Last month, I published a Sunday essay that made a number of people extremely angry. It was called “The Seeds of Political Violence Are Being Sown in Church.”  In the piece I noted that Michael Flynn, a man who called for martial law to help overturn the election, was packing churches across America as part of a “ReAwaken America” tour that was so thoroughly Christian that it was sponsored by one of Pentecostal Christianity’s most important publications, Charisma News. The response to my essay can best be described as “volcanic.” But not because I got my facts wrong. The threats I described in the piece are real. The attendance of thousands upon thousands of Christians at those rallies is real. Flynn’s record is well-documented. The recent record of religiously motivated political violence was very real.

Source: Getting ‘More Christians Into Politics’ Is the Wrong Christian Goal

“We don’t really understand why,” Alan Scott said in a recording of a Sunday service obtained by CT. “I wish I really could sit before you today and say, ‘Here are the six reasons,’ ‘Here’s our issues,’ ‘Here are our grievances,’ or whatever. … We don’t always know what’s on the other side of obedience.”

Source: Leading Church Exits Vineyard…… | News & Reporting | Christianity Today

On the religious roots of war and the Christian response.

Source: The Best of Christian Compassion, the Worst of Religious Power

The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.

Source: March 12, 2022 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday Russia announced a revised military doctrine, signed by President Vladimir Putin, that names NATO as the Kremlin’s main adversary and clarifies that Russia’s military reserves…

Source: Putin’s Orthodox Jihad – The XX Committee

Conservative evangelicals have failed to live up to the ideal of the reformation to “always be reforming” and as a result exists in an echo chamber of their own making. “Ecclesia Semper Reformanda est” or “The Church should always be reformed” was a popular axiom proclaimed by Augustine and then again later by Karl Barth. It’s a phrase that goes directly to the problem in conservative evangelicalism that it refuses to accept criticism both externally and internally. More times than not conservative evangelicalism sees any criticism as an attack and, therefore, dig their heels in to hold their position instead of humbly considering whether the criticism has any validity.

Source: Evangelicals in the Hands of an Angry God: 8 Theses | Eric Scot English

According to MacArthur, Gray’s sin was that she had decided “to leave her husband, to grant no grace at all, to take the children, to go away, to forsake him.” This, MacArthur emphasized, meant rejecting “all the instruction and counsel of the elders, all instruction from the Word of God.”MacArthur then encouraged the church to pray for Eileen and to “treat her as an unbeliever—for all we know, she may be.”

Source: EXCLUSIVE: MacArthur Shamed, Excommunicated Wife of Child Abuser