Damned Christians

[Fake Messiah]

Omaha televangelist: A pastor allied with Trump. His church is booming – and buying serious real estate

Big names in the evangelical Christian world had descended upon Millard for FlashPoint Next Level, a worship service with a panel of pastors. From the stage, they expressed their gratitude for Donald Trump’s second term.

They’d prophesied Trump’s victory for years, decried the 2020 election as stolen, and pushed for Nebraska to adopt a winner-take-all electoral system – a change that Kunneman’s Lord of Hosts Church is still advocating.

And Kunneman’s Millard-based church has quickly amassed real estate, money and power in the Omaha area, too, building a sprawling multi-million dollar church and buying up an estimated $14.9 million of nearby commercial real estate.

“They are driving the conversation within American evangelicalism, and they have accumulated a great deal of political capital,” Taylor said. “I think that they’re gonna wield that sword … against their enemies.”

In the year leading up to the 2024 election, Kunneman called Trump “appointed and anointed” by God. He broadcasted prophecies of Trump’s success across social media and his own One Voice Television.

This type of talk draws in both local congregants and online viewers fueling the church’s growth.

Brittany Shaw, a church member, said she saw videos of Kunneman preaching online as she was preparing to move to Omaha from Colorado. Feeling oppressed by strict COVID-19 restrictions at the time, she said it was life changing to see the pastor speaking out.

“Evangelicals have really gravitated into these churches because they’re more political, they’re more Trumpy,” Taylor said. “They’re more ecstatic, exciting and they’re preaching the pro-Trump message that a lot of people wanted to hear during COVID.”

One Voice Ministries, Kunneman and his wife’s outreach nonprofit, reported massive gains in revenue in its IRS 990 filings, from about $648,000 in 2019 to $1 million in 2020 and $3 million in 2021.

Even as that revenue increased, the church received government support.

In 2020, Lord of Hosts World Outreach Inc. took out a Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, loan. Including interest, a total of $175,344 was forgiven.

As a church, Lord of Hosts isn’t required to file 990s with the IRS, and is exempt from paying income and property taxes.

Though Lord of Hosts operates independent of any denomination, Kunneman often works within a network of megachurch pastors who appear well connected to Trump.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump brought in his friend Paula White, an independent charismatic like Kunneman, Taylor said. White then introduced Trump to the televangelist pastors then willing to meet him.

Prophecies about Trump grew by the hundreds in the lead-up to the 2020 election, with pastors often comparing him to Biblical figures.

FlashPoint served as a mobilizing force in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Taylor said. While Kunneman himself didn’t appear to be there, Taylor said he identified more than 60 independent charismatic leaders in the D.C. crowd that day.

Violent right-wing rhetoric has blended with spiritual warfare, Taylor said, its messengers promoting a struggle to take back American culture and government from opponents they call demonic.

“I don’t think it’s too far to call it propagandizing Trump,” Taylor said.

That pond isn’t expected to stay small, though. With White in charge of the Trump administration’s faith office, experts expect to see pastors like Kunneman’s power expand.

“This is the fastest growing part of American Christianity, as far as we can tell, and it is growing leaps and bounds in terms of its political influence,” Taylor said.

https://flatwaterfreepress.org/hometown-...al-estate/

[Fake Messiah]

Christians are claiming persecution after a pastor in Ireland broke onto the abortion clinic grounds to protest in front of women. They now defend him by claiming that he was not protesting at all, but rather spreading the gospel and holding an open mass that coincidentally happened to be in front of an abortion facility.

They don't even consider these grounds as being breached, but claim that the law is controversial, which also means that people's right to privacy is also controversial.

Baptist pastor prosecuted in Northern Ireland for open-air sermon on John 3:16

A retired Baptist pastor has been charged with violating the controversial buffer zone law near an abortion clinic in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, after delivering an open-air sermon based on the Bible verse John 3:16.

The 76-year-old pastor, Clive Johnston, a former president of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland, faces two charges under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, including allegedly seeking to “influence” individuals accessing abortion services and failing to leave the area when instructed by police.

The Christian Institute’s Deputy Director Simon Calvert called the prosecution “an outrageous restriction on freedom of religion and freedom of speech.”

Calvert argued that the buffer zone law, designed to prevent harassment or protests near abortion clinics, is being misapplied in this instance. “It’s just not reasonable or rational to suggest that preaching the Gospel, with no reference to abortion, is a protest against abortion. The Police and the Public Prosecution Service are over-stepping the mark. This is not what buffer zones were designed to do.”

The Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, introduced in 2022 by the Green Party, established 100-150 meter buffer zones around hospitals and abortion clinics in Northern Ireland. The law prohibits activities that impede, record, influence, or cause harassment, alarm, or distress within these zones.

