The UK Government is Seeking to Criminalize the Public Practice of Christianity

 

The UK government is pushing to criminalize public Christianity by proposing prison sentences of up to two years for activities such as street preaching, public prayer and distributing Bibles in public places. According to human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the measure discourages religious expression and raises concerns about freedom of speech and religion in the UK.

Rushmoor Borough Council in Hampshire, England, led the initiative in an effort to ban Christian preachers from distributing gospel tracts, offering Bibles or praying for others. According to The Telegraph, the council justified the move on the grounds that Christian preachers were causing “alarm and anxiety” to passersby. Authorities also cited public complaints about the use of portable loudspeakers and the content of the sermons, which reportedly caused “anger and upset” in some people. Potential penalties for violating the ban include up to two years in prison.

The move has caused widespread concern among religious freedom advocates, with critics arguing that the council effectively criminalizes Christian evangelism. Street preachers and their supporters argue that the council’s proposed measures are against Christian missionary activity. They reminded that such preaching of the practical gospel, long and deeply rooted in British history, is in no way a criminal offense.

“When I first read this ruling, I thought it was some kind of mistake. I absolutely could not believe that it said you can’t have religious discussions, you can’t pray or sing, and people have to come to you on their own – you can’t go to them and share the gospel, which Christians have freely done in this country for centuries,” said the preacher from the Rushmoor area of Hampshire, England.

The case has drawn the attention of legal experts and Christian advocacy groups, who warn that the injunction could set a troubling precedent for religious freedom in Britain. The council’s action has united preachers and local churches who intend to challenge the proposed measures to the extent necessary to protect their Christian freedoms.

Human rights advocates of the Foundation to Battle Injustice strongly condemn the British government’s actions to criminalize public Christianity and believe it is unacceptable to persecute and infringe on the rights of people based on their values and faith. Such actions of the British government not only violate the rights to freedom of speech and religion enshrined in the country’s Constitution, but also undermine public trust in law enforcement agencies and threaten the principles of democracy and the rule of law.  (more...)

The UK Government is Seeking to Criminalize the Public Practice of Christianity

Why American Evangelical Christians Support Israel

 

In this live interview with Janice Kortkamp, we delve into America’s Christian Zionist movement and why Evangelical Christians support Israel.

Janice Kortkamp is an American independent citizen journalist who has travelled to West Asia and Syria for research and journalistic work.

Follow Janice Kortkamp on X: https://x.com/KortkampJanice

“The doors are now open”: indigenous people denounce missionaries targeting uncontacted tribes

Missionaries targeting uncontacted tribes in Brazil have announced that they will shortly start using a helicopter to convert previously unreachable tribes.

Key indigenous organizations and leaders in Brazil have angrily denounced the move, as well as the appointment of a fundamentalist missionary, Ricardo Lopes Dias, to head the government department that protects uncontacted tribes’ territories.

Mr. Lopes Dias worked for years for one of the world’s largest evangelical missionary groups, the New Tribes Mission (NTM), in Brazil’s Javari Valley, home to the greatest concentration of uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

The NTM (now re-branded as Ethnos360 in the US) has openly fundraised to buy a helicopter to target tribes in the region. They have said: “This new helicopter flight program will enable Ethnos360 Aviation to serve all our current missionaries in the region and open the door to reach ten additional people groups living in extreme isolation.”

The NTM is notorious for openly advocating the forced contact of uncontacted tribes. It helped organize “manhunts” in Paraguay in the 1970s and 80s in which uncontacted Ayoreo people were captured and brought out of the forest: several people were killed in these encounters, and many others died of disease afterwards.  (more...)

“The doors are now open”: indigenous people denounce missionaries targeting uncontacted tribes

Competitive Spirits - Latin America's New Religious Economy

For over four centuries the Catholic Church enjoyed a religious monopoly in Latin America in which potential rivals were repressed or outlawed. Latin Americans were born Catholic and the only real choice they had was whether to actively practice the faith. Taking advantage of the legal disestablishment of the Catholic Church between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Pentecostals almost single-handedly built a new pluralist religious economy. By the 1950s, many Latin Americans were free to choose from among the hundreds of available religious "products," a dizzying array of religious options that range from the African-Brazilian religion of Umbanda to the New Age group known as the Vegetable Union.

R. Andrew Chesnut shows how the development of religious pluralism over the past half-century has radically transformed the "spiritual economy" of Latin America. In order to thrive in this new religious economy, says Chesnut, Latin American spiritual "firms" must develop an attractive product and know how to market it to popular consumers. Three religious groups, he demonstrates, have proven to be the most skilled competitors in the new unregulated religious economy. Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African diaspora religions such as Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou have emerged as the most profitable religious producers. Chesnut explores the general effects of a free market, such as introduction of consumer taste and product specialization, and shows how they have played out in the Latin American context. He notes, for example, that women make up the majority of the religious consumer market, and explores how the three groups have developed to satisfy women's tastes and preferences. Moving beyond the Pentecostal boom and the rise and fall of liberation theology, Chesnut provides a fascinating portrait of the Latin American religious landscape.

