RealClearReligion Articles

Twelve score and ten years ago, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, delivered his famous speech on the Gettysburg battlefield on Nov. 19, 1863, he was harkening back to the Declaration of Independence. Score equals 20 years. Lincoln said, “Four score and seven years ago.” Subtract 87 from 1863, and it takes us back to 1776. The very thing we now celebrate 250 years of: the Declaration of Independence. The Gettysburg...

"Quo Vadis (Where are you going?), America?" With those unforgettable words, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen opened the very first episode of Life Is Worth Living, his network television show in the early 1950s. Week after week, millions of Americans tuned in because he challenged people to ask life's most important questions. His television program eventually reached nearly 30 million viewers and earned him an Emmy, but his greatest achievement was leading countless people to encounter Jesus Christ. As our nation approaches its 250th birthday, Sheen's question feels as timely as ever. Many...

Samal escaped China to her native Kazakhstan in 2018. It was there that she, amid bouts of sobbing, described night-shifts at a Xinjiang province detention center, removing intestines from corpses. Many bodies were still warm. Many bore the marks of torture. Samal worked assisting her friend, a Uyghur veterinarian, in a fortified compound of three medical clinics, four floors down from a massive detention center. In assembly line fashion, they would prep several corpses a night and send them on for further “cleaning” by a team of eleven Mandarin-speaking doctors.  Camp...

Juneteenth is a powerful reminder that the Democrats lost their war for slavery and secession. Yes, the glorious news of Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation finally made its two year trek to the great state of Texas. On June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3 and proclaimed, in part: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” WHO IS JUNETEENTH FOR? This freedom was made possible by whites, blacks, Asians, and...

Ministers and the church should have nothing to do with politics. Or so we hear all the time. Thankfully, during the settling and founding eras of America, that was not the dominant opinion. In fact, ministers often helped lead the way to American independence. Christian educator Travis Witt of Virginia once remarked: “Every single one of the issues mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence had been preached from the American pulpits in New England before 1763.” His remarks are well-documented in a 1928 (revised in 1958) book by Duke professor, Alice M....

Stephen Colbert built a TV audience with skills he picked up in writing, ad lib, standup, dance, mimicry, impersonation, singing, acting and even stunt fighting. He is well-schooled in acting, popular culture, various genres of literature, pop culture, film-making and movie history.  His friendship with co-producer Jon Stewart was always touching and fun, and the segments with his wife Evie were heartfelt and enjoyable. Sometimes, there were moments of brilliant banter, as with Brian Cranston (4-8-26) or when, in some pleasant early segments, Colbert lay on the grass looking at the stars...

I was a young boy, hiding in the closet, looking at a magazine given to me by a family member. He was almost as young and had no business looking at or sharing the magazine; neither of us truly grasped what was in our hands. The images are burned into my  memories all these years later, and it started an unhealthy objectification of women that would haunt me for decades.   Today, as a pastor, I regularly speak with men and couples struggling with pornography. Many stories resemble my own. One congregant told me she discovered a stack of sexually explicit magazines as a child,...

Before he led the Church, Pope Leo watched the man who brought it into America's living rooms. Earlier this week the Holy Father told a gathering of the Pontifical Mission Societies that now Venerable Fulton Sheen, a former head of said societies, influenced him as a child. Of Venerable Sheen, who once ran the Pontifical Mission Societies himself, Pope Leo said, “Archbishop Sheen was a light of faith, hope, and love that shone through radio and television media for decades.” He then smiled, looked up from his formal remarks, and said with a nostalgic twinge, “I myself am a...

As we get closer to honor America at 250, it seems like not everyone wants to celebrate. For example, there has been some deliberate damage recently in our nation’s capital in order to sabotage America’s 250th anniversary celebration. Writes Anthony Blair in The New York Post: “Vandals sabotaged generators at President Trump's Freedom 250 event, according to a spokeswoman — and fuel leached into underground water tanks, contaminating them.” And, of course, we keep hearing about celebrities now refusing to participate in America at 250 events, reportedly because...

