To read about Kevin Swanson at Freedom 2015, click here. To read about Cruz, Jindal, and Huckabee at Freedom 2015, click here. To read about Geoffrey Botkin's talk, click here and here.
Freedom 2015: The National Religious Liberties Conference will take place in Des Moines, Iowa on November 6-7. The conference, sponsored by Kevin Swanson's Generations with Vision show and other Religious Right groups, will be a two-day summit on alleged threats to Christians' religious freedom in the U.S.
The conference website overflows with bombastic rhetoric about the
supposed threats of religious persecution. Predictably, it conflates
victories for LGBTQ rights with subjugation of Christians, as if LGBTQ
equality and religious liberty were diametrically opposed. It argues
that the 2016 presidential election will be vital for the struggle for
"religious freedom".
The 2016 elections will be definitive. For Christians, religious liberties will be the issue.
The Supreme Court of the United States recently legalized
homosexual marriage in all 50 states in the Obergefell V. Hodges
decision. Are you ready to face persecution for opposing the homosexual
agenda?
The Supreme Court let stand the New York City ban on religious
meetings in public buildings in March, 2015. Are churches ready for
eviction?
The Supreme Court let stand the lower court ruling against the
New Mexico photographer who refused a “gay” wedding in April, 2014.
Religious freedom bills in Indiana and Kentucky went down in flames in April, 2015.
American Christians are concerned. According to Pew Research,
the minority group fearing persecution more than any others:
evangelical protestants, a group representing some 35 million Americans.
They are concerned about their jobs in a politically-correct work
environment, their businesses, their churches, their marriage licenses,
their parental freedoms.
International persecution against
Christians has reached epidemic levels. They are the most persecuted
religious group in the world, and Christians need to know how to
respond.
The website strives to instill fear in attendees, warning them that a wicked state will persecute believers and snatch their children away. The fact that none of this is actually happening doesn't seem to faze them.
Americans, get ready for the gathering storm!
These are serious questions ... are you read for this?
Are you ready ... to lose your children to the state?
Is your pastor ready to go to jail for refusing to officiate a same sex marriage?
Will your church be shut down?
Will Christians be forced to break the law?
Right Wing Watch
reports that Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Mike
Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal will speak at the summit. The three
candidates seem to have no problem with speaking at an event organized
by Kevin Swanson, a Christian Patriarchy adherent with a long, outrageous historyofmisogynistandhomophobicstatements.
If the conference's schedule is any indication, Freedom 2015 will depict fundamentalist Christians as a persecuted community. Attendees can enjoy lunch with the Benham Brothers, praised by the website for "standing for the sake of faith in Christ ... no matter what the cost!" The workshop offerings are exactly what you'd expect.
Freedom: Why Christians Should Engage the Battle for Liberty
Child Protective Services: One of the Greatest Threats to Your Religious Freedom
Why Christians Must Defend Marriage in Family, Church, and State
Targeted: Men & Women Persecuted for the Christian Faith
Crushing Leviathan: Biblical Principles to Break Free of the Modern Inquisition
Securing Religious Liberty Starts at the State Capitols
The Decline of Freedom: From the Bill of Rights to the Ten Planks of Communism, America's Domestic Enemies and Where They Came From
I eagerly wait to hear how Cruz, Huckabee, and Jindal will appeal to Religious Right voters at Freedom 2015. If their speeches enchant Christian fundamentalists, they will no doubt alienate moderate voters and make the three candidates even less viable.
To read additional commentary, visit the following links.
As discussed in a prior post, Worldview Academy founder Bill Jack filed a religious discrimination complaint against Azucar Bakery in Denver, Colorado, after bakery owner Marjorie Silva refused to write an anti-gay message on a Bible-shaped cake for him. Azucar Bakery was not Bill Jack's only target. KUSA 9 News reports that Jack has filed complaints against Bakery Sensual and Hateaux Pastries for refusing similar requests. Jack, who served as interim host of Kevin Swanson's Generations with Vision radio show several months ago, has made outrageous statements about LGBTQ rights, atheism, and Planned Parenthood.
Azucar Bakery now has reason to celebrate. According to the Washington Post, the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies ruled on April 3rd that Azucar Bakery was within its rights when Silva refused to put an anti-gay message on Jack's cake.
Jack was not amused. According to KUSA 9, Jack issued a statement claiming that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) is being used to "censor" and "coerce" Christians.
