Last week President Obama came out in support of gay ‘marriage.’ (Selections from the video in which he made the remarks can be viewed here). Moreover, the Presidents’ itinerary suggests that he will have more to say on the subject of same-sex ‘marriage’ in the days immediately ahead.
Everyone is talking about this announcement, together with the remarks of Vice President Biden that preceded it, as if it is a real shock. To those who have been carefully watching the president, however, it comes as no surprise. Last year we reported in our Newsletter how President Obama had told the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in
the federal courts.
DOMA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and mandates that the federal government can only recognize a union between one man and one woman as being a ‘marriage’. DOMA also restricts benefits to married couples.
The Attorney General also announced last year (on Feb. 23) that the President believes DOMA discriminates against homosexuals by denying them marital benefits.
The final stage in this process will either be for individual states in America or the federal government itself to grant legal recognition to same-sex ‘marriage.’ If and when that ever happens, we know from the example of Sweden what the result will be. Ever since 2009 when the Swedish government passed a gender neutral marriage law, allowing for homosexual “marriages,” the nation has been working overtime to try to eradicate gender distinctions from every other facet of life. Here are just some examples, most of them taken from Nathalie Rothschild article “Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen,”. While some of these examples are just plain silly, others indicate a type of social totalitarianism that should concern everyone who values freedom of speech and freedom of thought:
The country’s online National Encyclopedia has added the pronoun, hen, to the language. It explains the term as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].” (The genderless pronoun “hen” had to be borrowed from the Finnish language since the Swedish language did not possess an appropriate equivalent.)
Sweden’s first gender-neutral children’s book has already been published, with the new pronoun used throughout. Similarly, the Swedish lifestyle magazine, Nöjesguiden, recently released an issue in which hen is used throughout.
A Swedish children’s clothes company has removed separate boys and girls sections from their stores, choosing instead to mix everything up.
A Swedish toy catalogue recently decided to switch things around, showing a girl in denim riding a tractor and a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram.
The Swedish Bowling Association is planning to merge male and female bowling tournaments to make the sport gender-neutral.
Law-makers have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms in public places.
Various Swedish preschools have banned pupils making references to the gender of other students, so that teachers can no longer say things like, “good morning, boys and girls.”
These examples suggest that there is a relentless logic at work. After all, if the distinctions between men and women do not matter with respect to marriage, then we might legitimately ask where you draw the line. If it is the case (as advocates of same-sex “marriage”, and now the President, argue is the case) that trying to preserve gender distinctions with respect to marriage is an act of discrimination, sexism, and bigotry, then why is it legitimate to maintain these distinctions in any area of life? That is the question Sweden is now asking, and the answers they are giving are hardly reassuring.
In nations other than Sweden we see even even alarming trajectory once same-sex ‘marriages’ are legalized. After the Netherlands legalized same-sex ‘marriage,’ they began giving legal recognition to threesomes. After Spain did the same they began changing birth certificates so as to refer to ‘Progenitor A’ and ‘Progenitor B’ rather than ‘mother’ and ‘father’. In Mexico City, proposals were subsequently introduced to allow for fixed-term marriages. Canada introduced ‘gay marriage’ and there are now credible and logical attempts to use the measure as a precedent for legalising polygamy.
This should also serve as a warning to our nation, which is now in the process of attempting to legalize same-sex ‘marriage.’
To learn about why gay ‘marriage’ is wrong and what you can do about it, visit our new briefing paper on the topic at the following link:
Christians in the UK are being ‘driven underground’ and ‘vilified’ by British judges, former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has warned.
Lord Carey condemned British judges who ‘consistently applied equality law to discriminate against Christians.’ The result, he warned, is that Christians are being progressively driven out of the public sphere.
The former archbishop’s remarks form part of a written submission he is presenting to the European Court of Human Rights, in advance of a hearing in Strasbourg on 4 September which will look at the cases of various British employees who have been discriminated against in the workplace because of their Christian beliefs.
He will be asking the European Court of Human Rights to intervene to safeguard Britain’s religious freedoms.
Among the concerns he is raising is the fact that believers are being treated as ‘bigots’, while many face being fired from their jobs simply for expressing their Christian beliefs. He blamed this on a ‘secular conformity of belief and conduct’ which is resulting in the Christian faith being effectively ‘banned’ from public.
He continued: ‘In a country where Christians can be sacked for manifesting their faith, are vilified by state bodies, are in fear of reprisal or even arrest for expressing their views on sexual ethics, something is very wrong….’
“Christians are excluded from many sectors of employment simply because of their beliefs; beliefs which are not contrary to the public good”.
A blog on the Daily Telegraph has shown how the bus advert storm has highlighted a homosexual activist U-Turn.
Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, says it used to be ‘the gays’ who emphasised their choice of sexuality and said they had a right to whatever orientation and lifestyle they wanted.
Now, he says, organisations like Stonewall have switched their position. Now it is all: ‘Be nice to poor us; we cannot change who we are; we are stuck like it; get over it!’
He also says that nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Christians held to the determinist position, but that they have switched around as well. He is on less sure ground there, although it depends on which theology a certain Christian holds. The evangelicals, such as the prison psychiatrist of Liverpool nick in the 1950s, Dr F H Brisby, who wrote an article for the BMA cataloguing homosexuals who had changed which was submitted to the Wolfenden Committee, have always maintained that Christ can heal and transform our pathological nature.
But as for ‘the gays’, he is bang on target. When I researched my book ‘The Sexual Dead End’, I found a strong emphasis amongst homosexual writers of the 1970s and 1980s on sexual freedom and the right to choose our ‘orientation’. Agreed, it was strongest amongst the lesbians, where ‘going gay’ is seen as a logical feminist rejection of what they see as a male-dominated society.
Books like ‘Pink Triangles’ and ‘With downcast gays’ had a theme of sexual freedom, but it was at its strongest in the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. In other words it was the radical end of homosexual activism which emphasised freedom of choice, while the political savvies saw that determinism was a better way to achieve their aims.
All the same, Leo Abse, when bringing in the Sexual Offences Bill 1967, which started the whole gay machine rolling, attributed the curse, as he put it, of homosexuality to a lad growing up without a father figure with whom to identify. The lack of a proper identification as a member of one’s one sex is still seen as one of the routes into homosexuality by conservative psychiatric professionals – and Christians in healing ministries, today.
Homosexual behaviour was looked upon as just a matter of sin until people like Carl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfield came along in the l880s and proposed the ‘third sex’ idea. Sigmund Freud opposed their determinism and rejected a genetic or hormonal predisposition in a move which was catastrophic to homosexual political aspirations.
It was when Simon Le Vay found differences in the brains of homosexual men as against a heterosexual control group that the determinists got really exited, despite LeVay himself admitting:
“It’s important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain (as quoted in Byrd, et al., 2001).”
Hard on Le Vay’s heels came Bailey and Pillard’s ‘gay twins’ in 1992/1993 and Dean Hamer’s ‘gay gene’ in 1993. Now the determinists and the homosexual politicos were cooking. Hamer’s results have not been replicated, and he didn’t claim to have found a ‘gay gene’ responsible for all homosexuality either.
So to come right up to the present, the Christians behind the proposed bus ads are emphasising what gay activists were in the 1980s, that a homosexual lifestyle is chosen, learnt behaviour. Where they differ is in mainataining that such a lifestyle is not a good thing and that the underlying pathologies can be dealt with and a person restored to how God intended him or her to be through the healing power of Jesus Christ.
And it works; men and women have walked away from the homosexual lifestyle and had their orientation changed by Jesus Christ. Their stories are the ones which cannot be allowed to be heard in today’s politically correct climate, but they will not go away.
And it is because Christian healing is such a political time-bomb that Stonewall have to reject it, with all the determist fervour they can muster.
Followingthe 2003 publication of Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a renaissance of interest in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. This ancient heresy has exerted its tentacles deep into the fabric of contemporary life, even influencing the church in many unhelpful ways. (To read about some of the ways that Gnostic ideas have infiltrated the church, see my article, ‘Eight Gnostic Myths You May Have Imbibed’.)
At the heart of the Gnostic heresy was the notion that the material world is bad. If the fundamental antithesis for Christianity was between good and evil, for the Gnostics the fundamental antithesis was between the physical and the spiritual. The material world is bad, they argued, precisely because it is physical. True spirituality involves escape from this world. Whereas the Christian tradition taught that redemption history culminates in the resurrection of the body, Gnostics believed that the goal of salvation was eternal disembodiment.
The Gospel of Thomas… gives esoteric insight into the spiritual realm, but fails to offer either vision or hope for the present world. Whereas the canonical gospels carefully chart Jesus’ ministry within the context of Israel’s story line, showing how Christ brings the narrative of Israel to its climactic fulfillment, Thomas completely neglects this larger narrative of redemption history.
