Free Republic

President Donald Trump will take executive action on Thursday to ease a ban on political activity by churches and other tax-exempt institutions as part of an order on religious liberties, a senior White House official said on Wednesday. Trump's executive order to mark the National Day of Prayer will also mandate regulatory relief to religious employers that object to contraception, such as Little Sisters of the Poor, the official said in a briefing.

CBS This Morning on Tuesday did the bidding of the ACLU and expressed concern over an Alabama mega church lobbying to have its own police force. Showing a clueless attitude in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, reporter David Begnaud asked Greg Garrison of AL.com: “Why can't they just rely on 911 and call for help if they need it?”

If you have a ministry and a church you are automatically tax exempt. This book shows you how to cut through the road blocks and simply claim it The Communist-George Soros Democrats running the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have managed to bully churches into becoming partners with them by the creation of the 501c3 (Not-for-Profit) status. This action pushed churches to incorporate themselves as franchises of the United States in order to avoid taxes they never owed in the first place. Don’t forget that last sentence. According to an informative book; Things You Need to Know about Non-profits-Making Sense of...

The ISIS terror group has claimed responsibility for two separate Palm Sunday bombing attacks at Coptic Christian churches in Egypt that have killed 37 people and injured more than 100. The first blast happened at St. George church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta, where at least 26 people were killed and 71 others wounded, officials said. Television footage showed the inside of the church, where a large number of people gathered around what appeared to be lifeless, bloody bodies covered with papers. A second explosion was later reported at St. Mark's Cathedral in the coastal city of Alexandria,...

Last month, America lost a great defender of freedom, Michael Novak.Novak was committed to rightly ordered liberty and cared deeply about the principles and practices that produce it. His enormous body of work emphasized the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible.In the words of Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, “Michael forced those of us trained in the dismal science of economics to explain that we should be more than ‘free to choose’—rather we should be free to make good free choices.”Last year, I was the recipient of the...

California is the only state in the U.S. that requires health insurance plans to cover elective abortions. Its onerous mandate even forces churches and other religious groups to pay for abortions in their employee health plans. The new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare in Congress could change that, and some California leaders are upset. The Sacramento Bee reports the proposed American Health Care Act would get rid of taxpayer-funded subsidies for insurance plans that cover elective abortions. If enacted, all of the health insurance plans in the California exchange would no longer be subsidized, according to the report. Here’s...

President Donald Trump vowed Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” a provision barring religious groups from participation in politics. “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution,” he said. “I will do that. Remember.”

A German court has found seven men guilty of burglarizing churches to financially support Islamic extremists fighting in Syria. Cologne’s regional court sentenced the men to between three years and 6 months, and four years and 10 months in prison for the robberies. Judges say that there’s sufficient proof the men — aged between 24 and 37 — broke into up to five churches and other buildings between 2013 and 2014. …

Police are hunting vandals after a series of chapels and shrines were desecrated within the space of a few days in northern Austria. Statues have been beheaded, prayer books burned and sacred images destroyed since the New Year in the Innviertel region on the Bavarian border. On New Year’s Eve, the vandals struck a chapel in the village of St Radegund, damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary before burning prayer books and wooden objects from the chapel in a nearby wood. That same day, another chapel at the nearby town of Auerbach was also attacked, with vandals smashing the...

A Canadian study found that conservative churches are still growing, while less orthodox congregations dwindle away.Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, further ensuring their decline. Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S....

“Now Is Time to Behead Unbelievers” The jihad on churches -- including those in America and Europe. Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reports of Muslims torturing, raping, and forcing Christians to embrace Islam continued to mount throughout the month of October.   Alice Assaf, a Christian woman recounted the experiences of Christians—including her son’s execution for refusing to deny his faith—in a village near Damascus at the hands of the Islamic State.  She also told how the Islamic State massacres children in cruel and unusual ways—including by throwing them...

File this under “things that should be obvious,” but immigration control isn’t slavery. Nor is breaking a just federal law consistent with Christian ethics. Nonetheless, a network of “progressive” Christians is preparing to fight the Trump administration’s immigration efforts with an “underground railroad” for illegals. A recent story at The New York Times details how a network of 450 churches across the country are planning to break federal law and defy the will of the American people by sheltering criminal illegal immigrants against deportation.

FULL TITLE: FBI warns of possible Christmas ISIS attacks after list of US churches is posted on Islamic extremist website The FBI has warned state and city police of possible ISIS threats against the US after a list of churches across the country was posted online by fanatics. The bureau said while no one specific threat had been traced, officers should be more vigilant over the holidays given the amid 'aspirational calls for attacks'. In a memo it told how the Islamic extremist group had compiled a list of churches across the country and shared it online. 'The FBI is...

The Islamic State has published a list containing the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States, Canada, France, and the Netherlands, encouraging followers to attack them during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday season. http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/12/22/isis-lists-u-s-churches-attack-bloody-celebrations-christian-new-year/

The terror group threatened "bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year" The Islamic State published the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States and called on its adherents to attack them during the holiday season, according to a message posted late-night Wednesday in the group’s “Secrets of Jihadis” social media group. A user going by the name of “Abu Marya al-Iraqi” posted an Arabic-language message calling “for bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year” and announced the group’s plans to utilize its network of lone wolf attackers to “turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror...

A Mississippi man arrested in the burning of an African-American church that was spray-painted with the words "Vote Trump" is a member of the congregation, the church's bishop said. Andrew McClinton, 45, of Leland, Mississippi, was charged Wednesday with first degree arson of a place of worship, said Warren Strain, spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. McClinton is African-American. McClinton was arrested in Greenville, where Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church was burned and vandalized Nov. 1, a week before the presidential election. Hopewell Bishop Clarence Green said McClinton is a member of the church. Green said he didn't know...

It's very likely Ohio Gov. John Kasich didn't see this kind of reaction coming when he decided to veto a legislative bill that would have outlawed abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. At a press conference held at the Ohio Statehouse on Thursday, a group of pastors urged Republicans to override the governor's veto. They said they represent "no less than 2,500 churches in the state of Ohio," and tens of thousands of registered voters who "care deeply about this issue." "We would like to make a declaration and to challenge our legislators that we're going to stand with...

Researchers looked at 22 Protestant churches in CanadaA study of Protestant churches in Canada has found that growing churches tend to be more orthodox, while shrinking ones are theologically liberal.Terry Mattingly, author of the Get Religion blog, covered the findings of the study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Review of Religion Research.The researchers, David Millard Haskell, Kevin N Flatt and Stephanie Burgoyne, looked at 22 mainline Protestant churches in Canada. Nine of the churches were growing in attendance, while 13 were declining. The researchers found that when other factors were controlled for, ”the theological conservatism of both attendees...

The rhetoric on immigration during the presidential campaign season has struck fear into the hearts of many foreign-born families, and a new network of Minnesota churches is mobilizing to respond. The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on St. Paul’s Dale Street already maintains 22 shelter beds for the homeless in its basement, where families with no other place to go often spend the night on a temporary basis. The Rev. James Erlandson said those beds may soon serve a different purpose: offering sanctuary to those facing deportation. “That’s a moral stand that we’ve taken,” Erlandson said. “We want to say: ‘Don’t increase...

The presidential election was so close that many factors were “but-for” causes of Donald Trump’s victory. One that’s been mostly overlooked is Trump’s surprising success with religious voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.