Sermon Illustrations on Freedom Of Religion — page 2

The New First Freedom: Sexual vs. Religious Freedom

Acts 4:19

Take a look at the Bill of Rights. What’s the first freedom listed? And why is that first freedom on the ropes today?

The first words of the Bill of Rights read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Founders thought enough about the importance of religious freedom that they put it at the top of the Bill of Rights.

One can’t help but wonder where religious freedom would rank if we held the debate today.

The question occurred to several of us here at BreakPoint after reading an article at Yahoo entitled “From Peyote to Sex: Religious Liberty Fight Recast.” In it, Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press described how the religious freedom issues being litigated in the courts have changed over the decades.

Seventy years ago, courts were deciding whether Jehovah’s Witnesses could be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag. Forty years ago, the issue was whether Amish children could be compelled to attend school past ninth grade. But today, mainstream Christian groups like Catholic nuns, evangelical businessmen, and Christian nonprofit organizations are being told to do what just a few years ago was unimaginable for them. And the issues being decided all boil down to the same thing: can Christians be compelled to go along with the Sexual Revolution as a condition for full participation in American society?

Now if that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s not. Last summer, a justice on the New Mexico Supreme Court wrote that the state’s anti-discrimination law compelled Christians to “compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives.”

He called this compromise “the price of citizenship” and argued that this compromise was “part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people.”

Now leaving aside the one-sided nature of this “compromise” — notice the other side is never asked to compromise its beliefs — it’s telling that the “tolerance” being called for concerns sex.

In many ways, sexual freedom is becoming, if it’s not already become, the first freedom to Americans.

If that sounds like an overstatement, consider the fact that just about the only speech our culture will not tolerate is any which calls the sexual revolution into question.

“But what about racist speech?” you might ask. Well, comedienne Sarah Silverman, who recently won an Emmy, says things about African-Americans and Latinos that would be at home at a Klan rally or White Supremacist websites. Yet far from being condemned, she is feted for being “edgy” and “provocative.”

No such consideration is extended to those who, for religious reasons, dissent from the orthodoxy on sexual freedom. To oppose same-sex marriage is to be called a “bigot” and face reprisals, even though the President held the same position as recently as four years ago.

For fighting the HHS contraceptive mandate, Hobby Lobby was vilified, even though it is — in all the ways that really should matter — a model employer.

The triumph of the sexual revolution is why, to use Zoll’s phrase, the battle of religious freedom has been “recast.” Freedom has come to mean personal autonomy, and that autonomy is principally expressed in the sexual sphere.

Thus, the Christian insistence that sex, like every other human activity, is subject to norms is seen as an assault on the idea of human freedom itself, even if we only seek to apply those norms to ourselves.

No matter that our beliefs inspire our lives. The fear that it might make others question their own beliefs makes religious freedom the wrong kind of freedom these days.

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Private Religion Would Hurt Public Life

Growing numbers of voices are telling Christians “Keep your views to yourself!” “Stay out of the public square!” Well, what if we did?

Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” showed a despairing George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, learning how the world would be without him. Well, perhaps we need a similar cinematic telling for all those currently telling Christians to stay out of the public square and to keep their thoughts about marriage, religious freedom, and the dignity of human life to ourselves. And maybe a few wobbly-kneed Christians need to see it too.

Just like George Bailey was stunned to discover what Bedford Falls would look like had he “never been born,” I think it may be similarly shocking to see what the world would look like today without Christianity’s influence.

For one thing, we wouldn’t have thousands of volunteers working in prisons to help incarcerated men and women return to their communities as productive citizens. We’d certainly see fewer hospitals and free clinics. After all, I’ve seen a lot of Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic hospitals, but I can’t remember any Buddhist, atheist, or New Age ones, or for that matter food kitchens, or rescue missions, or adoption agencies, or disaster relief organizations, or entrepreneurial training programs. And good luck sustaining free, public education to the millions of students once religious schools shut their doors. When Christians “keep it to ourselves,” everybody loses.