The absence of a redemptive-historical narrative in Thomas is not surprising. For the Gnostics, there is no redemption history of the world because salvation is not about what happens in this world. Rather, redemption is about escaping from the world.
Because of their anti-creational orientation, many Gnostics them taught that sexuality is at the heart of our fallen condition. Being immersed in the material world has given rise to the unfortunate reality of sexual differentiation, and the existence of beings that are capable of uniting sexually. In the Gnostic utopia, however, the gender polarity will be obliterated, as women migrate into a condition of masculinity. Thus in verse 114 of The Gospel of Thomas, we read,
Simon Peter said to Him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.”
Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
There is more than mere misogyny going on in the idea that “Every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” For the world-hating Gnostics, the very idea of there being two sexes was anathema. Many Gnostics attempted to achieve a unisex society this side of paradise, teaching an ideal of asceticism that saw celibacy as the only truly spiritual option.
Unfortunately, Gnostic pessimism about sex influenced many of the church fathers, who imported into the Christian faith Platonic and Stoic notions concerning the body. The first-century Stoic Seneca expressed the mood well when he declared,
“All love of another’s wife is shameful; so too, too much love of your own. A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not affection. Let him control his impulses and not be borne headlong into copulation. Nothing is fouler to love a wife like an adulteress. . . . Let them show themselves to their wives not as lovers, but as husbands.”
This devaluing of conjugal love within the Gnostic and Stoic traditions was reinforced by the influence of Platonism within Mediterranean society. Though not all scholars agree that Plato took a pejorative view of the body, in Plato’s Phaedo Socrates talks about the body in ways that deeply resonated with the later Gnostic movement:
Plato
“We are convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things in isolation with the soul in isolation…. If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will be isolated and independent of the body. It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall keep as close as possible to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body…”
The idea here seems to be that the body holds the soul back from perfect knowledge, so that the philosophers’ task is to disengage himself as much as possible from the trappings of the physical body.
Given the fact that many of the church fathers were deeply influenced by Platonism, it is not surprising to find early Christian teachers imbibing a Platonic and Gnostic view of the body. Saint Jerome (c. 347 –420) reflected Gnostic assumptions when he taught that the more we love God, the less we will have leftover for human affection.
“It is hard for the human soul to avoid loving something, and our mind must of necessity give way to affection of one kind or another. The love of the flesh is overcome by the love of the spirit. Desire is quenched by desire. What is taken from the one increases the other….In paradise Eve was a virgin… virginity is natural while wedlock only follows guilt…”
For Jerome, Marriage was a necessary evil in order that virgins could be produced:
“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell.” The thirteenth-century French Dominican Vincent of Beauvais put the matter rather brusquely: “a man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife or too much love for one’s own is shameful.”
Jerome was not alone. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) also reflected gnostic and neo-Platonic ideas about the body, arguing that sexuality only came about after, and because of, Adam’s fall.
St. Jerome
Despite the legacy of the church fathers, as well as the fact that a Gnostic devaluing of human sexuality continued to crop up throughout the history of the medieval church, on the whole the Christian tradition has done a good job in proclaiming the goodness of the world and our experiences in it, including the experience of marriage. The Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church have even gone so far as to consider marriage a sacrament.
The Bible itself puts an especially high valuation on marriage. The material world was proclaimed good by God (Gen 1:31), and the marriage bed is particularly honourable (Heb 13:4). We glorify God not by denying our God-given sexual desires, like some in Paul’s day were teaching (1 Timothy 4:3), but by fulfilling those desires in honourable marriage. Marriage is thus the ultimate anti-Gnostic statement, in so far as it proclaims that the material world is good, and that we can glorify God by enjoying the good things in the world that He has given us, such as sex. Thus, the Bible puts a premium on the importance of frequent sex in marriage (1 Cor. 7:5; Proverbs 5:19), and even uses the one-flesh relationship between husband and wife as a type of the love between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22-33).
What is interesting about the movement to legalize same-sex ‘marriage’ is that in many respects it is a return to Gnostic ideas about the body. Advocates of gay ‘marriage’ will frequently downplay the physical aspects of marriage, urging instead that marriage is not primarily about becoming one-flesh physically, but a spiritual and emotional connection for which our physical experiences are extrinsic rather than intrinsic.
In downplaying the importance of consummation in marriage, advocates of same-sex ‘marriage’ have tried to reduce the meaning of marriage to merely a loving and committed relationship between two adults. It’s an emotional and relational union that creates the necessary conditions for marriage, they argue, not what you do with your bodies. In fact, the physical anatomy of the adults in question is irrelevant. Marriage is first about the communion of souls in a committed and affectionate relationship and only secondarily about physical union.
By contrast, in traditional marriage one cannot disengage the relational and the physical aspects of union. As Robert George wrote back in 2009 in an article for First Things,
“A human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Far from being a mere instrument of the person, the body is intrinsically part of the personal reality of the human being. Bodily union is thus personal union, and comprehensive personal union—marital union—is founded on bodily union.”…
“Arguments that true marriage is something other than or broader than the union of two sexually complementary spouses necessarily suppose that the value of sex must be instrumental either to procreation or to pleasure, considered as an end in itself or as a means of expressing affection, tender feelings, etc. Thus, critics of traditional norms of marriage and sexuality say that homosexual sex acts, for example, are indistinguishable from heterosexual acts whenever the motivation for such acts is something other than procreation. That is to say, the sexual acts of same-sex partners are indistinguishable in motivation, meaning, value, and significance from the marital acts of spouses who know that at least one spouse is temporarily or permanently infertile. Thus, the argument goes, the traditional understanding of marriage is guilty of unfairness in treating sterile persons of opposite sexes as capable of marrying while treating same-sex partners as ineligible to marry.”
For the homosexual community, what we do with our bodies is irrelevant because what really matters is the motivation behind it; therefore, if the motivation behind the sex acts of homosexual partners is the same as the motivation behind the sex acts of heterosexual married couples, then the former should be able to qualify as an instance of marriage. The fact that homosexual sex acts are completely different to full sexual intercourse in marriage is irrelevant within the neo-Gnostic paradigm of the gay community: for them what really matters is what happens in the mind, emotion and soul and not the body. In fact, if their mantra that “marriage is a relationship between two committed individuals” were taken at face value, the body has little or nothing to do with marriage at all. As Adam G. Mersereau pointed out,
Some gay activists try to meet that burden by claiming that marriage is, at its core, the legal recognition of a committed, loving relationship between adults. But that is incorrect. Marriage is not, and has never been, the mere recognition of committed and loving relationships between adults. Lots of adults love one another and are committed to one another (a grandmother and her adult grandchild, or war buddies, or close sisters, and the like), but these commitments have never been considered marriage. No one would argue that these relationships are essentially the same as a heterosexual marital relationship. So it remains an open question why two homosexuals should qualify for marriage merely because they claim to love one another dearly.
Within the Christian tradition, bodies are important and help to define who we are. Our bodies are not, as homosexuals claim, an irrelevancy like race.
Within the Christian understanding, on the other hand, our bodies are important and help to define who we are. I relate to the world as a man, and this is rooted in my biological experience as a male. Similarly, my wife relates to the world as a woman, and this is grounded in her experience being biologically female. The different perspectives we bring to the world as men and women is something to be embraced, relished and enjoyed, not trivialized. By contrast, many within the homosexual community argue that our experience as members of one particular gender is really irrelevant to our functioning in the world.
The biological sex that one happens to be is like one’s race, they argue. Indeed, one of the most frequent arguments for same-sex ‘marriage’ is that opposition to it is akin to opposition to interracial marriage. Just as race is, or ought to be, irrelevant to marriage, so they argue that one’s gender is similarly irrelevant, that my actual physical anatomy is as irrelevant to my experiences in the world as the colour of my skin.
This Gnostic-like trivializing of the body has led homosexual activists to claim that one’s biology as either male or female makes absolutely no difference to a person’s experience as a parent. A dad is just the same as a mom because our biological differences are irrelevant to our lived experiences in the world. Listen to what Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse said in an article reflecting on her debate with Judith Stacey:
I crossed swords with Judith Stacey…at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter….
Treating same sex unions like marriage amounts to saying that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. It is a coin toss from a child’s point of view, whether they have two moms, two dads, or one of each.
This trivialising of our identity as men and women is something that is completely alien to the earthiness of the Christian worldview. It is a throw-back to the Gnostic movement, and to the idea in The Gospel of Thomas that in paradise there will be no sex differences. The only difference is that while the Gnostics expected that to occur in the life to come, the homosexual community is attempting to bring it into the present age. It is an attempt to achieve the sexless utopia described by feminist writer Susan Moller Okin near the end of her book Justice, Gender and the Family: “A just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”
By reducing our physical experiences as men and women to irrelevancy like this, the feminist and homosexual communities have colluded with the Gnostic lie that our bodies do not ultimately matter.
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The Conservative Mayor of London has banned London buses from carrying adverts promoting an ex-gay ministry.
