A book was released recently by Christian author that talks
about religious abuse and offers an 11-step program of recovery from it.

Jack Watts, author of Recovering from Religious Abuse: 11
Steps to Spiritual Freedom, says that although clergy sexual abuse has received
wide media attention, what is less spoken of, and barely acknowledged by the
church, is religious abuse, The Christian Post said.

Watts told The Christian Post that religious abuse involves
“the mistreatment of a person by someone in a position of spiritual authority,
resulting in the diminishing of that person’s sense of well-being and growth –
both spiritually and emotionally.”

Religious abuse also involves “misuse of Scripture that
harms a person’s relationship with God,” Watts told The Christian Post, adding,
“Probably the best definition of religious abuse is if you feel like you have
been abused, you have, [and] millions say they have been.”

More
prevalent, less identified

Watts told The Christian Post that verbal and emotional
abuse in the church is more prevalent, but less often identified, than sexual
abuse. In his website, he describes it as oftentimes more rooted in a
legalistic approach to the gospel. It takes a heavy toll on its victims.

Watts says in his website, “Most abused Christian’s lead
half-lives, consumed with anger, bitterness, shame, and disillusionment. They
question whether the best years of their lives have already passed, hoping they
haven’t but suspecting they have. They are prone to depression and acting-out
behavior, including over eating, over spending, alcoholism, drug addiction,
pornography and promiscuity.”

In describing the dynamics of spiritual abuse
Watts says in his website that oftentimes, the religious abuser blames the
victim for the emotional and psychological damage that the victim experiences.

Watts says in his website, “Worst of all, the
mistreated person comes to believe that his or her abusers are correct.” This
enhances the guilt feelings in the victim and drives him further away from God.
“It’s a vicious, destructive downward spiral.”

Least discussed

Watts
told The Christian Post that oftentimes people are disengaged with the church
because they have questions or different ideas. Because of this, the church cuts
them off.

Watts
told The Christian Post, “Once shunned, they go off and are quickly forgotten.
So instead of leaving the 99 that are saved and going after the one that is
lost, they’ve allowed the people that are lost to become so great that they now
constitute 12 percent of the population.”

Watts’
book is published by Simon and Schuster and can be found in Barnes & Noble,
but not in LifeWay Christian bookstore. Watts told The Christian Post, “My
guess is they don’t like that I’m calling them on their stuff. I am, in the
evangelical world, the Nathan (the prophet in the Old Testament who confronted
King David about his sin).”

Personal
experience

Watts draws on his own experience of religious abuse,
writing in his website, “The first inkling of the severity of my psychological
damage came when I went shopping for a motorcycle, which I needed for
transportation. There were two good choices. Being a little confused about
which to purchase, I remember asking myself, Who is going to tell me which
one to buy?”

That was when he realized how dependent he had become on his church elders for making decisions, amid a community where
“acting independently” was viewed as rebelliousness.

Spiritual healing

Watts says in his 11 step program, among other things, that one has to recognize that God is not the abuser, The Christian Post said.

Other things one must do, according to his website, is to share one’s experience with a trusted friend, ask God to change what he wishes and submit one’s pain to God for healing.

Forgiveness is required. Watts wrote on his website, “Because God forgives us as we forgive others, I forgive my abusers.” Finally, he said one has to “make a commitment to nurture [one’s] relationship with God, asking him to reveal his will and to give [one] power to obey.”

A book on the history of the first 3,000 years of Christianity won recently Canada’s top literary nonfiction award, besting over 180 competitors from around the globe.

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch won $75,000 and the Cundill Prize in History from McGill University, The Globe and Mail reported.

The Cundill Prize was established in 2008 by Peter Cundill, an investment manager and McGill alumnus. The competition is open to writers worldwide, according to The Globe and Mail.

MacCulloch, 59, who is an Oxford professor, walked away with Canada’s largest monetary award given by the country for his 1,200 page tome during the awarding festivities held in Montreal, according to CBC News.

MacCulloch told The Globe and Mail that the award was “a great voice of confidence” in his work, adding, “Peter Cundill comes from the world of business, a world that doesn’t always take the long view, so it’s superb that someone who’s done so well in that world sees what we do as important and useful.”

