The Persecuted Pastor Becomes a Bishop

September 10, 2021 By Gene Veith

In more news about Christians being prosecuted in Finland for disapproving of homosexuality, the Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, who will be tried for his part in the publication of a tract on Biblical sexuality, has been made a bishop.

On August 1, he became the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland (ELMDF), a church body that in 2019 entered into full altar and pulpit fellowship with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

The latest Lutheran Witness has an excellent article on the subject by Kevin Ambrust, who goes into detail about the consecration, the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese, and the controversy surrounding Bishop Pohjola.

The list of participants in the service shows that Bible-believing Lutherans can still be found throughout ostensibly secularist Scandinavia. Conservative bishops from Sweden, Norway, and Latvia were there in support of Bishop Pohjola, as were representatives from the LCMS, including president Matthew Harrison.

From Kevin Ambrust, ‘To live is Christ’: Pohjola consecrated as bishop of Finnish Lutheran Church in The Lutheran Witness:

Participating in the consecration were the Rev. Risto Soramies, bishop of the ELMDF since its inception as an independent organization in 2013; the Rev. Dr. Matti Väisänen, bishop from 2010 to 2013, when the ELMDF was a mission diocese; the Rev. Hanss Jensons, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia; the Rev. Bengt Ådahl, bishop of the Mission Province in Sweden; the Rev. Thor Henrik With, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese in Norway; and the Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison, president of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS). Clergy from the International Lutheran Council (ILC), the ELMDF and the LCMS — including the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Shaw, director of LCMS Church Relations; the Rev. James Krikava, associate executive director of the LCMS Office of International Mission and director of the LCMS Eurasia region; and the Rev. Dr. Timothy Quill, general secretary of the ILC — also processed in support of the new bishop.

“We Christians confess Jesus and His redemptive words and deeds as our life and salvation. Corrupt culture calls us to reject this ‘little Word’ in favor of flashy signs and woke wisdom. The consecration of Rev. Pohjola as bishop of the ELMDF, the LCMS’ newest sister church, was a witness to that triumphant ‘little Word,’” said Shaw. “How heartening to join with the faithful who boldly confess Christ and His doctrine, despite the liberal Finnish state church having defrocked ELMDF clergy, seized church buildings and brought criminal charges against Bishop Pohjola for publishing a pamphlet on divinely ordered human sexuality. Other confessional Lutheran churches — small by the world’s standards — sent their bishops to participate. Bishop Ådahl put it succinctly: ‘We are not a small church among big churches. We are the church.’ As the Body of Christ, we together receive from the fullness of His grace.”

[Keep reading. . .]

Lutheran Bishops?

You may be wondering, what’s this about Lutheran bishops? I’m Lutheran and I don’t have a bishop.

Well, some denominations define themselves not by their teaching, as such, but by their church government. For Congregationalists, the individual congregation makes all the decisions. Presbyterians are governed by elders (Greek: presbyters), which means pastors and lay leaders. Episcopalians are ruled by bishops. Roman Catholics are ruled by the Pope.

What makes a Lutheran is not any particular kind of church government but adherence to the doctrines set forth in the Scriptures as taught in the confessions of the Early Church and the Reformation collected in the Book of Concord. Thus, Lutherans can be found with a number of different ecclesiastical polities. We Missouri Synod Lutherans are mostly congregational.

Though the Reformation brought conflict with different jurisdictions, that didn’t happen in Scandinavia, where the existing churches as a whole embraced the Reformation whole. Thus, they kept their bishops. This meant too that they retained Apostolic Succession, with their bishops being able to trace their lineage all the way back to the first Apostles.

Lutherans as a whole don’t consider that to be important. To be “apostolic,” as the Creed describes the church, is to follow the teachings of the apostles that they wrote down in the inspired words of Scripture. And it isn’t so much bishops who are in a chain of laying on of hands as pastors, the pastoral office having been established by Christ and bishops simply being pastors who have been elected to a position of particular responsibility.

But Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Anglicans do put major emphasis on the Apostolic Succession, to the point of insisting that “valid orders”–that is, legitimate pastors–are only those who have been ordained by bishops in the apostolic train.

Conversely, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and liberal state church Scandinavian Lutherans do have to recognize pastors ordained by bishops in the Apostolic Succession.