Boris Johnson, who is running for re-election next month, told Transport for London to pull the adverts booked by two conservative Anglican groups within two hours of the story about the adverts appearing in the Guardian.
The ads were due to run on 24 buses on five routes and were booked on behalf of the Core Issues Trust whose leader, Mike Davidson, believes “homoerotic behaviour is sinful”.
Core Issues Trust funds “reparative therapy” for gay Christians, which it claims can “develop their heterosexual potential”. The campaign was also backed by Anglican Mainstream.
The advert was due to say: “Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!”
It was an obvious and timely send-up of the Stonewall homosexual lobby group’s bus adverts which say “Some people are gay – get over it!”
The Christian groups used the same black, red and white colour scheme as Stonewall and in a statement announcing the campaign accused it of promoting the “false idea that there is indisputable scientific evidence that people are born gay”.
Johnson, who contacted the Guardian to announce he was stopping the adverts within two hours of their contents becoming public, said: “London is one of the most tolerant cities in the world and intolerant of intolerance. It is clearly offensive to suggest that being gay is an illness that someone recovers from and I am not prepared to have that suggestion driven around London on our buses.”
The Christian groups insisted the advert had been cleared with Transport for London (TfL), which is chaired by the mayor. Davidson said: “I didn’t realise censorship was in place. We went through the correct channels and we were encouraged by the bus company to go through their procedures. They okayed it and now it has been pulled.”
CBS Outdoor, the media company that sells the bus advertising sites, said the ad had been passed for display by the Committee of Advertising Practice. It is understood TfL was due to make around £10,000 for allowing the adverts to run on about two dozen buses across five routes.
Mayor Johnson’s decision will fuel concerns over religious discrimination by showing that there is one rule for homosexual activists and another for Christians.
The move by Boris is also certain to be seen as anti-Christian by an electorate which includes a large number of evangelical Christians. Half of all Christians in London are black African or Caribbean and other fast-growing churches are heavily evangelical or pentecostal.
They have had the embarrassment of the ‘big price drop’ flop, the worst perfomance of the ‘big four’ over Christmas, the humiliation of their market share dropping below 30% for the first time since they achieved that milestone, a shock profits warning, their share price plummet almost 20%, wiping almost £5bn of their valuation, their UK operations CEO sacked, their local management in a spin and a plague of mice which shut their Covent Garden store.
What else could go wrong for Tesco and its investors? Watching the company is for many of them like watching a slow-motion car crash. Talking of which, Tesco’s online second-hand car sales venture has now run out of petroland closed. It is the latest problem to hit the stricken firm since it announced a £30,000 gift to London Gay Pride in November 2011.
Whether the Gay Pride decision has brought the wrath of God on the supermarket giant, or whether that ill-timed and ill-thought-out decision was simply a manifestation of a general and deep-seated incompetence, depends on one’s point of view.
The second-hand car business was a joint venture with the established firm Carsite, and began just twelve months ago with much fanfare, hoping to sell thousands of RAC-inspected cars at prices up to 20% below those offered by traditional forecourt dealers. Even at the halfway stage, although sales weren’t as high as hoped, things were still looking pretty good.
So what happened? Tesco said the site had come to the end of the road after it “couldn’t procure a good supply of cars”.
However, a Tesco source said that at the end of 2011, Tesco was only selling 150 vehicles a month, no more than Carsite did on its own. That suggests it was customers who couldn’t be found.
Last month the firm lost a battle when its plans to open a Tesco Express store in Herne village in Kent united the whole village against their planning application, with a local councillor branding the company ‘totally silly’.
Local parish councillor Carol Davis said: “Almost immediately the community was right against it.
“It would have meant the village store would never have survived, and that would be a tragedy. It was in totally wrong position, they are totally silly – why they ever considered it I don’t know.”
When Tesco launched its £30,000 donation to London Gay Pride, we put up an article with the headline: Prayer will humble proud Tesco. We called for a boycott and our members and friends began giving out leaflets at Tesco stores encouraging others to boycott to store in the run-up to Christmas.
Those prayers, backed up by our actions, certainly seem to have been answered in dramatic fashion.
Tesco and the £30,000 Gay Pride donation; what you can do:
1 Pray that God will send repentance into the Tesco boardroom, and that they will reverse their grant to gay pride..
2 In the meantime, Boycott Tesco and encourage others to do the same.
3 Mount a witness with banners and/or give leaflets out to shoppers outside Tesco’s high street stores ‘Tesco Direct’ (they can ask you to leave their car park, but you have every right to witness on the street). Contact us for leaflets on 01994 484544 or email info@christianvoice.org.uk (there is a spam arrest filter if you have not emailed us before). The text of the LEAFLET is HERE Always go in pairs or a group, not alone.
4 Email/write to the Tesco Group Chief Executive, Philip Clark, philip.clarke@tesco.com. You can also write to their new Chairman, Sir Richard Broadbent, at New Tesco House, Delamare Rd, Cheshunt, Herts, EN8 9SL. His email seems to be: richard.broadbent@tesco.com. Ask them what their policy is regarding freedom of speech and what advice they have given or will be giving to branch managers who have Christians leafleting outside their stores.
David Cameron has quoted from the Gospel of Luke and spoken of ‘we’ Christians at a pre-Easter reception at Downing Street.
Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell famously didn’t ‘Do God’, but Mr Cameron is making rather a habit of it. As Easter Sunday approaches, Mr Cameron has decided to “do God” in public, as Alastair Campbell might say.
He said there were three reasons why the King James Bible was as relevant today as any point in its history.
“First, the King James Bible has bequeathed a body of language that permeates every aspect of our culture and heritage. Second, just as our language and culture is steeped in the Bible, so too is our politics.
“Third, we are a Christian country. And we should not be afraid to say so. Let me be clear: I am not in any way saying that to have another faith – or no faith – is somehow wrong.”
“This is the time when, as Christians, we remember the life, sacrifice and living legacy of Christ. The New Testament tells us so much about the character of Jesus; a man of incomparable compassion, generosity, grace, humility and love. These are the values that Jesus embraced, and I believe these are values people of any faith, or no faith, can also share in, and admire.
“It is values like these that make our country what it is – a place which is tolerant, generous and caring. A nation which has an established faith, that together is most content when we are defined by what we are for, rather than defined by what we are against. In the book of Luke, we are told that Jesus said, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ – advice that when followed makes for a happier, and better society for everyone.”
He told the assembled guests that he welcomed a Christian “fightback”. He said: “I think there’s something of a fightback going on, and we should welcome that. The values of the Bible, the values of Christianity, are the values that we need.”
Interestingly, this is what Jesus said about marriage, which Mr Cameron wants to change into a ‘gay’ version:
Mar 10:6 “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. 7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; 8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. 9 What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said:
“The last verse, Mark 10:9, is normally taken to refer to individual marriages, which people in Britain today set aside as a routine. I’ve been on the receiving end of divorce on demand. Some fifty percent of marriages are now being put asunder because one party simply decides to walk out.
“But David Cameron wants to put asunder the whole institution of marriage as ordained in the beginning by God Almighty. In 2007 he voted for the Sexual Orientation Goods and Services Regulations which have been used against Christian hoteliers operating the values of the Bible, yet now he urges a ‘fightback’ against secularism.
“David Cameron voted to abolish the blasphemy laws in May 2008, which provided a foundation for a culture of respect for both God and man. In the same month he voted to allow animal/human hybrid embryos. A day later he voted to allow abortion – or the murder of children in the womb – at 16 weeks gestation, a time when every organ and every brain function is in place and operating. It was good that he quoted Christ’s ‘golden rule’ from Luke 6:13 (and Matthew 7:12) but he would not allow to be done to him what he allows to be done to children in the womb.
“It is a good beginning to call for Christian values and to urge a Christian fight-back, but Mr Cameron’s thinking needs to be joined up. He needs to be transformed by the renewing of his mind. How can he in all seriousness urge a ‘fight-back’ against the marginalisation of Christianity and against attempts to ban the wearing of crosses and crucifixes when the Home Office is fighting in the European Court to uphold exactly such a ban?
“David Cameron is right that the values of Christianity are the values that we need’ but he needs our prayers to realise that he cannot pick and choose from the Bible or from the teachings of the Lord. Yes, respect for property helps stop youth looting from shops. Yes, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you helps maintain order in society.
“But keeping a few of Christ’s commandments while breaking a raft of others is to break them all, as the Apostle James points out.
“A little like some of the church today, Mr Cameron overdoes the love and compassion of Christ, but shies away from his laws and judgments. But even then he is selective. He likes being compassionate to homosexuals to the extent of overturning God’s holy institution of marriage, but he doesn’t want a lot of compassion to be shown to last summer’s rioters, or for that matter to the disabled people being made redundant by Remploy.
“Napoleon liked religion when it maintained peace and order, and not when it challenged his assumed right to autocratic rule. Such a convenient approach seems to be catching to leaders.
