TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

First he declared that America isn’t “a Christian nation.” Now President Obama is telling the world that his country is a Muslim one. In a stunning interview with France’s Canal Plus, he said, “If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” The statement, one in a long line of White House shockers, is part of the administration’s campaign to soften the opposition to America in advance of the President’s speech to the Islamic world tomorrow. As ABC’s Jake Tapper puts it, President Obama is getting in touch with his “inner-Muslim,” even embracing “Hussein,” his once-taboo middle name.

Wednesday, the President is hoping his silky oratory will translate well in Cairo, where he will try to charm the Arab nations with his Muslim roots. While the White House may talk a good game, this President’s agenda is the embodiment of every immorality the Islamic world detests about the West. In five months, his policies have endorsed global promiscuity, sodomy, and abortion. Just last Friday, his Baghdad embassy presided over the region’s first “drag party” in the middle of a war zone. Like a growing number of Americans, the Middle East sees the tension between the President’s rhetoric and the global reality. This kind of duplicity only fans the flames of anti-American sentiment.

While the President speaks of peace and reconciliation on the Arab stage, American soldiers are being gunned down in the U.S. by Muslim converts. On Monday, a 24-year-old Army recruiter was killed and another wounded by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed in Arkansas. The suspect admitted to the killing, blaming “what [the Army] had done to Muslims in the past.”

As Gary Bauer pointed out in his End of Day, “President Obama, who immediately condemned the murder of abortionist George Tiller on Sunday, still has not – 24 hours later – said one word about the cowardly attack on these soldiers. The U.S. Justice Department, which sent federal marshals yesterday to guard abortion clinics, has sent no one to guard our military recruitment offices, even though more than 100 of those offices have been attacked in recent years … I guess he was just too busy pouring over his … proclamation declaring June ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.'”

Could the rise in government spending – from economic stimulus to health care reform to education spending – endanger the vitality of religion in America? That’s a question University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal.

Wilcox zeroed in on a intriguing study entitled “State Welfare Spending and Religiosity.” The study’s authors, Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, found an “inverse relationship between religious observance and welfare spending.” Put more simply, the more a government spends on welfare, the fewer people go to church. This is why it is that church attendance is so low in welfare states such as Denmark and Sweden compared to countries like the U.S. and the Philippines – where government doesn’t provide cradle-to-grave assistance.

Anthony Gill hits the nail on the head. “For many centuries,” he writes, “average citizens and local communities have often relied upon the support of religious organizations to meet their various social needs, including assistance for the poor, counseling in times of crisis, and education for the young.” So as the government grows, it elbows out the church and other voluntary associations. Gill continues, “Many people have found that they can get the same services from the government without having to give a time commitment to the local church.”

Now, we would like to think that most people don’t stay in church just because they get can get help in times of trouble. But the truth is that many people first encounter the Church when they are in need: at a crisis pregnancy center, a soup kitchen, or in counseling for drug abuse or alcoholism. So as Wilcox writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Many of those who initially turn to religious organizations for mutual aid end up developing a faith that is as supernatural as it is material.”

Yes there are other factors behind declining church attendance in America but the recent turning of the people toward government as the answer to all our problems is also detrimental to themselves and the Church. It is also destructive to the future of American democracy.

In his book, Democracy in America, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how Americans could accomplish almost anything through voluntary associations – especially churches. They built schools, hospitals, sent missionaries all over the world. He wrote, “I frequently admired the boundless skill of Americans in setting large numbers of people a common goal and inducing them to strive toward that goal voluntarily.”

De Tocqueville doubted that government could ever accomplish all that American citizens could do through their associations. But he also warned that if government should supplant the good work of these associations, the American people would ultimately end up dependent upon government. And this, he said, would imperil not only American democracy, but “civilization itself.”

In times of trouble, it’s natural to echo the question of the Psalmist from Psalm 121: “Where does my help come from?” Sadly, it seems that more and more Americans these days would answer, “It comes from Uncle Sam.”

The government limits Christianity in prisons but by all means let Islam do what it wants !

Last week, the FBI arrested four members of a would-be terrorist cell in New York.  While the arrests eliminated the immediate threat from this particular group, it highlighted a much bigger threat: the spawning of terrorism in American prisons.

The four men, allegedly angered by the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan, had planned to bomb several synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down a military plane using a Stinger missile.  Thankfully the plastic explosives and the Stinger missile they planned on using were fake because the FBI, acting on a tip from another member of their mosque had penetrated the cell and sold them fake goods and foiled the plot.

Maybe these terrorists were not in the know weapon-wise but their rage was well-developed.  Their leader considered Jews “the source of all problems in America.”  They “wanted to make a statement” by targeting synagogues and destroying military aircraft.

What is more frightening than their rage is the fact that there are potentially a lot more of them where they came from … our prisons.  At least two of the terror suspects converted to radical Islam while in prison, while the other two were also the product of what is called “jailhouse Islam.”

An NYPD report, entitled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, concludes that in-prison conversions to Islam “fuel anger towards the United States.”  Part of the reason is that the men doing the converting are often angry and resentful and looking for someone to blame for their predicament so they pass that anger on.  Most of it though has to do with the kind of Islam being preached in American prisons since in many American prisons, prisoners learn about Islam from other prisoners.  These prisoners, in turn, rely on reading material targeted at prisoners and their resentments as the book called The Noble Koran does.

This version of the Koran, distributed by a Wahhabi group, included “numerous interpolations” not present in the original Arabic.  It includes a 22-page appendix entitled “A Call to Jihad” urging “war against non-Muslims who have not submitted to Islamic rule.”  Other literature from the same group told prisoners that non-Islamic government “must be sincerely hated and despised for the pleasure of Allah.”

While some prison systems have banned this group’s literature, others haven’t.  The effect of this literature on angry and, in many cases, unstable men isn’t hard to imagine … as the events in New York remind us, we don’t have to imagine it.

What’s the answer?  For starters, officials should crack down on the purveyors of radical Islam in our prisons.  That kind of literature and the message it spreads have no business in our prisons.  They should focus on the problem … Islam … not religion in general because that would kick out Christianity – the only thing that can really help the prisoners because it brings the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ into prisons across America.

The fact of the matter is that prisoners are looking for solutions to their problems.  And they will find one in drugs, or gangs, or even in hate-filled jihadism and Stinger missiles.  They need to be offered the only solution that will work … forgiveness of their sins, and transformation through Jesus Christ.