So they have to reckon with Bishop Pohjola, even if he is put in prison, and they have to recognize at some level the validity of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, as well as those of Sweden and Norway, because they are Dioceses with valid bishops. (Some of those conservative churches that broke away from the liberal state churches had their bishops and first pastors ordained by the recognized bishops from Africa or the Ingrian Lutherans of Russia.)

Why “Mission”?

You may also be wondering why these new Scandinavian Lutheran churches have “mission” in their names. This is something really distinct in these nations, as I explain in my post Scandinavia’s Two Tracks of Christianity.

Briefly, the Pietist movement in the Nordic countries led to a proliferation of highly-evangelical groups known as Mission Societies. Pietism was often in conflict with Orthodox Lutheranism, especially in Germany, but in the Scandinavian countries, the state church made peace with these mostly lay-led groups, which began, with the church’s blessing, taking on aspects of the church’s ministry.

The Outer Mission groups sent missionaries throughout the world, and their highly-effective work is largely responsible for evangelizing–and planting thriving Lutheran churches–in many regions of Africa and Asia. The Inner Mission groups focused on ministry within the nations, organizing Bible studies, running Sunday Schools and youth ministries, caring for the poor, and operating a wide range of social ministries.

These Mission societies remain highly active today. And whereas the state church has gone extremely liberal, the Mission Societies are still theologically conservative and evangelical. Not only that, the Mission Societies, for all of their Pietist heritage, have become more and more Lutheran theologically.

Studies of religion in Scandinavia look at the empty state churches and conclude that Christianity is dead. But vital Christianity remains in the Mission Societies. Conservatives don’t attend the state churches anymore than the secularists do.

Things have gotten so bad with the established church that the Mission Society Christians are now getting together for worship. The parish churches meet on Sunday mornings, so the Mission services meet on Sunday afternoons. In Finland, they are not allowed to meet in church buildings, so they meet in school auditoriums and other locales. They conduct the Divine Service, including the Sacrament, presided over by ordained pastors who are sympathetic to the cause.

Some Mission folks have taken the next step: breaking away completely from the state church and forming their own church. To do this, they need their own bishops, who can ordain their own pastors. Thus we have the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, the Mission Province in Sweden, and the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese in Norway.

The situation in Denmark is different and better. According to Danish law, citizens have the right to form their own religious congregations. So Mission Christians are doing so, thus enabling a polity more like the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. These Mission congregations can call their own pastors, who are being trained at the universities, where they have set up parallel theological institutes that conservative pastoral students attend.

As for Latvia, the Lutheran church in that Baltic Republic is the remnant of the state church that survived the persecution and co-option of the Soviet Union. Since then, the entire Latvian church has experienced a confessional revival–to the point of reversing its former practice of women’s ordination–and is now in altar and pulpit fellowship–that is to say, full doctrinal agreement– with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Now the Latvian church is joining the International Lutheran Council, a global association of confessional Lutherans.

For more on all this, see my accounts of my visits to Finland and to Denmark and Norway.

Photo: Bishop Pohjola, with attending bishops and clergy [LCMS president Matthew Harrison on right], via International Lutheran Council.

Premium Content

Vaccination Statistics by Age

August 2, 2021 By Gene Veith

0 Comments

You can break down statistical data in any number of ways. In looking at COVID vaccination data, you can sort it out by race, political affiliation, religion, etc., etc. Thus we learn that the biggest resistance to getting vaccinated can be found among Republicans, evangelicals, blacks, and hispanics.

We can speculate why that is–generally, these groups are highly suspicious of the government–and, as that government is doing now, blame them for the resurgence of the Delta variation and lock down the nation again to protect the unvaccinated against their will.

But there are other ways to slice the data. One obvious way is by age. When we do that, a different picture emerges.

In his article It’s Time to Rethink What the ‘End’ of the Pandemic Looks Like, Jack Shafer of Politico says this (my bolds):

Any adjustment of our Covid-19 mindset should include a keener understanding of why so many people have rejected vaccination. That opposition, both passive and aggressive, appears to be linked to age. Older people, especially the 65-plus crowd, visit their doctors all the time compared with their younger cohorts. For them, a doctor or hospital visit is one of the main social events on their calendars. They become so accustomed to getting poked and bled that receiving a bolus of Pfizer in the upper arm is about as eventful as having a blood pressure check. Accordingly, they’ve taken to the vaccine like no other group in the country. An astonishing 91 percent of adults between the ages of 65 and 74 have taken at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine. They took it because their friends were taking it. They took it because they trust their doctors and their doctors have urged them to vaccinate. And they took it because they’ve absorbed the lesson of Covid-19’s deadliness — about 80 percent of the people who die from Covid-19 in the United States are 65 and older.