However, critics now question whether the law is being used to suppress non-abortion-related expressions of faith or speech.

Johnston’s supporters stressed that his gathering wasn't disruptive and that his sermon focused solely on the Gospel message of God’s love, as reflected in John 3:16.

The Christian Institute, which previously supported Ashers Baking Co. in a landmark Supreme Court case, argued that the prosecution sets a dangerous precedent for limiting freedom of expression in public spaces.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/pasto...doors.html

[Mr Greene]

About what we'd expect of a priest...

Brothers conned into signing over farm to church minister

Three elderly brothers who were conned out of their family farm by a church minister and a local businessman were not in the right state of mind to sign anything

Helen Fraser said her cousins Hugh, Roderick and David McCulloch were "groomed" into signing power of attorney documents by the two men.
Reverend Ivan Warwick and businessman Douglas Stewart then sold the farmhouse and drained the bank accounts of the vulnerable victims

Ms Fraser says that Warwick, a Church of Scotland minister who had preached to King Charles, had befriended Hugh, Roddy and David years earlier.
Along with Stewart, he persuaded the brothers, who were in their late 70s and 80s, into granting them power of attorney in 2013.
The following year the farm was transferred to Warwick and Stewart.
After persuading their victims into giving away their home and land, the two men sold the farmhouse and drained their bank accounts.
Later it would transpire the men had robbed the brothers of more than £1m.

[HappySkeptic]

I don't want to dump on all church ministers. The ones I know are good people.

However, as for being "honest", I think that most ministers disbelieve or are agnostic about most of the claims of their faith. They just can't admit that to their flock.

[Fake Messiah]

Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy

Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

The idea that caring about others could end civilization may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid.

The rightwing movement against empathy seeks to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.

On 21 January, the Right Rev Mariann Budde delivered a message from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral to a newly inaugurated President Trump. Immigrants and LGBTQ+ children were living in fear, the Episcopal bishop of Washington said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett with a photo of Budde in her religious garb. “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.”

Another Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, tweeted: “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.”

The pastor Joe Rigney drove the argument home in the evangelical publication World. “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness,” Rigney wrote. “Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.”

Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house best known for releasing apologia book for the antebellum south that characterized slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”.

Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. Quoting extensively from Calvin Robinson, the rightwing British cleric who was recently mimicking Musk’s Nazi salute at an anti-abortion rally, Rigney connects progressive political values to “a culture of victimhood flowing from toxic female empathy”.

“Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society,” he writes. “The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities, as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism.”

Justification is also at the heart of Stuckey’s book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. “Empathy may be part of what inspires us to do good, but it’s just an emotion and, like all emotions, highly susceptible to manipulation.” The book, published just ahead of the 2024 election, provides arguments for Christians to use in defense of five political positions (against abortion, against gay marriage, against trans people, against immigration and against social justice), no matter how many people on Instagram implore them to show a little empathy.

Rigney’s views are increasingly appealing to evangelical Christians. In February he was invited to promote his book on the podcast of Albert Mohler, an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention.

For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...musk-trump

[Alan V]

Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...musk-trump

Oh good, so they understand why we should be intolerant of their intolerance.  

[Fake Messiah]

Oops, wrong topic

[Fake Messiah]

The Christian Right’s 250-Year Fight Against America

Beginning in the late 18th century, “Covenanters” considered the Constitution flawed for its failure to acknowledge God; the Confederacy’s pro-slavery theologians saw the Declaration of Independence’s rhetoric about human equality as an affront to a God-ordained racial hierarchy; in the mid-20th century, Christian Reconstructionists saw nearly the entire U.S. legal system as antithetical to Old Testament law.

The Reformed Presbyterians — better known as the Covenanters — during the early Republic, took a stance of conscientious objection to the federal government. Their complaint was that the Constitution failed to acknowledge God and the rulership of Christ, and that, by not having a religious test, it allows for unbelievers or “infidels” to hold federal office and even rise to the position of president.

They regarded the First Amendment as problematic. The establishment clause forbidding Congress from setting up a state religion meant to them that civil government was not fulfilling its duty to support the church. And the free exercise clause meant that the government was permitting and licensing infidelity.

So, for all these reasons — and also for the Constitution’s tacit acceptance of slavery, which Covenanters regarded as sinful — they thought that the Constitution and the government it created were illegitimate. So they refused to participate in it as far as they could, including by not running for or accepting government offices and by not voting, until the nation repented from this original sin and established a truly Christian constitution.

Illiberal Christian thinkers went on not only to critique but to replace the American political order with a regime in accord with their theological beliefs. Some of them believed that all that was really required was a bit of constitutional tinkering — an amendment that would explicitly announce the United States as a Christian polity. But others argued for a more whole-scale transformation of the nation into a Catholic confessional state or a Calvinist theocratic republic.