How well do you think you know the Judeo-Christian roots of our nation? About 25 years ago, for the first time, I met author/speaker William J. (Bill) Federer, who knows them very well. I have interviewed him multiple times since. Bill is the author of the classic book, America’s God and Country, which contains quotes from the settlers and founders of America, documenting beyond a reasonable doubt that this nation was uniquely shaped by the Bible. The first time we met, we got into a long discussion, marveling at how the more you dig into our nation’s history, the greater you see...

It began with a seemingly polite question from my longtime doctor during my annual physical in December, 2023: “So how are things at Pepperdine?” Immediately, in the context of that moment, I knew it was much more than small talk. Over almost 20 years as my GP, we’ve rarely discussed faith — he a Jew, and I a Christian. Just a year earlier, he had told me with great pride that his daughter had been admitted to a highly-regarded public university in the Midwest. On this day, he haltingly described that young lady’s trials as Jew on campus, wondering whether she...

The 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding presents an opportunity for American Catholics to consecrate themselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, particularly at a time when our society is marked by polarization, antipathy, and even a profound lack of love.  In a recent Fox News survey, more than two-thirds of voters described the country negatively, with a majority believing Americans are “separated by different values.” These findings, however, are not outliers, but symptomatic of decades-long trends; indeed, over the years, many Americans have expressed...

If you had to provide the actual date for America’s first official day, what would you list it as? Of course, one could easily argue that it was July 4, 1776, when 56 men, representing three million people back home in 13 different colonies of British North America, agreed by voice vote the final wording of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate America at 250 because of that famous July 4th. But I would submit a different candidate as the first official day as a nation, as noted below. Interestingly, this last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, which coincided as the Sunday before...

On Sunday, May 17, I had the privilege of kicking off the Rededication 250 gathering in Washington DC by declaring the following “America is not done with God and God is not done with America.  God is up to something. Hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered together, not for a protest or a political rally, but to pray. They gathered to give thanks and to rededicate this nation to the God who blessed it when it was founded. The media may not have seen it coming. The polls did not predict it. But people of faith showed up anyway. The idea that spirituality is dead in America is a...

Giving USA reports that over the last 40 years, religious giving has fallen from 63% to 24% of total charitable contributions. For church leaders and ministry executives, it may be tempting to blame the economy. Inflation, household debt and financial pressure are squeezing families from every direction. Those forces matter. But reducing this challenge to a budget problem misses the deeper story. Generosity in America has not disappeared. Total charitable giving recently reached $592.5 billion, marking 3.3% growth after adjusting for inflation. What has changed is where that money flows, and...

Before he died, Thomas Jefferson expressed his desire that his three biggest accomplishments be listed on the obelisk that marks his grave at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. They were that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence (the acceptance of which we celebrate in America at 250) and the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (written in 1777 and adopted in 1786), and the founder of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville). Missing in those three accomplishments is that he was our third president or that he negotiated the largest...

When Graham Staines and his two young sons were brutally martyred in Odisha State in 1999, it shook the conscience of the nation and sparked a wave of nationwide prayer and Christian solidarity. It was in the shadow of that tragedy that the All India Christian Council (AICC) was born — a non-ecclesiastical alliance dedicated to protecting the Church and serving the marginalized communities among whom Graham had laboured. For the past four years, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) has been convening ecumenical gatherings, bringing together heads of various churches...

Augustine of Hippo finished The City of God in 426 A.D., just as the Roman Empire was coming apart at its seams. He had watched the eternal city sacked. He had watched Christians scramble to make theological sense of a collapsing political order. His answer was one of the most consequential arguments in the history of Western thought: there are two cities — the City of God and the city of man — and the great temptation of every age is to confuse one for the other. Sixteen centuries later, that confusion is back. And for those of us who study the long arc of religion and politics...

Antisemitism has permeated the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Most troubling, Matthew Ynglesias, Ezra Klein, and Jonathan Chait have all suggested that non-leftist Democrats should recommend ending military aid to Israel.  They contend that Israel-related policies should not estrange centrists like themselves from the leftwing of the party. They also are willing to keep Hassan Piker in the big tent; someone who favors Hamas over Israel.  Whenever the progressives are criticized, they contend that only the Democratic Party pursue social justice initiatives.  However,...