As you’ve probably heard, a grand jury in Houston Texas, originally tasked with investigating Planned Parenthood’s possible involvement in the sale of fetal tissue and body parts, has decided to instead to shoot the messenger.

Well, not exactly “shoot,” but something almost as inappropriate. The Harris County grand jury indicted both David R. Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, and his colleague Sandra Merritt, for “tampering with a government record.” Daleiden has also been charged with a misdemeanor related to the attempt to purchase human organs.

The first indictment is in connection with Daleiden’s and Merritt’s alleged use of fake California driver’s licenses to gain access to the various Planned Parenthood facilities. The second indictment is based on an email that Daleiden allegedly sent, offering to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood.

To put it very mildly, what happened in Houston was ironic. While Daleiden’s actions amount to a prima facie – the legal phrase meaning “at first glance” – violation of Texas law, no one believes he intended to buy fetal tissue. His and Merritt’s goal was to expose those who profit from this gruesome practice.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  The Indictment of David Daleiden: The Culture of Death Shoots the Messenger →

The big religion story of last year? Christianity is in decline in America. The sensational headlines were based on data from the Pew Research Center. But as Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research observed in the USA Today, the folks writing the headlines must not have read the study.

It turns out that almost all of the reported decline took place not among evangelicals, but in mainline Protestant denominations, which have been in freefall spiritually and numerically for decades. And no wonder. The “Christianity” preached in many of them sounds more like the Huffington Post opinion pages than the Bible.

Take the Episcopal Church, which in 2003 began ordaining openly gay clergy, and in 2015 created a marriage ceremony to bless same-sex couples. Earlier this month, a majority of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion voted to suspend the at a meeting in Canterbury voted to suspend the Episcopal Church’s voting rights over its support for homosexuality.

This decision, along with the statement from the primates reaffirming one-man-one-woman marriage was due in large part to the leadership of the African bishops. As Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America explained to me and Ed Stetzer on “BreakPoint This Week,” African Anglicans retain the traditional, biblical beliefs of the missionaries who planted their churches generations ago. And they feel abandoned by their American and European counterparts.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Which Christianity: Following Scripture or the Huffington Post →