As Christian and Jewish Americans prepare to celebrate Easter and Passover, respectively, Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque at an all-time low, averaging 50% in 2018. U.S. church membership was 70% or higher from 1937 through 1976, falling modestly to an average of 68% in the 1970s through the 1990s. The past 20 years have seen an acceleration in the drop-off, with a 20-percentage-point decline since 1999 and more than half of that change occurring since the start of the current decade…
Latest News
The group was run out of Arkansas in the early ’90s by then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s attorney general on charges of fraud and business deception, but “Ranier and NXIVM executives emerged a decade later only to donate $29,900 to Hillary Clinton’s 2006 president campaign.” The New York Post said at least three cult officials are or were “invitation-only” members of the Clinton Global Initiative. Currently, the cult is thought to have engaged in sex-slave activity involving a number of women. Pending federal charges include sex trafficking, forced labor, wire fraud conspiracy and human trafficking. Raniere also has pleaded not guilty to counts of child porn…
Bible scholars trying to retrace the route Moses took when he led the Israelites out of Egypt say they have found evidence that Mount Sinai is actually in eastern Saudi Arabia. Ryan Mauro, of the Doubting Thomas Research Foundation (DTRF), told Daily Star Online that his team traveled to Saudi Arabia three times to gather evidence. “What I found there was simply mind-blowing,” Mauro said. “I couldn’t believe that there was all this evidence for the Exodus and hardly anyone outside this region was aware of it.”
Christians waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the end of the world fear an asteroid “deep impact” is coming. Paul Begley, an evangelical Christian preacher from West Lafayette in Indiana, US, warned an asteroid could hit the Earth as soon as 2029. Citing prophetic passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelation, the firebrand preacher said the monstrous Asteroid Apophis matches biblical descriptions of the Apocalypse. Speaking online to his fervent followers, the preacher said Apophis could Earth on Friday 13 in 2029…
That’s according to Yale researchers who studied 3,635 people older than 50 and found that those who read books for 30 minutes daily lived an average of 23 months longer than nonreaders or magazine readers. Apparently, the practice of reading books creates cognitive engagement that improves lots of things, including vocabulary, thinking skills, and concentration. It also can affect empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence, the sum of which helps people stay on the planet longer.
I’m thrilled to hear about the great impact that Unplanned is already having. It has exceeded box office expectations and, more importantly, the movie is changing many lives. How wonderful to hear of Planned Parenthood workers who are resigning after seeing it. At the same time, we can be reasonably certain that many more American Christians saw Captain Marvel than Unplanned. Why? It’s because we’d rather be entertained.
Hollywood filmmaker Russell Bissell and the lead actors of the new movie “The Best of Enemies” said it was Ann Atwater’s Christian display of love that broke through the hatred of KKK leader C.P. Ellis in the ‘70s. “The Best of Enemies” tells the true story of an unlikely relationship between Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson), an outspoken civil rights activist, and C.P. Ellis, the president of the Durham chapter of United Klans of America (played by Oscar winner Sam Rockwell). The pair unwittingly co-chaired a community summit in Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 1971, just months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to desegregate schools. What followed would change Durham and the lives of Atwater and Ellis forever, as the two formed a friendship that lasted a lifetime…
Messianic Jewish leaders were invited to participate in a recent pro-Israel event hosted at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida. The American Pro-Israel PAC (APIP), a new pro-Israel Christian initiative, brought together over 300 influential Evangelical Christians, as well as traditional and Messianic Jews. According to Joel Chernoff, Executive Director of the Messianic Alliance for Israel Advocacy, Messianic Jews played a major role in the program, which featured Jonathan Cahn as one of the speakers…
Here’s a sobering fact the Church must come to grips with: Even children who are “churched” are woefully unprepared to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3) This is a frontline issue, yet Church leaders and parents just don’t “get” how important it is to teach the younger generation to defend their faith. The Apostle Paul faced this issue head on in the early church. In a letter to Timothy, he warned: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (2 Tim 4:3-4) All the Apostles dealt with false teaching, Gnosticism in particular, and for this reason they wanted to insure correct doctrine was taught…
Pope Francis the reformer is being challenged by his conservative predecessor – who now has a far-right backing including Steve Bannon… Their social conservatism is matched by political concerns. Where Francis is prophetically pro-refugee, pro-environment and pro-global cooperation, this wing of the church most emphatically is not. The ramifications go far beyond the fraught politics of Catholicism. There are two more prominent figures the pope might have had in mind when he was recommending forgiveness this Easter: former Donald Trump right-hand man Steve Bannon, and Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini […] Whatever the truth, no one can be in any doubt this Easter that there are two rival camps, if not yet rival popes, fighting it out for ultimate power at God’s business address on Earth…
