Free Republic

In 17th Century Europe, you’d have swung for blaspheming against the dominant church of the day. In 2022, you can now be criminalised for professing the scripture of that same faith. A Bishop and a parliamentarian have been tried for ‘hate speech’ in Finland, in this case for merely quoting and affirming biblical views. In 2019 MP Päivi Räsänen, grandmother of seven, had sent a tweet, accompanied by a Bible verse, criticising her church for co-sponsoring the Helsinki Pride parade. Less than 280 characters triggered a life-changing police investigation. Räsänen was charged for the tweet, and also for backing biblical...

Helsinki, Finland, Mar 30, 2022 / 05:05 am (CNA). The verdict in the closely watched trial of a Finnish Christian MP was announced on Wednesday. A court in Helsinki dismissed all charges against Päivi Räsänen, a physician and mother of five, and Juhana Pohjola, a bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland. The court said in a unanimous ruling on March 30 that “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” The court said in a unanimous ruling on March 30 that “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” It ordered...

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This report was first published by the Gatetone Institute. The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of July, 2021:The Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion of Christian Girls in Pakistan A Muslim teacher raped an 8-year-old Christian in a school bathroom, and the school and police are covering it up. According to the July 11 report, Shahzad Masih’s young daughter was “shaking and screaming in pain when she returned home from school that day, June 22, her uniform spotted with blood.” “She...

‘Catholics for Biden’ Declare War on the ChurchOn December 6, major news outlets announced that “President-elect” Joe Biden selected California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Prior to the announcement, it was rumored that Becerra would serve as the U.S. Attorney General under the Biden Administration, given his involvement with the “Biden for Catholics” grassroots organization, his serving as co-chair with former vice-presidential candidate and Senator Tim Kaine, and his current role as California’s chief law-enforcement officer.The nomination gained tacit approval of the liberal establishment as the New York Times wrote in...

In the same article, the Post also reports on a backlash against this amazing generosity. A leader of the Yellow Vest movement says that if donors can give so much money to rebuild Notre Dame, “they should stop telling us there is no money to help deal with the social emergency.” But the donations to Notre Dame are coming from private donors. No one denies they have money. It’s the French government that’s running out. Some in the Yellow Vest movement probably favor the government taking yet more money from the wealthy “to help deal with the social emergency.” That’s...

Chinese persecution continues into the afterlife, as authorities remove crosses and crescent moons from tombstones.The purging of religious symbols by Chinese authorities has now expanded to the removal of crosses and crescent moons from cemeteries and tombstones. What is a common and often overlooked scene in other countries – crosses adorning graves and church grounds – could be the cause of government persecution in China. Mr. Wang hails from a town in Gongyi city, in China’s central province of Henan. He told Bitter Winter that in April of last year, while he was still grieving from the loss of his...

The war in eastern Ukraine hasn't just been about territory — religion has deepened the divide. In Donetsk, Protestants are being forced to conduct their services in apartments, persecuted by pro-Russia separatists who believe there’s only room for one religion in the region: Russian Orthodoxy. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky traveled to Donetsk to attend secret Protestant churches, and spoke with members of the Donetsk People’s Republic as well as the Orthodox Church to find out whether the DPR’s vision for the rebel-controlled region includes the coexistence of religious beliefs.

Authorities of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), an unrecognized entity that declared independence from Ukraine in 2014, have halted worship meetings by a range of religious communities, seized religious literature and fined religious leaders. The most recent raid came on a Pentecostal Church in Alchevsk on Aug. 6. Earlier raids included one June 10 on a Baptist congregation in the town of Krasnodon (official Ukrainian name Sorokyne), near the eastern border with Russia. The church had gathered for its regular Sunday morning worship meeting when police arrived. State registration Officers told church members there that under Article 9 of...

For 16 years, North Korea has been ranked the “most oppressive place in the world for Christians,” and this week the U.S. State Department re-asserted it as one of the world’s worst religious persecutors – torturing and executing those even suspected of worshipping God. But that still hasn’t stopped an estimated 36 percent of the population – around 9 million – from practicing Christianity. “Life is extremely difficult for all North Koreans, but Christians face an even tougher road,” Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern told Fox News. “Christians are accused of being imperialists seeking to overthrow the government...

It appears that Russia is leading the way towards a much-needed rejection of "religious freedom" in the West: Source from NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/446966/russia-jehovahs-witnesses-ban-continues-putin-religious-persecution Russia’s crackdown on religious activity took a major step forward this week as the Justice Ministry banned Jehovah’s Witnesses. Russia has steadily curtailed rights to evangelize in recent years, but this move signals their commitment to aggressively policing private religious activity. The Russian supreme court ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses amount to an “extremist group,” and therefore the government is shutting down their headquarters and local chapters, seizing their property, and banning them from meeting. Vladimir Putin’s campaign...

