Mike Huckabee: U.S. moving toward 'criminalization of Christianity'

[RGCheek]

"The United States is moving toward “criminalization of Christianity” as a result of legalizing same-sex marriage, Mike Huckabee told a group of conservative pastors in a conference call organized by the Family Research Council.

“I think it’s fair to say that Christian convictions are under attack as never before,” Huckabee said Thursday, according to audio of the call obtained by Right Wing Watch, a project of the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way. “Not just in our lifetime, but ever before in the history of this great nation. We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”…

“If the courts rule that people have a civil right not only to be a homosexual but a civil right to have a homosexual marriage, then a homosexual couple coming to a pastor who believes in biblical marriage who says ‘I can’t perform that wedding’ will now be breaking the law,” he said. “Let me make clear: It’s not just saying, ‘I’m sorry you have a preference.’ No, you will be breaking the law subject to civil, for sure, and possibly criminal penalties for violating the law, depending on how the law is written in communities, states and in the nation.”

Huckabee told the pastors that if they do follow their convictions according to the Bible, “your behavior will be criminal.”

“Once the courts have been allowed to run over us and nobody stands up for us in the other two branches of government, then God help us all,” he said.

Read more: politico.com/story/2015/04/mike-huckabee-us-criminalization-of-christianity-117310.html#ixzz3YJa1rIQ1

The criminalization of Christianity seems to be happening on multiple fronts. In the arena of parenting practices and law, Christian Biblical practice of using corporal punishment is being categorized as ‘abuse’. In civil law, same sex marriage is being set up as a constitutional right that it will be criminal to refuse participation. It is now illegal in many communities to even feed the homeless. Reading the first chapter of the book of Romans can get you arrested in the UK, Canada and Australia.

And beyond mere legalities, the social activism of anti-Christians has put Christian activists back on their heels. In politics Christians intent on reviving a Christian culture are attacked as ‘Dominion Theology’ advocates and even a conservative Christian version of Facebook was hounded into extinction with porn and an avalanche of trolls and spam. In modern America you may have the legal right to be a Christian and express your opinions, but don’t try to make a big deal about it or you might end up being ostracized even within your own church.

Without the ability to effectively organize to represent their own interests, how can Christians have even a remote chance to fight back against the criminalization of Christian practices?

And in all of this, where is the Christian clergy who are supposed to be our leaders of the flock and guard it against the wolves?

 

[phil_at_dayboro]

Who comes up with these ideas,

 

[Petaro]

Don’t know about America but it isn’t illegal to read the Bible publicly in Australia. No one cares.
That is not to say that Christian morality is not under legal threat in America. If you cannot feed the poor legally in Texas, or if you can be fined for not baking a cake your civil liberties are not under threat, they are gone.
The litigious madness that is America has not infected the rest of the West; however the aggressive gay and lesbian agenda is in our media; and is creeping into our discrimination laws. However as Australia is one of the most Godless and secular nations on the earth we do not have the aggressive Anti-Christian legal cases attempting to secure not just a separation of Church and State, but the eradication of all overt Christian worship within society that is so prevalent in the US. (I am not sure which is better… may be worthwhile having a public battle rather than the lukewarm apathy we have here.)

 

[St_Francis]

The Left (however far to the Right it stretches) wants everything to flow through the government or an entity under the government’s thumb, because they want to be God.

Now they have something to hold over the heads of Christians–that might explain the extreme push for SS"M".

 

[RGCheek]

Don’t know about America but it isn’t illegal to read the Bible publicly in Australia. No one cares.
That is not to say that Christian morality is not under legal threat in America. If you cannot feed the poor legally in Texas, or if you can be fined for not baking a cake your civil liberties are not under threat, they are gone.
The litigious madness that is America has not infected the rest of the West; however the aggressive gay and lesbian agenda is in our media; and is creeping into our discrimination laws. However as Australia is one of the most Godless and secular nations on the earth we do not have the aggressive Anti-Christian legal cases attempting to secure not just a separation of Church and State, but the eradication of all overt Christian worship within society that is so prevalent in the US. (I am not sure which is better… may be worthwhile having a public battle rather than the lukewarm apathy we have here.)