As a member of this demographic, I am trying to be personally offended about what he says about visiting the doctor being one of our main social events, but I have to grudgingly concede that he has a point! And we are indeed used to being poked and bled, so getting a shot is no longer the big deal that it once was.

Furthermore, Shafer shows that the vaccination rate goes down according to age: “This appetite for vaccines declines as you descend the age ladder: 76 percent of those between 50 and 64 have taken at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine; 66 percent of the 40-49 age group; 57 percent for 25-39; 52 percent for 18-24; 48 percent for 16-17; and 37 percent for 12-15.”

Shafer points out that such variations by age are not irrational. The older you are, the greater the chance of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID, and the younger you are, the less likely you are to have serious symptoms.

And since the demographic that suffered 80% of the deaths is now 91% vaccinated, that is very good news in the battle against the pandemic. This explains why, though the infection rate from the Delta variant has sent the number of infections soaring, the number of deaths, at least right now, is low.

True, progress needs to be made. Now younger adults make up a bigger percentage of deaths, so they need to protect themselves also, as we oldies have done.

Shafer says that we need to determine our “tolerance level” for the disease, realizing that we are unlikely to eradicate it completely but that we cannot keep shutting down our society in an effort to eliminate all risk. We don’t do that with other diseases. He points out that in the 2017-2018 flu season, influenza put 810,000 Americans in the hospital and killed 61,000. Those are terrible numbers, but we didn’t panic, mandate masks, or lock down the economy. Could we accept numbers like that for COVID, treating it as just another, to quote Hamlet, of “the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to”?

Photo: “Army Cpt. Isaiah Horton, a doctor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, receives a COVID-19 vaccination, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., Dec. 14, 2020.” (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando) U.S. Secretary of Defense, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Premium Content

“Liberal Authoritarianism”

July 29, 2021 By Gene Veith

0 Comments

In yesterday’s post I referred to an article by Catholic author George Weigel, who said that he is all for the modern version of the Mass, but criticizes the Vatican for the heavy-handed way they put the kibosh on the traditional Latin version. His article, Liberal Authoritarianism and the Traditional Latin Mass, put a name to a phenomenon that goes beyond ecclesiastical disputes: Liberal Authoritarianism.

Weigel writes,

Progressive Catholicism has typically been characterized by an authoritarian streak—a tendency to bullying and intimidation that certainly bespeaks impatience and may suggest a lack of confidence in its proposals and arguments. In the present pontificate, that has led to an extreme notion of papal authority that might make Pope Pius IX blush.

Liberal Catholics used to downplay papal authority, but now that one of their own, seemingly, is in power, they demand obedience. Of course, conservative Catholics used to insist on papal authority above all, but now that they have a more liberal pontiff, they are looking for loopholes. So that’s probably just the inevitable nature of ecclesiastical politics. But Weigel’s reference to progressives having “an authoritarian streak–a tendency to bullying and intimidation” sounds familiar and has a broader application.

Liberals used to have the reputation of advocating diversity, tolerance, and letting people do what they want, a “live and let live” attitude and championing civil liberties, with an emphasis on liberty. In my academic world, liberalism stood for the “free speech movement” on campus–including the freedom to use obscenity and other forbidden words–as well as “sexual freedom” and the ability of students who design their own curriculum. In politics, liberals promoted freedom in the Civil Rights movement, sent military aid and sometimes even troops to other countries “fighting for freedom” in the Cold War, and eventually pushed for “free trade” globally.

We conservatives certainly had a libertarian streak and agreed with much of that, but we often spoke of “ordered liberty,” not wanting to throw out morality, tradition, and the rule of law.

But now the progressives in academia are enforcing speech codes, policing sexual relations, and mandating courses and workshops that can seem like political indoctrination.