Though many in the media don’t get that point, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof does, and good for him. “In liberal circles,” Kristof recently wrote, “evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly. And yet the liberal caricature of evangelicals,” he continues, “is incomplete and unfair. But I’ve been truly awed by those I’ve seen in so many remote places, combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lord’s work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided.”

To make his point, Kristof points to just one example. On a recent trip to the war-torn nation of Angola, he met medical missionary Dr. Stephen Foster, who has been working there — without the world’s acclaim — for 37 years. The white-haired doctor, who is now 65, has stood firm against six-foot cobras, enraged Marxist soldiers, and horrible health and working conditions. One of his sons contracted polio; a daughter survived a cerebral hemorrhage. As Kristof relates, his son Rob says, “For a while I blamed my dad and his high-risk dedication to others. Today ... I am no longer bitter or resentful. If me getting polio meant that thousands of lives were either saved or immeasurably improved by my father’s work, then so be it.”

So we should keep our faith to ourselves?

Or consider those like Dr. Kent Brantley or other Christian medical professionals, who courageously fought and are fighting Ebola at great personal risk. Should they leave the public square and stop acting on the basis of their beliefs? Are the guardians of so-called “civil rights” willing to go in their place?

Now it’s true that sometimes we Christians undermine our witness by wrong words and deeds, but it’s also true that we’ve brought a lot more to our neighbors and communities than many folks realize.

A few years ago, for instance, a University of Pennsylvania researcher found that urban congregations, such as First Baptist in Philadelphia, provide millions of dollars in services to their communities in everything from marriage counseling, to helping people off drugs and alcohol, to providing K-12 education.

So like Bedford Falls and George Bailey, our society really will miss us if we are cowed into a privatized faith that keeps religion safely inside the four walls of our own churches. Christianity is not only to be believed; it must be lived — and not just for our own benefit, but for the good of our neighbors. And now of all times, we must increase our work of restoration in our communities. But that doesn’t mean be silent. Like Jesus, let’s be about the business of sharing it, both in word and in deed. Even when others tell us to keep it to ourselves.

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The New Totalitarians: Change Your Religious Beliefs Or Else

Mark 12:14

If you think the era of totalitarianism is over, you haven’t been paying attention to the headlines.

In the first century, Jesus was asked whether the Jewish people, who were under pagan, Roman occupation, should pay taxes to Caesar. The Lord, of course, said we are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. But in 21st century America, Caesar is angling for a better deal — and he’s getting it.

Our old friend Chuck Colson sounded the alarm several years ago when certain political figures on the Left — including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton — began downsizing the First Amendment’s guarantee of our God-given right to freedom of religion into a more manageable “freedom of worship.”

Chuck feared — rightly, it turns out — that opponents of religious liberty were seeking to keep religion within the four walls of our churches, synagogues, and mosques — as if religious belief were no more than a purely private opinion with no practical implications for the real world. In other words, “Feel free to worship, if you like, but keep your religiously informed opinions and actions to yourself.”

It’s a totalitarian impulse, and you can see it in the intensifying efforts to force faith groups to pay for abortions, to shut down Christian businesses that don’t want to participate in so-called “gay weddings,” and so on.

And the totalitarians are getting bolder about it. In Victoria, Australia, doctors are required by law to perform abortions when asked, or refer the patient to a colleague who will. In Canada, meanwhile, the Ontario and Saskatchewan Colleges of Doctors and Surgeons want physicians forced to perform euthanasia — which is now a fundamental national “right” — if no one else is available to do it.

And the totalitarians — being totalitarians — will brook no compromise. According to Canadian bioethicist Udo Schuklenk, “The very idea that we ought to countenance conscientious objection in any profession is objectionable.”

Really? And alas, this totalitarian streak is not confined to the Great White North. Mrs. Clinton, who once said that abortion can be “a sad, even tragic choice,” now asserts that a so-called “right to reproductive health care” trumps religious freedom. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she said at a recent meeting of the Women in the World Summit. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Religious beliefs have to be changed?

Now Caesar seeks to regulate not just our actions, but our thoughts as well!