"CADA is being used to censor Christian business owners' free speech and is being used to coerce them to participate in events that violate their consciences. This is hypocrisy and unequal treatment before the law. At this most holy time on the Christian calendar, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, it is reprehensible and demeaning that the Bible is considered an immoral, illegal book to be censored from the public arena. Therefore, I am in the process of filing an appeal with the CCRD."
Bill, this was never about your faith or your scripture. No one was condemning the Bible here. Azucar Bakery is not anti-Christian, as it bakes cakes with Christian themes for events such as christenings. Your complaint fizzled because you demanded an anti-gay cake. It is your homophobia, not your Christianity, that enlightened people took issue with. Azucar Bakery was within its rights to handle your anti-gay cake request in the manner it did.
Bill, just stop. Stop launching these publicity stunts. Stop nursing the Religious Right's collective persecution complex. Stop annoying bakers with discrimination complaints. Stop conflating faith with homophobia. Find a more Christ-like way to spend your time.
As discussed in a prior post, Worldview Academy co-founder Bill Jack has filed a religious discrimination complaint against Azucar Bakery in Denver, Colorado. Jack filed the complaint after bakery owner Marjorie Silva refused to write an anti-gay message on a Bible-shaped cake, according to KDVR Fox 31.
I recently learned that Bill Jack not only promotes his right-wing worldview at Christian homeschool events, but that he's an interim co-host on Kevin Swanson's Generations with Visionshow. Bill Jack and Steve Vaughan have been co-hosting Generations with Vision during Kevin Swanson's sabbatical, showing themselves to be every bit as right-wing as Swanson. I've provided a few Generations with Vision quotes from Bill Jack to paint a portrait of the man behind the anti-gay cake controversy.
First, in a January 14th show entitled "Cannibalism!", Jack briefly discussed the book Savage Harvest by Deckle Edge, which discusses the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea in 1961. At the 9:22 mark, Jack claimed that the New Guinea Asmat tribe, which allegedly killed Rockefeller, fell into violence and depravity because they turned from God.
"They performed perverted sex acts. They practiced polygamy. They drank each other's urine. They covered themselves in human blood. These are disgusting practices, and these are a people who had abandoned or had drifted away from God, so they had accepted myths, and they were practicing the results of these myths. And so what happened was they had become cannibalistic."
Vaughan and Jack also discussed Ryan Bell, the Seventh-Day Adventist pastor who stopped believing in God after living as an atheist for a year. At the 14:03 mark of "Cannibals!", Jack called atheism a "parasite" on Christianity.
"Atheism is really just a parasite on the body of Christianity. They cannot have a culture that is good without God. Men cannot be good without God, despite what people like Richard Dawkins, famed atheist, says ... Without God, you cut the heart out of civilization. Without God, you cut the heart out of history."
"There is this call for a revival, and to express free speech by praying to God, by talking to God, and there are those who want to squelch free speech on a tax-paid institution's campus, hosted by the governor of the state. You know what? If Christians were protesting the LGBTQ rally at LSU, Christians would be called censors and bigots ... So what we have here is the opposition to Christianity ... Christophobes who are trying to squelch free speech, who are trying to be censors and bigots because they don't want to allow free speech. They don't want to allow the discussion of an opposing world view. That is happening all over the country."
Later in "Sex, Lies, and the Genderbred Person", Vaughan and Jack criticized comprehensive sex education, including sex ed provided by Planned Parenthood. At the 26:50 mark, Jack claimed that Planned Parenthood wants to make "pigs" out of children.
"This is what Planned Parenthood does. They want your children to be pigs. They want them to wallow in the muck. And what we need to do is, we as Christians need to expose evil ... Shine the light of truth and grace on such activities. So I urge you as homeschooling parents to investigate what's being taught in public school and to expose it."
In a January 2nd episode entitled "From Heil Hitler to Heil the Secular State", Vaughan and Jack criticized an anti-gun advertisement filmed at a charter school, likening such messages to Hitler Youth propaganda. "The school has become an enclave of totalitarianism in our day, just as it was in Hitler's day," Jack said at the 7:28 mark. Jack accused ominous movements of targeting young people at the 10:48 mark, oblivious to the fact that this is exactly what fundamentalist Christian homeschool advocates like himself do.
"It doesn't matter whether it's a totalitarian government or even the most benign and, well, apparently innocent attempt to bring about peace and justice. They always go with the youth. They try to indoctrinate the youth."
The irony continued at the 1:45 mark, when he lamented that young people are supposedly being used as "puppets" and "pawns" by progressives.