In politics, progressives seem pre-occupied with making people do things. Legalizing abortion is not enough, taxpayers must pay for abortions. Pro-life pregnancy centers must advertise for abortionists. Legalizing homosexuality is not enough, nor is legalizing same-sex marriage. Everyone must approve of it.

The liberal states have certainly taken the most authoritarian line in dealing with the COVID pandemic: Children must not go to school. Businesses are not allowed to open. Churches are forbidden from meeting. You must wear a mask at all times, even outdoors. You must stay at least six feet away from other people.

Even after the pandemic is on the decline, some leaders–virtually all of them Democrats–want to keep up the restrictions. There is, though, a hesitancy to mandate vaccinations. While the media focuses on Trump supporters and evangelical Christians are being the main COVID and vaccine deniers, Black Americans are similarly vaccine hesitant, at about the same rate, with 28% of white Republicans, 25% of African-Americans, and a whopping 37% of Hispanics saying they will never get the shot. (Hispanics are another Democratic constituency, for now, but once again they show how they may be Republicans at heart.)

Now that we are experiencing another surge of COVID infections, the impulse of many Democratic governors is to clamp down again, while Republican governors want their states to stay open. With about 60% of American adults fully vaccinated, including 80% of seniors who are most in danger of the disease, no one seems to be making the libertarian case that now we should just let people live according to their decisions, with the unvaccinated accepting their risk as they have chosen to do. No, we should shut down and make the vaccinated wear masks against a disease they are likely neither to get nor to transmit, in a show of protecting those who do not want to be vaccinated, whether they want to be protected or not. (And the vaccine skeptics are also among the most vehemently opposed to all of the lockdowns!)

My topic for now, though, is not COVID policies but “liberal authoritarianism.” I agree that President Joe Biden does not seem to have an authoritarian personality. But you can’t say that of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, California governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. . . .all of whom seem to enjoy telling people what to do.

As for social media, the progressive civilians employ shaming, shunning, policing, and judgmentalism on a scale that puts Puritan small towns to shame.

All I’m saying is that conservatives used to have the reputation–and perhaps the temptation–of being authoritarian. Now we are in an era of liberal authoritarianism.

Or maybe what we’re seeing is the transition from traditional liberalism to the “successor” to liberalism, a mindset that is not only political, but that extends even into churches.

Illustration via pxfuel, royalty-free images

Premium Content

The Sexual Revolution Is Systemic

July 27, 2021 By Gene Veith

0 Comments

What inspired yesterday’s post was an article by Karen Prior, whom I’ve known for a long time. She rejects critical race theory, but still maintains that racism is systemic; that is, that “a culture shaped by racist laws, policies and attitudes affects everyone in that culture.”

To illustrate what she means, she turns to a different kind of sin that has become systemic: the sexual revolution.

I would like us to reflect on that part of her article. She writes:

The sexual revolution that started in the 1960s — spread through popular culture, enacted by the masses and codified in law — is now as pervasive and inescapable as the popup ads on our computer screens. Almost no home or family or person has been unaffected by it.

Not long after the sexual revolution began, Time magazine, in a 1964 cover story, called it “a revolution of mores and an erosion of morals,” likening the shift to “a big machine” (that) works on its subjects continuously, day and night”:

From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

In other words, the revolution became — and continues to be — systemic. Today, any individual striving to resist the lure of sexual sin has not only his or her own temptations and weaknesses to contend with, but an entire social, cultural and legal system, too.

Good point?

She goes on to cite abortion, which has also become embedded in our culture. “These are not just individual sins, but are entrenched and engrained in our culture. They are systemic.” In fact, she observes the very premise of Christians being engaged in a “culture war” is that moral issues are “cultural”; that is, systemic. “If sexual sin can reshape a culture in our attitudes, laws, policies, values and beliefs in ways we can’t always see or recognize, so can the sin of racism.”

Can we say that sin itself is systemic, that part of what we mean by original sin is that our rebellion against God permeates everything we human beings touch, including the cultures, civilizations, and institutions that we build? That would be why they all, eventually, go wrong, why utopias on either the micro- or the macro- scale are impossible and why “the world,” no less than the flesh and the devil, can so easily tempt us to our ruin.