New York Times columnist and gay-rights advocate Frank Bruni thinks we need to change our religious beliefs about marriage, too — since, he says, interpreting the Bible is filled with subjectivity and uncertainty. Therefore believers shouldn’t take it too literally on matters of sexuality. “So our debate about religious freedom,” Bruni says, “should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”

How nice that Mr. Bruni and other sexual totalitarians stand ready to “free us” from our prejudices. What’s next, re-education camps? If you think I’m exaggerating the totalitarian threat, in the same newspaper, David Brooks writes, “If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.”

Lord have mercy.

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RESOURCES

Hillary: ‘Religious Beliefs’ Must Change For Sake Of Abortion

Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, Fox News, April 27, 2015

Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana

Frank Bruni, New York Times, April 3, 2015

Kill or get out of medicine!

Wesley Smith, lifesitenews.com, April 20, 2015

Memo to Hillary Clinton: On Marriage, Here Christians Stand and We’re Not Moving

Rob Schwarzwalder, Christianpost.com, April 24, 2015

Hillary Clinton: ‘Religious Beliefs’ About Abortion ‘Have To Be Changed’

John McCormack, Weekly Standard, April 24, 2015

The Week in ‘Tolerance:’ Boycotts, Bans and Bullying

Guy Benson, Townhall.com, Apr 27, 2015

Religious Liberty and Equality

David Brooks, New York Times, March 31, 2015

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It's Ramadan: Pray For Your Muslim Neighbors

The anniversary of September 11 and all of the hubbub over Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s speaking engagement at Columbia University are now behind us. It is easy to allow our American sensibilities about radical Islam to jump the fence from righteous anger to outright hatred. But there is a far more appropriate way to respond. As Christians, our response to the Muslim world should be no different than our response to anything: Pray.

And what better time than during Ramadan — the 30 days from September 13 to October 12 in which Muslims devote themselves to prayer and fasting. Since 1992, Christians from around the world have united to pray for the 30 days corresponding to Ramadan. They pray for those who reside in predominantly Muslim countries, those oppressed by Islam. Christians who have been involved in sponsoring this 30-day prayer movement have created an online prayer guide with daily prayer requests for specific Muslim nations: Breathtaking pictures are there and powerful stories of lives transformed through Jesus Christ.

Take, for example, a former Muslim man in China who was converted to Christianity. He was so convicted by the Lord’s Prayer to “forgive his debtors,” that he did exactly that. Those he forgave were so amazed by his actions that they all came to Christ. This is the kind of thing that prayer can result in.

Right now, Ramadan is well underway. In fact, it is almost over. But that does not mean that we cannot seize the day by praying that Muslims will be exposed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So, here’s an idea: For the remaining eight days of Ramadan, join me in praying for a specific part of the Muslim world, like Mauritania.

Like many Muslim countries, freedom of religion is limited at best in Mauritania, an Islamic republic in West Africa. For example, guards frequently stand at church doors keeping citizens from worshipping freely. An imam who showed the Jesus film in a mosque there died of uncertain causes. And a Christian who recently visited the country said, “You can have freedom of speech if you are a Muslim. You can have freedom of religion if you are a Muslim. It is, in fact, okay to be a Christian, but it is offensive to speak of Jesus as anything other than one of the prophets.”

Please join me in praying that God’s love will be evident to this small country of three million and that Christians will find the freedom to worship God in spirit and truth. There is nothing that excites God more than watching His people overcome evil with good.

After all, Ramadan may be a Muslim observance, but there is no rule that keeps Christians from using the same calendar to pray that God would show His radical and transforming love to those who so desperately need Him. Second Peter 3:9 says that God is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

Remember, that for every radical Islamic terrorist out there, there is another lonely, lost, hurting Muslim. It could even be your neighbor. So, pray for your neighbor, pray for Mauritania, and pray for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5541]

Americans Not Losing Their Religion, But Changing It Often

Acts 2:40

Ingrid Case was a devoted church-goer as a child, not only attending Sunday school, but also serving as an acolyte at her Episcopalian church in Greeley, Colorado.

More than half of American adults have changed religion in their lives, according to a new survey.

“Basically, it’s the priest’s assistant,” she explained. “You carry a cross in front of them, get the things they need to perform the service, scurrying around doing what they need.”

