CHAPTER 2

Against the Powers of This Dark World

My parents divorced when I was very young, and for a lot of my life it was just me and my mother. I have no relationship now with my biological father. Long ago he joined my Internet trolls and for a time enjoyed crudely abusing me on Facebook and in comments sections of Web sites. He once wrote to a progressive blogger explaining that he was a hard-core Democrat and that I, a conservative, had lost my way, as though name-dropping a daughter he hadn’t seen in over a decade gave him some sort of insider information. (The blogger, while disagreeing with me on most everything, kindly forwarded to me the correspondence.) He once even called an affiliate radio station and threatened to sue them if I ever mentioned him in a negative light on air. Amazingly, his aggressive behavior toward me had nothing to do with my conservative conversion, so absent was he in my life. That I came from a broken home did affect me, though in an opposite way from what progressives might think. It served to fuel my early progressive politics. I was let down in the most egregious way by a parent, a man. This created a chip on my shoulder that wasn’t buffed out until my midtwenties. It started me on the path toward feminism. I never wanted to be dependent on a member of the opposite sex for any emotional, financial, or physical security. Oddly, the more feminist I became, the more I began to see that this was quite the opposite of the aim of the third-wave movement. (More on that to come.) I decided early on that if I was to marry, it would be for no other reason than that I was more certain of my potential union than I was of my next breath. I married when I was twenty-one years old and celebrated my fifteenth wedding anniversary this year. I am in my thirties now, and what I’ve learned is that marriage isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. It’s love and work. It’s patience. It’s at odds with our instant-gratification society, which teaches the idiotic concept of “starter marriages” (like a starter house, but for your love life) and sanctions emotional adultery. I am harsh on divorce. I am harsh on people who take their spouses for granted, stop courting, stop loving, and ruin their families. I watched, heartbroken, as the marriages of two of our friends dissolved because of pure, unadulterated selfishness. I cannot take seriously the protests of any postured Christian who commits marital seppuku with dishonesty and adultery while pointing fingers at gay America for ruining marriage. No, you did a fine job of that yourself.

The majority of Americans (around seven in ten)7 identify as Christian, to be sure. America is still home to more Christians than anywhere else in the world; at least, that’s the statistic thrown out whenever people of faith decry the recent uptick in stateside religious persecution. Believing in God is one thing; believing in Jesus, becoming a disciple, not just a follower, fellowshipping regularly by attending church, that’s something entirely different. Many put on their faith along with their Sunday best, true, and some posture to shepherd the faith with questionable doctrine that widens the gap between people and God. Society doesn’t make it easy. If you watch television, go to the movies, or in any way participate in pop culture, you’d think that Christians were the minority. In culture, church and faith are sidelined.

There must be something about church that coastals really want to push out of the mainstream.

 • • • 

The town my family is from is made up of 301 people, at the last census. It includes a restaurant called, literally, “The Rest’urnt,” a gas station and convenience mart, a small bank, and three churches that all exist within sight of one another: the Baptist church, the Church of the Nazarene, and Happy Zion Church. They’re all salt-of-the-earth people. Amusingly, the Church of the Nazarene made a couple of townsfolk upset (or jealous) by building a ginormous new building that looks like a slightly uneven cross from above. My uncle Junior leads the church choir at the Baptist church. Uncle Junior is the 1970s manifest in one man. An upstanding man of God, he’s tall and southern proper, he prefers brown polyester leisure suits and gold aviators, he wears a gold pinkie ring, and he coifs his black hair back behind his ears. If everyone has a personal theme song, Uncle Junior’s is Ram Jam’s “Black Betty,” and his stride matches the beat. During Sunday-morning services Uncle Junior Ram Jam–walks into the sanctuary, adjusting the robe over his shoulders as he snaps the choir to attention. The church organist lays her hands on the keys at the jab of his finger, and we’re off to worship, spilling a week’s worth of trials from our lungs in praise as the organist loses herself in the music, the flourishes, the theatrics before the keys, driving the hymn within an inch of sin with emotional, musical passion. It should be noted that no one actually knows Uncle Junior’s real first name, except perhaps for his dearly departed wife, my great-aunt W. Many of the people from my family’s town are known by nicknames only—Speedy, Too Tall (a cousin, reportedly), Clunker, Boots, etc.—and for a spell were even listed in the official town phone book in the same manner. It is, in every respect, a stereotypical country town in Flyover Nation, similar to Walkerton, Indiana, except perhaps Walkerton is a lot bigger with its fancy McDonald’s and Main Street storefronts.

