Background on Religious Liberty

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Religious Faith in the Workplace? The Resistance May Not Be What You Think

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More often than not, park-it-at-the-door thinking [about religious faith] has less to do with hostility to faith than with the avoidance of risk, for many employer’s fear that any hint of religion is ...

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The Separation of Church and State in America: What Did Their Separation Entail?

Author

Jon Meacham

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The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics. Church and state are specific things: the former signifies institutions for believers to congregate ...

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A Neglected Garden & The Right to Choose your Religion

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

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The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was once engaged in a conversation with a man who believed children should never receive any kind of religious education or instruction, not until they were ol...

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Independence Day to the African Slave

Author

Esau McCaulley

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When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...

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The Religion Shop Has Been Closed

Author

Robert Farrar Capon

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Scripture

Acts 9:1-22, Galatians 2:16, Ephesians 2:4-5, Romans 5:8, John 4:4-26, Luke 18:9-14

[For Christians] the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiast...

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A Mischief to Religion

Author

Joseph Glanvill

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Anti-Intellectualism has been a problem in the church for some time now. Consider the words of the 17th century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who had this to say about the role of reason in faith...

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Religion: A Private Affair

Author

Peter Baelz

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So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

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Defining Religion: Creed, Cult, Conduct

Author

Robert Farrar Capon

Keywords

Religion

In this fictionalized pastoral counseling session, the Episcopalian Priest Robert Farrar Capon shares some eternal truths related to the nature of religion—and in conclusion, how Christianity differs....

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“Respecting” Religion by Making it Private

Author

Nancy Pearcey

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Scripture

Exodus 5:1–2, 1 Kings 18:21–39, Daniel 3:16–18, Matthew 5:14–16, Acts 4:19–20, Psalm 2:1–2, 10–12

Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere—which takes it out of the realm of true a...

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Defining the Separation of Church and State in the U.S.

Author

Justin Giboney

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Scripture

Exodus 20:1-17, Psalm 82:3-4, Romans 13:1-4, Matthew 22:37-40, Deuteronomy 16:18-20, Isaiah 1:17

Many people have misinterpreted the separation of church and state to mean that religious views shouldn’t play a role in public discussions and lawmaking. Someone might say, “We shouldn’t restrict abo...

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Sabbath-Keeping and Legalism

Author

Walter Brueggemann

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Scripture

Genesis 2:1-3, Exodus 20:8-11, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, Mark 2:27-28, Matthew 12:8, Luke 6:5

For the most part, contemporary Christians pay little attention to the Sabbath. We more or less know that the day came to reflect, in U.S. culture, the most stringent disciplinary faith of the Puritan...

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The United States is Like Samaria

Author

Phillip Yancey

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Scripture

Jeremiah 29:4-7 , 2 Kings 17:24-33, Isaiah 1:18-20, John 4:4-26, Acts 8:4-8, 14-17, Psalm 46:1-2

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

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Grace & Guilt

Author

Paul Tournier

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Scripture

Genesis 3:1-24, Isaiah 6:1-8, Genesis 50:15-21, John 8:1-11, Luke 15:11-32, Psalm 51:1-17

In Guilt and Grace , Swiss physician and Christian, Paul Tournier, writes… I cannot study this very serious problem of guilt with you without raising the very obvious and tragic fact that rel...

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The Faithfulness of a Few

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

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Scripture

Proverbs 28:20, Revelation 2:10, Matthew 5:10-12, Matthew 10:22, 2 Corinthians 4:8-10, 1 Peter 4:12-14, Romans 8:35-37, John 15:18-20, Psalm 31:23, Matthew 25:21, 1 Corinthians 4:2, 1 Timothy 6:12, Matthew 24:45-46

Pliny, a Roman Governor serving around 112 AD, faced a challenging situation regarding Christianity. Many Church historians believe that by his time, it had become illegal to profess the Christian fai...

