Separation of Church and State

Many Americans are familiar with the First Amendment to our Constitution, the first portion of which guarantees religious liberty: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What many do not know is that Baptists played an important role in ensuring the inclusion of religious freedom in…

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COVID-19 and the Struggle for Worship in Canada

The world is still in the midst of a global pandemic of significant proportions. I say significant for the COVID pandemic because this is not as serious a global problem as similar events that have been faced in human history. The Spanish flu killed an estimated fifty million people worldwide in 1918-1920 and maybe as…

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Comment on the Supreme Court opinion in the New York churches case

Late last Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holiday the US Supreme Court issued a decision on an emergency relief petition involving attendance restrictions imposed by the State of New York on houses of worship. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court granted the emergency petition and prohibited New York from enforcing severe restrictions on attendance at…

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Prospects for Religious Liberty in the United States

Questions We Are (or Ought to Be) Asking [Ed. note: This article comes from FrontLine, September/October 2013. In light of the present turmoil, the article is of interest in several ways. First, many of the concerns Dr. Shumate anticipated in the article are only growing more intense in our current climate. Second, though current threats…

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Understanding Religious Liberty – Leland and Madison

This article features quotes from a sixty-eight page article in the Penn State Law Review. The title is “John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights,” written by Mark S. Scarberry, professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law. ((Note…

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First Freedom: A review

Duesing, Jason G, Thomas White, and Malcolm B Yarnell, eds. First Freedom: The Beginning and End of Religious Liberty. Second Edition. Nashville: B & H Academic, 2016. Reviewed by Don Johnson I laboured through this volume, I have to say that right up front. It is not that the subject isn’t important, it is very…

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The Fight Over Transgenderism Goes Far Beyond Bathrooms

Don Johnson You’ve probably heard enough about this topic, but the battle our culture is in goes far beyond the question of who has the right to open certain public bathroom doors. My home and native land provides an example of the next step the struggle is taking. The National Post reports on May 17…

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Christians are Told to Bow or Face a Fierce Collision

Matt Recker In a recent New York Times opinion column entitled, “Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,” opinion columnist Frank Bruni tells conservative churches to “take homosexuality off the sin list” and bow to the new enlightened understanding of our modern world (New York Times, April 3, 2015). Bruni sees that homosexuality and…

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The Pressure Is Growing

Wally Morris Three recent events illustrate the growing pressure on anyone who believes in the traditional (Biblical) definition of marriage and who believes that homosexuality is wrong.

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Roots of the First Amendment

David L. Cummins It is well that we understand the background of the First Amendment to our national Constitution. How tragic that the current Supreme Court members no longer seek to understand the Constitution with the use of “original intent.” The hermeneutical system of the justices is surely pedantic and panders to the liberal, left…

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