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Recently I wrote for FrontPage Mag about the editor of Mother Jones magazine complaining that a flight attendant had shared a “Christian nationalist dog-whistle” by merely wishing the passengers a “blessed” night. The editor even tried to pressure Alaska Airlines publicly to take action to ensure that no passenger would be oppressed again by the “dominant culture enforcing its norms.”
She rightfully received a flood of pushback on social media shaming her for her ingratitude and anti-Christian fear-mongering, but hers is the sort of “soft totalitarianism” routinely directed at Christians by our cultural elites, who in fact do dominate our culture institutions and who have no qualms about enforcing their norms, such as kink-promoting “Pride” parades, transgender flags adorning classrooms, demands to accommodate personal pronouns, sexualizing pre-K children, and pornography in school libraries.
All of these progressive shibboleths – indeed, progressivism itself, which is simply rebranded communism – directly conflict with Christian values. Karl Marx himself saw the eradication of Christianity as a necessary pre-condition for realizing his collectivist utopian vision, and today’s neo-Marxists are no less intolerant of Christians and their “invisible sky god” whose moral demands are an obstacle to progressive libertinism.
In a telling recent example, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who like her deposed boss Joe Biden claims to be a believing Christian, paused during a University of Wisconsin rally to address a pair of Christian students in the crowd who protested her pro-abortion promises by shouting, “Jesus is Lord!” She told them, to the crowd’s uproarious approval, “You guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street,” referring to a recent Trump rally (whose attendance actually dwarfed Kamala’s). The students later told Fox News they were heckled, cursed, and shoved by other attendees. This anti-Christian hostility and bigotry is a core Democrat characteristic.
Elsewhere in the West, in countries that lack our First Amendment rights, this soft totalitarianism is hardening into the criminalization of expressions of Christian faith such as saying “God bless you” to someone, and silent prayer. Case in point: last week Adam Smith-Connor, a British army veteran who served in Afghanistan, was found guilty of praying silently near an abortion clinic in Dorset, England. His offense was the breaching a buffer zone established by a Public Spaces Protection Order designed to stop pro-life beliefs being expressed near the facility, including offering help or prayers to women in crisis pregnancies.
According to Christian Daily, Smith-Connor (pictured above) was merely thinking about his son, whose abortion he regretted having paid for many years before:
Smith-Connor had slightly bowed his head and clasped his hands in prayer on a public green in a buffer zone near the abortion facility in Orphir Road, Bournemouth in November 2022. During a confrontation with police officers that he recorded, they asked him, “What is the nature of your prayer?”
What is the nature of your prayer? Could there be a more chilling, invasive police inquiry than a demand to know the details of one’s private communion with God? Whose business is “the nature of your prayer” but yours and God’s? Would the UK police approach, say, Muslims who lay their prayer mats in public spaces, and demand, “What is the nature of your prayer?”, much less arrest them?
Smith-Connor had merely stood behind a tree, spoken to no one, and even had his back to the facility, and yet the court found guilty of an act of “disapproval of abortion” and gave him a conditional discharge, meaning he will be sentenced only if convicted of future offenses within the next two years. The court also ordered the father of two to pay prosecution costs of 9,000 British pounds ($11,700 USD).
“Today, the court has decided that certain thoughts – silent thoughts – can be illegal in the United Kingdom,” Smith-Connor said after the ruling. “That cannot be right. All I did was pray to God, in the privacy of my own mind and yet I stand convicted as a criminal?”
He continued,
I served for 20 years in the army reserves, including a tour in Afghanistan, to protect the fundamental freedoms that this country is built upon. I continue that spirit of service as a healthcare professional and church volunteer. It troubles me greatly to see our freedoms eroded to the extent that thought-crimes are now being prosecuted in the U.K.
After the ruling, Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for ADF UK, correctly called the result a “legal turning point of immense proportions”:
A man has been convicted today because of the content of his thoughts – his prayers to God – on the public streets of England. We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of free speech and thought.
Igunnubole concluded, “This is a watershed moment for British freedoms, and one the public must not take lightly.”
Indeed not. Under the radical new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the recently elected Labour Government has vowed to implement such buffer zones near abortion clinics all across the country (currently five UK councils that enforce such zones). Smith-Connor’s experience is only the beginning.
The UK police, who won’t address skyrocketing knife crime but will go door-to-door questioning citizens about their social media posts, have demonstrated over and over again that they will punish Christians for “causing offense” online or in a neighborhood with an abortion clinic but will do nothing to Muslims marching in the streets shouting the genocidal chant “From the river to the sea” and the supremacist “Allahu Akbar.” Multiculturalism trumps all, and refuses to coexist with Western cultural norms.
