Christians have neglected the public square

Christians have neglected the public square
By Terry A. Hurlbut
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the most famous leader of the early Church (after Jesus Christ Himself) faced examination by torture. But at that precise moment, he had an “out,” and he used it. He asked his would-be torturers whether they had the authority, under the laws and regulations of the polity and empire they served, to examine a citizen of that polity under the lash. Should he have done this? An alarming number of Christians might actually say he shouldn’t have – if they thought about the question at all. And they reason is that Christians have abandoned the public square. They think they are not citizens, either of the United States or of any other polity. Politics, to them, is an uncouth and unnecessary point of division they must avoid at all costs. Their fellow citizens are paying for their folly.
Confrontations between church and state in Roman times
The Bibie records two major confrontations between Paul of Tarsus (and his friends Silas, Timothy, and Luke) and Roman authorities. The first of these took place in ancient Philippi, a major city in Macedonia (and site of a famous battle). Paul and his friends were there in answer to a spiritual calling Paul had earlier sensed. Eventually Paul did something that caught unwelcome attention: he relieved a slave-girl of her demonic possession. This girl had made considerable money for her owners telling people’s fortunes; now the money flow had stopped. (Forerunner to the USAID crisis, perhaps?)
So the girl’s owners seized the missionaries and hauled them before the propraetors, accusing them of disturbing the peace. (Acts 16:21.)
They teach customs that are not lawful for us, as Roman, to receive or even to observe.
So the magistrates had them stripped, flogged, imprisoned (in “Maximum,” yet!), and even put into stocks. That night an earthquake shook the prison house, and the vibrations broke the locks on everyone’s shackles and cell doors. The warden almost killed himself, thinking all his prisoners had escaped, but Paul assured him no one had fled. That prompted the warden to become a Christian then and there.
Then the more important confrontation took place. (Acts 16: 35-39.)
When the day broke, the propraetors sent their lictors [that is, official magisterial bodyguards] with this order: “Release those men.”
The prison warden repeated these orders to Paul: “The propraetors have sent word to release you. So leave, and go in peace.”
But Paul said back to [the lictors], “They have whipped us openly without a guilty verdict—and we are Roman citizens!—and have thrown us into prison. Do they think they're going to throw us out privately? Oh, no! They can come here themselves and fetch us out.” The lictors repeated these words to the propraetors, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens. They came and pleaded with them, and brought them out, and begged them to leave the city.
Should Paul have said that? If, as modern Christians now say, we have no citizenship of any earthly polity, he should not have.
Are you a Roman citizen?
The second took place in Jerusalem, when Paul was spreading his Message in Herod’s Temple. The Temple Guard Force and other Jewish worshipers seized him and started beating him. A report reached Tribune Claudius Lysias, the garrison commander, that the whole city was running riot. He rushed to the spot with several soldiers and centurions and placed Paul under arrest. (Acts 21:27-36.)
Paul tried to defend himself before the crowd, who listened at first, until he talked of preaching to Gentiles. Then they started to riot all over again. So the tribune ordered his men to carry Paul into Antonia Fortress – and examine him under the lash. (Acts 22:23-24.)
That’s when this exchange (Acts 22:25-29) took place:
As they were tying him with thongs, Paul said to the centurion standing by, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman citizen, and has not been convicted of any crime?”
When the centurion heard that, he went and told the tribune, saying, “Be careful what you are doing, Tribune! This man is a Roman citizen!”
Then the tribune came, and asked him, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”
And he said, “Yes.”
The tribune answered, “I bought my citizenship and paid handsomely for it.”
And Paul said, “But I was born a citizen.”
Then those who were about to interrogate him immediately left the room. The tribune was also afraid, after he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen, and he had had him chained.
Should Paul have made an issue of that? Or – again – are Christians so detached from the society into which they were born, that their civil rights are of no moment? Will they allow officials of the United States government to violate their rights with impunity? Might modern Christians accuse Paul of having copped out of their duty to “suffer in Christ’s Name”?
Modern analogues to which Christians should pay attention
Anyone who received, from President Donald J. Trump, a pardon for charges arising out of the January 6 Event, should recognize himself in Paul of Tarsus pleading his Roman citizenship. (The fourteen defendants whose sentences Trump commuted to time thus far served, still have their cases under review.) Likewise, any person imprisoned for praying (and doing nothing else) in front of an abortion mill, will recognize himself (or herself) in Paul casting out the fortune-telling demon from the slave girl and suffering beating and imprisonment for that act.
The last twenty-four hours provide ample evidence of selective disrespect for the rights of Christians in the public square. First, examine a “buffer zone ordinance” in Carbondale, Illinois. In that city, no one may preach the Gospel or any pro-life message within 100 feet of an abortion clinic, without the consent of any person they approach. A group called Coalition Life tried to challenge this law at the U.S. Supreme Court. For reasons unstated, the Court denied review. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in writing, saying the Carbondale law, and laws like it, “turn the First Amendment upside down.” But Thomas also identified another salient problem the Court has always had:
The jurisprudence of this Court has a way of changing when abortion is involved.
So saying, Justice Thomas (as did Justice Scalia, whom he was quoting) flatly accused his colleagues of selective application of the Constitution.
The Carbondale city council repealed their ordinance, in fear that the Court would review it and strike it down.
From abortion to surgical woman-passing
