religion | Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

After I heard of Trump’s executive order aimed at eradicating “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government, I read some articles to help understand what he planned.

According to various online newspaper articles, it would involve agencies reviewing practices that try to suppress religious activities and activisms.

I then wondered, does Trump realize he is pushing a new federal policy that he in essence violated not three weeks ago?

Remember that prayer meeting with Pastor Budde where she is invited to speak at a prayer meeting? You know a prayer meeting, where people talk about their faith and religious beliefs, and they pray. They pray in the way their faith has taught them.

But after Pastor Budde basically parroted Jesus’s word (You know Jesus, the one they call Christ, the one the Christian faith is supposedly based on) Trump got all up in his feels, claimed she was out of line, not very good at her job, and attacked her online.

When someone has millions of followers on social media, and they accuse someone of committing some egregious wrong against them—as Trump did Budde—there is always a risk that some of those followers will then attack the person whom they believed wronged their hero.

And sure enough, Pastor Budde received death threats from Trump supporters simply because she was expressing her Christian beliefs. Is Trump’s administration planning on going after those people?

Remember how we’ve been told all of our lives that many of the Christians who first came to America did so to escape religious persecution? It’s one reason we have the First Amendment, to protect American citizens from being persecuted by the government because of their religion.

You want to guess what folks were most likely to be persecuting Christians back then—those Christians who fled to this new land seeking religious freedom? Other Christians!

Quakers, Separatists, Puritans, and Catholics are all Christian, and all came to this country to avoid persecution from other Christians. Across the pond, before and after we were a country, Protestant and Catholic differences often led to bloody outcomes.

There are over 200 Christian denominations in this country. I fear Trump’s new anti-Christian bias agenda is attempting to define what it is to be Christian, and in doing so, will exclude many Christian denominations from his club. If this isn’t a clear violation of our First Amendment, I don’t know what is.

Let’s pretend for a minute that America really is a Christian nation, with no atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Daoist, Bahai’s, Wicca, or any other religion. Christians would still be persecuted in this country, by other Christians. Trump’s new anti-bias Christian agenda would be targeting people that aren’t “their kind of Christians,” just as it is now.

One thing about Christians, they LOVE to tell other people they are not real Christians because they don’t believe how they do.

Guess what, there are Christian religions out there that support LGBTQ communities and same sex marriage, along with abortion rights. There are Christians out there who, like Jesus, welcome the immigrant and believe in feeding the poor and helping the downtrodden.

Right now, I can practically hear some “Christians” proclaiming those religions I just mentioned are not real Christians. Which only proves my point.

Evangelicals often love to tell other Christians, like Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jehovah Witnesses, and Unitarians that they are not “real” Christians.

So Trump’s new agenda, in my opinion, is not about protecting the Christian faith, it is about redefining what Christianity is, and then prioritizing their beliefs, while persecuting the “Other Christians,” many of whom are actually practicing Jesus’s teachings.

There are politicians in this country who love to shout about a war on Christians. In my opinion, the call is coming from within the house. Why? Because there is a loud group of Christians who, instead of spreading the word of Jesus, divide this country by spreading hate instead of love. A group that has turned empathy—one of Jesus’s most notable traits—into a sin. The number of adults identifying as Christian in this country is declining. One reason, I believe, is that they don’t want to be associated with “those” Christians.

I used to identify as Christian, but the behavior of some of the more outspoken Christians in this country has made me unwilling to be asociated with that group. It doesn’t mean I have pushed away Jesus, just the moniker Christian. And I’m not alone.

But this is nothing new. It’s my opinion Jesus’s message was hijacked for personal and political gain the moment he died on that cross. And it has been going on for centuries.

In conclusion, I strongly support our US Constitution and feel Trump’s anti-Christian policy violates the First Amendment.

When the last occupier of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, David Fry, ranted his grievances against the government before his surrender, one grienvance was a resentment for having to pay for abortions with his tax dollars. It was a tense situation, and no one bothered to explain that tax dollars cannot generally pay for abortions, only in certain cases, such as rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Of course, for Pro-Lifers, even those exceptions are too great.

I grew up in a household where my father was pro-life and my mother pro-choice. Ironically, mom was the parent who believed in God, while Dad claimed the Bible was written by a bunch of smart Jews to keep people in line.

My mother was raised Christian Science (yet she saw doctors) while my father was raised evangelical Christian and regularly attended church at least twice a week while growing up. He rejected his fundamental Christian upbringing, yet he wasn’t an atheist, and by the end of his life, he had reached out to a higher power.

Therefore, his pro-life stand didn’t stem from his early religious upbringing, but by the fact his mother (who had been in an unhappy marriage) once confessed she would have aborted him had it been legal. I can certainly understand why Dad was pro-life.

I’m not sure if it is accurate to describe my views on abortion as pro-choice, yet I do not align myself with the philosophies expressed by those claiming to be pro-life.

I suppose, like traditional Christians, my feelings on abortion are based on my belief system. Basically, I see our physical body as a vessel—what holds our spirit. It belongs to us. It’s our private property—no one has the right to harm or inflict their will on our private property—our body.

I also don’t believe life begins with our physical body—the essence of who we are is our spirit or soul. I don’t believe our spirit or soul is created when our flesh and blood body evolves. It’s just where we settle to live out our time on this earth.

So basically, I believe a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy in the very early stages—especially in the instances of rape. But once the embryo evolves and becomes a viable physical life—I move over to the pro-life category. While I believe a woman has the right to decide who occupies her body for nine months—if she goes past a certain point, then I feel that new body has established squatter rights. The mother has lost her right to evict.

The only time I can agree with a late term abortion is for medical reasons, especially to save the life of the mother. At that point, the rights of the mother’s physical body trumps the child’s, in my opinion.

As for the actual spirit or soul of the aborted fetus, I’m not even sure it has one yet. When does the spirit of who we are move into our body? And if that body is terminated, why wouldn’t we simply move into another unborn body?

For me, this concept was dramatically brought home when my father died. Mom and I were with Dad when he passed away. I sat beside his bed, talking to him, telling him I loved him, that he was a wonderful father, and urged him to follow the light.

Some thirty minutes after he flatlined, I remember looking at his body. It was the first time I had really looked at a dead body—one that hadn’t been tampered with by embalming and make up. It struck me how his physical body was now nothing more than an empty vessel. My father, the man we all loved, was no longer there. He had moved on. His body eerily reminded me of an abandoned building.

If you find my opinons on abortion cockamamie—you aren’t alone. One of my devote Christian friends found it hilarious. Yet, I’m very serious.

How do I know I’m right? I don’t. After all, with over 4,000 religions in the world, which one of us is right?

About four years ago I wrote a “what if” short story—It’s the future and Roe VS Wade has been overturned. American Bondage is just 99 cents and you can find it at Amazon.

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The True Persecutor of Christians in the USA

Is pro-choice the same thing as pro-abortion?