(CP) The president of a nonprofit Christian persecution watchdog that monitors hostility to faith and freedom abroad warned that too few Christians in America and the West seem aware of how such trends are manifesting at home.
“Basically, we’re frogs within the kettle, and the bubbles keep coming up under us,” Jeff King, president of the Washington DC-based International Christian Concern (ICC), told The Christian Post.
“Too many individuals aren’t aware politically, they usually’re so used to pondering of how things were that they cannot work out where these bubbles are coming from, not realizing they’re being cooked.”
ICC, which was founded in 1995 to advocate for the persecuted church all over the world, has been speaking out, particularly about Staci Barber’s case in Texas.
Barber is a college teacher who sued the Katy Independent School District near Houston in March after her principal allegedly reprimanded her last September for praying with two other teachers at the college’s flagpole as a part of “See You At the Pole,” an annual international event.
The administrator reportedly told her that teachers weren’t allowed to hope where students could see them and be influenced to hitch, in response to the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ). Teachers were told they “couldn’t pray in any location where students could be present, even when this praying occurred before the college day began,” in response to the lawsuit.
Barber had previously been barred from starting a campus chapter of Students for Christ, and the college board instituted a policy mandating that “employees will neither advance nor inhibit religion.”
“Employees may not promote, lead, or take part in religious activities of noncurriculum-related student groups,” the policy stated, which the ACLJ argued is “blatantly unconstitutional,” in response to the Christian Broadcasting Network.
King told CP that Barber’s case “highlights the depth of ignorance amongst school boards and even on the principal level of what rights the Constitution grants people,” but he suggested her situation is symptomatic of a wider hostility toward Christians within the U.S. in any respect levels.
King warned that the identical trends his nonprofit has been tracking and advocating against overseas are increasingly manifesting within the historically free nations of the Western world, including the United States. He pinpointed a corrupt, cumbersome judicial process and proliferating hate speech laws because the major prongs of the attack on Christian beliefs.
King explained that dictators and despots will promise religious liberty out of 1 side of their mouths while at the identical time effectively mandating that religious residents keep their opinions to themselves and out of the general public square.
“If that sounds familiar, there is a reason,” he said. “The big picture, and what people need to know, is that is what is going on on here within the West, and that is what numerous individuals who dislike Christianity are proposing and attempting to push forward.”
In countries where leaders possess antipathy toward Christianity, a politically weaponized judicial system plays a key role in chilling speech and driving Christians to self-censor, King said. He cited the instance of India, where Christians are increasingly persecuted and their churches vandalized despite the guarantee of non secular freedom within the country’s structure.
“They have religious freedom of their structure, but it surely doesn’t matter,” he said of India. “It’s what happens in practice. And so when pastors are sometimes attacked within the streets or within the churches, guess who gets arrested? It’s the pastor. What happens is you retain your head down. So that is what we’re seeing within the States.”
Even if courts rule against the bad actors, King noted that the onerous judicial process itself is sufficient to convey the regime’s message.
“People learn that you just don’t stick your head up, and also you start being quiet because the method is the punishment,” he said, adding that he has even seen examples of comparable situations in Christian ministries within the U.S. where employees have been dragged before HR for not “toeing on the road” on LGBTQ issues and pronoun usage.
He pinpointed that essentially the most egregious hate speech laws are in Canada and Europe, but noted that the identical impulse to clamp down on speech — especially regarding sexuality — can be emerging within the U.S. with proposed laws similar to the Equality Act.
“It’s strategic, it’s banana republic, and these are political enemies of Christianity,” he said. “They’ve gained power, they usually’re using the very laws, the very power of democracy, to go against their political enemies.”
King also observed that American culture has shifted dramatically inside the past 30 years or so, and that the population has been “softened up” to the creeping totalitarian and anti-Christian impulses of their political leaders.
Noting how such things have progressed steadily along a spectrum, he was reluctant to trace such trends to any particular yr or event, but said they appeared to escalate as a backlash to the political rise of the Moral Majority in the course of the Eighties.
Likening their influence to “poison that is been poured into the masses for the last 30 years,” King said media and the entertainment industry have played a pivotal role for many years in promoting immorality and portraying people of religion in a negative light.
“When you employ propaganda, you may turn the masses over time, and that is part of what is happened,” he said, adding that a hedonistic society views Christians as an unwelcome “giant stop sign” against such impulses, which results in constructing resentment.
Regarding whether there’s any hope that things will be turned around, King acknowledged that while some recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been favorable, the behavior of many school boards and employers is “discouraging.”
He also said that with the rise of cancel culture, the general public discourse has also shifted from encouraging vigorous debate to considering it acceptable to silence and “punish those that have different views.”
King maintained that Christians must first seek revival in their very own spheres of influence.
“This really comes all the way down to revival, and it starts with us personally,” he said. “We’ve all got to show back and cry to the Lord about not the political state of our country, however the religious state,” he said.
“We desperately need revival, and that each one starts with us personally seeking to the Lord and saying, ‘Call me back and I’m completely yours, whatever you’ll have me do. All of my life is yours.'”
