OPINION:
There are several ways to desecrate a church. One is to destroy it from the outside — burn it and vandalize its holy contents as a sign of disrespect. Another is to attack it from the inside — undermine its teachings and turn its congregants against their own beliefs. Christianity, for one, is under attack from without and within. As religious values fade from the social landscape, with them disappears respect for human life.
The Democratic Party has pursued a decades-long crusade for abortion, a form of infanticide. Unsurprisingly, a decline in the appeal of Christianity, which holds human life as precious and eternal, has accompanied it. Pew Research Center surveys have charted a decline in the proportion of U.S. respondents identifying as Christian from 77% in 2009 to 63% in 2021.
No less an eminence than Pope Benedict XVI, emeritus leader of the Catholic Church, has noticed the challenge posed to the church by prominent but quietly unsupportive American Catholics, including President Biden.
“It’s true, he’s Catholic and observant,” the retired pontiff told the Italian publication Corriere della Sera. “And personally, he is against abortion. But as president, he tends to present himself in continuity with the line of the Democratic Party.”
Adhering to the party line, one of Mr. Biden’s first presidential acts was to cancel the so-called Mexico City Policy, which bans the use of U.S. funds to promote abortion abroad. Democrats excluded Hyde Amendment language, which prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion domestically, from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that the House just approved. The president is expected to sign the bill if it passes the Senate.
To be sure, there is no religious test for U.S. public office, and Mr. Biden is free to practice his values in accordance with his conscience, or not. The same goes for fellow Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who shares the president’s devotion to Catholicism while repudiating it with her abortion leadership.
The consequences of declining Christian faith are already well underway in Europe. An 800-year-old church in Sweden was firebombed in January, and several days later, attackers returned to finish the job. A study was published in February, writes Raymond Ibrahim in The American Thinker, reporting that Sweden, normally thought of as a haven of tolerance, suffered 829 “hate crimes” against churches between 2012 and 2018.
France underwent 1,063 similar attacks on churches or religious symbols in 2018 alone, a 17% increase in one year. And Germany reported some 200 churches in Bavaria’s alpine region were vandalized in 2017 and their crosses broken.
The challenge from a competing faith, Islam, is blamed for much of the church destruction in Europe. Thus far in the U.S., denial of a divine component to human existence is eroding church irrelevance. Abraham Lincoln once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Similarly, when churchgoers are separated from their faith, human life is desecrated.
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