“I repeat, David Cameron needs our prayers; and a few letters might not go amiss either.”
Derby City Council’s planning committee last night ignored advice from planning officers that they should refuse the application, pictured left.
The news was described as “devastating” from campaigners against the plans but scores of Muslims at the meeting audibly “thanked Allah” for the result.
Committee chairman Councillor Robin Wood said the mosque would “be an addition to some of the finest architecture in Derby”. The committee was told one planning problem remained of a kitchen wall and window that would overlook a neighbour’s garden.
But a spokesman for design consultant Archi-Structure said this could be “scaled back”.
He said the proposed site, on waste land, between Mill Hill Lane and Renals Street, was currently a “rubbish-strewn eyesore”.
Di Weston, of Mill Hill Lane, spoke for campaigners against the plan. She said: “I’m devastated. It’s too big and will dominate the whole area.” She said the residents’ parking permit in the area was not in force on Sundays or after 6pm and the roads would be full of people using the mosque at those times.
This news was the first we heard about a potential mosque in Derby. Planning applications for mosques and Muslim ‘community centres’ in other towns have been defeated by involving ‘Mosquebusters’.
Christians need to be looking over planning applications in their towns, and alert not just for mosques but mosques disguised as community centres, cultural centres or whatever. Let us know if you are prepared to do this, or if you unearth anything suspicious. Email info@christianvoice.org.uk
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It doesn’t get any better for Tesco, who have seen their ‘big price drop’ flop, sales and profits drop, the worst perfomance of the ‘big four’ over Christmas, their share price plummet, their UK operations CEO sacked, their local management in a spin, all since announcing a £30,000 gift to London Gay Pride in November 2011. And only days ago we reported on a Tesco manageress in Gravesend calling the police because one of our members was giving out our ‘Boycott Tesco’ leaflets outside her store.
This is not the first time mice have been found in Tesco. Just over a year ago, in December 2010, a shopper in Birmingham was horrified to see baby mice fall out of crisp packet she picked off the shelves in Tesco’s Aston store.
Customer Liz Wray told the Daily Mirror: “There were half a dozen of them crawling out of different holes in the crisps and we couldn’t believe our eyes. All staff did was put a cardboard box over them and close aisle six.
“I’m not sure if they were inside the multipack or if they were just in amongst the packets.
“But there were a lot of holes in the bag, they’d obviously been at them.”
She was astounded that staff did not close the store. To let mice feed in the store would be bad enough. For mice to be allowed to build a nest in the stock betrays a lack of seriousness over hygiene and general cleanliness.
And the same inability to distinguish between right and wrong is behind their decision to support ‘gay pride’. Philip Clarke was elevated to CEO and the recently-departed Philip Brasher to UK Chief in March 2011. It has all goine wrong since then. Tesco’s only hope is to put their trust in God. Repenting of the ‘Gay Pride’ decision will be part of that.
Three prominent Christian MPs have challenged the Advertising Standards Authority to produce evidence to support their assertion that God cannot heal, reports Total Politics.
“NEED HEALING? GOD CAN HEAL TODAY! … We’d love to pray for your healing right now! We’re Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness”.
In a letter (on the Total Politics link above) to the Chairman of the ASA, Lord Smith of Finsbury, the MPs, Gary Streeter MP (Con), Gavin Shuker MP (Labour) and Tim Farron (Lib-Dem), from the all-party group Christians in Parliament, mention the prayer that has gone up for Fabrice Muamba and ask if those praying for him are wrong.
As the MPs point out, a belief that God can heal today is based on ‘two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible’.
The Lord Jesus said: Mark 16:17 ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe; … 18 … they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’
The Apostle James said: James 5:14 Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: 15 And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. 16 Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
One of the claims made by the ASA is that belief that God heals might stop people going to the doctor. In fact, none of the Bath Christians would advise against medical assistance. Christian theology views medicine as a gift from God and being a doctor or nurse as a vocation. One of the evangelists, Luke, was a doctor. No Christian is going to tell a man with gall stones not to have the operation.
But just as God did not step in to save the Israelites from the advancing Egyptian army in Exodus 14 until they had exhausted all human ideas, and the woman with a flow of blood in Luke 8 had seen all the doctors before she came to Jesus, so it is often when the efforts of medicine can do no more that the miracle comes.
At other times, as in Fabrice Muamba’s case, prayer covers the whole pattern of events, such that an operation and healing go more swiftly and smoothly than anyone could imagine. And then the doctors speak of ‘a miracle’.
Faith is also important. Both the Lord Jesus and the Apostle James tell us not to doubt. The ‘double-minded’ will receive nothing from the Lord, says James. We must not pray and then say to ourselves ‘I don’t think the Lord will do it, but it’s worth a try.’ And prayer has to be fervent, from the heart.
Just put “miraculous healing” into any search engine, be encouraged, and confound the ASA!
Those who have joined Christian Voice receive our newsletter every month. In every issue, our newsletter features a column titled, ‘The Persecuted Church,’ which reports on a different country where believers face challenges, alerting our readers to prayer needs for the Christians there.
This year we have run a number of articles looking at the challenges Christians are facing in North Korea. Because of the seriousness of the issue, we are making these articles available online.
First, however, it may be helpful to have some historical background behind the worst totalitarian regime in the history of the world.
A Brief History of North Korea
The ancient principality of Korea was a unified sovereign nation since the 7th century. During and following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japanese forces occupied the peninsula.
In 1910, Japan officially annexed the nation. It was not until after WWII that Korea finally regained its independence after being liberated by Soviet and American forces. However, this “independence” meant little in practice since the Communist Russians took possession of the industrial north while the United States (under the auspices of the United Nations) took control of the agricultural south. The reason the US took possession of the South was to prevent the Soviets from occupying it in the massive land grab which followed the second world war.
Both the U.S. and the USSR approved Korean-led governments in their respective halves, each of which were favourable to the occupying power’s political ideology. The communist North, known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, supported the government of Kim Il-sung, who had been a Guerrilla fighter with the Chinese Communist forces. The US-supported South, on the other hand, was known as the Republic of Korea and officially came into existence in 1948.
Almost from the beginning of this division, the South had to contend with the North’s guerrilla movement. By the time the guerrillas were defeated, a massive concentration of troops had been amassed along the border on both sides. On June 25, 1950, a North Korean armoured brigade crashed through the line and marched toward the Southern capital of Seoul, beginning the three-year period of conflict known as the Korean War. Communist China assisted North Korea in this bloody war, while American forces fought for the South.
When the armistice agreement was finally signed on July 27, 1953, the borders simply reverted to what they had been prior to the war. To this day, it remains the most heavily fortified border in the world.
Resources
You find download links below, in addition to links to some of our recent website articles and videos about North Korea.
Kim Jong Il’s Death Highlights Concerns for Christians. This is a report we ran the day that Kim Jong Il’s death was reported. We lamented the bias in much of the mainline media in downplaying Kim Jong Il’s atrocities when covering his death. We used this as an opportunity to highlight his crimes against the Christian in the country.
Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. This post gives the background to Kang Chol-Hwan’s chilling exposé of the concentration camp system, together with a video giving satellite images of the country’s concentration camp system.
Review of Kang Chol-Hwan’s book. This is a PDF download to a full review of The Aquariums of Pyongyan: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag.
Persecution of Christians in North Korea. This is a PDF download of our February report assessing the situation in North Korea under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un.
The ability for same-sex couples to ‘marry’ is not a human right European judges have ruled.
The landmark decision comes only days after the UK Government opened a consultation on the implementation of gay ‘marriage’, based on their belief that same-sex couples in the UK are being deprived of a human right.
The case went before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg after the French lesbian couple, Valerie Gas and Nathalie Dubois, complained that they were being discriminating against by not being able to adopt an 11 year-old as a couple.
The judges declared that those in a same-sex partnership cannot be expected to have the same rights and privileges as married couples, adding, “With regard to married couples, the court considers that in view of the social, personal, and legal consequences of marriage, the applicants’ legal situation could not be said to be comparable to that of married couples.”
Although defenders of traditional marriage heralded the ruling as a victory, it was actually a mixed blessing. The ruling also said that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, then any church that refuses to offer wedding services to them will be guilty of discrimination.
“Where national legislation recognises registered partnerships between same sex,” the judges said, “member states should aim to ensure that their legal status and their rights and obligations are equivalent to those of heterosexual couples in a similar situation.”
This announcement contradicts Coalition promises that churches will not be compelled to conduct homosexual weddings under Government’s gay ‘marriage’ plans. It confirms what Church of England lawyers have already understood from analyzing equality legislation, namely that if same-sex ‘marriages’ are legalized, then equality law is likely to force churches to fall into line and perform the wedding ceremonies.