Walkerton is a thirty-minute drive south of South Bend, Indiana. It was this town that a reporter named Alyssa Marino from ABC 57 visited in search of content for a story on the state’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Business rights were in the news, with a string of bakers, photographers, and T-shirt makers in court citing faith as the reason why they wouldn’t cater, make a cake for, make a T-shirt for, or photograph a same-sex marriage ceremony. Marino went to Flyover Nation in search of a stereotypical Christian business owner to answer on record whether or not they’d serve same-sex couples. She found a small-town pizza joint in Walkerton, with crosses on the walls, called Memories Pizza. It was to this business, specifically daughter Crystal O’Connor, who was manning the register that day, that Marino asked her question: Would the pizza parlor cater a gay wedding? Let it settle in, the insane context of this question and where it was asked. The Lois Lane of gay wedding journalism, Alyssa Marino, asked a small-town pizza parlor whether or not it would cater a gay wedding. Has Marino ever met a gay person? I have gay friends and family members. Not a single one of them would ever cater their wedding with pizza. My gay neighbors in our old neighborhood held a block party once and had bottle service. I’m from the Ozarks, and while I’ve had kin who disassembled and stored their Harleys in their living rooms during winter (sensible), not a single one of them would cater a wedding with pizza. I was disappointed that Marino asked only a hypothetical question and didn’t bring along any actual gay customers as props to get an actual refusal of service on camera, Oprah style, but this is a reporter who went to a small-town pizza joint to ask about catering a wedding. I was shocked Marino didn’t follow up by visiting a QuikTrip and asking if it would do the same. All O’Connor said was that Memories Pizza would, in fact, serve gay customers. The owners just didn’t want to cater a gay wedding, declining to participate in an activity that didn’t jibe with their sincere faith.

I mulled two motivations as the Internet batted about this rage ball like catnipped kitties: Either Marino is the dull, nubbin-tipped crayon in a box of new, perfectly sharpened Crayolas or she knew people wouldn’t pay attention enough to notice that hers was a hypothetical question and that no service was actually refused—but the truth would be irrelevant, as people with agendas would conflate the two anyway. Ignoring this, Marino proved with her skill set why she works in a smaller, local market; her disingenuously ridiculous headline, which was quickly altered8 after blowback, was RFRA: FIRST BUSINESS TO PUBLICLY DENY SAME SEX SERVICE. No. O’Connor did not “deny same sex service,” nor did O’Connor say she would “deny same sex service,” publicly or otherwise. What was specifically said was that the parlor would not participate in the activity of catering a same-sex wedding. I realize this obvious distinction is lost on people like Marino, who likely couldn’t spell “nuance” without the benefit of spell-check, but alas, it’s an important difference. The Internet Rage Mob® didn’t care. They wanted blood; they protest for the pure carnage of silencing any and all opposition. Death of diverse thought by a million paper cuts.

They didn’t get it.

Yes, the O’Connors had to temporarily close up shop and hide out in their home with the blinds closed, and yes, they even prepared to shutter the business entirely and leave the state.

But Flyover Nation flexed its muscles.

I’d had it. This was the modus operandi of the secular left: isolate, boycott, and destroy. These viral, rage-addicted vampires are always more concerned with how they’re going to look to strangers on Tumblr or Instagram than with what happens to people in real life. This is what happens to people when they lose their sense of community.

After watching them successfully do it to a number of businesses and individuals, I knew they had to be stopped, and stopped in a magnificent, narrative-destroying manner. Enraged at this snuffing out of diverse thought, my Blaze staff and I created a fund-raising campaign for the pizza shop–owning O’Connors to help offset the cost of lost business. I covered it on my radio and television programs. I pushed it on social media. Flyover denizens responded by raising nearly a million dollars for Memories Pizza. It was one of the largest fund-raisers in GoFundMe’s history, but the site wouldn’t acknowledge it for fear of retribution from the “tolerant” secular Left. I didn’t care. They knew. We knew. Everyone knew. That they couldn’t bring themselves to even acknowledge it out of hateful spite was further proof of victory. I could have continued. We could have raised over a million. Memories Pizza became a lightning rod, the second exception in this ongoing issue to the Alinsky tactics of isolate and destroy. The first was Chick-fil-A.