But after college, Case drifted away. She didn’t feel like she fit in socially at the Episcopalian church in Princeton, New Jersey, and found herself uncomfortable with some of its theology.

“I began to see there were some things I wasn’t able to get on board with fully. I don’t like the traditional Episcopalian focus on the afterlife,” she said.

Today she’s a Quaker.

She got involved with the Society of Friends, as the denomination is formally known, through the man who later became her husband, Nat Case. He wasn’t raised a Quaker either, she said, though he went to a Quaker-run boarding school as a child.

Her shift in religion was gradual, said Case, 41, a freelance writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“It wasn’t so much ‘You people stink and I am out of here,’ as ‘I like this better and this is what I want to do.’ ”

Case isn’t alone. More than half of American adults have changed religion in their lives, a huge new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found. And there is no discernible pattern to the change, just “a free for all,” one of the lead researchers told CNN.

“You’re seeing the free market at work,” said Gregory Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum. “If people are dissatisfied, they will leave. And if they see something they like better, they will join it.”

Many people switch because they move to a new community, and others because they marry someone of a different faith, he said.

Some don’t like their ministers or pastors; some like the pastor at another church better.

And many people list more than one reason for changing, Smith said.

“The reasons people change religions are as diverse as the religious landscape itself,” he told CNN by phone.

Some factors that might be expected to drive people away from religion -- such as sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, or a belief that science “disproves” religion -- actually play a very small role, the study suggests.

“I’ve been struck by the very large number across all the different groups who say they just gradually drifted away. Not all of this is the product of carefully considered, conscious decision-making that happens at a specific point in time,” Smith said.

Case left the Episcopal Church at a time of huge turmoil within the denomination over whether women could be priests, she remembered, but that wasn’t a factor in her decision.

“There was a gradual sense of, ‘Hey, that pair of shoes fits better,’ ” she said.

The number of people who have changed religion is much higher than previously thought, the new report suggests. A Pew Forum study released last year concluded that just over one in four Americans had switched.

Even that lower number was considered “striking,” the Pew Forum said, and the latest research suggests it was a serious underestimate.

More than four in 10 American adults are no longer members of the religion they were brought up in, while about one in 10 changed religion, then went back to the one they left, the study found. Just under five in 10 -- 47 percent -- have never changed faith.

Some have switched more than once, and a small number have changed three times or more, according to the study.

The survey supported a study released last month in that it found about 16 percent of Americans are not affiliated with any religion. The American Religious Identification Survey, from Trinity College in Connecticut, found the number to be about 15 percent.

But Smith warned against labeling those people “secular.”

“Upwards of one-third of newly unaffiliated people say they just haven’t found the right religion yet,” Smith said.

And many people who had no religion as children later join one, he said.

“More than half the people who are raised unaffiliated are now affiliated,” he said. “More than half [of those people] say they joined their current faith in part because they felt called by God to do so.”

“Just because a people is part of a particular group at this point in time, or a part of no religion, doesn’t mean they are going to stay that way forever,” said Smith.

Mark Silk, a professor of religion in public life at Trinity College, cautioned against assuming the Pew study was uncovering a new trend.

“The sense that there is a huge amount of flux where there was not before is not accurate,” he told CNN by phone. “In the 19th century there was a huge amount of switching around and the establishment of new denominations.”

Smith admitted the Pew Forum study could not show much about the past.

“There have been studies that have been done before, but it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison,” he said.

That said, the fact that most people who switch religions do so before they are 24, combined with the finding that older people as well as younger people have changed, suggests to Smith that the trend has been going on for some time, he said.

“If I’m 65 and I changed religion at 24, I changed 40 years ago,” he pointed out. “It’s not a new phenomenon.”

“Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.,” is based on 2,867 new telephone interviews with people who participated in the Pew Forum’s “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” which was released last year.

Underground Christians In China Find Faith

Mark 10:30

Kids are singing about Baby Jesus sleeping in the hay. They look like children performing for their congregation, but to the Chinese authorities, they are criminals because they’re at an underground “house” church.