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said:
‘This ruling has massive implications for theUK. Peter and Hazlemary Bull were held to have discriminated against a homosexual couple to whom they would not let a double bed, even though they had the same policy for unmarried heterosexual couples, on the grounds that civil partnership was equivalent to marriage. TheEuropean Courthas ruled that it isn’t.
‘In addition, David Cameron has promoted his plans for ‘gay marriage’ on human rights grounds. That argument can no longer stand.’
Discrimination law specialist Neil Addison commented on the implications of the ruling:
‘Once same-sex marriage has been legalised then the partners to such a marriage are entitled to exactly the same rights as partners in a heterosexual marriage. This means that if same-sex marriage is legalised in theUKit will be illegal for the Government to prevent such marriages happening in religious premises.’
A rogue Tesco manageress has used the police to try to stop Christians giving out leaflets outside her store about Tesco’s £30,000 support of this year’s ‘London Gay Pride’.
Christian Voice member Raj Bhachoo was arrested in Gravesend on 21st January 2012 outside the Tesco Metro after the manageress called the police.
No other Christian Voice activist has reported any problem at all giving out the Tesco leaflets. Christian Voice National Director Stephen Green has not only given out the leaflets outside two Tescos near Baker Street in London, but also outside the very Tesco Metro in Gravesend where Raj was arrested, precisely two weeks after his arrest.
‘I and two Christian Voice ladies gave out 400 Tesco leaflets right outside the Gravesend Tesco on Saturday 4th February. We gave the police prior notice that this was what we were going to do. Again, the manageress came out and again she was abusive and again she called the police. But in my case the police came, walked past me, went inside Tesco, and engaged in conversation with the staff for what seemed like half-an-hour.
‘Eventually, having given out all our leaflets and getting tired of standing around in the cold, I had to go into Tesco and actually ask the police if I was going to be arrested. Receiving the answer ‘No’, I and the ladies left.
‘Clearly, Tesco staff in Gravesend do not believe in freedom of speech, but drafting in the police is counter-productive and heavy-handed. Such a problem has not been experienced anywhere else, and I call on the Tesco Chief Executive, Philip Clarke, to send a message to all his stores that we prize freedom of speech in this country and that a more mature approach is called for which does not waste police time every time a protest turns up on the doorstep.’
In view of Tesco’s action in Gravesend, there are six important and effective things Christians can do:
1 Pray that God will send repentance into the Tesco boardroom, and that they will reverse their grant to gay pride..
2 Boycott Tesco and encourage others to do the same.
3 Mount a witness with banners and/or give leaflets out to shoppers outside Tesco’s high street stores ‘Tesco Direct’ (they can ask you to leave their car park, but you have every right to witness on the street). Contact us for leaflets on 01994 484544 or email info@christianvoice.org.uk (there is a spam arrest filter if you have not emailed us before). The text of the LEAFLET is HERE Always go in pairs or a group, not alone.
4 Email/write to the Tesco Group Chief Executive, Philip Clark, philip.clarke@tesco.com. You can also write to their new Chairman, Sir Richard Broadbent, at New Tesco House, Delamare Rd, Cheshunt, Herts, EN8 9SL. His email seems to be: richard.broadbent@tesco.com. Ask them what their policy is regarding freedom of speech and what advice they have given or will be giving to branch managers who have Christians leafleting outside their stores.
A wealthy psychiatrist who provided expert evidence on parents to enable social workers to take children into care may now be struck off the medical register, according to the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Express (the latter has the fuller report, by respected journalist Ted Jeory).
Dr George Hibbert misdiagnosed parents as suffering from personality disorders, it is alleged. In one case, he is claimed to have concluded that a new mother, named only as Miss A, had bipolar disorder because the local social services department wanted her child to be adopted.
The story backs up the experience of many parents who have contacted Christian Voice. They say that Social Services use the flimsiest of excuses to take their children away from them and into care. Put before the Family Court are expert psychiatric reports laced with innuendo, loaded comments and accusations.
Such evidence would never pass unchallenged in the criminal courts, but as the Family Court operates in secrecy injustice cannot be seen when it is being done. The secrecy is supposedly to protect the children, but it can fairly be argued it is there to protect a system in which experts owe their living to social services departments and will never produce a report favourable to parents.
Christian Voice was told of one mother who was diagnosed as bipolar and a risk to her children because she liked shopping. Another was said to be a danger to her children because she burnt the toast.
Mr John Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley, told Parliament: “He [Dr Hibbert] is someone about whom a number of people have complained. I am told that at least one person has refused to work for him because of what she saw as his unethical provision of reports to suit the demands of local authorities.”
Dr Hibbert charged local authorities £6,000 a week for every family in his care and £210 an hour to read documents such as medical records. His company, Assessment in Care, made a profit of around £460,000 in 2007 from its arrangements with social services.
Christian Voice has discovered that Dr Hibbert and his live-in lover solicitor Jill Canvin operate their companies Assessment in Care Ltd and Tadpole Cottage Ltd from their home in Tadpole Lane, Blunsdon near Swindon in Wiltshire. A third company, ‘The Attachment Assessment Company Ltd’ was dissolved last year. They also own properties at Windmill Farm, Common Hill, Cricklade, Wilts.
A website www.assessments-in-care.co.uk is registered to Dr Hibbert at 14a High Street, Calne BA2 3BH, the office of Jill Elizabeth Canvin. The website is currently dormant and being held by Madasafish.
The main website www.tadpolecottage.org was taken down in summer 2012. Cached copies of its webpages revealed that Jill Canvin specialises not in representing parents, but “children in care proceedings where there are suspicions of abuse or neglect.” The cached copies are offline as well now. The website developers, Geeks Ltd, kindly provided us with a copy of the page on which the biographies of both Hibbert and Canvin were placed. These reveal that Jill Canvin is a long-standing member of the Law Society Children Panel, which means she can appear in the secret family courts.
The website heavily promoted the “Tadpole Dialectical Parenting Assessment (TDPA)” a programme which it says “combines the law and psychiatry to develop online behaviour assessment software”. It claims to be “a revolutionary approach to measuring parenting capacity using web-based computing to analyse and present a wealth of information about current behaviour relevant to parenting.”
According to that submission, parents are assessed by the Tadpole system as to whether they can:
* Consistently dress, feed, keep clean, be affectionate and protect their child;
* get their child to school on time, ready to learn;
* provide a home where he or she can achieve normal development;
* manage their own and their child’s behaviour without over-harsh discipline;
* protect the child from harm;
* organise everyday life adequately; and
* cooperate with professionals and show a capacity to recognise their own failings and accept guidance.
Social workers or psychiatric professionals in their pay could readily find fault with any competent parent using such a system. Smacking a child in the eyes of a modern social worker would be ‘over-harsh discipline’. Finding out that your child was abused behind your back would be ‘failing to protect the child from harm’. Expressing any disquiet about the involvement of social services in the first place would be failing to cooperate, whilst even the positive ‘recognise their own failings’ will be used against the parents.
It could be argued that this means making it easier to get children into care. And providing reports which assist social services to do that is how Dr George Hibbert and his cohabittee Jill Canvin make their money, lots of it. How sad that highly-qualified professionals who probably started out with the loftiest ambitions should end up selling ordinary decent people down the river.
They need our prayers. Our nation needs our prayers.
Post Script: In May 2013, the Swindon Advertiser reported that Dr Hibbert had won the right to challenge the GMC’s decision to investigate him in a judicial review.
Litigation for parents and children unjustly parted on false evidence is being handled by Paul Grant of Bernard Chill and Axtell in Southampton. Their phone number is 02380 228821.
We understand cases will be taken on where the people concerned were parties to proceedings in which:
(1) An unfavourable expert report, containing demonstrable falsehoods which can be refuted by hard evidence, and which mirrored the prejudices of social services, was accepted by the court, or
(2) A contrasting report was obtained by the parents but was ruled inadmissible, or
(3) Children were taken away and subject to a closed adoption order which, although it was granted on demonstrably false premises, cannot be reversed.
PRAY this Psalm:
Psalm 10:1 Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?
2 The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
4 The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.
5 His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of his sight: as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them.
6 He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall never be in adversity.
7 His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity.
8 He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret places doth he murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against the poor.
9 He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net.
10 He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones.
11 He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it.
12 Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.
13 Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.
14 Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.
15 Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his wickedness till thou find none.
16 The LORD is King for ever and ever: the heathen are perished out of his land.
17 LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear:
18 To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress.
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This Sunday, 18th March 2012, is Mothers’ Day (or Mothering Sunday for the more old-fashioned among us). But if the Government get their way and enact ‘Gay Marriage’, mother and father could be renamed ‘Parent A’ and ‘Parent B’ on birth certificates.
According to Labour peer Lord Brennan QC, the Stonewall homosexual lobby group have said the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ should be replaced by ‘parties to a marriage’, even while saying homosexuals want to call each other ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’. And we know that what Stonewall wants from the Con-Lib Coalition, Stonewall gets.
