Aspiring tyrants are now brazen in their crusade against free speech. John Kerry, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kentanji Brown Jackson, Letitia James, and their allies in academia and the media have been unequivocal in their calls to destroy the protections of the First Amendment.
These threats are not hypothetical. The West has weaponized the judicial system to punish Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Mark Steyn, Douglass Mackey, VDARE, Roger Ver, Pavel Durov, and many others for their disobedience to the Washington establishment.
But beyond these blatant persecutions of protected political speech, a more insidious – and far less reported – assault on free expression is taking place: Christianity is under attack in the West, the former home of freedom. This might sound hyperbolic, because “mainstream” news media will not report on the subject.
In England, a British Army veteran named Adam Smith-Connor was convicted for praying silently on a public street. Police approached Smith-Connor and told him they were there to “inquire as to [his] activities.” “Well, I’m praying,” he explained in an exchange captured on video. The officer followed up, “What is the nature of your prayer today?” “I’m praying for my son,” he responded.
Smith-Connor was praying silently near an abortion facility, which the British police ruled violated the laws of the United Kingdom, although he prayed with his back to the facility “to avoid any impression of approaching or engaging any women entering or leaving the facility,” his lawyers wrote.
His attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom explained, “According to the rules of the censorship zone in which he was praying, if Adam were thinking about any other issue – the economy, immigration, or healthcare, for example – he wouldn’t have been fined. It was the nature of his thoughts [of his unborn son about to be killed], his silent prayer, that got him in legal trouble.” The Judge found Smith-Connor guilty because his “hands were clasped, and his head was slightly bowed.”
While Britain has weaponized its legal system against Christian in peaceful, silent prayer, Canada’s government has been complicit in the mass destruction of houses of Christian worship. There, arsonists have torched dozens of churches, in response to a 2021 hoax claiming that there were mass graves of native American children near Christian churches and schools, the implication being that the staff had abused the children to death and secretly buried them in mass graves.
It was bizarre and illogical nonsense, but Prime Minister Justin Castro (following the convention of naming sons after their biological fathers) promoted the hoax and said that the anger against white Christians of European extraction was “fully understandable.”
Three years later, the false claims have been debunked but the arson and other vandalism continues. By some counts, the number of churches burned or vandalized has now reached 112. So far, the disgraceful Canadian PM has said nothing to correct the record or apologize for his part in egging on the destruction. Justin “Trudeau” is a Christian-hating communist like his biological father—Justin effusively praised Fidel Castro when he died—and the mass grave hoax served as a convenient excuse to incite destruction of Christian property.
From the Jacobins in France to the Bolsheviks in Russia, Christianity has long been the target of Leftist revolutionaries and society’s nihilistic malcontents. We Americans have long considered ourselves immune to, if not above, the religious persecutions seen in Europe and other parts of the world, but the events of recent years, particularly the tyrannical response to the Covid pandemic, have proven that our confidence is misplaced.
In May, 2020, Kentucky State Police arrived at an Easter service to issue notices that attendance was criminal. They recorded the congregants’ license plate numbers and issued warnings that violators were subject to further sanction. In Mississippi that year, police issued citations to a church congregation that hosted a drive-in service despite attendees remaining in their vehicles for the entire service.
In Idaho, police arrested Christians for removing their masks to sing psalms outdoors in September 2020. “We were just singing songs,” said Christ Church Pastor Ben Zornes. But that was no excuse for the sin of violating an irrational and unscientific cloth commandment. “At some point in time you have to enforce,” the local police chief explained.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo threatened residents with $1,000 fines for attending “drive-in” services in May, 2020. “We’re not trying to be rebellious,” said Pastor Samson Ryman. “We’re just trying to be safe and reach our community with the gospel of Jesus Christ in these difficult times when people are having anxiety, worry, different mental concerns, and they want to get some spiritual help, through the word of God.” On May 3, 2020, Ryman held his first drive-in service in upstate New York with 23 attendees in 18 vehicles. The next day, Cuomo’s police force issued a cease-and-desist letter.
In California, the Santa Clara Health Department used GPS data to monitor congregants at a local evangelical church. The government partnered with a data mining company to create a “geofence” around the church’s property, monitoring over 65,000 mobile devices to record any citizens that spent more than four minutes in the area.
Governor Gavin Newsom limited church attendance to 25% of capacity and banned singing. In Nevada, the Governor allowed casinos to hold 500 gamblers while churches were limited to 50 congregants, no matter their respective capacity limits.
Around the country, governors deemed churches “non-essential” and barred them from opening their doors. Meanwhile, marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, abortionists, and lotteries received the protection of the arbitrary label of “essential services.”
In retrospect, it is now obvious that these restrictions on Christian worship had no connection whatsoever to public health. This was obviously the case with outdoor or even “drive-in” gatherings. The Covid pandemic was an entirely specious excuse for the Marxist revolutionaries who control government in America to act out their hatred for Christianity, and they seized the opportunity.
Sadly, because of the worthlessness of John Roberts, The Supreme Court upheld these blatant, and blatantly baseless, attacks on religion until Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in October, 2020, giving conservatives a five to four majority to put a stop to the government persecution.
The fraudulent nature of the public health narrative used to justify the attack on Christianity was laid bare by the George Floyd riots that June. When asked about the double standard, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded, “When you see a nation, an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”
The message to that “devout religious person” was clear: government-promoted racial grievance is important, your Christian religion is not. The former supersedes the purported public health rationale for state-mandated “social distancing,” but Christianity does not.
The secular religion pushed by the Marxists even has its own peculiar canon of saints. In Washington, DC, the Mayor renamed Christmas Eve “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Day” in 2020, a declaration rivaled in its blasphemy only by President Biden’s proclamation naming Easter Sunday 2024 as “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
Christianity threatens this revolutionary Leftist regime because it promotes faith in a God who is far greater and more powerful than the state, a God who has given us rights that the state may not abridge; it teaches allegiance to permanent truths rather than to an ever-changing cacophony of cultural Marxist slogans and talking points. The assault on religion is not collateral damage in the war against free expression; suppressing worship is fundamental to the tyranny they are building.
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them” — Thomas Jefferson
This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute, written by the editors thereof. It is published here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License