Leftists Shout Down Pastor Leading Prayer at Town Hall

church millitant ^ | April 22, 2017 | trey elmore

[Morgana]

GAYLORD, Mich. (ChurchMilitant.com) - A group of feminists shouted down a Protestant pastor opening a Michigan town hall meeting with prayer. Held in the city of Gaylord in Michigan's First Congressional District Thursday, Dr. Derek Hagland of Grace Baptist Church kicked off the event for state Republican congressman Jack Bergman, a former lieutenant general in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Chanting "separation of Church and State," leftist activists — men and women alike — wearing the now-familiar pink hats associated with the D.C. Women's March tried to drown out Hagland's opening prayer.

"He's incredibly transparent about faith being an important part of his life," said Bergman's communications director Farahn Morgan. "His faith is unequivocally what guides him, and he's not apologetic about that at all."

Morgan told Breitbart that the disruption was carried out by the anti-Trump group Indivisible. The Facebook page for Indivisible in the Michigan First District featured an announcement that the town hall would be taking place.

The commotion was underway before Hagland approached the podium. Immediately following the invocation was the Pledge of Allegiance, which started off in more order than had been demonstrated by the crowd up until that point. The "under God" portion of the pledge was accompanied by some voices making a point to shout the words, and others trying to shout over them.

The episode reveals divisions among Americans about the proper relationship between religion and government, which undergirds policy differences on a host of issues ,from so-called same-sex marriage to abortion to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. As Church Militant has recently reported, shortly following the nomination and swearing in of Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the first cases coming before the High Court involves public grants given to religious institutions, namely Trinity Lutheran Church in Missouri.

Before the secularist movement began attacking public displays of religion in schools and during national holidays in the United States, it was happening by way of anti-clerical laws across Europe, including Portugal at the time of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima.

Pope St. Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical Vehementer Nos on the French Law of Separation:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.

The term "separation of Church and State" is found in a private letter of Thomas Jefferson, not in the U.S. Constitution itself, as is widely thought. In the letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson used the phrase "a wall of separation between Church and State" to mean that the Constitution protects religion from government interference. Today, the meaning of the phrase has been turned on its head, denoting the opposite.

The most recent Supreme Court decision about prayer in public functions was the 2014 decision in Town of Greece v Galloway, a 5–4 ruling that upheld the constitutionality of allowing volunteer chaplains to lead local legislative sessions in prayer.

[Huebolt]

My daughter asked why the Biblical texts included so many miracles. No one was asked just to have faith.

She asked why they had miracles and powerful showings of the presence of God and we get nothing but “Just Believe”.

I had no good answer. Just faith was all I could come up with at the time.