loathing for the president leached into popular culture long before Democrats rushed to mock Trump’s brush with death last year in Butler, Pennsylvania. For instance, a theater production simulated his assassination in New York City and an aspiring D-list comedian posed with a fake decapitated head made to look like the president.
A masked London-born agitpropist who calls himself Mason Storm recently contributed to this unhinged anti-Trump genre with a hyper-realistic, life-size sculpture of the president dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and set on a cross-shaped gurney in a cruciform pose. The sculpture, which is titled “The Saint or the Sinner,” depicts Trump as incapacitated with the implication — made explicit elsewhere — that he is dead as the result of a lethal injection.
According to a statement shared online by Storm, “In a world increasingly driven by polarized narratives, this work offers a moment of reflection, urging us to take responsibility — and to realize that every decision tells a story.”
RELATED: Evil unchecked always spreads — and Democrats are proof
Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images
While the title of the sculpture and the corresponding statement from Storm suggest there’s an ambiguity about the work’s meaning, Storm made clear online his antipathy toward Trump, writing, for instance, “He’s not the messiah he’s a very naughty boy!”
‘Simply deviant.’
The sculpture, which was shown earlier this year in Vienna, was also going to be shown at the central train station in Basel, Switzerland; however, Gleis 4, the gallery responsible for the planned pop-up, called it off, citing “expected large crowds and feared disturbances.”
On Saturday, Gleis 4 reportedly installed the sculpture in a showcase window on Kunstmeile, an indoor pedestrian walkway in downtown Basel.
According to France24, the sculpture has been purchased by an “internationally renowned figure living in Europe” whose identity will remain confidential.
Bishop Hermann Glettler of the Diocese of Innsbruck has called the sculpture “simply deviant.”
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Antifreeze ice cream and pesticide tea: Why it’s time to ditch processed foods
If you read the label on your favorite “healthy” food, the chances are high that you’re going to be extremely disappointed — and maybe even inspired to make a massive change.
And that’s exactly what happened when Christian homesteader Michelle Visser took a harder look at what she was putting in her body.
“I had been a junk food junkie my whole life, and I had been eating processed food my whole life,” Visser tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.
“I started looking at the ingredients of the processed food, and I started realizing, well, instead of using this little pack of taco seasoning, I could make my own taco seasoning. And instead of buying this ice cream that has antifreeze as one of its ingredients, I could make my own ice cream,” Visser explains.
“What differences did you see in your own body and in the health of your family when you started making those changes?” Stuckey asks.
“So much more energy and just zest for life and a really good feeling about food that I had never had before,” she responds, telling Stuckey that the difference between opening up a cardboard box and making your own food from scratch is staggering.
“It just doesn’t give you the satisfaction and the creativity that real food can give you,” she says. “So I started feeling much better in that way. Just more energy, sleeping better, just really good overall.”
Stuckey points out that in many cases, removing processed foods from diets does alleviate a lot of chronic symptoms people may have had.
“It’s not just one quick fix, but you know, a lot of the things that people in America struggle with today, when it comes to our gut, when it comes to our skin, a lot of the things that start with our digestion, they can be alleviated, or helped a lot, by what we do in the kitchen,” Stuckey says.
And Visser has some shocking news for those who believe they’re being healthy by drinking tea every night.
“It turns out it’s one of the most heavily unregulated, yet heavily sprayed with pesticide food or drink that you can eat,” she tells Stuckey, explaining that even when the tea is “organic,” it may come in a toxic bleached bag.
“So maybe loose leaf tea is the way to go,” Stuckey says.
“That’s what I recommend,” Visser agrees.
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Welcome to Harvard, where studying is now a hate crime
News broke last week that Harvard University — that ancient temple of American prestige and intersectional pride — may finally attempt to curb its notorious grade inflation. For decades, Harvard has handed out A’s like party favors at a preschool graduation. But now, administrators seem to fear the public has noticed that every graduate’s transcript reads: Congratulations! You’re brilliant.
Naturally, the students have responded with calm reflection and humility.
The American university had one job — to cultivate wisdom and virtue. If Harvard students now treat studying as oppression, maybe it’s time to grade the universities themselves.
Just kidding. They’re in full moral meltdown — which is remarkable, since most of them deny morality exists unless it’s part of an identity rubric. Touch their grades, though, and suddenly they rediscover absolute truth, glowing with divine fire.
What provoked this crisis of the soul? The rumor — merely the rumor — that they might have to study.
