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A Black and White Issue 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
I was 15 years of age (growing up in White-ruled and racially segregated Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) when I read in Time magazine about the Bible Belt of the southern United States. I still recall my disbelief and puzzlement. How could the “Bible Belt” be the most Christian region in the United States and also be
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Know Nothings 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
There was a nineteenthth-century American political party known to history as the Know Nothings. Do today’s right-wing movements, some of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, warrant a comparison with that nineteenth-century political party? To do so, we must examine just what the Know Nothing, or American Nativist, Party, whose greatest influence
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The Strange Fire of Cultural Conservatism 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
Students of the Bible remember the Old Testament story of Nadab and Abihu—two priests who offered “strange fire” before the Lord in the wilderness sanctuary and were slain as a result (Leviticus 10:1, 2). This narrative has often served as a warning to Bible believers of the danger of mingling, in various ways, the sacred
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Could it Be in America?0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
Consequential circumstances can sometimes be triggered by inconsequential events. Given the versatility of wind and weather, it might seem of little consequence that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock rather than far to the south near Virginia, but nevertheless the event has etched itself deeply into the historical consciousness of the country. The Puritan settlement
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Free Exercise or Free Entitlement?0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those 16 words encapsulate what many modern declarations of religious liberty attempt to guarantee by a plethora of verbiage. James Madison penned those clauses, and deliberated whether to use the term conscience, but after much debate he opted for
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The Temple of Liberty 0
- March/April 2021
- March 1, 2021
Well into the woods of a new year, we babes of the third millennium might well take note of the dried leaves already littering the landscape. Indeed, it was only a week into 2021 that a surging crowd broke down the doors of “the temple of democracy,” to use Speaker Pelosi’s term, and pillaged its
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