Edge of Apocalypse Today

There is a shadow growing over religious freedom in America. We aren’t talking about the recent Supreme Court decision in the Christian Legal Society (CLS) case, where the Court upheld the banning of a Christian law group from official recognition on a college campus because it wouldn’t deny its Biblical approach to homosexuality, as bad as that was. We are talking about the Obama Administration’s subtle, but apparently deliberate use of a language-sleight-of-hand, substituting the phrase “freedom of worship” for “freedom of religion.” That new phrase has been used consistently in several speeches by President Obama, and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in speeches in December and January.  The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted this shift and complained about it in it’s 2010 report, causing Christianity Today to pick up on this trend in its July 9th issue.

So, what is the big problem? Simply this: the phrase “freedom of worship” follows an international concept that departs from our First Amendment understanding of religious freedom. Under international law, “worship” is a limited right, and connotes activities within a church body, but can exclude public evangelism. The UN Declaration of Human Rights protects “teaching, practice, worship and observance” but fails to protect public preaching.  The United Nation’s 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance uses the same approach on matters of religion. Article 9 of the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms allows evangelism to be banned on the basis of  protecting “public order.” In 1997 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that under Article 9 Christians could be prosecuted for efforts to evangelize.

In our new futuristic novel, Edge of Apocalypse, we give a picture of America that, sadly, is beginning to look more and more like the headlines of today rather than forecasts about the future. In this fiction story, the United States has signed onto an international treaty that radically restricts the right of Christians to preach the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ. This fictional treaty closely resembles the real-life “defamation of religion” resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March of 2009. As our current Administration edges us closer to a global approach in matters of religion, it is important to remember that the future “Babylon” in the Bible’s book of Revelation has in fact three aspects, much like a three-legged stool: two of them are a global economic system and a global political system. The third? A global unification of religion. It would seem to us improbable for the stage to be set for this kind of religious unification  until Christian evangelism is finally outlawed – or something worse.

(c) 2010 Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

All Rights Reserved

First it was the ultra-liberal group People for the American way that attacked our blog (see below) on Elena Kagan, currently up for Senate confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Then, yesterday, Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined the fray. That organization, known for assailing Christian messages whenever they appear in public spaces,  calling “pathetic” our conclusions about Ms. Kagan’s loyalty to foreign law as a tool to reinvent the U.S. Constitution, and treats our views as mere conspiracy theories.  True enough, in our new novel Edge of Apocalypse, we do portray a futuristic America where our courts have become servants to international law, among other problems (like an impending economic collapse and compromised national security).  We believe that global law as a master over American courts would not only be tragic for America, but would be a tragedy of Biblical proportions. Yet consider the fact that our detractors dodge the real question: would Elena Kagan move our High Court toward an internationalist approach to law?  So, if you are trying to decide this issue for yourself then first consider our arguments in the blog below.

Next, ponder Elena Kagan’s own testimony this week before the Senate.  She stated that she believes that the foreign law of other nations is a source of “good ideas” on how the Justices should rule on our own Constitution. In that way she went ever farther than another recent Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonya Sotomayor on that same subject. During her confirmation hearing Sotomayor downplayed any allegiance to international law. Then, a few months after being placed on the Court, she joined the liberal block on the  Supreme Court in a decision on a death penalty issue that relied on, and specifically cited foreign law.  Judging by Ms. Kagan’s own testimony, we can expect her to be not just a foreign law follower, but a true global law leader on the Court.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia once noted in a case in 2004, that the Founding Fathers would have been “appalled” at the idea of global law being imported in our view of the American Constitution; that our fundamental constitutional rights could be nullified by American judges who defer to the newest legal trends from France, Spain, or Russia. As we demonstrate in our post below, there are currently four justices on the Supreme Court who have cited foreign law in court opinions as a way of deciding issues involving our most basic constitutional rights. A future Justice Kagan would create a majority.

Keep watching our Supreme Court. Just last week the liberal block + Justice Kennedy formed a majority  that voted to uphold the Hastings Law School ban on campus recognition for the Christian Legal Society (CLS). CLS’s offense? They refused to deny their belief that homosexuals are disqualified for leadership in their Christian organization. Dissenting from that opinion, Justice Alito, appointed by President Bush, gives us a glimpse of this approaching storm over the issue of global law. He states that even if the America is the last nation left that stands for free speech and religious freedom, “ I would not change our law to conform to international standards …”