Tag: religion

Mike Huckabee: US No Longer Pursuing Goal of Palestinian State

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, told Bloomberg in an interview published on Tuesday that he believes the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state.

“Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” the former Arkansas governor told the outlet, adding that he didn’t think those “changes” would happen “in our lifetime.”

When asked if the US was still pursuing the goal of a Palestinian state, he said, “I don’t think so.”

While the US has been working against a Palestinian state for decades by continuing to back Israel as it expands illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Huckabee’s comments mark one of the most explicit denials of the goal of a Palestinian state from a top US official.

Huckabee also suggested that a Palestinian state could be carved out of a Muslim country. “Does it have to be in Judea and Samaria?” he said, using the Biblical name for the West Bank.

For Huckabee, his opposition to a Palestinian state is ideological and rooted in his religious beliefs. As a Christian Zionist, Huckabee believes that God gave historic Palestine to the modern state of Israel.

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Southern Baptists target porn, sports betting, same-sex marriage and ‘willful childlessness’

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

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Catholics fight government surveillance in confession after wins against abortion mandate, tax

Catholic physicians and social service workers won over the Trump administration and Supreme Court, respectively, last week against their compelled participation in emergency room abortions and a state unemployment compensation program that costs more than their own church’s.

Bishops hope to make it a trifecta against a Washington state law that violates the seal of confession, threatening priests with imprisonment and fines if they don’t report suspected child abuse or neglect when “penitents” confess, but not lawyers who learn the same from clients.

Diocesan leaders filed a motion for preliminary injunction Thursday against Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nicholas Brown and county prosecutors in federal court in Tacoma to block SB 5375 at least 10 days before it takes effect July 27.

The Justice Department also quickly opened a civil rights investigation into the law as a prima facie First Amendment violation after Ferguson signed it, expanding the category of mandatory reporter to “member of the clergy,” defined as any regularly licensed, accredited or ordained minister, priest, rabbi, imam, elder, or similarly positioned religious or spiritual leader.

Denial of an injunction would likely fast-track the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, if also rejected by the historically most liberal appeals court, to SCOTUS, which has rarely struggled to reach lopsided rulings upholding religious liberty.

The high court Thursday unanimously overturned the Wisconsin Supreme Court‘s ruling that found that a local Catholic Charities bureau’s work is primarily secular and hence it can’t get a religious exemption from paying into the state unemployment compensation system.

Justices unanimously ruled for Gerald Groff two years ago after the U.S. Postal Service threatened to fire the evangelical Christian for refusing to work Sundays under an Amazon delivery agreement, junking the “de minimis cost” standard that let employers easily deny religious exemptions but only appeared in a footnote in a 1977 ruling.

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FBI Exposed: Deep State Plot Against Traditional Catholics

On June 4, 2025, new documents released by Senator Chuck Grassley exposed an alleged FBI plot targeting traditional Catholics, sparking outrage.

War Room reported, “The documents revealed by Chairman Grassley expose the depth and staggering breadth of the dissemination of this field office memo targeting traditional Catholics as radical terrorists.”

Consequently, this revelation in the FBI traditional Catholic plot has sparked outrage.

The 2023 leaked FBI Richmond field office memo, initially dismissed by Chris Wray as a rogue act during a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Dec. 5, 2023, now appears part of a broader scheme.

Now, the FBI faces scrutiny for targeting peaceful, patriotic groups. Read the full documents released by Senator Grassley.

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Supreme Court Sides With Catholic Charities in Case About Tax Exemptions for Religious Organizations

The Supreme Court unanimously sided with Catholic Charities Bureau on Thursday, ruling that Wisconsin discriminated against the organization by denying tax exempt status and violated the First Amendment’s protection for religion. 

Wisconsin has a law, similar to most states and the federal government, that exempts certain religious organizations from paying unemployment compensation taxes. The statute exempts nonprofit organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes” and “operated, supervised, controlled, or principally supported by a church or convention or association of churches.” Catholic Charities Bureau and four of its sub-entities tried to obtain the exemption in 2016 as an organization controlled by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin.

After years of litigation, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately denied the exemption, ruling that Catholic Charities Bureau was not “operated primarily for religious purposes” because they do not engage in proselytization or limit their charitable services to Catholics. However, Catholic Charities Bureau argued that Catholic teachings do not permit “misus[ing] works of charity for purposes of proselytism.”

“There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court. 