 • • • 

A few years ago the East and West Coasts, along with the Left’s viral vampires spread throughout the Twittersphere, suddenly realized Chick-fil-A was a Christian-owned establishment. Never before had chicken sandwiches so roiled a country. The Left decided that they couldn’t just order a chicken sandwich without first subjecting the seller to a litmus test on same-sex marriage. It sounds like a Portlandia episode. Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy responded to the Baptist Press in an interview that he was “guilty as charged” in support of traditional marriage. Cathy told the outlet:

We are very much supportive of the family—the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

We operate as a family business. . . . Our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that.

We intend to stay the course. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.9

Secularists, who’d likely never read the Baptist Press, lost their ever-loving minds. They staged boycotts, sit-ins, and kiss-ins and vowed to shut down the fast-food chain. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.” Yes, because selling chicken sandwiches is incompatible with the gangbanging, drug-pushing Chicago way of life, apparently.

The Chick-fil-A protest backfired, setting a sales record as Christians (and really, just sensible people who love good fried chicken and indoor playgrounds) flocked to their nearest outlet in the midst of the frenzy.

Progressives targeted also the Robertson family and Duck Dynasty after patriarch Phil Robertson spoke in favor of traditional marriage. The entire family stuck together, claiming that if Phil went, so too would they—and A&E’s biggest cash-cow television series to date. Robertson was absent a few episodes but returned, and the family continued. So strong is their popularity that they’ve branched into retail with products ranging from Miss Kay’s kitchens to brother Jep’s beard balm (not to mention a few best-selling books).

The Benham brothers, twins David and Jason, were to host an HGTV program called Flip It Forward, until progressive Web sites pressed for the duo’s cancellation because they are Christian and support traditional marriage. I appeared on television to discuss the story and listened as progressives who have done less for their fellow man than the Benhams accuse the twins of bigotry because they follow Scripture. The campaign against them was an anti-Christian smear campaign.

Most of the time, however, the viral vampires go after small targets with fewer ways to defend themselves.

They’re not attacking an illegal activity, but they are trying to make holding an opinion different from their own an illegal act.

A Lexington, Kentucky, T-shirt shop called Hands On Originals was found in violation of “antidiscrimination” laws because the owner, a devout Christian, declined to print T-shirts for a gay-pride event.10

Hands On Originals and its owner, Blaine Adamson, said they declined the 2012 T-shirt order because of religious beliefs and disagreed with the shirt’s message, which included the words “Lexington Pride Festival” with a list of sponsors of the gay-pride event on the back.

Adamson even suggested other T-shirt printers with comparable prices, but the organization behind the event wanted Adamson’s shop, and in protest of being denied exercise of their belief in commerce, they succeeded in infringing on Adamson’s beliefs. Surely Adamson’s shop wasn’t the only T-shirt shop in or near Lexington; a quick search turned up several printing shops in Lexington proper, and even more just on the outskirts.

New Mexico photographer Elaine Huguenin was targeted by a lesbian couple, Vanessa Willock and Misti Collinsworth, who apparently believed that Huguenin was the only wedding photographer in all of the state. Willock inquired about Huguenin’s services for a “same gender ceremony,” to which Huguenin replied that she only photographed “traditional weddings.” Willock and Collinsworth immediately sued, citing discrimination. The couple wanted the State of New Mexico to compel Huguenin to use her talent—her free expression—as they saw fit without any regard for whether the content of that required expression conflicted with Huguenin’s own personal beliefs. So far the State of New Mexico has won against Huguenot in court, thereby establishing the precedent that artists have no freedom to accept or decline commissioned work.

A same-sex couple from California sued a Hawaiian bed-and-breakfast privately owned by a Christian woman because she declined them a room due to her devout beliefs.11 A number of bed-and-breakfasts from Hawaii to Vermont have faced this same fight. In January 2012 a judge ruled against a church in New Jersey12 that declined use of its own property for a same-sex wedding. Catholic Charities was barred from assisting in adoptions in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, and Illinois and excluded from future contracts because it declined to consider same-sex couples.

Sweet Cakes, a bakery run by Melissa Klein, an Oregon baker and mother of five, was maliciously and ruthlessly targeted by the gay brigade for declining to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer sued Aaron and Melissa Klein, forcing the bakery to close its doors (remodeled on a modest budget by Melissa when she excitedly opened her first storefront), and won damages of $75,000 and $60,000 for Laurel and Rachel, respectively, which will bankrupt the family. That’s $135,000 for a cake. To receive this money, the Bowman-Cryers claimed they felt “mentally raped” in a list of eighty-eight symptoms of emotional distress at being refused a cake:

In January 2015, an investigation by the bureau found the Kleins guilty of violating the state’s public accommodation law by denying Rachel and Laurel full and equal access to their bakery, which the state considers a place of public accommodation.

