The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk is a reminder that martyrdom is not just an historical phenomenon. Prominent spokesmen for Christian truth can still be killed for their beliefs.Sean Feucht’s recent experience of event cancellations in parts of Canada is certainly not as serious as Kirk’s, but it points to the same general tendency of “progressives” successfully stifling Christian voices.North America has been heading in this anti-Christian direction for several decades. In his 2018 book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, David Horowitz writes about the long-running efforts to de-Christianize the United States..EDITORIAL: LGB breaking free from the rainbow alphabet soup.The progressives have been openly at war with Christianity in America since at least the early 1960s. In the 1962 Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale, prayer was banished from public schools in the US. In Horowitz’s view, “This decision set forces in motion that would change the culture and alter the course of a nation.”Over the next few decades, several Supreme Court decisions altered the country.One of them, of course, was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that created abortion rights in the US. The right to abortion was based on the “right to privacy.” Of course, that right is not mentioned in the Constitution. But as Horowitz notes, the Court “contended that the rights explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution had ‘penumbras,’ created by ‘emanations from these guarantees that help give them life and substance.’”.So instead of relying on the text and original meaning of the Constitution, judges could create new rights based on the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Bill of Rights. According to Horowitz, this kind of thinking would lead not only to the creation of abortion rights, but also to other groundbreaking rights such as a right to homosexuality (2003) and the right to same-sex marriage (2015).As he puts it, “The secular left had discovered an all-powerful instrument — the Supreme Court — with which it could impose its radical, anti-Christian agenda on an unwilling nation.”It was the secular left that initiated the culture war by using political and judicial efforts to uproot America’s Christian foundations. .HILTON-O’BRIEN: Is public education dying?.By launching its culture war, the secular left provoked a response from religious conservatives.The 1962 school prayer decision helped to spark a growth in the number of families choosing Christian schools. Then, in 1978, an “attempt by the IRS to revoke tax-exempt status for Christian schools encountered overwhelming resistance and was quickly withdrawn. It was, as one observer wrote, ‘the precise trigger for the rise of the religious right.’ Christians felt that their families, churches, and beliefs were under siege. The attacks on their religion by the government and the left galvanized them to seek the political means to defend themselves.”This is a key insight. The rise of the religious right was the direct result of the secular left’s war against Christianity. The religious “conservatives were fighting a defensive battle to preserve their constitutional liberties.”.Under President Obama, the war against these liberties was especially apparent. He brought in the Affordable Care Act, which became widely known as “Obamacare.” One aspect of this program required employers to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization. This violated the religious convictions of some employers.A Catholic religious charity called Little Sisters of the Poor resisted the Obamacare mandates through court action. As Horowitz notes, “Imposing their views on others was so important to the radicals, as the essence of the plan to fundamentally transform America, that they forced the Little Sisters to undergo years of costly legal battles to defend the religious freedom that is plainly guaranteed by the First Amendment.”Thankfully, the Little Sisters won their case at the Supreme Court in 2016. .THOMSON: If the West has its way, Palestine will be Afghanistan 2.0.Obamacare was not the only major threat to religious freedom in the United States. In 2015, the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Horowitz writes that this decision “laid the groundwork for attacks by gay rights groups on the religious liberty of those they opposed. These were manifested in suits brought by LGBTQ individuals against businesspeople such as bakers, florists, nonprofits, and higher educational institutions with traditional views of marriage.”Similarly, in Canada, the Supreme Court’s Trinity Western University decision of 2018 undermined religious freedom by upholding a decision to deny the university a law school due to its Christian code of conduct for students.It is the secular left’s efforts to transform the US and Canada into different kinds of countries that have led to the culture war of the last few decades. Conservatives and Christians have been fighting back in self-defence. And recent events have demonstrated these defensive measures will need to increase if our countries are to be saved from leftist tyranny.