Last Wednesday morning, a surreal scene unfolded at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a man with two Crusades-themed tattoos and the author of a book calling for a modern “American Crusade” — inaugurated a new, perhaps monthly Christian prayer and worship service at the Pentagon auditorium. Hegseth’s personal pastor — who leads a Tennessee church associated with theocratic (and self-described “paleo-Confederate”) theologian Doug Wilson—flew in to lead the prayer service, where he suggested Donald Trump was divinely appointed to the presidency. And in his opening remarks, Hegseth led a prayer to “King Jesus,” telling military staff gathered for the purportedly voluntary service that “where we need to be as a nation” is praying “on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

The display followed an already active first four months of the Trump administration’s efforts to make America “more religious” than ever before, as Trump vowed in a Truth Social post Easter morning. In February, Trump created a White House Faith Office and a Department of Justice task force to eradicate “anti-Christian bias.”

Roughly two weeks later, Trump proposed that the country “forget about” the separation of church and state while announcing the creation of a new commission on religious liberty populated almost entirely by MAGA-allied Christian Right figures.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/christi...n-heretics

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Christian nationalism is being forced into OK schools. It's a war on reality

Oklahoma Republicans are staging a war on reality in their public schools, and every American who cares about religious freedom and democracy should be ashamed. State officials are trying to force the Bible and the Christian nationalist “1776 Commission” report into public classrooms, turning education into religious and political indoctrination.

I work daily with young Americans who believe deeply in the separation of church and state. The percentage of Americans who identify as secular grows by the day, and they understand what is at stake when politicians attempt to impose a single religious worldview through government power.

Nearly half of Gen Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated. These students are not “less American” because they are secular, just as students of minority faiths are not “less American” because they worship differently from the Christian majority. Forcing a Christian religious framework into public education sends a dangerous message: that full citizenship and acceptance are reserved only for those who conform. This attack is disguised as patriotism, but in reality is pure propaganda. It is a deliberate effort to rewrite history, erase injustice and glorify a narrow, exclusionary vision of America.

Oklahoma’s students deserve better. They deserve an education that prepares them to think critically, engage with complexity, and participate fully in a pluralistic society. They deserve classrooms that reflect the real, diverse America they are inheriting, but instead could be forced to endure a whitewashed fantasy crafted by politicians desperate to cling to power.

https://www.oklahoman.com/story/opinion/...748497007/

[Fake Messiah]

ACLU to sue Texas over Ten Commandments bill

Senate Bill 10 requires schools to purchase posters or framed copies of the Ten Commandments

[Fake Messiah]

When did Christianity become so heartless?

Supporting Trump now means denying food to the hungry, medicine to the poor, and justice to the wrongfully accused, all while supporting a $1 TRILLION military budget, the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza, constant violations of the Constitution, blatant corruption, the spreading of preventable disease, and so much else.

A fine example of the state of American Christianity is the response to my column from one or our local Christian “thinkers,” who justified letting African babies contract HIV as a matter of fiscal responsibility. But maybe the better example is Senator Joni Ernst justifying cuts to healthcare and food aid for impoverished Americans by dismissively proclaiming, “We all are going to die,” and then calling for those dying prematurely to just put their faith in Christ. “Let them eat cake” sounds pretty compassionate compared to “just die already; we need the money.”

Maybe the best example of the cruelty that has infested conservative Christianity is the stream of cross-wearing Republicans flying to the CECOT prison in El Salvador so they can pose in front of concrete cells packed with human misery, their photos reminiscent of those taken by white Southerners (also devout Christians) proudly posing with freshly lynched Black men a century back.

Maybe it’s always been like this. For two millenia Jesus has been invoked to justify burning women and philosophers, torturing political enemies, annihilating indigenous peoples, slavery, and wars beyond count. Even the German Nazis overwhelmingly considered themselves Christian, though today, as “unsavory elements” are being shackled and marched off to camps, it’s not under the swastika. It’s under the crucifix.

Before you dismiss this as hyperbole, just look at the composition of MAGA and the Republican party. You’ll see Confederates, neo-Nazis, and evangelicals sharing the same political space with zero friction. Eventually, evangelicals will have to face the fact that they’ve let fear and the lust for power displace love at the center of their faith.

Are there yet good Christians in this country? Of course. No doubt, the vast majority across the board are kind and decent people just trying to live their best lives. But the general silence of the churches — or all too often, their enthusiastic support—in the face of Trump’s barbarism is shocking.

And it’s why Christian churches are dying. When non-Christians look to the churches, all we now see is hypocrisy and greed, lies and manipulation, and a bobblehead Jesus with all the moral heft and spiritual significance of a football jersey.

https://www.dnews.com/opinion/opinion-1d57c844