It’s called that because they meet without state approval, CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen reports.

The church let CBS News in to take pictures that show both faith and defiance, while the congregation was brave enough to share their stories of what happens when the government finds the faithful.

“The police called us evil and arrested us for illegal assembly,” one woman explains.

Chinese-born American Dr. Sam Chao works in China for religious freedom and researched the dangers faced by underground church worshipers.

“I interviewed about 40, 50 people; every one of them (was) beaten and jailed and harassed and beaten on the body,” says Chao, Director of China Ministries International.

When Mao Tse-tung took power, he banned religion. Communism was the new faith. These days, the state allows churches, but worshippers must register with police. And yet, there are many young people worshipping.

“They’ve grown up in a society where the moral imperative is to make money and get ahead, and that doesn’t take you very far,” says Ken Lieberthal, a China expert at the University of Michigan.

People in Beijing are discovering perhaps a simple truth: Money alone is not bringing happiness. Hundreds of millions — and more each day — are seeking something more.

So even traditional eastern religions like Buddhism are flourishing again. But none like the underground Christians.

In one village, they were even building their own church ... until the authorities knocked it down.

In China, it was once easy to know what to believe in — the Communist Party. Those days may be gone for good as a new generation learns how to find and keep its own faith.

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Tortured In Bangladesh

Mark 10:30

At the urging of local Muslim leaders, police in western Bangladesh have tortured a pastor and two other Christians for legally proclaiming Christ.

Habibur Rahman, 45, pastor of Boalia Spiritual Church in Boalia in Cuadanga district, 136 miles west of Dhaka, said he was about to meet with 11 others for a monthly meeting on evangelism June 8 when local police stormed in and seized him and Zahid Hassan, 25, and a 40-year-old Christian identified only as Fazlur.

The first question the police commander asked him, Rahman said, was, “Why did you become Christian?”

“Using a lot of filthy words, he charged me that I was teaching the Bible and converting people to Christianity in this area,” the pastor told Compass Direct News. Police dragged them to a nearby parked vehicle and transported them to Shamvunagar police camp.

“Police told us, ‘We will teach you in the camp how to forget your Christ,’ while dragging us to the vehicle,” Rahman said.

Police blindfolded them after reaching the camp and took them to three separate rooms.

“I heard blood-curdling scream from other rooms,” Rahman said. “I was sitting on the floor blindfolded. I could not understand what was happening around me. Later several police came to me and one of them kicked me on the back of my head, and my head ricocheted off the wall. They also kicked my waist.”

Ordering him to say how many people he had converted to Christianity in the Muslim-majority nation, the commander said he would kick him a like number of times. The official told him to call out to Jesus, saying he wanted to see how Jesus would save him, Rahman said.

“While beating us, police told us there will be no Christian in this area,” the pastor said. “Police hurt our hands, lips, thighs and faces with burning cigarettes. They beat me in the joints of my limbs with a wooden club. They beat us for one hour, and I became senseless at some point.”

Police officers told Rahman to admit that whatever he had done in his life was wrong, he said. When they sent them to Boalia police station early the next morning, dozens of Christians arrived to try to obtain their release.

Police, however, were reluctant to release the detained Christians.

“Some Christian villagers then said, ‘We are also criminal because we believe in Christ like Habibur Rahman and the other two Christians,’” Rahman said. “They told police, ‘If you do not release them, then arrest us and put us in jail.’” Police did not release the three Christians until later that night.

The next day, June 10, thousands of Muslim villagers demonstrated in front of a local government office called the Zamzami Union Council chanting, “We want a Christian-free society,” and “We will not allow any Christians in Cuadanga.”

The frenzied mob called for Rahman to appear at the local government office, and a sub-district administrative chief called in 10 Christians and 10 Muslims including imams to try to resolve the matter. In that meeting, the administrative official told everyone to practice their religion freely without disturbing others.

“The administrative chief also said nobody should interfere in other religions, but even now we cannot attend our churches for worship,” Rahman said. “Local people said, ‘You will come in the church alive but return home dead.’”

Police denied carrying out any torture, saying they arrested the Christians for interrogation because villagers had informed officers that some underground Maoist terrorists had gathered in the house.