"Ideas do have consequences. Good ideas, excellent consequences; bad ideas, devastating consequences, and it is our youth who suffer. It is our youth who are being used as puppets and as pawns, and that is why we need to re-establish a Biblical worldview in our culture. We need to establish truth and justice based on God's word, not on some man's view."
Jack mused on "The Poisonous Mushroom", a story from an anti-Semitic children's book called Der Giftpilz. At the 23:10 mark, he likened public school education to Hitler Youth indoctrination.
"They're teaching anti-Christian doctrine, they're teaching secularism to students through arithmetic, through geography, through history, through psychology, through every subject area, and most parents are not aware of what's happening, and as a result, children are being used. They are being, well, enlisted into the modern-day Hitler Youth movement. And pretty soon, parents are going to reap what they sow if we don't wake up and realize how the government schools are abusing our children."
In conclusion, Bill Jack's commentary on Generations with Visions reveals a great deal about his outlook. In Jack's eyes, secularism, non-Christians, LGBTQ rights advocates, and Planned Parenthood are depraved opponents of Christianity, ensnaring the next generation with their wiles. In this paranoid worldview, Christians are to imbue the surrounding culture with a "Biblical worldview", lest society continue to sink into sin. Those who think otherwise are caricatured as modern-day Nazis, indoctrinating children through a modern-day Hitler Youth.
By smearing others in this manner, Jack reveals his black-and-white, us-versus-them view of the world. His bakery stunt can be understood as a way to challenge a society he sees as corrupt. In short, Bill Jack displays the paranoia and siege mentality commonly seen among Christian fundamentalist, and fundamentalist homeschool advocates in particular.
In 2014, severalbakeriesacross the U.S. drew criticism for their refusal to bake cakes for same-sex couples. Now, an anti-gay Christian is unhappy with a Colorado bakery that refused his request for a homophobic cake. The man at the center of the controversy, Bill Jack, has a long history of fundamentalist Christian work.
According to KDVR Fox 31, Bill Jack filed a religious discrimination complaint against Azucar Bakery in Denver, Colorado, after the bakery refused to write an anti-gay message on a cake. Azucar Bakery owner Marjorie Silva said that Jack requested a Bible-shaped cake depicting two men holding hands with an "X" over them, inscribed with an anti-gay message. Silva refused to write the words, uncomfortable with presenting "hateful words" on a cake. In an earlier article at KDVR, Silva described him as "pushy and disruptive".
Bill Jack is co-founder of Worldview Academy, a Christian organization devoted to "helping Christians to think and to live in accord with a biblical worldview so that they will serve Christ and lead the culture". Worldview Academy hosts youth camps across the U.S., which instill young people with a "biblical worldview". Bill Jack also spent several years with the Caleb Campaign, a creationist youth ministry.
I recognized Bill Jack as a recurring teen track speaker at the annual convention of the Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania (CHAP). Every spring, CHAP hosts its annual convention at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, PA. The conference is decidedly conservative, withcontent that encourages suspicion of mainstream society and a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. I first blogged on the CHAP convention in 2011, after I observed talks by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and DougPhillips of the now defunct Vision Forum. I continue to keep an eye on the CHAP website whenever the convention returns to Harrisburg, even if I can't attend in person.
Recently, CHAP made audio recordings of its 2014 convention workshops available for free download, including recordings of Bill Jack's teen track. Jack's workshops framed the world in dichotomous terms, one in which Christians battle against a monolithic secular society. Mainstream society was depicted not only as sinful, but something that Christians must "capture" and transform, lest it "capture" young Christians. Jack's worldview may help us understand why he locked horns with an Colorado bakery.
Given Jack's stance toward LGBTQ issues at CHAP, I'm not surprised that he asked a baker to make an anti-gay cake. In a CHAP 2014 workshop entitled "Counterfeit Reality", Jack
spoke of same-sex marriage, incestuous marriage, man-car marriage, and
pedophilia in the same breath. At the 0:28 mark, he had this to say.
"Can I legally marry my sister? ...
No. It's outlawed in states. There are incest laws, right? There are
laws against marrying too closely in the family. Can I marry my car? No,
because it's an absurdity, right? So we draw lines everywhere. Just
because two people love each other doesn't mean that they can get
married, because marriage has a different set of rules than just the
emotion of love, correct? ... There is an organization called North
American Man-Boy Love Association, and these are men who want to have
sex with little boys, and they say there shouldn't be any laws against
that."
