The words ‘Christian persecution’,
conjure up images of first century Christians being killed by lions in the
Roman coliseum. Growing up in a free
country, I thought the persecution of Christians was distant history, and I
often wondered whether I would have had the courage to stand up for my faith. Similarly, when I read about the Crusades, I
thought they too were nothing more than long ago stories about courageous
knights defending Christian Europe from the Moors, Turks, or Muslim
invaders. And yet, here we are in the 21st
century and 100 million Christians are being persecuted in the sense that they
are being driven from their homes, crucified, beheaded and forced to flee their
homeland. Hundreds of Christian churches
have been bombed in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria and many other
places. ISIS beheads Christian children
as well as adults, and Boko Haram kills or abducts hundreds of Christian
children, selling them into slavery, or worse. In Nigeria alone, 10,000 Christians were
killed just last year. Yet, on his most
recent trip to Africa, our president condemned leaders of the African nations
for their refusal to openly endorse gay marriage, but had little to say about
the persecution of Christians or the many human rights travesties resulting
therefrom.
Here in America, “home of the brave,
land of the free”, the Little Sisters of the Poor are being relentlessly
pursued by the Justice Department for refusal to violate their religious
conviction that providing birth control, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs
is morally wrong. Hundreds of religious
and non-religious employers are seeking relief in the courts from that same
Obamacare mandate. Christian florists,
bakers and photographers who refuse to participate in gay weddings are being
fined, and in some cases arrested, for ‘violating the civil rights of the gay
couple.’ Just last week in our nation’s
capital, the Washington D.C. city council voted unanimously to revoke a 40 year
old ordinance that protected religious organizations from being forced to
endorse activities opposed to their religious beliefs, opening the door to
lawsuits if priests or ministers refuse to perform gay marriage, or if they
openly oppose abortion.
This past Sunday was the Feast of the
Baptism of the Lord, commemorating the beginning of Jesus public ministry. Those of us who are baptized are called upon
to decide whether or not we acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, and profess
belief in Him and the Church He established.
The alternative is to believe that He was no more than a gifted,
itinerant preacher. Are we willing to
stand up for our belief, or have we given in to the relentless criticism of
Christians as intolerant, naïve, and perhaps somewhat dim-witted for believing
in “pie-in-the-sky?”
Fr. Robert Baron explains that there
are two prevalent “meta-narratives” in the world. A meta-narrative explains how people understand
and explain their view of the world. The
first holds that the age of enlightenment in the 18th century was
the ‘coming of age’ of human reason, when the great thinkers of the age debunked
religion and relegated it to the dustbin of history. In doing so, they ushered in a new
progressive political agenda that calls for improving humanity through science
and technology. The second
meta-narrative is that the highpoint of human history was the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ who revealed the true nature of God and our
supernatural nature as children of God.
Belief in the first narrative played out in the establishment of
Communism, and continues through the pursuit of the liberal, progressive and
socialist political agendas. The second
is essentially the conservative, Christian worldview. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others
carried out their agenda by dint of force, attempting to eradicate all
religious belief which they viewed as an impediment to human progress, and simply
killing or abandoning all the people they thought were dragging down humanity’s
progress. Despite the economic and
social failure of Communism and Fascism, the liberal, progressive political
continues, if more subtly, in Western nations, and the toll in human lives is
no less staggering. While the Communists
executed tens of millions in their effort to rid the world of the “unfit,” 50
million babies have been murdered in the USA alone, at the hands of the secular
meta-narrative. In the Middle East,
Islamic fascists openly persecute and murder Christians, seizing control of
entire regions in their effort to establish a new world-wide Caliphate in much
the same way Mohammed and his successors did for 1000 years, from the middle of
the first to the middle of the second millennium. This week in France, 40 world leaders joined
to demonstrate their solidarity in opposing the advance of this effort (sans
any US presence). Could this be the
beginning of a new Crusade to push back the advances of Islamic extremism?
In the meanwhile, the secular,
progressive agenda, led by the Obama administration and implemented through the
departments of Health and Justice, continue to harass Christians, and threatens
them with government imposed fines and lawsuits if they dare follow their
religious conscience on matters of abortion and gay marriage. Our government also directly funds abortions
with a half billion dollars given directly to Planned Parenthood and billions
more in Obamacare funding of abortions as required in the new plans which, by
law, must include abortion coverage. 87%
of the people enrolled in these plans receive federal subsidies to pay for
their coverage.
The question for us is whether or not
we are willing to stand up and fight for the Christian meta-narrative. Will we endorse open resistance toward the
advance of Islamic terrorists, in effect launching a crusade to stop the
creation of a worldwide Caliphate? This
is almost a rhetorical question because it’s easy to see the danger of growing
terrorism incited by those who believe they are called by Ala to impose their
religion on the entire world. But other
extreme is a government attempting to impose the secular meta-narrative on its
citizens, and essentially eradicating the exercise of religious belief. As Christians, we must resist this advance of
the secular meta-narrative before it takes complete control of our country, led
by the incumbent administration which has been methodically ignoring and
dismantling religious freedom as prescribed by the First Amendment. This must be what Jesus meant when He said
that He has come to earth to light a fire, and that fire is the Spirit of
Truth. Will America remain "home of the brave and land of the free," or will we succumb to the secular meta-narrative?
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