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Louisiana, Law, and Lies: Is Displaying the Ten Commandments in Classrooms Constitutional?

By Selwyn Duke

“The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount,” said a famed American figure. “The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.”

Which evangelist said the above? Billy Graham? Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell?

Actually, it was Democratic president Harry Truman.

“Give ’Em Hell Harry” wasn’t alone. In 1935, fellow Democrat and New Deal author President Franklin Roosevelt said in a statement, “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a Nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.”

150,000 Dead and Counting: Christians Killed for Their Faith EVERY Week

By Selwyn Duke

The Roman arena, where Christians might be thrown to lions, is long gone. But though the tormentors and methods have changed, this doesn’t mean such persecution has ended. In fact, 100,000-150,000 Christians have been slaughtered worldwide by Muslims (often jihadists) during the last two decades. One of the worst killing fields is Nigeria, where approximately 52,250 Christians were killed from 2009 to 2023 alone, according to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law. Holy Week hasn’t meant a break from this unholy phenomenon, either, with 51 Christians killed in Nigeria mere hours after Palm Sunday.

This is religious persecution — some would say genocide — the mainstream media generally don’t report, even though it’s savage and continual.

Christian Revival: Is (Once?) Woke Silicon Valley Coming to Jesus?

By Selwyn Duke

When it was alleged in 2023 that the message “Jesus died so you could live” was labeled “hate speech” by Facebook, it perhaps was not surprising. Two years later, however, something else surely is.

Christian code has entered Silicon Valley, we hear, and may be supplanting its notoriously secular programming. Apparently, man does not live by bits and bytes alone.

Yet how sincere is this movement? And will it really eradicate the woke mind virus? Or will it reflect what Barna Group research company president David Kinnaman lamented a decade ago? To wit: “Americans’ dedication to Jesus is, in most cases,” he said, “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Does Teaching Bible in Schools Make Kids More Moral and Mentally Healthy?

By Selwyn Duke

While talking about “raising and training children” and “implanting” the proper “moral code,” a prominent politician had an interesting prescription. “The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount,” he said. “The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.”

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state education superintendent, certainly must believe the above, too. Last year, in fact, he mandated that the Bible should be taught in all his state’s K-12 schools. Only, truth in advertising, while Walters certainly would embrace the quoted words, he didn’t utter them.

Rather, they were spoken by Democratic president Harry S. Truman in 1950. And, no, this wasn’t while speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention, either. He was instead giving an address before the Attorney General’s Conference on Law Enforcement Problems.

Well, pop goes another stereotype.

Bernie Sanders Rally Features Vulgar Anti-Christian Song Portraying God as Sexual Predator

By Selwyn Duke

Conservative partisans online will sometimes, waxing pejorative, call our major liberal political party the “Demoncrats.” Many would assume they’re just speaking loosely, too. Yet Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has now given the critics more ammunition to make their case.

That is, on Friday, Sanders held a rally featuring a song portraying God as a sexual predator who assaults people. Profoundly vulgar, blasphemous, and anti-Christian, it included lyrics such as “Does your god have a big fat d***?”

Without God, There is No TRUE Respect for Human Life

By Selwyn Duke

Since my title is bound to inspire criticism that I’m a “God botherer,” I’ll preface what follows by stating that I wasn’t always the halo-adorned, floating-in-the-ether desert mystic (without the sand or heat) you behold today. I wasn’t raised with faith, and as a 12-year-old was an agnostic who’d say, “I’d never believe or disbelieve in anything there’s no proof of.” Later on I’d be rather dismissive of theists, actually, viewing them as God botherers myself, though we didn’t have that term or as many Richard Dawkins-like secularist warriors back then. I suppose we were, relatively speaking, handicapped in our exercise of supercilious anti-theism.

But that has changed — and I’ve changed. I long ago could’ve moved on to supercilious pro-theism; only, my faith instructs that Pride is the father of all sin, Humility is a virtue and warns that “he who exalts himself will be humbled.” The realization I’ll expound upon today further explains why I’ve changed, and I mention my spiritual evolution not because I’m narcissistic (though that isn’t to say I’m not!) but because maybe, just perhaps, a few non-believers will consider what follows more seriously knowing it doesn’t come from someone “raised to think that way.”