One distraught undergraduate complained that stricter grading would force students to spend time on academics instead of extracurriculars. And as every Harvard student knows, college is all about extracurriculars. Academics are a high-school hazing ritual — a price of entry to the elite club where you never have to study again.
Other students reportedly spent the day crying. It’s a hard life.
When they lamented losing time for extracurriculars, some surely meant yachting. Others meant activism. Who will dismantle “colonizing heteronormativity” if the revolution has to pause for midterms? Who will liberate the oppressed from the tyranny of citations?
Their outrage, ridiculous as it sounds, reveals at least three uncomfortable truths about the American university system — and the students it produces.
1. They worked hard once so they never have to again.
Some students said they nearly killed themselves to get into Harvard. Not to study there — don’t be ridiculous! — but to ensure that they’d never need to study again.
If you’re an employer expecting a Harvard graduate to be a disciplined thinker, brace yourself. You may be hiring someone who hasn’t cracked a book in years. Many of them majored in activism and minored in demanding that you pay them to keep doing it.
These students treat the workplace as an extension of campus — a new platform for “advocacy,” complete with your office space, Slack channels, and HR department. You wanted an employee. You may get an organizer.
2. Entitlement isn’t an accident — it’s the admissions policy.
Harvard attracts a particular type: students convinced that excellence is their birthright and that hard work is a microaggression.
Some even claim that “work ethic” must be decolonized as a relic of whiteness — a fragile idea until you remember they say it while demanding an A for not working. One almost admires the nerve.
We should stop treating “Harvard graduate” as a compliment. It’s becoming a warning label. These students expect to skip effort, skip merit, skip discipline — and demand that you “check your privilege” if you object.
Why wouldn’t they? Harvard built an entire institutional culture around their sensitivities. The modern university no longer shapes students; it rearranges itself around their demands.
3. The university system has failed.
The Harvard meltdown exposes a national rot. For decades, Americans have been told that college is essential for success. Universities responded by expanding enrollment, inventing dozens of useless “studies” degrees, building administrative empires, and raising tuition to swallow every loan dollar available.
The result?
Now we’re mass-producing indebted graduates with inflated expectations of high-paying careers and no knowledge or skills to justify either. Education has become a luxury accessory — a handbag whose value lies in the logo.
To test the system’s bankruptcy, try asking a recent Ivy League graduate:
- What is wisdom?
- What is the highest good?
- How did your education make you a more virtuous person?
You’ll likely get a breathless word salad about “advocating for marginalized identities and dismantling structures of oppression.” Ask how that helps anyone achieve the good, and you’ll get a vacant stare fit for a zoning map.
Of course, technical fields like engineering still demand real work. But those are small islands in a vast sea of bureaucratic waste. Most universities now operate as billion-dollar community centers with a few classes on the side — entertainment disguised as education.
RELATED: The real fraud in higher ed: Universities need that Chinese money
Photo by VCG / Contributor via Getty Images
Can the system be saved?
Maybe, but don’t bet on it.
You can’t “hire your way out” of a faculty that’s 97% left or far left. That’s not an imbalance; it’s a monoculture. And monocultures don’t reform themselves.
But the reckoning is coming. Enrollment is falling, budgets are exploding, and public trust is collapsing. The only thing keeping many universities alive is their ability to convince students that identity activism and LGBTQ+ advocacy are transcendent educational callings.
The solution is simple: Stop paying for the nonsense. No one is obliged to spend $80,000 a year to hear a gender-theory lecturer attack the biblical definition of marriage. No law, moral or otherwise, requires funding your own indoctrination.
Let them lecture to empty rooms.
The American university had one job — to cultivate wisdom and virtue. If Harvard students now treat studying as oppression, maybe it’s time to grade the universities themselves.
And the report card is long overdue.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey Blasted On Social Media For Victory Speech In Somali After Winning Third Term
‘The most humiliating thing I’ve ever seen.’
Glenn Beck’s blueprint for true conservatism in 2026 and beyond
Too many right-wingers today equate conservatism with opposing the left, voting for Republicans, or trying to get back to the “good ol’ days.”
But being a true conservative is none of those things, says Glenn Beck. Conservatism isn’t about reacting to the left, obsessing over policies, or worshipping the past. “It’s really about principles,” he says. “And that’s why we’ve lost our way because we’ve lost our principles.”
So what are the principles that undergird conservatism?