Jotish Biswas, executive director of Way of Life Trust, said the marks of torture were unmistakable.

“There were streaks of blood on their legs, hands and faces,” said Biswas, who interceded with police on behalf of the arrested Christians. “I have seen marks of cigarette burns on their bodies. They were beaten so severely that they could not walk properly.”

Biswas said he had learned that a local official and some Muslim clerics had prompted police to torture the Christians because they objected to their evangelistic activity.

“Police violated the rights of minorities enshrined in the Bangladeshi constitution,” Biswas said. “It was a gross violation of human rights.”

Chanchal Mehmud Kashem, a Christian journalist who visited the area, told Compass that the area is lacking in freedom of religion.

“Torture by police suggests that those Christians are not citizens of Bangladesh,” Kashem said. “It suggests they are illegal, alien and that evangelism is a crime.”

Kashem added that the notion that “underground terrorists” had gathered in a house was a pretext for harassing the Christians. “Rahman has been working as an evangelist in this area for one and half years,” he said.

There are more than 170 Christians in the area where Rahman works as an evangelist and pastor, he said.

“The local government council chairman told me two times not to come in this area,” Rahman said. “He said, ‘There is no Christian in this area, so why do you come here to make Christians?’”

Local Muslim villagers have since refused to give work to area Christians, most of whom are day laborers dependent on obtaining daily jobs to survive.

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Aenon Shalom writes for Compass Direct News.

They Would Not Deny Their Faith

Mark 10:30

Two women who converted from Islam to Christianity in Iran were expelled from the country in May 2010. Rostampour and Amirizadeh were arrested in March the previous year on charges of anti-state activity and for “taking part in illegal gatherings.” In other words, they participated in house church activities. They were detained in the notorious Evin prison, a facility known for its human rights violations and capital punishment, and were psychologically abused.

In prison, the two were pressured to renounce their new Christian faith and to return to Islam. But they repeatedly refused. During a court hearing, they told the judge, “We love Jesus,” “Yes, we are Christians,” and “We will not deny our faith.”

It was then that they had a new charge leveled against them: apostasy. The penalty is death. So their expulsion was actually a merciful action by the Iranian government. Many Christians living in Islamic states face similar persecution.

Private Religion Would Hurt Public Life

Growing numbers of voices are telling Christians “Keep your views to yourself!” “Stay out of the public square!” Well, what if we did?

Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” showed a despairing George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, learning how the world would be without him. Well, perhaps we need a similar cinematic telling for all those currently telling Christians to stay out of the public square and to keep their thoughts about marriage, religious freedom, and the dignity of human life to ourselves. And maybe a few wobbly-kneed Christians need to see it too.

Just like George Bailey was stunned to discover what Bedford Falls would look like had he “never been born,” I think it may be similarly shocking to see what the world would look like today without Christianity’s influence.

For one thing, we wouldn’t have thousands of volunteers working in prisons to help incarcerated men and women return to their communities as productive citizens. We’d certainly see fewer hospitals and free clinics. After all, I’ve seen a lot of Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic hospitals, but I can’t remember any Buddhist, atheist, or New Age ones, or for that matter food kitchens, or rescue missions, or adoption agencies, or disaster relief organizations, or entrepreneurial training programs. And good luck sustaining free, public education to the millions of students once religious schools shut their doors. When Christians “keep it to ourselves,” everybody loses.

Though many in the media don’t get that point, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof does, and good for him. “In liberal circles,” Kristof recently wrote, “evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly. And yet the liberal caricature of evangelicals,” he continues, “is incomplete and unfair. But I’ve been truly awed by those I’ve seen in so many remote places, combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lord’s work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided.”

To make his point, Kristof points to just one example. On a recent trip to the war-torn nation of Angola, he met medical missionary Dr. Stephen Foster, who has been working there — without the world’s acclaim — for 37 years. The white-haired doctor, who is now 65, has stood firm against six-foot cobras, enraged Marxist soldiers, and horrible health and working conditions. One of his sons contracted polio; a daughter survived a cerebral hemorrhage. As Kristof relates, his son Rob says, “For a while I blamed my dad and his high-risk dedication to others. Today ... I am no longer bitter or resentful. If me getting polio meant that thousands of lives were either saved or immeasurably improved by my father’s work, then so be it.”