While I agree with much of that, Australia does have a fairly virulent anti-hate speech code that extends into every form of communication, and sexual orientation has been added to its rubric of things that one cannot discriminate against.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Australia

religioustolerance.org/auspeech.htm

culturecampaign.blogspot.com/2007/12/pastor-found-guilty-of-hate-crime.html

thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/14991-american-arrested-for-anti-homosexual-statements

1timothy4-13.com/files/teach/danger.html

religioustolerance.org/hatespeech.htm

 

[RGCheek]

Who comes up with these ideas,

Satan, a.k.a. Lucifer.

 

[grotto]

We love our Faith, Family and Freedom - and protect it! So if the enemy tries to harm us we will fight. Jesus I trust in You, have mercy on us!

 

[RGCheek]

The Left (however far to the Right it stretches) wants everything to flow through the government or an entity under the government’s thumb, because they want to be God.

Now they have something to hold over the heads of Christians–that might explain the extreme push for SS"M".

I have long held the theory that our dominant oligarchy of wealthy families in the USA have only been marginally Christian at best, and downright diabolical at worst. They were the source for the eugenics laws, the racism laws and the anti-drug laws that have caused so much misery and oppression in our country.

The trouble is that our clergy, lawyers and scientists are educated through institutions under the direct control of these oligarchies and so everyone buys into the rubric of values that are expressed in general on a wide variety of subjects.

And so we have Christians that are Biblical on some issues but see the social consensus in college as defining what is the norm on all other issues that they not yet studied. So we have Christians who are against SSM, but support gun registration, think the Shroud of Turin a fake, and that Thomas Jefferson raped his slave Sally Hemmings. And yet all of these are wrong, not just one or two of them and these Christians undermine efforts to thwart the advance of these liberal advocacies.

We get played one against the other because we still accept the university academic elites word for things despite the general embrace of the Big Lie techniques among leftist ideologues.

In other words, we have met the enemy and they are us in the form of our gullibility toward authoritative sources of information that are not authoritative nor even basically honest.

 

[RGCheek]

We love our Faith, Family and Freedom - and protect it! So if the enemy tries to harm us we will fight. Jesus I trust in You, have mercy on us!

To fight as one individual or one family against a Leviathan is suicide. A better stratagem is to hide and await the awakening of our clergy, our shepherds to protect us as is their God given duty and role, and pray that it isn’t too long a wait.

 

[grotto]

Well, one has to develop their best way to fight when threatened. Me and mine are not waiting when its before us.

 

[spedteacherita]

Hi, all!

I just wanted to ask - did the recently martyred Christians wait for their leaders and clergy? I don’t think so.

What about those who were led into the Colliseum with fierce animals and other otrocities with which to face?

We can’t hide and wait…we need to be on the front lines and fight for our right to believe as we do for our children who come after us…and for those unbelievers who want to do harm or think evil of our beliefs.

God be with us all…and please send Jesus back soon!!

Rita

 

[baliano]

Where do you all think we are along this path?

Progression of Religious Persecution:

stigmatizing the targeted group,
marginalizing its role in society,
vilifying it for alleged crimes or misconduct,
criminalizing it,
and finally, persecuting it outright.

 

[RGCheek]

Where do you all think we are along this path?

Progression of Religious Persecution:

stigmatizing the targeted group,
marginalizing its role in society,
vilifying it for alleged crimes or misconduct,
criminalizing it,
and finally, persecuting it outright.

Well given the criminalization of Biblical corporal punishment, the criminalization of expression of Biblical morality, and the criminalization of the moral right to follow your own conscience, it seems clear we are at the ‘criminalizing it’ stage but it isn’t yet fully overt.

 

[Neofight]

I would take it with a grain of salt, it’s political season and he is pandering to party members in his base, who are primarily evangelicals, to get them whipped up to make sure they get active and vocal in support for anyone that will get the Republican nomination.

 

[RGCheek]

Hi, all!

I just wanted to ask - did the recently martyred Christians wait for their leaders and clergy? I don’t think so.

What about those who were led into the Colliseum with fierce animals and other otrocities with which to face?