Approximately 90,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2016 worldwide, making them the most persecuted religious group in the world. That number — which amounts to one Christian killed every six minutes — is down a bit from 2015 when the number was estimated to be approximately 105,000.According to a Fox News report, nearly a third of the deaths in 2016 were at the hands of Islamic extremists like ISIS, and others were killed by state and non-state persecution. Massimo Introvigne, director of CENSUR, told Vatican Radio that approximately 70 percent of the martyred Christians in 2016 were from tribal villages in Africa, and their...

In the Santa Clara WEEKLY that I picked up yesterday, I learned that atheist activists won yet another battle locally to eradicate religious symbols from public life. Removal of Park Cross: City Cave-in or Prudent Compromise? described the removal from city property of a 14 foot granite cross that stood in the Mission Cross Park in Santa Clara for nearly 64 years. Much pressure is being put on cities to remove Christian religious symbols. Sometimes even when Christian images are banned, by some lapse of logic, pagan idols are not. Near where I live in San Jose, for example, nativity...

A lot of people have seemed pretty shocked by the leftist media’s assault on Chip and Joanna Gaines. BuzzFeed, along with other liberal sites, went after the Gaines family this week for committing the crime of being Christian. Sure, they didn’t put it like that exactly. Instead they accused Chip and Joanna of attending a church led by a pastor who doesn’t believe in gay marriage. But, as anyone with even a trivial understanding of the world’s largest religion already knows, every authentic Christian church in the world teaches the same thing. There has never existed a real Christian church...

Christianity: An Antidote to TyrannyClifford Staples Like all modern tyrants, Karl Marx hated religion, Christianity in particular, because he understood that it was going to be very difficult if not impossible to get men to follow him so long as they continued to follow Jesus Christ, and so the first thing an aspiring tyrant in the middle of Christian Europe needed to do was to uproot and destroy Christianity. With Christ dwelling in the hearts of men there was no room for the atheist humanism that Marx and others were proposing as an alternative. But without God men could be...

CHRISTIAN communities in China have been left horrified after the government started tearing down thousands of crucifixes in a crude bid to eradicate the faith in the country. More than two thousand crosses have now been forcefully removed from churches as part of a government campaign to regulate "excessive religious sites". ... Several members of the public have since been arrested for attempting to halt the government's crude attempt to suppress the Christian faith. Among the arrested was prominent human rights lawyer Zhang Kai, who was detained after he mounted a legal campaign to challenge the removal of the crosses....

Moscow, March 30, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) will hold a World Summit of Christian Leaders in Moscow, on October 28-30, in support of persecuted Christians. The forum is expected to gather about a thousand delegates from 150 countries, a spokesperson for the Russian Orthodox Church said. "The reason for conducting such a large-scale event are the mass persecutions, unprecedented in contemporary history, of Christians in the Middle East, Africa and other world regions, comparable to the persecution of Christians in the early centuries and mass repressions by atheist authorities in the...

Gov. Nathan Deal on Monday vetoed the controversial Religious Freedom bill, saying it "contains language that causes me concern." “I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community in Georgia of which I and my family have been part of all of our lives,” Deal said.

A Christian couple in Norway have reportedly become embroiled in a battle with social services after their five children were removed on charges that included “Christian radicalization and indoctrination.” On Nov. 16, Norway’s child welfare services, the Barnevernet, seized Marius and Ruth Bodnariu’s two daughters, two sons and their baby, Ezekiel. The two eldest children were reportedly removed from school without their parents knowledge, and then Barnevarnet representatives arrived with police at the Bodnariu home, where welfare services seized the remaining children, minus the baby. The organization returned the following day and removed the infant as well after the family...

The Oireachtas has approved legislation that extends equality law protections for LGBT teachers to schools and institutions run by the Catholic Church. The Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, which has passed all legislative stages, scraps Section 37(1) of the Employment Equality Act, which exempts the promotion of "certain religious values" from the legal definition of discrimination. The section applies to "religious, educational or medical" institutions which are "under the direction or control of a body established for religious purposes". The move to amend the Act is principally aimed at protecting staff at denominational schools which receive state funding, though hospitals and...

A prominent politician in the Australian state of Tasmania has lodged a formal complaint against a pamphlet on marriage produced by the Catholic Church, saying that it causes “immeasurable harm” by arguing against acceptance of same-sex unions. Martine Delaney, the anti-discrimination commissioner of Tasmania’s state government, called for an investigation of the Australian bishops’ conference which issued Don’t Mess with Marriage. The pamphlet was distributed to 12,000 families with children in the state’s Catholic schools. Delaney charged that the publication denigrated the rights of homosexuals.