Yes, this example is from the UK and not the U.S., and fortunately we have First Amendment protection against religious discrimination. But do not think for a moment that America will be safe under a far-Left regime led by Kamala Harris if she is successful in retaining the White House for the Democrats. The Left is obsessed with eroding the inconvenient safeguards of our Constitution, which they see as a “living document” that needs updating for our time. They relentlessly push for censorship of what they deem to be “misinformation” or “disinformation.” They despise free speech advocate Elon Musk for enabling the social media platform X to become a more trustworthy news outlet than the propagandistic mainstream media they control. They label speech they disagree with “fascist violence,” which justifies violent “resistance” against their political enemies.
If the Democrats continue to hold political and cultural power, they will continue to work tirelessly for the erosion of our constitutional protections, and for the increasing marginalization of Christians and Jews whose moral code is anathema to the progressive religion of expressive individualism. The soft totalitarianism will harden into the criminalization of Christian religious expression as it has in the UK, and will snowball from there to encompass all perceived threats to their one-party hegemony.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
The only prayers allowed are none since Communism/Socialisms totally Secular/Humanists
We Christian’s are not taking a stand to protect our values in name of our “love to the next” we need to follow,Jesus Christ example exposing the wrecked.
Beautifully written. And chilling.
.
Much appreciated, DrLarry.
the democrats have every thing in common with marx , he was a self loathing jew and hater of humanity he destroyed his own family and went on to destroy families world wide and it continues to this very day . a more appalling legacy is not to be found . the irony of labelling trump as the reincarnation of hitler when in fact their policies are the very essence of marx and hitler combined .
All true, as is the fact that he was raised as a Christian, never thought of himself as a Jew, and that his parents converted to Christianity either (IIIRC) before he was born or when he was very young & were not what one would call philosemites.
There’s a double whammy which hits a reader of this excellent article:
the fact that Christianity is so maligned by the Left who would like to
see it eradicated and the double standard by which Muslims are treated
in comparison. The thought police regarding both is alive and well in
the United States and is called the mainstream media.
The mainstream media which backs Kamala Harris to the hilt – nowhere
more in evidence than the Presidential debate between her and Trump.
Author Raymond Ibrahim has for many years written at the Gatestone
Institute a summary each month of Muslim atrocities throughout the
world, including continually in Europe. The barbarity is that widespread
and frequent. Also for many years, the Christian people of Nigeria have
been regularly and severely slaughtered by Muslims – almost onto a
genocide. Yet there isn’t a peep about any of these Islamic undertakings
in the media – not the barest consciousness of it in the minds of Americans.
Through such a blackout, the MSM props up the erasure of Christianity and
the savagery of Islam. If their Communist candidate Kamala gets in – it’s for
certain Americans – like their counterparts in U.K. – will soon too be asked by
police “What is the nature of your prayer?”
TRUMP OR TYRANNY 2024
Not sure why my attempts to upvote your comment aren’t registering, but as my classmate j Jones once said, I could hardly fail to disagree with you less.
Someone needs to organise a silent prayer protest outside every abortion clinic where thousands turn up to pray.
Gee whiz, the modern totalitarians are behaving just like the Christian theocracies of the Christian Dark Age used to do.
The intolerance and tyranny of the modern globalists would make Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Cotton Mather proud.
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it and the people in the rising religious movement today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor, but philosophy and culture are…. Religion has been the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning, it has ruled in disguised forms, and still is, and now the disguise had to be stripped off… What socialism is doing is really helping religion, the bigger the statism, the more people grow accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead from the more secular side… The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
You can take comfort in the fact that you will never be asked “What is the nature of your prayer?” since you an inveterate baby killer. Although your hands are soaked in the blood of the innocent.
Atheism and abortion…..two peas in a pod.
A member of Ayn Rand’s group would have known, luridly, the dangers of thought-crime. Many of them were, in fact, victimized by it (i.e. her). (I had my subscription to The Objectivist cancelled because of it! LOL. I still have the condemning letter, signed by Elaine Kalberman). By the way, the church-related universities of the “Middle Ages” were hotbeds of open and vivid inquiry.
Don’t know who this Leonard guy is, but YOU cerrainly sound like a piece of work.
The root of this discussion is DEAD BABIES. Some people find the killing of them to be offensive. Perhaps if it was YOUR skin in the game, you’d feel a touch differently? SOmething along the lines of “PWEEZE doan kill ME. What did I do to YOU to warrant death?
There are a number of people in history that seemed to delight in the death of innocents. You seem to be comfortable with that.
There is a litle sentence buried in that Book you despise. It goes something like this:
whoever by his hand sheds the blood of innocents, by the hand of man shall HIS blood be spilled.