I think that’s part of it, but a few cautions are in order. We mustn’t lapse into the mindset that “society is to be blame,” rather than the sinful human heart. That’s the error of the Romantic movement, which exalts the purity of the unspoiled Self, and sees “society” as the source of all evils. In this mindset, individuals should throw off the rules and conventions that society imposes upon us all. That perspective, in fact, gave us the Sexual Revolution.

We also have to be careful not to condemn “systems” in their totality just because they have become corrupted by sin. Social structures–such as the family, governments, and communities–are part of what makes us human. They are gifts of God, meant for our flourishing. (Think of Luther’s doctrine of the Estates and the doctrine of vocation.)

In terms of the three estates, the family, the church, and the state may all be corrupted, but we cannot do without any of them. Some today would like to, with some on the Left wanting to abolish the family, some on the Right wanting to abolish the government, and “nones” on both sides wanting to abolish the church. What all three of these estates need–that is, what we need from them–is “reformation.”

Sex is not an evil in itself, but the sexual revolution has made it such by tearing it out of the context of marriage, parenthood, and the family. That is, by removing it from culture. Many of the social sins we decry, while embedded in the culture, are actually anti-cultural. Governments are supposed to help, serve, and protect their citizens, not oppress them.

To be sure, some sins, such as abortion and racism, are evil in themselves. But they too are anti-cultural. Parents are supposed to love and care for their children, not abort them, and to do so undermines the foundation of culture–the family–to its core. Societies are supposed to be made up of individuals who come together to form communities. Mistreating some people because of what race they are is a violation of that communal coming-together that makes culture possible.

So, yes, sin infects systems. They thus need to be “re-formed” around their true purpose and their true nature. Laws that regulate external behavior can help with that, but, ultimately, the underlying sin must be rooted out by the inner transformation wrought by the Gospel.

Illustration: Sexual Revolution Buttons by Jlbrandt, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Premium Content

Spending $6 Trillion and Scrapping the Hyde Amendment

May 31, 2021 By Gene Veith

0 Comments

President Biden has submitted his 2022 budget, which comes in at $6 trillion. That would be the highest level of government spending since World War II. And it signals the biggest, most all-encompassing government in our nation’s history. And it would force all taxpayers to pay for abortions.

The magnitude of this level of spending is hard to comprehend. The budget projects spending to grow even more, to $8 trillion, by 2031. The budget runs a deficit of $1.8 trillion, and it will continue to run a deficit of at least $1.3 trillion for every year for the rest of the decade. By then, the deficit will be 117% of the entire economy. In just two years, federal indebtedness as a share of the entire national economy will exceed what it was during World War II, when the nation was completely mobilized in a fight for its life. Yet today we have no war, no depression, and are in the beginnings of an economic boom. We’ll see if that can last if this scale of government spending comes to pass.

But fear not, says the budget. Tax increases will also accumulate and will begin to cut the deficit beginning in the 2030s.

Do you realize how much taxes will have to soar in order to cover this much spending? President Biden assures us that only businesses and the wealthy will pay more taxes. But will there be enough businesses and wealthy people left, once this kind of spending impacts the private economy? Or will inflation–the inevitable consequence of so much new government-printed money being injected into the economy–put us all in the category of being wealthy, as we push our wheelbarrows of cash to the grocery store, even though most things will be too expensive for us to buy?

President Biden’s plan covers his infrastructure plan, his family plan, his environmental plan, his healthcare plan, his bailout plan, his welfare plan, and on and on.

The budget also includes his abortion plan. It scraps the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds–that is to say, taxpayer money–from paying for abortions.

Democratic as well as Republican presidents and lawmakers have supported this provision ever since it was enacted in 1976. It has been included in every federal budget since that time. Until now.

Estimates are that the Hyde Amendment has saved some 50,000 lives per year, for a total of more than 2 million.

But Democrats want Medicaid, the government’s health plan for poor people, to pay for abortions. They are even framing it as a social justice issue, saying that the lack of Medicaid coverage is racist because it discriminates against Black people. As if the priority of aborting Black children were not itself racist to the core.

To be sure, presidential budgets rarely get through Congress as submitted. But Democrats are highly committed to the programs President Biden is pushing, so they may well use the budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered, to push them through.