The author took three years off from his work in Oxford University to write the book which is cited for its comprehensive historical treatment. He was up against two U.S. academics for the top prize, The Globe and Mail said.

Juror Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer and McGill alumnus, said in a statement that MacCullough’s book is refreshing amid a time when people of faith are at odds with one another and against seculars and atheists, CBC News said.

Gopnik said the book has “given us the one thing that we most need — not polemic but history, high, wide, and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch.”

Gopnik added, “If any book could truly fulfill the charge of the Cundill Prize — to make first class history more potent to a wide reading public, and above all to remind us that history, even three thousand years worth, matters — this one does.”

Gopnik also said the book reached a “near perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, MacCulloch has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure,” The Globe and Mail reported.

Another juror, Ken Whyte of Maclean’s, said MacCulloch’s book helped to make history more potent and meaningful to a wide reading public, according to The Globe and Mail.

Previous books by MacCullough are Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 which won the British Academy Book Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, CBC News reported.

MacCulloch also hosted a BBC television series that was based on his Cundill Prize-winning book on Christianity, CBC News said.

Sam Childers arriving to the Book Signing Event of his book “Another Man’s War,” Beverly Hills, CA on May 5, 2009 - Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com Source: Wikimedia Commons

Hollywood action superstar Gerard Butler, whose recent high-octane roles include King Leonidas in “300” (2006) and Clyde Shelton in “Law Abiding Citizen” (2009), will soon be playing the role of real-life AK-47-toting Pastor Sam Childers in 2012’s “Machine Gun Preacher,” according to the Internet Movie Database.

A former bike gang member and drug dealer, Childers underwent a massive spiritual transformation in 1992, during a revival at an Assembly of God church and his pastor prophesied that Sam would one day travel to Africa.

Six years later, near the close of 1998, Childers boarded a plane for the Sudan.

It would be the first of several trips he would make to the war-torn region where the Ugandan sectarian militant group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Koney, had abducted and tortured an estimated 30,000 children and displaced 1.6 million people since the start of the rebellion in 1986.

The LRA claims they act under the principles and morals found in the Christian Bible and the Ten Commandments.

Childers made it his life’s mission to defend and protect the innocent children of the Sudan region by any means necessary.

For the past 12 years, the so-called “unconventional American pastor” has lived and operated in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda. His Angels of East African Children’s village has become a safe haven for rescued children.

“Machine Gun Preacher” is currently in its preproduction phase and will begin shooting in Pennsylvania in early July, according to Variety Magazine.

Under the directorship of Golden Globe nominee Marc Foster, whose 2008 “Quantum of Solace” follow-up to the 2006 James Bond remake “Casino Royale” cemented him as a Hollywood action-film giant, “Machine Gun Preacher” will co-star Michelle Monoghan of “Mission Impossible 3” (2006) and “Eagle Eye” (2008) fame as Childers’ wife Lyn.

The Christian Post recently interviewed Childers about his use of heavy firearms.

“I don’t condone violence at all,” he responded. “I don’t believe in violence but at the same time I don’t believe that children should be raped, murdered or cut up.”

Gerard Butler at the 2010 Golden Globe Awards. Photo © gerardjamesbutler.co.uk Fan Site.

He also added, “I look at it as self-defense and I look at it as I’m helping God’s children. I’m not a person out to murder. It’s not that I like hurting anybody. But at the same time these people [the LRA] need to be stopped.”

Childers’ book Another Man’s War: the True Story of One Man’s Battle to Save Children in the Sudan and his official web site http://machinegunpreacher.org/ recall “the gruesome scenes after LRA raids that included the smelling of burning flesh and saving a woman drenched in her own blood from a breast that was half cut off by a machete,” according to The Christian Post.

Childers also recounted the LRA’s forcing of their victim’s to engage in cannibalism and children to murder their own mothers.

The biopic film’s release dates have undergone several changes and reschedulings since entering preproduction and is now slated for release sometime in 2012 with Lionsgate Entertainment and in association with 1984 Films.

You can find out more about Childers and his Angels of East Africa organization at his website www.machinegunpreacher.org.

Two academics who are also respected book authors said recently that secularism is just as much a religion as is Christianity and Islam.

Margaret Somerville, director of the Center of Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, recently called secularism “The most encompassing religion that functions as a basket holding all the other [secular faiths],” in an article she wrote for The Montreal Gazette.