So we should keep our faith to ourselves?

Or consider those like Dr. Kent Brantley or other Christian medical professionals, who courageously fought and are fighting Ebola at great personal risk. Should they leave the public square and stop acting on the basis of their beliefs? Are the guardians of so-called “civil rights” willing to go in their place?

Now it’s true that sometimes we Christians undermine our witness by wrong words and deeds, but it’s also true that we’ve brought a lot more to our neighbors and communities than many folks realize.

A few years ago, for instance, a University of Pennsylvania researcher found that urban congregations, such as First Baptist in Philadelphia, provide millions of dollars in services to their communities in everything from marriage counseling, to helping people off drugs and alcohol, to providing K-12 education.

So like Bedford Falls and George Bailey, our society really will miss us if we are cowed into a privatized faith that keeps religion safely inside the four walls of our own churches. Christianity is not only to be believed; it must be lived — and not just for our own benefit, but for the good of our neighbors. And now of all times, we must increase our work of restoration in our communities. But that doesn’t mean be silent. Like Jesus, let’s be about the business of sharing it, both in word and in deed. Even when others tell us to keep it to ourselves.

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Outlawing Conscience: Homosexual Practice Trumps Religious Belief

You may think the day would never come when preaching the Gospel would be illegal in a Western country — when governments would restrict what Christians can teach.

You would be wrong. The persecution against the Church has taken a decisive turn in the cradle of civil liberty — the United Kingdom (UK). And it will happen in America, also, if we do not wake up to the danger.

In London last month, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights recommended regulations that would make it illegal for private, religious schools to teach that homosexual conduct is immoral. The committee claimed the regulations are needed to combat discrimination against homosexuals.

And we know about this. Last summer, the British government closed down our IFI unit because we teach that sex should be limited to heterosexual marriage. And if these regulations violate the rights of Christians — what does the government say? “Too bad.”

Luke Gormally, a fellow at London’s Linacre Centre, a Christian bioethics institute, put it this way: “The Committee could not be clearer in saying that they believe the freedom to live a practicing homosexual lifestyle trumps the freedom to live a religious lifestyle.”

The committee explicitly said that no exemption should be made for Christian schools. So, unbelievable though it sounds, Gormally notes, when it comes to sexual morality, the committee would make it illegal for Christian schools “to teach that Christianity and its principles are ‘objectively true.’”

Christian schools will not be alone in seeing their religious freedom stripped away. If this law passes, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for ministers to share the Bible’s teachings on sexual morality. Property owners who do not want, for moral reasons, to rent property to homosexuals will be breaking the law. So will Christian printers who refuse to print pro-gay literature.

Last Thursday, a House of Commons committee met to decide on the Sexual Orientation Regulations. Many MPs protested the Blair government’s refusal to allow a full debate in the House of Commons. And despite repeated appeals for a postponement, the chairperson insisted on taking an immediate vote: The regulations were upheld.

Now, the Blair government is attempting to rush the law through both houses of Parliament before opponents have time to organize. The vote will take place on Wednesday.

On that day, many Christians will be found at a prayer vigil in Old Palace Yard near the entrance to the House of Lords. We need to be praying with them, because it is going to take a miracle to keep this law from passing.

We must also realize that we are going to face this same kind of persecution if same-sex “marriage” is legalized in America. It’s already begun, especially in Massachusetts, where same-sex “marriage” was imposed by judges. For instance, a federal judge recently decreed that Christian parents cannot opt their kindergarteners out of public school classes that normalize homosexuality. And last year Catholic Charities shut down its adoption agencies rather than agree to send innocent children into homosexual homes.

This is why we desperately need to be vigilant — especially our religious liberty groups. This is why, for example, we need to pass a federal marriage amendment. If we do nothing, we are going to be facing the same future that Christians in the UK are facing: a future in which preaching the truths of the Gospel is against the law.