We can’t hide and wait…we need to be on the front lines and fight for our right to believe as we do for our children who come after us…and for those unbelievers who want to do harm or think evil of our beliefs.

When a person is martyred they don’t have to wait for their bishops and other clergy as the enemy just does it at their own schedule.

How we respond to the persecution is what I am discussing. If we do it on an individual basis, we lead our own selves to the slaughter. This is the bane of all who oppose evil change. We simply need to survive it by going underground, back to the catacombs, if you will.

We will win for various reasons:

1. God is with us.
2. Demographically we will out produce our enemies with children.
3. We will frustrate the authorities who will find themselves spending absurd amounts of government finance to do what? Tell us what we can and cannot believe? Yes, and how difficult is that?
4. and the persecution will sharpen our minds, purge us of weak members, strengthen our zeal and make us better servants of our Lord who does not wish us to play Caesar, but to be with Him. And the blood of the martyrs has always been irrefutable proof of this reality and far more effectively spreads the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But why make it any easier for our enemies by leaping into the flames voluntarily?

That is what we do when we respond to provocateurs and informants.

 

[DevotedChild]

The Left (however far to the Right it stretches) wants everything to flow through the government or an entity under the government’s thumb, because they want to be God.

They want a communist government, but they won’t say out right, but in the end, that is what they want.

Oh and how this starts to remind me of the horrors that North Korea does to it’s Christians. I’d hate to think that we are slowly becoming like North Korea and Syria. With the government pulling the strings and or just turning a blind eye to those arrested for their faith as others clobber them to death.

 

[unstoppable_II]

…

We get played one against the other because we still accept the university academic elites word for things …

All ideas originate with academia; that’s what we pay them for. The downside is that anyone who doesn’t accept their word for something, that person is considered unenlightened. Think The Emperor’s New Clothes, about a situation where no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes.

 

[Mount_Carmel]

Here in the UK and the rest of Europe we Christians are also feeling the heat and opression of atheistic politics.

 

[unstoppable_II]

Here in the UK and the rest of Europe we Christians are also feeling the heat and opression of atheistic politics.

“As a result [of the 500-year test] we are seeing the end of Christendom – not the end of Christianity – not the end of the Church – but the end of the influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic on the primary institutions of Western Civilization.” – Bishop Fulton Sheen.

And it’s been a while since he first said that.

 

[ChurchSoldier]

When a person is martyred they don’t have to wait for their bishops and other clergy as the enemy just does it at their own schedule.

How we respond to the persecution is what I am discussing. If we do it on an individual basis, we lead our own selves to the slaughter. This is the bane of all who oppose evil change. We simply need to survive it by going underground, back to the catacombs, if you will.

We will win for various reasons:

1. God is with us.
2. Demographically we will out produce our enemies with children.
3. We will frustrate the authorities who will find themselves spending absurd amounts of government finance to do what? Tell us what we can and cannot believe? Yes, and how difficult is that?
4. and the persecution will sharpen our minds, purge us of weak members, strengthen our zeal and make us better servants of our Lord who does not wish us to play Caesar, but to be with Him. And the blood of the martyrs has always been irrefutable proof of this reality and far more effectively spreads the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But why make it any easier for our enemies by leaping into the flames voluntarily?

That is what we do when we respond to provocateurs and informants.

I agree with much of what these sentences say. It is a large reason the Evangelical Protestant churches which preach “it’s about relationship, not religion” are setting large numbers of people up to be pushed away from the faith. It is all about “them” rather than “their part in the larger mission of the church”. They are outside a body of believers and therefore isolated.

But an individual can do amazing things, particularly when they have a deep belief in the mission. We are given an example in a man named Shamgar found in Judges 3:31 “After him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who killed six hundred men of the Philistines with an ox goad; and he also delivered Israel.”. He is only mentioned one other time which actually just refers back to this passage. One man with a stick delivered Israel.

The second example are the Apostles, who, while generally separated from the group were on mission to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. Obviously they changed the world.

So while the practice of the Christian Faith will certainly move to a less prominent place in our public life for a while, any given individual can make a huge difference when they make it their mission to do so.

Pax.