In Somerville’s article, “Religion has a role to play in the public square” she wrote, “It’s a mistake to accept that secularism is neutral. It too is a belief system used to bind people together. We need all voices to be heard in the democratic public square, and they have a right to be heard.”

Somerville also wrote the book, The Ethical Imagination:  Journeys of the Human Spirit.

Her views were echoed by Ian Buruma, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, NY.  In rd magazine Buruma said,  “Secularism can be turned into a kind of dogma of its own which is the case of France after the revolution.  Reason was almost treated as a matter of faith.”

Buruma, who also wrote the book Taming the Gods, said secularism, like laicite is ideological.  “To extol reason as the highest form of human expression, that wants to ban religious symbols from public places and so on…it can become quite dogmatic, which secularism doesn’t have to be,” according to rd magazine.

Somerville cited a wide range of secular religions, quoting religious studies scholars Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young.

Some examples are humanism, atheism, scientism and moralism which all have adherents bound through a common belief and ideology.

Somerville said they are harmful when, as Richard Dawkins does with scientism, they are used to deny any space for spirituality and traditional  religion in the public square and replaced with secularism, according to The Montreal Gazette.

Somerville adds that separation of church and state is simply a doctrine meant to protect the state from being controlled or wrongfully interfered with by a religion or religions, and to protect religions, within their valid sphere of operation, from state interference or control.

She contrasts this with Islamic societies like Iran where no separation exists, and China where the government interferes in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops.

She concludes, “Values conflicts cannot be solved by excluding religious voices from the public square. On the contrary, doing so is likely to exacerbate those conflicts.”

Political conservative pundit S.E. Cupp’s newest book, “Losing Our Religion:  The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity” has further polarized conservative and liberal media, even as its title and subject matter drew claims of irony.

Cupp’s book polarizes conservatives, liberals, raises claims of irony

Newsweek, which reviewed Cupp’s book, extensively quoted her and indicated page numbers; said it was melodramatic, patronizing to her readers, and inspired fear mongering.

Newsweek also denied that they are a mainstream publication, and said they are not attacking Christians or even religious freedom.

Media Matters for America focused on what Cupp wrote about evolution, and said that she does violence to the science of evolution and to the public’s expectations of science journalists and science teachers.

Cupp’s book has also raised a sense of irony that an atheist should write a book that strongly defends Christianity.  Cupp however says that political conservatives like herself would benefit if Christians worked harder to protect their turf, as mainstream liberal media shoots two birds with one stone when they attack Christianity.

Cupp said Christianity is a target so that mainstream media can also attack conservatism.  “If they can effectively paint Christians as dangerous fanatics, it’s just a skip away from painting conservatives as dangerous fanatics,” she said in an interview with Mediaite.

In that same report she said that her being an atheist gave her the needed objectivity to write the book.  “I would hope it gives a little more credibility to the project than having some fundamentalist Christian write about attacks on Christianity,” she said.

Christian Today noted that other studies have also documented Cupp’s viewpoints, including The Media Elite by Lichter, Rothman and Lichter (1986), and Bias by Bernard Goldberg (2001).

Bill Muehlenberg, who authored the Christian Today review wrote, “Western Christians are sleeping through their own execution.They seem oblivious [that] the surrounding culture has declared war on the Christian faith.”

In her book Cupp wrote, according to Newsweek, that:

1. Secular media has turned religious worship into a “subculture” and reacted to presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s 2007 Christmas commercial by focusing on a “strategically placed” cross in the background.  (She cites The Washington Post and CNN).
2. Major media did not cover Obama’s snub of the National Day of Prayer.
3. Newsweek’s review of the Christian bestseller “Left Behind” said, “Sociologists tell us that the United States is experiencing a religious revival, but if the bestseller lists are any guide, the revival looks more like a collective leaving of the senses.”
4. Reviews of the Christian story “Narnia” were lukewarm despite its being a box office hit.  Reviews for The Golden Compass, which attacks Christianity, were positive although the movie did not do well at the tills.

Cupp also noted that the liberal press downplays Obama’s discomfort with religious America and barely wrote about his covering up of religious imagery in the backdrop when he gave a speech at Georgetown University.

What makes everyone think artist Leonardo Da Vinci uncovered some big Christian secret?