The Civil Rights Division of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries is responsible for enforcing the state’s public accommodation law, and the judge who issued today’s proposed order works for the bureau.

In order to reach $135,000, Rachel and Laurel submitted a long list of alleged physical, emotional and mental damages they claim to have experienced as a result of the Kleins’ unlawful conduct. One of the women, whose name was redacted to protect her privacy, listed 88 symptoms as grounds for compensation. The other, whose name was also redacted, listed 90.

Examples of symptoms include “acute loss of confidence,” “doubt,” “excessive sleep,” “felt mentally raped, dirty and shameful,” “high blood pressure,” “impaired digestion,” “loss of appetite,” “migraine headaches,” “pale and sick at home after work,” “resumption of smoking habit,” “shock” “stunned,” “surprise,” “uncertainty,” “weight gain” and “worry.”13

The Bowman-Cryers simultaneously lost their appetite and gained weight, in addition to comparing being denied a cake to violent, forcible physical penetration. One of the Kleins’ competitors drove down the Kleins’ Yelp ratings, flooded social media with nasty comments, and even succeeded in shutting down a GoFundMe fund-raiser for the Kleins, then bragged on Facebook about having done so. I spoke with the Kleins several times, and each time, though through tears, they reiterated that they would fight for their faith. It’s important to note that when the incident happened, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Oregon; additionally, the Oregon labor commissioner, Brad Avakian (who was behind this judgment against the Kleins) is an outspoken supporter of same-sex marriage and said previously that his goal is to “rehabilitate”14 businesses that do not accept same-sex marriage.

Barronelle Stutzman is a seventy-year-old grandmother and proprietor of Arlene’s Flowers, a business she built with her mother over thirty years ago. I spoke with her on my television program in the spring of 2015. Stutzman was sued into bankruptcy by a longtime client, Robert Ingersoll, whom she had always happily served—until she declined to specifically use her expression for his same-sex wedding ceremony due to her deeply held Christian beliefs. According to her attorney, Kristen Waggoner with Alliance Defending Freedom, “it will take a miracle” for Stutzman to financially survive this. The case is still going through the legal system and Stutzman stands to lose her home. Funds raised for her online are helping.

The fight for equal rights isn’t about “equality.” It’s about attacking faith. Really, this isn’t about gay rights. Gay marriage has turned trendy, with the polling changing faster than Caitlyn Jenner at a photo shoot. The Left views the gay community in the same way that it views women: nothing more than a voting bloc. They pay lip service to these demographic groups but never offer anything more beyond decades of inaction. While leftist groups fight for “marriage equality,” the Obama administration makes marriage an economic hit with horrible policy. You got bait and switched, leftists! No, the Left has but one goal in mind: Pry the populace from the influence of the church. Every one of these people was attacked more for admitting their Christian beliefs in public than for the threat they posed to anyone’s individual rights.

It’s hard speaking for truth. Evangelism isn’t without struggle. The secular Left has waged every attack upon Christians, and yet so many have stood successfully against it with the backing of the very large and powerful Christian population.

That Christians in this country haven’t always known our strengths has been one of our greatest weaknesses.

 • • • 

Last year a friend in Texas whose child attends Keller High School in the Keller Independent School District alerted me to a letter sent out to parents apologizing for an admission made by a motivational speaker named Ryan Roberts. The speaker, a graduate of the school and part of the youth ministry at an area church, spoke to students on dealing with stress and overcoming challenges as part of the C3 Student Leadership Group. He included in his remarks that there was someone in whom they could find peace and relief and asked the students to shout the name of this person on the count of three, yelling “Jesus!” on three. Some found it offensive because there apparently exists the belief that when one person utters the name Jesus in a public setting, a secret magic renders any other diverse thought negligible. People become offended when someone holds a different perspective because in our modern era, not sharing another’s point of view is a challenge to that person’s character and intelligence. That is how self-serving, insecure, and pathetically whiny people have grown. Roberts apologized on his Facebook page, writing:

At the close of the assembly, I spoke on my own accord regarding my personal story and Christian faith with a lack of full awareness of the C3 Student Leadership and Keller High School verbal agreement. There was no misunderstanding between the school and the organization as to the topic of the assembly; I accept responsibility for the boundary line that was crossed. This is not an issue of religious liberty; this is a breach of trust between C3 Student Leadership and Keller ISD and for that specifically I sincerely apologize to the students, families, teachers, and administrators affected.15

Any “trust” that demands one deny one’s Savior isn’t a trust.