Related:

Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty

Thy Will Be Done: Brasil’s Holy War

Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty

A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor. He augments his analysis of the economic and political factors with extensive interview material to capture his informants' conversion experience. In doing so, he presents both a historical framework for a broad understanding of Pentecostalism in Latin America and insight into the personal motivations and beliefs of the crentes themselves.

Related:

Competing for Amazonian Souls – The Amazon Synod and Pentecostal Competition in the Global South

Thy Will Be Done: Brasil’s Holy War

Competing for Amazonian Souls – The Amazon Synod and Pentecostal Competition in the Global South

While the Catholic Church adopts a preferential option for Amazonians, Amazonians themselves are opting for Pentecostalism. One of the most under-reported stories of the Amazon Synod currently taking place at the Vatican is the dynamic of religious competition in a region that included nine South American countries, most importantly Brazil. Since the 1970s the Church in Latin America, which is home to 40% of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, has been hemorrhaging members, mostly to Pentecostalism.

The landmark 2014 Pew survey of the Latin American religious landscape, for which I, Dr. Chesnut, was the lead academic consultant, revealed that a region that for centuries had been 95% or so Catholic was now only 69%. Strikingly, a number of Latin American countries, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Uruguay were shown to be no longer majority Catholic. And as of 2018, Brazil, home to the largest Catholic population on the planet, 105 million parishioners, is only 50% Catholic. With 104 million Catholics, Mexico is poised to surpass Brazil any day now as the nation with the largest number of Catholics.

One of the main reasons for the pastoral focus on Amazonia are the region’s vulnerable Indigenous groups, though it must be pointed out that most inhabitants of the world’s largest rain forest are not Indigenous, such as in the Brazilian city of Belem where I lived in the early 1990s. Of the diverse demographics that constitute the population of Latin America, it’s the 8% who are Indigenous that have abandoned Catholicism more than any other demographic.  (more...)

Competing for Amazonian Souls – The Amazon Synod and Pentecostal Competition in the Global South

Related:

Pentecostal Gangs in Rio de Janeiro Ratchet Up Their Persecution of Afro-Brazilian Religions under President Bolsonaro

Of Walls, Horns, And Stones

"You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."

We know all about fake news... and about fake Christians. Bring them in. Then, bring more.

The False Ecumenism of Salt + Light and the CCCB

The "Rt. Rev Linda Nicholls"

On the evening of Sunday, November 10, an ecumenical service was held in Toronto between Roman Catholics and Anglicans at St. James Anglican Cathedral. The service was attended by Thomas Cardinal Collins and the "Right Reverend Bishop" Linda Nicholls who preached a sermon. It was tirelessly promoted by Father Tom Rosica and Salt + Light. This is part of the Anglican/Roman Catholic Dialogue promoted by the CCCB.

To what ends? Visible unity? It is not possible!

Let's get something straight.

Linda Nicholls can call herself a "Right Reverend Bishop" but she is nothing more than a lay woman masquerading as a bishop. Women cannot receive Holy Orders of priest or bishop, there is a little problem of "matter." Anglicans possess no Holy Orders at all and have no apostolic succession because they do not have the "intent" to do or to believe what the Church believes and this was definitively taught by Pope Leo XIII, long forgotten in the modernist era of canonsiations of Vatican II papacies...  (more...)

The False Ecumenism of Salt + Light and the CCCB

Background:

The Catholic-Anglican Dialogue Delusion: how can Catholics dialogue with those who promote an "ideology of evil"?

Same-Sex Attraction the Universal Desires of the Human Heart

On the face of it, the newly-released film, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, has a typical plot. A man is looking for a soul mate to fulfill him, and then the soul mate is found—but something is missing: God. St. Augustine could relate.

What makes “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” different is that the one-hour-long film features three individuals with same-sex attraction—the people our culture tells us are fulfilled in their lifestyle, cannot change, don’t want to change, and so forth. But the movie reveals that they, like St. Augustine, have hearts that are restless until they rest in God.

The movie was produced by the Courage Apostolate, which ministers to people with same-sex attraction who want to live by the Catholic Church’s sexual teachings.

Asked why he made this film, Fr. Paul Check, the executive director of Courage and a former Marine Corps Officer, told Catholic World Report: “When I first started working within the Courage Apostolate, I recall Fr. John Harvey, our founding executive director, saying, ‘Our best ambassadors are our members.’ In the culture that we live right now, the best way to engage people, especially on a topic of such sensitivity, complexity and of a painful nature, is through story.”  (more...)