And at least three Democrats in the Senate, Joe Manchin (WV), Bob Casey (Pa), and Tim Kaine (Va) support the Hyde Amendment, so the chance of eliminating it completely is small, at least for now. (This sympathetic article describes the pro-abortion politicians’ “backup plan,” how they have been providing money for abortion despite the Hyde Amendment by giving non-abortion-specific grants to Planned Parenthood.)

At any rate, the budget shows what our government wants to do and how it recognizes no financial limits to its ambitions. And how it would run rough-shod over any of its citizens’ qualms about becoming complicit in abortion.

Again, this is not the time for Christians and other conservatives to quit their political involvement.

Illustration: A child’s handprint in red ink by b0red via FreeImg, Creative Commons 0, Public Domain

Premium Content

Churches Decline with Privilege, Grow With Pluralism & Persecution

May 18, 2021 By Gene Veith

0 Comments

When Christianity has the active support of the government, it declines. When it faces competition from other religions, it grows. When it faces persecution, it grows even more dramatically.

Those are the findings of a large-scale international study by Nilay Saiya and Stuti Manchanda, sociologists from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. They have published their research in the journal Sociology of Religion in an article entitled Paradoxes of Pluralism, Privilege, and Persecution: Explaining Christian Growth and Decline Worldwide.

Here is the abstract (my paragraphing and emphasis):

This article examines the effect of church–state relations on rates of Christian population growth or decline worldwide. It makes the paradoxical argument that contexts of both pluralism and persecution do not impede Christian growth rates.

In these environments, Christians do not have the luxury of becoming complacent. On one hand, pluralism means that Christianity must actively compete with other faith traditions in order to gain and maintain adherents. On the other hand, persecution can, paradoxically, sometimes strengthen Christianity by deepening attachments to faith and reinforcing solidarity among Christians.

Rather, it is a third type of relationship—privilege, or state support for Christianity—that corresponds to the greatest threat to growth in Christianity. Countries where Christianity is privileged by the state encourage apathy and the politicization of religion, resulting in a less dynamic faith and the overall decline of Christian populations.

We test these propositions using a cross-national, time-series analysis of a global sample of countries from 2010 to 2020. Our findings provide support for our theory that Christianity suffers in contexts of privilege but not in environments of pluralism or persecution. The finding is robust to a number of model specifications and statistical approaches.

Prof. Saiya discusses the research and its findings in an article for Christianity Today: Proof That Political Privilege Is Harmful for Christianity. He shows how churches, along with adherence to Christianity, are declining the most in countries whose governments give them special privileges. This is evident in the state churches of Western Europe, but also in the Catholic and Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe and Russia, where governments are aggressively courting church support.

Conversely, Christianity is growing fastest today in Asia and Africa, where religious pluralism is highest. Prof. Saiya invokes free market economics in citing how competition in religion, as in business, makes for dynamism and success. But I would argue that it is also true that, among religions, Christianity often has the strongest appeal. I would also call attention to another corollary of the free marketplace principle, that just as government involvement tends to be a “dead hand” that harms economic growth, it also inhibits church growth.

When the government becomes identified with the religion, the religion becomes discredited. Evidently, no one much likes their government. According to Prof. Saiya, this also applies to religions getting involved with their governments, as in evangelicals becoming discredited in the United States because of their support for Donald Trump, though, as I have posted, that is a misleading account of the data. A religion’s support of a government is not the same thing as the government’s support of a religion.

But when the government opposes Christianity, the church really grows. The article gives empirical data to support Tertullian’s observation that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Iran has been ranked as one of the worst nations in the world to be a Christian, such is the “extreme” level of persecution that is taking place there. And yet, its underground church is one of the fastest growing in the world. An even worst place to be a Christian, according to one finding, is Afghanistan, where the church is also growing in leaps and bounds, as it has long been doing in China, despite all its anti-religious measures.

This research goes against the conventional wisdom and against the political theories of some conservative thinkers. Cameron Hilditch in National Review discusses how this research works against the claims of the Integralists, the mostly Catholic theorists who advocate the union of church and state and who are applauding the nations working towards that end, such as Hungary. And yet Hungary is one of those nations where Christianity is declining the most.

The bottom line for American evangelicals and conservative Christians, given their current exile from the halls of power, the current government’s hostility to its moral and cultural teachings, and the growing prominence of non-Christian religions: Get ready for a resurgence of church growth!

Image by Prawny from Pixabay

Premium Content