Jack looked askance at mainstream society in several talks. In one CHAP 2014 workshop entitled "Counterfeit Reality", Jack argued that mainstream culture is filled with "myth-information", a false reality based on secularism. In another workshop entitled "Seven Habits of Highly Suppressive People", Jack claimed that people who suppress God's truth do not honor God, and therefore become "futile in their speculation", leading to ideas such as evolution.
Jack's antipathy toward mainstream society was on full display in a teen track talk entitled "The Four Duties of a Good Soldier of Christ Jesus". During the talk, Jack encouraged teens to be "good soldiers" for God. "If you want to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ, you need to understand your duties," he told listeners. Their first duty, he explained at the 34:12 mark, was to avoid being "captured".
"First duty of a good soldier, first duty: do
not get captured. Do not get captured, because not only are you of no
use to your side, but the enemy will use you against your own troops. We
have seen that numerous times in numerous conflicts in recent years
where in the Middle East, the enemy has said, 'You bomb these positions
[and] you will be killing your own troops because we have taken some
captive, and we're going to place them in these strategic locations, and
if you send missiles there, you will be killing your own troops'."
Specifically, teens were to evade "capture" by secular culture. "Secularism is not held up as the best thing in most cultures," he insisted, ignoring the existence of secular states and secular proponents worldwide. At the 35:21 mark, Jack demonized secularism as an alleged religion that seeks to exclude God from society.
"Secularism
is what were talking about here in context. Secularism is the belief
that there may or may not be a god. According to Webster's dictionary,
secularism is indifference to or rejection of or exclusion of religion
and religious considerations. Now I hate to take exception with your
great-great-great-great-granduncle Noah, but this is not the proper
definition of secularism. In fact, he would take exception with that if
he were living because he took his definitions from scripture. This is
not the proper definition of secularism. Secularism is not exclusion of
religion, it is not the rejection of religion, it is not indifference
toward religion. Secularism IS a religion. It is the belief that there
may or may not be a god, but even if there is, he is irrelevant in
history, art, science, literature, music, philosophy. You see, we
compartmentalize our lives. We become schizoid. Do not be taken
captive."
In keeping with the war theme of his talk, Jack encouraged his young listeners to take the surrounding culture "captive" at the 38:08 mark.
"If
you're not to be taken captive, then what should you do as a good
soldier of Jesus Christ? Take something captive. What should we take
captive? Well, if you take a look at the command, it is that we are to
capture the culture, not the flag."
Amidst his talk of the Great Commission and multiplying the kingdom of God, Jack scoffed at "fun" as one of the corrupt values of mainstream culture. At the 20:21 mark, he called fun "unbiblical".
"'Fun' is an unbiblical word. Fun depends upon circumstances. Fun is driven by environment ... You know what the closest reference to 'fun' is in scripture? You know what the closest reference is? It is the the word 'folly'. What does folly mean? Foolishness. Goofiness. Silliness. Stupidity."
At the 21:15 mark, he criticized mainstream culture for allegedly holding fun in such high esteem.
"Fun is what we hold as our highest value in the culture. We have become a nation of fun junkies, and that's not what scripture calls us to, is it?"
Good soldiers don't have fun, Jack insisted. Rather, Christians are to have joy, which comes from obedience to God. A "worldview of difference" distinguished fun from godly joy, he told his teenage audience. Jack playfully coached his teenage audience on how to reply "Nooooo" when their parents asked them if they had fun at the CHAP convention.
Jack's stunt at Azucar Bakery may be a reflection of the worldview he put forth at the 2014 CHAP convention. If one sees mainstream society -- including its growing acceptance of LGBTQ equality -- as a deluded, sinful force, one will feel compelled to challenge it. If one believes that right-wing Christians are at war with a corrupt culture, acts such as the bakery stunt take on larger significance.
While people who think like Bill Jack are not uncommon, I remain optimistic. More and more people recognize the merits of pluralism and a secular state. More and more people are advocating for LGBTQ equality. I have a feeling that many youth who participated in Bill Jack's workshops at CHAP will someday realize that they are not in a zero-sum battle against mainstream society. Jack's bakery stunt may be an attempt to "capture" culture, but in the long run, it will not succeed.
UPDATE: I discovered that Bill Jack has been providing commentary on Kevin Swanson's rabidly right-wing Generations with Visionshow. I explore his commentary on the show in more depth here.
To read additional commentary, visit the following links.