Lord Brennan says that in Spain, where ‘gay marriage’ was introduced in 2005, ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ were replaced on birth certificates by ‘Progenitor A’ and ‘Progenitor B’ the following year. We must not believe the Government is they say a similar thing (probably ‘Parent A’ and ‘Parent B’) cannot happen here.
Never forget, in October 2000, Home Secretary Jack Straw said: “Marriage is about a union for the procreation of children, which by definition can only happen between a heterosexual couple. So I see no circumstances in which we would ever bring forward proposals for so-called gay marriages.” But that was when he was laying the ground for the Civil Partnership Bill and trying not to frighten the conservative horses.
Lynne Featherstone, the Governments’ Equalities Minister, will publish her consultation today on how the Government wants to enact ‘Gay Marriage’. Ms Featherstone has said in her heart ‘there is no God’ (Psalm 14:1)
They are only consulting on how to do it, not whether to do it. Many people would say that smacks of arrogance. Here are some reasons why Her Majesty’s Government should keep their hands off marriage:
1. Marriage was ordained by God as the first social institution. All earthly government is subject to the power and empire of Christ our Redeemer (as Her Majesty the Queen was told at her coronation when being given the Orb set under the Cross). Therefore Her Majesty’s Government has no power to change the definition of marriage. No Church can change what God has ordained. And no State can change what God has ordained.
It does not matter whether it is church marriage, or civil marriage, it is between a man and a woman as explained in the opening chapters of the first book of the Bible:
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
At a time and in a society in which polygamy was not unknown, the Lord Jesus went right back to the creation ordinance to define marriage as it has been understood in those societies based on Christian laws right up to today:
Matt 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
2. A marriage must be consummated. In consummation, the couple become physically, emotionally and spiritually ‘one flesh’. It does not matter if theirs was a registry office wedding, they still become physically, emotionally and spiritually ‘one flesh’. Becoming one flesh is what the Lord Jesus said is the foundation of marriage, and it is something a pair of homosexuals can never do. In the immortal words of Dr David Reuben (author of ‘Everything you always wanted to know about sex’), they are trying to solve the puzzle with only half the pieces.
Under Section 12 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 a marriage is voidable if it has not been consummated due to the incapacity of either party to consummate it. Consummation requires sexual intercourse which is ordinary and complete. How will a pair of lesbians or two men achieve consummation with only half the necessary equipment?
3. Marriage at all times and in all countries has been the union of a man and a woman. Even where polygamy was practised, it was exclusively heterosexual. Even in societies, such as Ancient Greece, where homosexuality was regarded as acceptable, there was never a thought that two people of the same sex could be married. Nowhere in the world, until the last few years, has homosexual marriage even been considered.
Some people believe that human beings are evolving and that this generation is simply the smartest, wisest, most compassionate, most enlightened, cleverest bunch of people who ever walked the earth. We look around, and we see the violence, the sacrilege, the thieving, the contempt for civilised standards, the crassness, the sexualisation, the disregard for God and man, and we beg to disagree.
But we repeat, marriage is not ‘tradition’, it is divine ordinance.
David Pollock is President of the European Humanist Federation
In a speech praising the march of the secular state, European Humanist Federation president David Pollock pointed to the murderous French Revolution as a glowing example of secularism in action.
A report on the speech was published by the European Humanist Federation on the first of this month, in an article titled, ‘All states in Europe are moving towards secularism.’ The article indeed the whole website has now gone but it cited their President saying that all the states of Europe are slowly making progress towards becoming truly ‘secular.’
Unlike many who brandish around the label ‘secular’ as a panacea of all ills, expecting the rest of us to grasp what they mean by such an ambiguous term, President Pollock has done us the courtesy of defining exactly what he means (oh, and he does think it’s a panacea of all ills).
In his speech (which could at one time be read in its entirety here) but now has to be gleaned from his other Guardian offerings HERE and HERE, the late Mr Pollock said that a secular state is a state that is “neutral as between different religions and beliefs…not taking sides for or against religion or atheism, for or against one belief or another.” Secularism as such “is the best guarantor we have of freedom of religion or belief.”
While we must appreciate the clear definition, there are two immediate problems that come to mind. The first is a problem of basic logic, the second is a problem of history.
The logical problem is that it is incoherent to speak of government being neutral towards religion and non-religion, or towards belief and non-belief. Frederick Mark Gedicks explained why this was in an article for the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, titled, ‘Religions, Fragmentations, and Doctrinal Limits.’ In the article Mr Gedicks explored the logical impossibility in the very concept of a government adopting a neutral posture towards religion and non-religion. While he was writing in the context of American government, his observations are equally pertinent to the question of secularism in Europe:
I mean, really, what sense can one possibly make of a rule that requires the government to remain neutral between a proposition and its negation? One may agree or disagree about what it could mean to be ‘neutral’ between various religions, but it is at least possible to have a sensible conversation about this. By contrast, there has always been something decidedly weird about the requirement that the government be neutral between religion and nonreligion, or belief and unbelief. Indeed, the requirement seems to constitute empirical proof that even the dumbest things can start to make sense if they’re repeated often enough.
Consider then what government neutrality might mean in the context of professional baseball. It is, of course, completely sensible to require that Congress be neutral between the Red Sox and the Yankees, or that the California Legislature be neutral between the A’s, the Angels, the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Padres, or, indeed, that Congress and all of the state legislatures be neutral with respect to all thirty major league baseball teams. But what could it possibly mean for Congress and the states to be neutral as between baseball and ‘not-baseball’?
For starters, I suppose, this would mean that baseball could not be treated any differently than not-baseball. So, Congress could not grant an exemption from the antitrust laws to baseball unless not-baseball got one, too. It would, therefore, be crucial to ascertain the referent of not-baseball. Would it be the National Basketball Association? Well, it is clearly not-baseball. The American Ballet Theatre? Also not-baseball. Fly-fishing? Watching public television? Cutting my lawn? All not-baseball. The Southern Cal defensive team against Vince Young in the 2006 Rose Bowl? Still not-baseball (and also not-defense).
Logically, ‘not-baseball’ encompasses everything except ‘baseball.’ Accordingly, neutrality between baseball and not-baseball requires that every activity in the United States be exempted, like baseball, from the anti-trust laws and more generally, that every activity in the United States be treated the same as baseball. Not only is this nonsensical from a policy standpoint, it is nonsensical from any standpoint.
Get the picture? If we are really serious about government being ‘neutral’ with respect to religion and non-religion, then our laws would have to interact with the entire portion of reality that comes under the “not religion” category (from the colour of my shoes down to the screw that popped out of my computer earlier today) in the exact same way that government acts towards religion, even as neutrality with respect to baseball would require that the state interacts with the Dodgers in the exact same way that it interacts with the Yankees (American teams, but I trust you get the picture). Even putting aside the problem that to decide what goes in the non-religion category is first to presuppose certain tacit religious presuppositions, we might ask whether our secularist policy-makers have really given adequate thought to what a consistent application of such neutrality would look like in practice. I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t.
But there is another problem with Pollock’s position, and it revolves around his claim that by (supposedly) not taking sides for or against religion or atheism, one belief or another, a secular state is the best guarantor we have of individual liberty and religious freedom. Putting aside the problem that belief in the fact that the state should not take sides about beliefs is itself a belief and therefore fails to conform to its own criteria (a point that Greg Koukl helpfully reminds us about in his work on The Myth of Moral Neutrality), Pollock’s assertion fails on a purely historical level.
Though there are exceptions we could point to, broadly speaking it has been those nations which vigorously affirmed their Christian heritage that have most successfully safe-guarded personal liberties, including the freedom of other religions to practice their faiths. This is a point that even David Cameron was bound to acknowledge in the remarks he made in a speech on the King James’ Bible:
The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option. You can’t fight something with nothing. Because if we don’t stand for something, we can’t stand against anything…. The Bible has helped to shape the values which define our country…. Yes, they are Christian values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them. Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour. I think these arguments are profoundly wrong…. those who say being a Christian country is doing down other faiths simply don’t understand that it is easier for people to believe and practise other faiths when Britain has confidence in its Christian identity. Many people tell me it is much easier to be Jewish or Muslim here in Britain than it is in a secular country like France. Why? Because the tolerance that Christianity demands of our society provides greater space for other religious faiths too.
The key point here is that “it is easier for people to believe and practise other faiths when Britain has confidence in its Christian identity.” This point was developed in scholarly depth by historian John Coffey for his 2003 Jubilee Centre report ‘The myth of secular tolerance.’