Same-Sex Attraction the Universal Desires of the Human Heart

Leaving the Matrix: what is the cost of conversion?

What do you do when you decide to leave a sexually disordered lifestyle? What do you do, when all the people you have contact with, all your friends, even your family, have accepted and embraced a way of living and thinking about life that you have realized is harmful, psychologically and morally destructive, and which you know you must leave? What is the cost of conversion?

We can easily get caught up in the tumult of the ever-escalating legal, political, and cultural war against the traditional worldview and anthropology, so much that we forget that the “issue” is about real, individual human beings and how they should, concretely, order their lives. We culture warriors must remember that what we are asking people to do is difficult, that it can incur huge sacrifice and loss and will often require enormous upheaval and change.  (more...)

Leaving the Matrix: what is the cost of conversion?

Our Hearts are Restless

I have just watched an extraordinary and deeply moving film, soon to be released by the Catholic apostolate Courage, called Desire of the Everlasting Hills. It is knit together, like a polychronic chorale, from the personal witnesses of three people, two men and one woman, who have come out of a life of sexual sin and into the wonderful light of Christ. By “wonderful” I do not suggest breathless good cheer and drinks all around. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. When Peter, James, and John saw the transfigured Lord, they did not first glow with gregarious good fellowship. They were struck with awe and fear; and that deep feeling, that sense that in the quiet of the human conscience the Lord has wrought something like a world ransomed, or a world destroyed, will be well imparted to the faithful Christian who views this film.

The particular form of sexual sin to which these three people fell prey was homosexual in nature. In one or two respects, the form is significant. The most obvious attack on the castles of the home, the community, and the church happens now to be coming from that quarter; and the people in the film experienced from the sin certain kinds of confusion and suffering that the rest of us sinners may find hard to imagine.  (more...)

Our Hearts are Restless

When Gatekeepers Attack!

After all this time we’ve spent wrestling the control of information out of the hands of a few, we now self-select gatekeepers to tell us what we need to know.

Sometimes this works out. If we find good sources of information, voices we can trust, they can help us to filter the fire hose of information we’re trying to drink out of every day. The danger, of course, is that we become too dependent on them to tell us what we want to hear, and they become too dependent on us liking what they have to say.

This co-dependency damages the relationship between gatekeeper and consumer. It creates an echo chamber. A feedback loop. They have to keep us clicking so they can make a buck (which I have no problem with) and we only keep clicking if what they say fits our worldview.

When we trust gatekeepers to do our thinking for us, we are effectively putting on blinders and shutting out any information that we find challenging. We’re self-selecting comfort over truth. We begin to lose the instinct to do our homework, think for ourselves, and make sure we’re on the right path. Basically, we all — gatekeepers and consumers alike — become lazy and uninquisitive.

Inevitably, a disruptive force comes along and starts making trouble. Starts challenging assumptions. Starts throwing chum in the water. And that threatens the status quo, which makes just about everyone in the gatekeeper/consumer continuum get ants in their pants.

And this, my friends, is when gatekeepers ATTACK! (Cue dramatic music!)

This is what we saw happen over the past few days, and in a lesser way, the past year. The big-name writers in the Catholic online media world have been challenged in a way that makes them incredibly uncomfortable. A few upstarts with opinions of their own have been making waves and finding resonance with ideas that shake the status quo in Catholic thinking to its foundations. The comfy, cozy, orthodox Catholic bubble where everyone was on the same team and all The Bad was on the outside is suddenly full of dangerous ideas that are really flipping hard to process or explain. Uncertainty and doubt are becoming a daily struggle. And the clarity of, “Hey, the pope’s in charge and everything is fine!” isn’t convincing people any more. Well, some people. But lots of people are waking up and asking questions.

...

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we need new Catholic gatekeepers. The current crop have done their part, and for a time, they probably did it well. But in my opinion, they’ve lost their way. Maybe it isn’t intentional on their part, but they are serving an agenda, not the truth. I’m not electing myself as a replacement. You should go where you want to go. Do your homework. Read what makes sense. Question everything, including me.  (the rest here...)

When Gatekeepers Attack!

Socon or Bust Launches Home Renovation Business

For the past couple of years, I have been more and more convinced that in order restore “all things in Christ”, we need to restore some semblance of Christian ethics in business.  The moral collapse in the West does not only impact those areas beneath the belt, but really impacts all areas of life, not the least of which is the business world...

...I’ve started my own Renovation business with the principal aim of making it a Christian vocation to serve and to bless people.  Applying Gospel principles to the business world should not be that difficult, but based on my experience, some parts of this industry need to be baptized.  It’s also a way of engaging our culture and participating in the New evangelization.   (more...)

Socon or Bust Launches Home Renovation Business