In this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn delivers an unflinching monologue that reminds us not only what being a conservative is really about, but why recovering true conservatism is critical for the nation’s survival.
1. Stewardship
“Being a conservative has to mean stewardship — the stewardship of a nation, of a civilization, of a moral inheritance that is too precious to abandon,” says Glenn.
This begins with understanding that the word “conserve” means to “stand guard” — in this case to “defend what the founders designed: the separation of powers, the rule of law, [and] the belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress but from the creator Himself.”
Right now, our founders’ brilliant blueprint for our government is treated like “a museum piece” instead of “a living covenant between the dead, the living, and the unborn,” says Glenn.
2. Confronting reality
“This chapter of conservatism must confront reality: economic reality, global reality, and moral reality,” says Glenn.
Just being against things, like high taxes and runaway inflation, isn’t going to cut it, he warns. We have to be for something — things like “economic sovereignty,” the “right to produce and to innovate,” “fiscal prudence,” and national independence.
“Being a conservative today means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that survives by debt,” says Glenn.
3. Recovering America’s soul
In our current “age of dislocation,” family, faith, and objective truth have all taken a massive hit. The results have been catastrophic. Depression and suicide are rampant. People feel like their lives are meaningless. Millions fill the emptiness with technology and other mind-numbing activities.
“If you want to be a conservative, then you have to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people that liberty cannot survive without virtue, that freedom untethered from moral order is nothing but chaos, and that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void where meaning used to live,” says Glenn.
In order to do this, we have to “rebuild competence,” “champion innovation,” “reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul,” “harness technology in defense of human dignity,” and above all “restore local strength” through families, schools, churches, and charities.
Drawing these threads together, Glenn paints a vivid portrait of the conservative’s role in the years ahead: “A conservative in 2025-26 is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government while actively stewarding the institutions, the culture, the economy of this nation for those who are alive and yet to be born.”
“We have to be a group of people that are not anchored in the past or in rage, but in reason and morality, realism, and hope for the future. We’re the stewards. We’re the ones that have to relight the torch,” he pleads.
To hear more, watch the video above.
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This crisis in churches is real. Will Christians fight back?
A new study has uncovered an alarming trend: Fewer regular churchgoers believe the Bible is clear on transgenderism and homosexuality.
The survey — conducted by the Family Research Council and the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University — found that only 47% of regular churchgoers believe that scripture is “clear and decisive” about “whether homosexuality is morally acceptable.” That’s a significant decline from 63% in 2023.
The moment believers treat biblical truth as negotiable, Christians become yet another cultural echo chamber.
Researchers, meanwhile, found that 26% believe the Bible is “unclear or ambiguous” about homosexuality, while another 16% said they believe scripture doesn’t address the issue.
Even worse, only 40% of regular churchgoers said the Bible is “clear and decisive” on “whether transgenderism is morally acceptable,” a 12-point drop from 2023. Nearly a quarter (23%) said they believe the Bible is “unclear and ambiguous” on trans ideology, while 24% said they believe the Bible doesn’t address it.
These results demonstrate that American churches are experiencing a crisis of biblical truth.
But how?
But these results are surprising for two important reasons, not least of which is that they appear to refute suggestions of a Christian revival in America.
First, while these are two issues central to the progressive project that have largely become cultural orthodoxy, a growing number of young people are rejecting the left’s version of the good life. Thus, you’d expect the data to reflect the trend away from progressivism and toward objective truth.
Second, the Bible is by no means unclear or ambiguous on either issue — no matter what “progressive Christians” say.
On homosexuality, the Bible establishes in Genesis that central to the union of man and woman (i.e., marriage) is the ability to reproduce. This prescription is reaffirmed countless times. Jesus even cites Genesis when challenged about the true purpose of marriage (hint: He does not affirm homosexuality). Moreover, as the fledgling church grappled with questions of sexual morality, the apostles affirmed that sexual immorality of any kind — that is, porneia, or any sexual activity beyond the confines of a marriage between one man and one woman — is sinful and contrary to God’s design. This, of course, includes homosexuality.
On transgenderism, Genesis is clear: God created man and woman, a complementary pair that reflects the divine union. God chooses our gender for us — not our feelings.
So what do we do?
First, we must name this for what it is: not a cultural or data problem, but a discipleship problem. The Bible hasn’t changed, and scripture isn’t suddenly vague. The truth is that many pastors and churches have gone quiet on these important issues, which demand moral and biblical clarity.