These babies ye within the wombs of their Mothers are indeed innocent.Fact is, if they are that unwanted it is almost universally the case that their Mothers carry some guilt of their own in conceiving them. Most often it revolves round spreading their legs for some man NOT their husband, and the resulting baby is proof of their own guilt.
No, the subject of this thread is that the content of one’s prayer, whether silent or spoken, is none of the Crown’s business, but the Crown seems dangerously willing to disregard that principle when the prayer involves saving babies from being killed in the womb but not when the prayer involves inciting the crowd to murder non-Muslims who are already alive.
Only one King has any concern with silent prayer and His seat is not in Buckingham Palace. And He already knows the content of the silent prayer &!
its every detail.
“Show me your papers” has devolved to “What is the nature of your prayer?”
First of all the response to that could be anything since it is a silent prayer. Secondly how do you arrest someone for prayer since the only thing the government can do is speculate as to the nature and content of the prayer. Unless the arrestee is dumb enough to divulge the content.
I’m trying to figure out what has gone wrong in England. This is what happens when you don’t have anything resembling a Bill of Rights.
Simply put, what has gone wrong in England is the same thing going wrong in many nations–including America–around the world and especially in the west: rejection of Christ and the Bible. Currently, Christianity as a large-scale religious entity in England, and other countries in the west, is devoid of any true relationship with Christ; thus, its congregants are slumbering under the provocative lie that “all religions lead to God”–nullifying the sanctified nature of Christ–and that any perverse lifestyle in direct contradiction to the Bible is valid and must be not only allowed in the pews, but also protected. This is based on the lie that “we’re all God’s children” and, therefore, any lifestyle is legitimate. In one fell swoop, both Christ and the Bible are dethroned as the ultimate source of authority. Society suffers.
Furthermore, what little Bible-believing Christians are left are relentlessly persecuted, delegitimized, harassed, and, evidently, arrested and charged with thought crimes for expressing biblical ideas, which are the very words that proceed from the mouth of God. So, then, any semblance of truth is bullied into the shadows where it is unable to proliferate among the lost in need of salvation offered thru Christ; thus, truth is replaced with lies. Society suffers.
A Bill of Rights will do you very little if your society does not include Christianity–and true Christianity rather than secularism with Christian flavor–as its baseline. This is very evident in America, where we do have a Bill of Rights, and yet our rights are becoming more trampled by the day, as if said Bill of Rights doesn’t exist. In fact, many of our political elites are openly discussing the possibility of overhauling portions of the Bill of Rights (as if they haven’t done so already). And the spiritual sickness prevalent in England is happening here, too, with megachurch culture where there’s a Christian flavor, but Christ and the Bible are markedly absent. Society suffers.
Well said and mostly I agree with you. However we still have an effective Bill of Rights. If we didn’t the 1A and 2A would have been rendered null and void.
The left is desperately trying to cancel free speech but there is that pesky 2A and the gun owners.
I’m no tech expert, but won’t future AI systems be able to read a human’s thoughts?.. or at least that’s a topic of sci-fi thrillers.
Wait until apps like the AI video creation tool, Invideo, can be attached to your brain via a Bluetooth-type device.
Then, not only can your dreams be turned into full length video clips, but you could play Call of Duty 25: It’s All In Your Mind” …. It will be AI Wars…. where you can compete against other players from around the world.
Given there’s rumors that over 100,000 Special Forces Operators from China have flooded into our country, I sure hope the good guys win this AI War.
These people will never quit until there is total control. There will be control over your electric money. There will also be a disinformation department. (already tried). The religion of the camels will reign supreme soon. Sadly the only defense we have against the camel religion is the illegals that are mostly Christian coming in from Mexico.
And soon Human Sacrifice like the Aztecs Incans and Myans did
If Harris and the Democrats win/seize power, we will start off with a kind of East Germany Lite, which will get “progressively” worse. On the other hand, one will be able to earn extra income from turning in your neighbor for engaging in thought crime.
Policing and enforcing the thoughts of others is the epitome of a dystopian society. It reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” where those who had bad thoughts got sent to the cornfield.
Always remember…They are more afraid of us than we are of them!!!!
The solution to harassment by the authorities asking about what are you praying is to simply say you are praying to ALAH. Then laugh and pray or rest your eyes or whatever reason you had your head bowed and hands clasped.
Feel free to get smart with the authorities.. They wouldn’t dare do anything.
Replace the word ‘christian’ with ‘hindu’. It is the prevailing situation in India also.
“After the Democrats are through with America, America will be through. We will end like ancient Rome. The post-American era will be Dark Ages 2.0.”
Leonard Peikoff nails why we should vote for Trump.
https://aynrandcentre.substack.com/p/anti-trumpites-for-trump-adapted