My staff at the Blaze reached out to Roberts to tell this story on my program, but sadly, I was informed by a mutual friend that the church in which he worships did not want what it viewed as bad press, so it instructed him to remain quiet on the issue and allowed the media interest to fade. I was utterly shocked at the decision by a church to pass on an opportunity to witness to the community and also warn its flock about the dangers of secularism to free speech. And yes, I view a publicly funded, government-regulated entity forbidding talk of Jesus as a restriction of speech. When did the church back away from such issues? You will never grow your flock by keeping your witnessing compartmentalized behind the safe-space doors of your building. You will never grow the choir by preaching only to its members. So many churches do such amazing mission work overseas, but too many forget the importance of missionary work in our culture right here at home.

The Bible teaches us to fear many things, but I don’t remember bad publicity being one of them.

It has been my personal experience that people of faith often struggle with political witnessing. Because I was raised by Christians as opinionated as me, I’ve never found it to be a difficulty. I don’t view it as “politicizing” to simply tell the truth. Do we believe that abortion is infanticide? Do we believe that the biblical definition of marriage is a union between one man and one woman? Do we believe that stewardship of our fellow man falls under our domain or under government’s domain? Can people of good faith nourish the soul and the body beyond the mediocre allotment of sustenance given by Uncle Sam? My political leanings are not at odds with Jesus’s teachings. While it has been Christians who have sheltered the single mother in need, missioned and witnessed to distant lands, given everything they had and more to help their fellow man, it is also the fellowship as a whole that has grown meek, timid, and quiet in the face of a pop-culture assault. Instead of fighting the culture we, with some exceptions, have set ourselves apart from it. Instead of being that light in the darkness we have created our own musical genre, our own production companies, our own films and television channels; we have shrunk from the mainstream pop-cultural sphere, which is insane because we are cultural.

I know many Christians who are afraid to engage on this publicly. Every week I have people say to me some variant of “Thank you for doing and saying what you do. I could never do that.”

“Why?” is always my response.

“I don’t want to lose friends,” “I’m not political like that,” and “Because it can be divisive” are some of the replies I receive. I’m uninterested in any false unity that dilutes Jesus’s sacrifice or God’s commandments for us. I’m not here to lie about what God thinks of children in the womb so as to make friends with someone who thinks infanticide is acceptable. I’m uninterested in speaking against godly marriage for the purpose of winning popularity or seeming less “divisive.” I’m not divisive. People have divided themselves from God. I don’t want to widen that gap. I want to close it. I can only do that with truth spoken in love. That’s the thing: So many Christians think that politics is a brawl. Yes and no. Responding in a loving manner isn’t a reflexive action for me, because I’m imperfect and self-centered. My first (second, and even third) response is all-out war. I don’t want to just destroy the argument; I want to destroy the person for making that argument. It’s an entirely progressive line of thinking, the last vestige of my liberal upbringing, against which I fight every single day. This is my absolute biggest struggle, my greatest temptation. I struggle most sincerely with separating the person from their argument. I think other Christians fear this too.

Some years ago I had Ephesians 6:12–13 tattooed on my forearm. It was not done to be fashionable. It was a desperate act to remind myself why I do what I do. The verse reads: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

I am not struggling against my fellow man. I am struggling against the evil influences of the world. And when I was once lost, God had mercy on me and grace for me. I cannot expect to win first hearts and then minds in a manner inconsistent with how God Himself pursues us. I also recognize these influences on me and that I’m caving to temptation and ego by submitting to them. If you follow me at all on Twitter, you see that I fail repeatedly. I have come far from where I once was, but the journey is long and I’ve a promise to keep. I divulge this because I know exactly how politics looks from the outside, especially to the many Christians who don’t want that sort of fight. You don’t have to have that sort fight. Your fight can look however you want it to look. But as a declared Christian you are in the fight nonetheless. The goal isn’t to crush the spirit but to win the heart. The goal isn’t to harden hearts with combativeness. A person converted with love in truth is one less person we have to fight.

I know this. I was that person once.

I have to remind myself of this every day, working in the media.