Silence has a cost, and now the bill is due. When pulpits grow timid, the pews grow confused.
Second, Christians must recover confidence in the Bible’s authority. God’s word is true and timeless. It doesn’t need to be apologized away or reinterpreted to acquiesce to our cultural moment. It speaks as clearly today as it always has. Cultures and politics may change, but God’s truth remains the same.
The moment believers treat biblical truth as negotiable, Christians become yet another cultural echo chamber — and lose their saltiness.
RELATED: The poisoned stream of culture is flowing through our churches
ChristinLola/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Third, Christian leaders must teach clearly, intentionally, and with conviction what the Bible says about sex, marriage, and human identity. Christians today are drowning in confusion, as this study proves. They desperately need clarity, truth, and courage to stand up for biblical truth and to live it out.
Finally, Christians must take heart and remember that decline isn’t defeat. It’s never the end of the story. Every generation of God’s people has faced moments of crisis and confusion. Revival is found on the other side of those moments. And it happens when ordinary Christians rediscover and reaffirm the power of God’s word and refuse to bow to cultural idols.
But that renewal only comes when Christians stop apologizing for what God has already made clear, is making clear, and will continue to make clear.
Now is the moment for Christians to decide what kind of witness they will be. One that bends to the culture? Or one that stands firm on the Rock? The world is desperate for truth. Thankfully, we have access to God of truth, and in the end, He wins.
The nukes are fine — the advice is not
Despite his well-known aversion to using the “other N-word” and discussing the issues connected to nuclear deterrence and nuclear saber-rattling by America’s adversaries, the president, during his recent trip to Asia, dropped a bombshell of his own.
On October 29, President Trump posted a brief statement on Truth Social about nuclear weapons testing, which contained the following key points:
- The United States has more nuclear weapons “than any other country.”
- During Trump’s first term in office, the U.S. accomplished a “complete update and renovation” of existing U.S. nuclear weapons.
- Because of other countries’ testing programs, the president has “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
- The process of testing our nuclear weapons “will begin immediately.”
Sadly, whoever provided the president with the background information for each of his statements is manifestly unaware of the easily ascertainable facts. The president is being extremely poorly served by his own staff.
The president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not.
First, the Russian Federation has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Its stockpile of nuclear weapons available to the Russian military is about 5,200, while its overall stockpile is about 5,600. The numbers for the U.S. are about 3,700 and 4,400, respectively. This information is readily available in public sources such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook or the annual assessments published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Second, during the president’s first term, progress was made on the Strategic Modernization Program initiated in 2010. Still, no new platforms (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, or land-based missiles) were deployed between 2017 and 2021. Instead, we rely today on aging systems that are decades old.
Importantly, a small number of modified, low-yield submarine-launched warheads were produced and placed in service, and development of new Air Force nuclear warheads began, but none were deployed.
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Third, the president’s staff has a profound misunderstanding about the difference between the test of a nuclear system’s delivery vehicle (i.e., a ballistic or cruise missile) and the test of a nuclear warhead. In the days before the president’s post, Russia conducted a test of a new cruise missile and a new trans-oceanic torpedo (both of which, incidentally, are not constrained by the new START treaty). Tests of missile systems are commonly conducted by all the nuclear powers, including the United States.
Today, with the sole exception of North Korea in 2017, neither Russia nor China nor any other nuclear power has conducted a nuclear warhead test in this century. To be clear, the U.S. intelligence community has raised concerns that both Russia and China may be covertly carrying out extremely low-yield tests of experimental nuclear designs, but those do not appear to be the “tests” to which the president’s Truth Social post was referring.
Finally, the president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not. That responsibility belongs to the Department of Energy. Based on over 30 years of neglect, that department would be unable today to conduct a nuclear weapon test in the near future. Based on estimates provided by the Department of Energy to Congress, it would take 24-36 months to do so, at a cost of several billion dollars — dollars that have not been authorized or appropriated by Congress.
When asked, on his return flight from Asia, why he had delivered this signal of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons muscle-flexing, the president said he believed that if others were testing, then we should too. Depending on the state of our own nuclear weapons (currently assessed by the military as being reliable), and if he had been properly informed on the facts that others had resumed testing of nuclear weapons, there would be something to this argument. But as things stand, the president owes it to himself and to America’s national security to improve the quality of advice he is being provided on the vital issue of nuclear deterrence and our ability to sustain it — and soon.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