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Religion and Politics in America

Author

Jon Meacham

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Religion has always been woven into American politics. John Quincy Adams liked to read the Bible in the mornings and would plunge naked into the Potomac for a swim before attending his weekly Sunday c...

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Statistics on Religion in America: The Rise of the None's

Author

JR Woodward

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Scripture

Matthew 7:13-14, 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Luke 18:8, 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, Matthew 24:12-13

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

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Using Christianity as a Means of Social Control

Author

Eugene Genovese

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A great burst of proselytizing among slaves followed the Nat Turner revolt. Whereas previously many slaveholders had feared slaves with religion—and the example of Turner himself confirmed their fears...

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Biblical Rigtheousness Goes Beyond the Private

Author

John R. W. Stott

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Scripture

Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:16-17, Amos 5:24, Jeremiah 22:3, Zechariah 7:9-10

For biblical righteousness is more than a private and personal affair; it includes social righteousness as well. And social righteousness, as we learn from the law and the prophets, is concerned with ...

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Christian Faith Proved by it’s Fruit

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The current context of cultural and religious pluralism magnifies this development. After the disintegration of Christendom-a historical topical apparatus that gave cultural pride of place to Christia...

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A Christianity for Those with their Backs Against the Wall

Author

Howard Thurman

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Scripture

Exodus 3:7–10, Isaiah 58:6–10 , Amos 5:21–24, Luke 4:16–21, James 2:1–7, Psalm 9:9–10

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent th...

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"Pure" Christianity and A Slave-Based Christianity

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

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Waking People up to Christ

Author

Bruce Larson

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Scripture

Isaiah 55:8-9, Jonah 4:1-11, Numbers 22:21-34, Matthew 9:10-13, Mark 2:23-28, Psalm 19:12-14

It takes a great deal of freedom and love to be therapeutic with a group. Many years ago when Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, was lecturing in this country, it was reported that when he prea...

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The Gospel is Freedom

Author

John Stott

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 119:45, 2 Corinthians 3:17, Romans 6:22, Galatians 5:1, John 8:36

Its [Romans] message is not that ‘man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, as Rousseau put it at the beginning of The Social Contract (1762); it is rather that human beings are born in sin ...

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Has Religion been a Force for Evil in Human History

Author

Francis S. Collins

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:7-10, Isaiah 58:6-10, Micah 6:6-8, Matthew 23:27-28 , James 1:26-27, Psalm 146:7-9

A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the compelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. This applies to virtually all faiths at some...

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The Heretic

Author

Emo Philips

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 7:3, James 2:13, 1 Corinthians 1:10, Galatians 3:28, Romans 14:1, John 13:35

I was walking in San Francisco along the Golden Gate Bridge when I saw a man about to jump off. I tried to dissuade him from committing suicide and told him simply that God loved him. A tear came to h...

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Fitting In

Author

Michael Frost

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Today, the church in America seems to have traded in its mandate to be eccentric and aimed instead at an unconscious conventionality. Rural norms are too quaint, urban norms too dangerous, so the chur...

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Fasting as a Flashpoint Issue for the Reformation

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On a chilly morning in March 1522, in the city of Zurich, the printer Christoph Froschauer sat down with his workers and shared a plate of sausages, in open deﬁance of the Roman Catholic Church, which...

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The Good News Isn’t Sounding Good to Some

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Scripture

Isaiah 53:3, Jeremiah 20:7-10, 1 Kings 22:8-28, John 15:18-19 , Acts 5:40-42, Psalm 37:1-2

In Vanishing Grace , Philip Yancey examines the growing negative perceptions of evangelicals. Although the book was written in 2014, these dynamics have only intensified in the era of MAGA and Ch...

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Negative Attitudes About Christians

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Western Culture

I’ve asked strangers and casual acquaintances, “Why do Christians stir up such negative feelings?” Some bring up past atrocities, such as the widespread belief that the church executed eight or nine m...

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Freedom vs. Independence

Author

Bill Tell

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“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...

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