Coffey showed convincingly that modern notions like tolerance and liberty are not modern notions at all, but arise directly out of the Christian roots of our society. By contrast, he shows that those nations which have attempted to be completely secular (for example, revolutionary France) have usually come down as the enemies of freedom. Coffey concluded his excellent article with the following remark:
The myth of secular tolerance is seriously flawed. There is no good reason to suppose that secular people are immune from the temptation to suppress or silence ‘the other’. Indeed, in practice secularists have often been highly intolerant. Moreover, although the church has sometimes turned aside from the way of Christ by resorting to persecution, the Christian Gospel was one of the principal sources of the rise of religious toleration. The myth of secular tolerance offers a convenient excuse for ignoring the truth claims of Jesus, and it provides a useful propaganda tool for those who wish to discredit the church and marginalise the Christian voice in contemporary debate.
This important historical point is being completely overlooked by David Pollock and his fellow secularists at the European Humanist Federation. One of the most revealing aspects of Mr Pollock’s speech was actually his appeal to history. Consider the following statement from near the beginning of his talk:
From the time of the Westphalian settlement, when states stopped trying to impose their religion on other states in the wars of religion and decided instead that cuius regio, eius religio, governments have taken sides on what religion their citizens should follow and have only slowly come to concede individual liberty.
I don’t dispute Mr Pollock’s claim that government should not take sides on what religion their citizens should follow. Nor do I know any Christian thinker who seriously believes that the government should coerce people to follow the Christian faith. However, the subtext to Pollock’s argument is interesting because it reinforces the standard redemption narrative of the modern state. It is a redemption narrative which goes something like this: throughout the history of the world, the alliance of religion and politics has been the cause of numerous wars and acts of violence. Following the close of the 30 Years War in the 17th century and then the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the Modern West has been struggling to build a foundation of peace based on the separation of religion and politics. This struggle has culminated in the salvation wrought by the modern state.
We find this myth all over the place. Charles Kimball’s reflected it in his book When Religion Becomes Evil when he wrote, “It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.”
Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee echoed this myth when she wrote in the Guardian that “The horrible history of Christianity shows that whenever religion grabs temporal power it turns lethal. Those who believe theirs is the only way, truth and light will kill to create their heavens on earth if they get the chance.”
The reality is that this common idea that religion causes violence (an idea on which the redemptive motifs of the modern state presuppose) hinges on a basic category confusion. In an article for the ‘Harvard Divinity School titled ‘Does Religion Cause Violence?‘, William Cavanaugh showed convincingly that in order for the notion that religion is a chief cause of violence to carry any weight, we would first need to coherently distinguish religion from other possible causes of violence. But can we even do this without serious anachronism? “The problem” Cavanaugh writes, “is that religion was not considered something separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then primarily in the West. What sense could be made of separating out Egyptian or Roman “religion” from the Egyptian or Roman “state”? Is Aztec “politics” to blame for their bloody human sacrifices, or is Aztec “religion” to blame?” Cavanaugh continues, drawing on the work of Canadian scholar of comparative religions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith:
As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion, “religion” as a discrete category of human activity separable from “culture,” “politics,” and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West. In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept “religion,” Smith was compelled to conclude that in premodern Europe there was no significant concept equivalent to what we think of as “religion,” and furthermore there is no “closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern West.”
If it is true that our contemporary notion of ‘religion’ is a comparatively recent phenomenon, then we should be cautious about imposing it retroactively onto the past when claiming that throughout history ‘religion’ functioned as a chief cause of violence.
But let’s continue unpacking Mr. Pollock’s speech:
That slow progress, marked by significant events such as the English civil war, the American declaration of independence and the French revolution, led by stages, via finally the collective determination to allow no repeat of Nazism, to the European Convention on Human Rights and religious freedom.
But no state has fully followed through the implications of individual freedom of religion or belief.
It is especially curious to see Pollock invoking the example of the French Revolution as being among the seminal developments leading up to the freedom that modern Europeans supposedly enjoy today. (One might also want to quibble with his inclusion of the English civil war, which resulted in a theocracy of radical Puritans that hardly led to more religious freedom for the people of Britain but less. Heck, they couldn’t even cook plumb puddings on Christmas day without getting into trouble with the police!) Let’s do a reality check about the French revolution. This was a time when there was a deliberate de-Christianization policy that included
The implementation of a new calendar to replace the Christian one. The calendar, which was adopted in 1793 and used for the next 12 years, employed a ten day week (in a 10 day week, no one could ever know which day was Sunday) and had 1792 (the year Louis XVI was taken into custody) as year 1. This was known as ‘the year of liberty.’
The dispossession, deportation and brutal martyrdom of thousands of clergy
Christians being denied freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought if it contravened the secular humanist ideology of the revolution.
The criminalization of all religious education
The elimination of all Christian symbols from the public sphere, including removing the word ‘saint’ from street names and destroying or defacing churches and religious monuments
The replacing of Christian holidays and symbols with civic and revolutionary cults like the ‘Cult of Reason’ and ‘Cult of the Supreme Being.’ A statue to the goddess Reason was even erected and worshiped in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November 1793.
This does not even include the more ubiquitous effects of the French Revolution. Indeed, as I point out in my forthcoming book Saints and Scoundrels, “The French Revolution left a legacy of civil war and international conflict in its wake that would last for the next twenty-five years,”
Given the legacy of totalitarianism, intolerance and thought control associated with the French Revolution, we might well ask why the president of the European Humanist Federation is appealing to revolutionary France as being seminal to the European Convention on Human Rights and religious freedom. At first I thought maybe he meant that the “slow progress” he is after occurred as a result of Europeans trying to avoid the errors of the French Revolution. Alas, no, that is not what he means. Just to be clear, let’s carefully review his words:
That slow progress, marked by significant events such as the English civil war, the American declaration of independence and the French revolution, led by stages, via finally the collective determination to allow no repeat of Nazism, to the European Convention on Human Rights and religious freedom.
But no state has fully followed through the implications of individual freedom of religion or belief.
Maybe Mr Pollock’s appeal to the French revolution wasn’t a mistake. Maybe that’s precisely the point. Perhaps Pollock would like to see some measure of de-Christianization policies occurring within contemporary Europe. Reading a bit further in his speech it seems that this is exactly what he wants. For example, he pointed out that a particular threat to European secularism was the fact that the Roman Catholic church enjoys a 88% hold in Croatia or the Eastern Orthodox church to which 76% of Bulgarians belong. The thrust of his argument was breathtakingly simple: secularism is good, but if churches are too strong then this represents a threat to secularism; therefore, it is bad for churches to be too strong.
Er…ok.
Despite setbacks such as European churches being too strong, Pollock takes heart from the fact that Europe is becoming more secular. But what does this secularity look like in practice? Here’s a few examples for starters, taken from an article we ran in the Christian Voice newsletter back in December of last year:
Bishop of Chester: questioned over his views on homosexuality by Cheshire police in November 2003 after he said that psychiatrists could help homosexuals to re-orientate themselves. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually dropped the case saying the Bishop had committed no crime.
Lynette Burrows: author who was interviewed by the police in December 2005 after she expressed disapproval of homosexual adoption on a talk show. The policewoman who talked to Mrs Burrows said that a ‘homophobic incident’ had been reported against her and that it would be kept on record by the police.
Joe and Heather Roberts: a couple who were interrogated by Lancashire police in December 2005 after complaining to their local council in Fleetwood (Wyre Borough Council) about council tax money being spent on promoting gay rights. Both the Police and the council at the time refused to admit they were wrong. After the threat of legal action, the Council and the Police apologised to the Roberts and settled out of court.
John Mitchell: Scottish fireman who refused to march at a gay pride (Pride Scotia) event along with several other firemen in 2006. He won a legal battle with his employer, the Strathclyde Fire And Rescue Service, for unfair punishment. The case against him and the other fireman involved was overturned at an industrial tribunal. The fire service admitted not taking into account his religious beliefs. Mr Mitchell received damages and an apology from the fire service.
Stephen Green: Arrested and detained in police station for handing out evangelistic tracts at a gay pride festival in Cardiff. Police said the arrest, which occurred in September 2006, was because the tracts Mr Green was distributing contained Bible verses about homosexuality.
Samantha Devine: Catholic schoolgirl banned from wearing a crucifix to school on health and safety grounds. On 12 January 2007 she vowed to defy the cross ban that had been issued by the Robert Napier School in Gillingham, Kent, even if it meant that she would be expelled from school. Students from other religions were allowed to wear symbols of their faith.
Gary McFarlane: Christian counsellor sacked from his job with Relate in 2008 because he confided that he would not be comfortable counselling homosexual couples about sexual problems. Relate conceded that they were wrong to sack Mr McFarlane without giving him notice, but he still didn‘t get his job back and the Tribunal ruling did not go in his favour.
Iris Robinson: Wife of Irish First Minister Peter Robinson investigated by the Serious Crimes Branch of the PSNI (Northern Ireland Police Force) for speaking out against homosexuality in June 2008.
Caroline Petrie: Nurse from Weston Super Mare suspended in December 2008 after offering to pray for the person she was caring for. The suspension was removed after a storm of protest.