“Lemon” Called a Lemon: Will Religion Fully Return to the Public Square — Where it Belongs?

By Selwyn Duke

The very first Congress, in 1789, was opened with Christian prayers. Congress continued opening with Christian prayers in following years, and it opens with prayers today — and they’re still usually Christian. Despite this, somehow, some way, somebody at some point got the idea that it was unconstitutional for a public-school football coach to do what Congress does, even if he does it privately. With the Supreme Court finally having put this notion to bed in 2022, however, a question arises.

Are we beginning to restore a proper understanding of religion’s place in the American Republic?

Hanson: Germany, Poster Boy for the West’s Decline, Is Committing “Slow-motion Suicide”

By Selwyn Duke

While summering in Germany at the age of 12, a person I was visiting mentioned something about his countrymen. “Germans are always 100 percent,” he said. He was referencing how, by his lights, they were a monolithic lot. This isn’t literally true. But what is surely correct is that Germans can be “100 percent” in applying themselves to endeavors — and to beliefs. Thus did they pioneer modern educational developments. Thus were they ground breakers in optics, brewing, and industrial engineering. Thus do the Germanic Amish likely lead the world in pacifism, with their 100-percent devotion to it.

And thus are the Germans perhaps now also at the forefront of a darker development: the decline of the West.

Booting Beelzebub: Trump Targets Anti-Christian Bias in Government

By Selwyn Duke

Christians “should be eradicated without hesitation or remorse.” So remarked an “elite” respondent years ago in a sociological study that documented anti-Christian bigotry in the United States. And just this week, too, we heard that the Idaho National Guard allegedly has a “no Christians in command” policy. But the man in command of our executive branch, President Donald Trump, has resolved to end such prejudice. At least, that is, in the federal government. Per USA Today:

God Driving the Devil Out? NY Times Writer Predicts a Religious Revival

By Selwyn Duke

“This is the end of marriage, capitalism and God. Finally!” a 2016 Salon title jubilantly proclaimed. Religion has been in decline in the West, too. But “This Christmas Seems Different” (yes, it’s still Christmastime), says a writer — at The New York Times, no less. That writer, man of faith Ross Douthat, senses a religious revival, though one of an unusual flavor.

Douthat opens his recent article discussing a March trip his family took to Italy, during which they visited a community of Benedictine monks. Interestingly and apropos here, he mentions what I did in my last piece: How Italy, whose Roman Empire once spread Christianity throughout much of Europe, now doesn’t even abide by the biblical injunction “Be fruitful and multiply.” That its cratering fertility rate means Italians are disappearing could seem a sort of cosmic justice, too. After all, statistics show that the world’s religious people are its fecund ones; secularists extinguish their bloodlines via childlessness. So is the message, deviate from God and you disappear?

A religious resurgence being nigh certainly is counterintuitive for many Westerners. For they may take it as a given that modernity and its “science” obviate and refute religion. (“Follow the science” to faithlessness?) Moreover, while secularists aren’t big on having their own kids, they’re rather adept at converting other people’s to secularism. Yet there’s more to the story.

Population Collapse: Is (Western) Human Extinction Near?

By Selwyn Duke

Dating back to the Middle Ages, the town of Semestene in Sardinia, Italy, has quite a history — one that could come to an end within a decade. With a population that has dwindled rapidly in recent years, 54 of its 126 residents are aged 65 or over. The town has just four children under 10 years old remaining. And its last birth, a 2023 report held, was eight years earlier.

Welcome to Ghost Town Italy.

Sound like exaggeration? Well, consider that the U.S. has approximately 3,800 ghost towns, with New Mexico having about 400 alone. Italy is about the size of that state.

And it has at least 6,000 ghost towns.

“At least,” that is, because that estimate was made in 2015 — and informed that another 15,000 localities were “on the brink.”

One could in fact wonder if this is the emptiest a European nation’s towns have been since the medieval black plague wiped out one-quarter to one-half of the continent’s population. The problem now is another plague, too.

The plague of low fertility.

Why worry about this? I mean, with pasta and pizza and the like having spread throughout the world, we needn’t worry about losing our favorite buonissima(!) Italian fare. What’s more, there are in excess of eight billion people on the planet. So shouldn’t we cheer this bambini bust? Perhaps not.