The dialogue in America about abortion is worse than that. Over the weekend, an actress lamented that a “twelve-year-old girl … can’t get an abortion.”
Now consider the spectacle of men who submit to surgical mutilation and/or hormonal poisoning, then enter into athletic competition against women and sweep away their records. Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) is defying President Trump’s executive order against this practice. After a boy “won” a pole-vault championship in Maine by this method, President Trump confronted Gov. Mills in front of several of her fellow governors at the White House.
President: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports. You better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.
Governor: We’ll see you in court.
President: Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.
Why should the President even have to say that? Because the government of the State of Maine learned nothing when the Supreme Court declared discrimination against people of faith, unconstitutional. Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. 767 (2022).
Sadly, Gov. Mills probably will still “be in elected politics,” because she actually is the governor of Portland, Maine. The Democratic Party is the Party of a handful of large cities whose hedonistic, atheistic, anti-religious populations single-handedly elect State-wide officials and U.S. Senators. (But black celebrity Charlamagne Da God criticized Gov. Mills sharply for pushing a “losing” issue.)
Why are folks still talking about trans athletes? Like, that is a losing talking point. America’s not with it, and they keep making a micro a macro with that conversation. It impacts such a small, small group of people, but it makes a whole lot of people think folks lack common sense, so why are they even having that conversation?
Bill Maher, on his Real Time program, sounded a similar warning.
You want you want to lose every election: Just keep coming down on the side of parents coming in second in a who gets to decide what goes on with my kid contest.
https://x.com/EricAbbenante/status/1893736142694207569
In fact, we now learn the extent to which the United States government actively funded Alphabet Soup activism. An Alphabet Soup group in Britain now has laid off half its staff – because its USAID money spigot is closed.
Why do Christians let such things happen?
Such things happen because Christians let them happen. This is not to say that Christians should riot, or assault or murder people who perform or assist in abortions. (Which, unfortunately, has happened in a few cases, years ago.) It is to say that Christians shouldn’t let the government violate their rights, nor those of fellow believers, without protest. Yet that is exactly what happens when Church officers or donors lay down an Eleventh Commandment that, they allege, reads:
Thou shalt not discuss matters of political import while in church or at church functions.
What, then, have they to say when obvious non-Christians twist the Message of Christ? Joy Reid, who recently lost her show and job, made this incredible defense. She defended her screeds about the 1619 Project (which alleges that the “real founding” of the United States occurred when a Dutch ship brought the first slaves to American shores), Israeli retaliation for the October 7 massacre, or defending the placement of books in school libraries that ought to offend every imaginable Christian sensibility. And she defended them by saying, “Those things are of God.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEaJdx8Z0Dc
That begs the question of which God – but Joy Reid is not alone. Sunny Hostin on ABC’s The View said something similar.
And that’s how I feel … so it angers me when people are like, “This woke stuff gotta go.” That’s telling me that you don’t care about my lived experience, you don’t care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community, you don’t care about the oppression of the disabled, you don’t care about the oppression of immigrants, you don’t care about your fellow neighbors — and that is un-Godly, that is not Christian.
And that was only the beginning.
https://x.com/NickFondacaro/status/1894070442580730266
The President has taken note of systematic anti-Christian bias by our federal government. But according to those “anti-political” church officers and donors, he shouldn’t.
Fellow Christians, we are voting citizens!
Wrong! Any President should so take note. More to the point, Christians should remember that we are voting citizens. To protest the selective application of the law, and the treatment of January 6 defendants – that is of God. And to protest the continued spectacle of abortion, including abortion tourism and abortion trafficking – that also is of God. Likewise, to protest a regime seeking the systematic sterilization of the human race – except for the close friends of the globalist leadership – by promoting a lifestyle that violates every precept of human anatomy and physiology – that is of God.
What is not of God is to ignore these things, whether because “we’re not the Spanish Inquisition,” or because “ours is a pluralistic society.” Pluralism does not have to mean the countenancing of murder. The alternative to the Spanish Inquisition should not be the tolerance of murder. Nor should it be George Orwell’s English Socialist Republic (INGSOC) and Anti-sex League from his novel Nineteen Eighty-four.
Jesus told His disciples, “Occupy until I come.” (Luke 19:13.) Certain church officers and donors prefer to go and dig a hole in the ground and hide our Lord’s Message. (Matthew 25:18.) We must not hide; we must share. God has given us a tactical advantage of which we could scarcely dream. We must use it.
Link to:
The article:
https://cnav.news/2025/02/25/foundation/constitution/christians-neglected-public-square/

Supreme Court order list, including Justice Thomas’ dissent in Coalition Live v. Carbondale:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/022425zor_6k47.pdf

Trump’s relevant executive orders:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/keeping-men-out-of-womens-sports/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/eradicating-anti-christian-bias/

Video: Bill Maher warns against pushing surgical/hormonal alteration on children:
https://x.com/EricAbbenante/status/1893736142694207569

Video: Joy Reid’s last conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEaJdx8Z0Dc

Video: The View says woke-ism is of God:
https://x.com/NickFondacaro/status/1894070442580730266

Declarations of Truth:
https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:
https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:
https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media
https://clixnet.com/