Pilgrim Homes: had £13,000 of funding removed by Brighton Council in December 2008 because the home refused to ask its elderly Christian residents every three months if they were homosexual. Funding was only restored when Pilgrim Homes promised to ask the residents about their sexual orientation on admission.
The Earl of Devon (Hugh Courtenay): Had his licence to hold wedding ceremonies at Powderham Castle near Exeter revoked by Devon County Council in January 2009. The justification for removing his licence was that the Earl’s Christian beliefs prevented him from allowing civil partnership ceremonies to be held on his property.
Julia Robinson: Head of Meersbrook Bank Community Primary School in Sheffield was accused of being a racist by some of the parents of the school, because she objected to Muslim-only assemblies. As a result she was forced to resign from her job at the school in February 2009
Jasmine and Jennie Cain: Jasmine, 5, was reprimanded in February 2009 for explaining to a classmate that Jesus saves people from hell. Her mother, Jennie, was then suspended from her job at the school and threatened with the sack after the school discovered she had emailed a prayer request about the matter to friends.
Lilian Ladele: Christian Registrar who faced the sack because she asked if she could be exempt from registering civil partnership. Even though she won the case against Islington Council, the Employment Appeal Tribunal overturned the case and ruled against her.
Unnamed Foster Mother: struck off the foster care register when a 16-year-old Muslim girl she was caring for converted of her own free will to Christianity. This foster mother had successfully fostered 80 children during her career.
Adrian Smith: housing manager who was demoted for not backing same-sex marriage. Smith, a practising Christian, has had his pay slashed in 2011 because he said on his private Facebook page that allowing gay weddings in churches was ‘an equality too far’.
British Catholic adoption agencies: closed down by the ‘sexual orientation regulations’ for refusing to place children with homosexual couples.
Peter and Hazelmary Bull: hoteliars who were sued using Government money after refusing to offer a double bed to a homosexual couple in 2011.
So much for the liberating influence of secularism!
If David Pollock wishes to stand by his words, let him do so in public, as I now officially challenge him to a written debate to be published on our respective websites. The debate will address the following proposition: Nations flourish better when they are governed secularism rather than religion. Pollock can defend the affirmative and I will argue for the negative.
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Christians gathered in front of the Pakistan High Commission this morning before handing in a petition to 10 Downing Street calling for a suspension of foreign aid to Pakistan until persecution of Christians stops.
The protest and witness was organised by the British Pakistani Christian Association and began at 11am in London’s Lowndes Square outside the Pakistani High Commission for a worship service .
There was a one minute silence for Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistan minister for minorities who was shot dead by gunmen on 2nd March last year for calling for the repeal of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which is regularly used by Muslims to settle scores against their Christian neighbours.
Pakistan High Commission, Lowdnes Square, London
Bhatti’s death followed that of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who had also opposed the law, and was shot dead by a renegade Islamist bodyguard.
A Christian woman, Asia Bibi, is still in prison in Pakistan after being sentenced to death for blasphemy. Her crime was to ask a Muslim neighbour during a religious argument, ‘Christ died for me; what did Muhammed ever do for you?’
The protest today called for the release of Asia Bibi, as well as the repeal of Pakistan’s blasphemy law.
Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the British Pakistan Christian Association, said: ‘The blasphemy laws in the Pakistan Penal Code need to be reformed so that they do not provide an opportunity to settle personal vendettas or to oppress Pakistani Christians and churches.’
Speakers at the witness outside Downing Street included Stuart Windsor of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Andre Minichello-Williams of Christian Concern, Alan Craig from Christian People’s Alliance, Gareth Wallace, Public Affairs Advisor of the Salvation Army, Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice and Martin Mawyer from the US Christian Action Network.
PRAY: That President Zardawi of Pakistan will respond to international calls for Asia Bibi to be released. There is a story around that he wants to release her, but that the Supreme Court of Pakistan has blocked the move until all legal process has finished, which could take months if not years. Meanwhile this determined young woman’s children need their mother.
WRITE TO: The Pakistani High Commissioner, His Excellency Wajid Shamsul Hasan at Pakistan High Commission, 35 Lowndes Square , LONDON , SW1X 9JN . Respectfully demand that Asia Bibi be released. Ask His Excellency to forward your demand to the President of Pakistan. Address him as “Your Excellency” and end “Yours faithfully.”
ALSO write to your MP and ask what representations the British Government has made to the government of Pakistan about Asia Bibi’s case.
ASK your MP to sign Andrew Stephenson’s Early Day Motion (EDM 2807) which ‘… notes that theUK gives significant aid to nations such as Pakistan where many minority communities suffer injustice under the blasphemy laws,
‘and calls on the Government to ensure that such aid is not used indiscriminately to perpetuate the resultant inequality, and in particular that it is does not facilitate educational material and teaching that denigrates and slanders minority religions and communities.’
Stephen Green congratulates Raj Bhachoo after his case was dismissed
Christian Voice Press Release – 19.00 hrs Wednesday 7th March 2012
Christian ‘Not Guilty’ in Stonewall email case
Stonewall witness fails to show
A Christian had a malicious communication case against him for sending a strongly-worded email to the Stonewall lobby group dismissed this afternoon when the only prosecution witness failed to turn up.
Raj Bhachoo was prosecuted after sending an email not just warning Stonewall of the fires of hell but linking homosexuality to child sexual abuse. But Stonewall’s Information Officer, Louise Kelly, did not appear and the prosecution case – they could not even produce evidence of the email in question – collapsed in her absence.
Stephen Green congratulates Raj Bhachoo after his case was dismissed this afternoon
The case was heard at Camberwell Green Magistrates Court this afternoon, and Christian Voice National Director Stephen Green had agreed to attend as an expert witness.
Stephen Green said after the case:
‘Raj Bhachoo certainly expressed himself in a robust way, but Stonewall will be the first to champion freedom of expression for their own side. They called me a ‘bigot’ and shortlisted me for a mock award last year, but I am grown-up enough not to go flying down to the police station.
‘I agreed to appear as an expert witness on Raj’s behalf, to show (a) that the word ‘queer’ is no longer a pejorative term amongst homosexuals, (b) that homosexual men have a greater tendency to commit sexual offences against children than heterosexual men and (c) that Stonewall are themselves fond of abusing their opponents. But with no case to answer, my evidence was not needed.’
The verdict marks the end of a nine-month ordeal for Raj, who was refused a not guilty plea last year in the same court and had to apply to the Crown Court for a retrial. By the grace of God his application was successful. Raj came to the attention of Christian Voice late last year when he telephoned for some leaflets against Tesco’s £30,000 support of Gay Pride to give out at his local store.
Born into a Sikh family, Raj became a Christian 8 years ago and is a staunch supporter of the Authorised Version of the Bible, which fed his early walk to faith.
Raj joined Christian Voice then told us about the Stonewall case. No other Christian group would support him, but National Director Stephen Green was appalled by the miscarriage of justice and found a criminal lawyer to represent him. Stonewall thought they could bully our brother, but when it came to it, they lacked the courage even to press their case.
Stephen Green concluded: ‘Thank God that justice has at last been done for our brother in Christ.’
For further information, phone Stephen Green on 07931 490050.
Land Address for Stephen Green and the Christian Voice office:
Wernlwyd, Pen-y-bont, CARMARTHEN, SA33 6QN
01994 484544 / 07931 490050 https://www.christianvoice.org.uk/
This is the last weekend when you can join Christian Voice and get our informative, faith-building, child-defending briefing A Generation Betrayed, free.
So many Christians and Christian groups moan about sex education, but we show parents, pastors, young people and youth leaders what they can actually do. A Generation Betrayed gives masses of information and practical points on how to protect our children, and for young people, shows the benefits of old-fashioned virtues such as modesty and chastity. It is a valuable resource for all the faithful, especially parents and those in leadership or youth ministry.
Let’s be blunt. Condoms do not protect against STD’s. So even at a humanitarian level, we should be showing Christian young people that just one sexual encounter could leave them never able to have children of their own. Add in the Scriptural imperatives to live lives of holiness and purity, and this subject becomes possibly the most important thing we can discuss with Christian young people.
For just five more days, when you join Christian Voice, you get A Generation Betrayed absolutely free, along with Britain in Sin, which lays bare the anti-Christian legislation of the last fifty years and the appalling social consequences, and our information-packed briefings Understanding Islam and Labelling Halal all by return of post. You won’t want to miss any of those!
We always give thanks to God for the support of every faithful believer who joins us, and by joining Christian Voice you will benefit in targeting your prayer and action through the vital information we provide.
Jesus Christ is the crucified, risen, ascended King of kings and we are called into his service. I believe the Lord is calling out those who will really stand four-square on his word, tell the truth and ask him what action to take. We are going to do exploits for the Lord and see His miracle-working power in answer to our prayers!
So join Christian Voice by clicking here and I’ll send you our February newsletter and all the other resources, including A Generation Betrayed, by return.
God’s word says:
Malachi 3:16 Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.