“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny,” she continued. “Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.”

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The Sexual Abuse Scandal That’s Engulfed the Evangelical Movement

Whenever Missouri megapreacher Mike Bickle received prophecies from God, he tended to shout the good news from the rooftops. But there was one recurring vision that he only shared with a few people. In the early 1980s, Bickle—who would go on to found International House of Prayer in Kansas City—confided in Tammy Woods, the 14-year-old who was babysitting his children, that his wife Diane would die and “that we could be together,” a prelude to his repeatedly sexually abusing her. The founder of the outrageously successful church certainly felt that God had his back. He had the same vision over a decade later, when he told his 19-year-old female intern that his wife would die and that they would get married.

But maybe God had other plans. Thanks to these two women and their willingness to come forward to attest to Bickle’s misdeeds, a larger crisis of sexual abuse in evangelical Christianity has been exposed, and countless more allegations have followed. In June, Trump spiritual adviser Robert Morris resigned from his Dallas-based Gateway megachurch after he was accused of abusing a 12-year-old girl. Last month, his successor was fired for undisclosed “moral issues.”

That two towering figures of the charismatic evangelical movement have faced such serious allegations ought to lead to soul searching, and more importantly, a rush to ensure better safeguards so that pastors cannot abuse their authority. If the past is any guide, there’s little hope that any kind of reckoning is at hand. As we’ve seen with a series of similar scandals and a damning report into sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s evangelical leaders have made failing to act responsibly into an art form.

Sexual abuse in churches has long been thought of as a “Catholic disease,” but as recent events have shown, it is unchecked power and authority, not celibacy, that is the root of the problem. It is also very much a crisis of the evangelical movement’s own making; in this milieu, commercial incentives have produced a culture where the more charismatic and authoritarian the leader, the more successful the church. The widespread culture of abuse, cover-up, and denial has been exacerbated by the kind of corruption that arises when friends appoint friends to positions of authority, tamping down any incentives toward transparency and accountability.

A big reason the problem has gotten out of control is the growing trend among evangelical churches of all stripes to label themselves “nondenominational.” According to religious data cruncher Ryan Burge, nearly 13 percent of all adults in the United States now identify as nondenominational Protestant Christians, and there are now more nondenominationals in the U.S. than mainline Protestants.

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Britain Imposes Islamic Blasphemy Law as Man is Convicted of Burning a Quran

Britain’s transformation into an Islamic state is almost complete.

The case in question relates to a man who has been convicted of a “religiously aggravated public order offence” after he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London.

The Spectator magazine reports:

This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate.

The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.

Hamit Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in February, before being attacked by a man named Moussa Kadri who has since pleaded guilty to the assault. Mr Coskun was initially charged under the Crime and Disorder Act with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam harassment, alarm or distress’.

On sentencing Coskun, the left-wing activist Judge John McGarva said Coskun’s conduct was “provocative and taunting” and accused him of harboring a “deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers.”

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FBI opens investigation into targeted violence against Christians in Seattle

Dan Bongino of the FBI announced on Tuesday that the agency has opened an investigation into “allegations of targetd violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert.” This follows an incident on Sunday in which Mayday USA, a Christian group, held a permitted concert in Cal Anderson Park which drew Antifa counter-protesters who then attacked the Christians.

Following the attack, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell condemned the Christian group who was attacked, claiming that they were “far-right” and had no business holding an event in the park due to its proximity to the locus of the LGBTQ+ community. 23 arrests were made among the militants who showed up to harass the Christian event.

“We have asked our team to fully investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert. Freedom of religion isn’t a suggestion,” Bongino said.

“Today’s far-right rally was held here for this very reason – to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood,” Harrell said following the event on Saturday.

“When the humanity of trans people and those who have been historically marginalized is questioned, we triumph by demonstrating our values through our words and peaceful protest – we lose our voice when this is disrupted by violence, chaos, and confusion,” Harrell went on. 

This led to calls for Harrell’s resignation and those calls turned into a protest on Tuesday where the Christian group protested Harrell and more Antifa and trans activists showed up to protest the Christians.

It was later revealed that, despite Harrell’s protestations against the Christian group and his complaints over the location of their event, city officials had previously suggested that the event happen in the park. Event organizers had suggested Pike Street, the location of the iconic Pike Place Market, but an official said that “other Seattle Parks locations” should be considered, including Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill where the event did go forward.

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