Writers and religious skeptics have always come up with alternative narratives about Jesus’ life and ministry. But author Dan Brown brought it to center stage in a spectacular way, with his blockbuster 2003 fiction, The Da Vinci Code, followed by the movie and all its sequels and franchises.

Brown provoked speculation in both secular and theological circles—all the way to the Vatican:

Did Leonardo Da Vinci write an encrypted code on his famous Vitruvian Man? Was Mary Magdalene married to Jesus? Is there really a Holy Grail?

Seven years later, even Christian magazines are still asking questions like, “Why weren’t there women in Da Vinci’s Last Supper painting?” (Light & Life Magazine, March, April 2010, pp. 10-11).

I’d like some answers from you, Mr. Da Vinci…may I call you Leo?

How is it that you lived from 1452 to 1519—over 14 centuries after Jesus—yet you have all the secrets of his ministry that not even his contemporaries revealed, or the prophets were inspired by God to write?

Surely, a Renaissance man like yourself, jack of many trades, was able to construct a Time Machine. Is that how you went back and did the portrait of Jesus at the Last Supper, and hid at least one woman in the background, as some say?

What about those who claim you purposefully left women out of the picture?

Grid reproduction of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"

Let’s spend some time on this unfounded “women missing from The Last Supper” claim. Before we ask why Da Vinci left them out of his painting, we could ask why they were left out of the Last Supper accounts, when we see women mentioned in many other New Testament scriptures.

All four disciples who wrote the gospels found it important enough to mention that women were the first to see Jesus’ empty tomb (Matthew 28:8-10; Mark 16:9-10; Luke 24:8-11; John 20:10-18). John speaks of the Samaritan woman at the well to whom Jesus offers “living water” (John 4:7-42), and the woman whom Jesus saved from punishment for adultery (John 8:3-11).

Matthew 14:21 specifically mentions women as being present, yet outside of the 5,000-man count at the five loaves and fish miracle. Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, are mentioned in Luke 10:38-41 and John 11:1-40.

Throughout the book of Acts and his later writings, the apostle Paul mentions by name many women who participated in spreading the gospel. In 2 Timothy 1:5, he gives credit to Timothy’s mother and grandmother for how they raised the young disciple.

So why, then, would women be left out of the Last Supper accounts? And why would Da Vinci leave them out of his painting?

Simple answers to these questions:
A Boston Museum of Science website devoted to Da Vinci’s works quotes the artist:
The most praiseworthy form of painting is the one that most resembles what it imitates.

I doubt Da Vinci, having said this, would have put brush to canvas for The Last Supper without first reading the Biblical accounts of its occurrence. Therefore, he imitated what he saw in scripture.

He didn’t read anything between the lines like people love to do with the Bible today in order to discredit the Book itself and its sources. He didn’t add women for one simple reason…they weren’t there.

And, I’m sure Da Vinci would say Jesus wasn’t married either.

But the most important answer comes from a Christian’s own faith: What’s in the Bible was divinely inspired by God through the hands of man, and God knew what books would be canonized.

The New Testament’s writers had a hunch their stories would seem unbelievable and questionable. That’s why Luke 1:1-2 states:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been  fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses.

And 2 Peter 1:16 says:
We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Why should Christians stick with what the Bible says?

As Christians, we must learn to trust the Lord with all our heart rather than leaning on our own human understanding (Proverbs 3:5). Our faith grows through hearing and reading the Word of God (Romans 10:17).

In other words, the greatest faith in knowing that Jesus was who He said He was, and that things went down exactly as they appear in the Bible, comes from believing the book itself…not through the speculations of man.

The people who write these modern-day things can’t prove what they’re saying; neither have they yet proven the Bible is false.

Scriptures quoted in italics within this commentary are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

In a world where technology reigns and evil is plotting to bum rush the population through terrorism and corrupt influences, Paul Roman saves the day.

Roman, who makes his debut in “Orange Peel,” a 40-page online comic, is not your typical superhero.

Move over Superman and Spiderman, there’s a new superhero in town and he’s Christian, pro-life/Credit: Dan Lawlis-www.orangepeel3.com

His home is a planet called Godderth, and he drives a sleek and sporty automobile, known as the Orange Peel.

Clad in an orange jumpsuit with the number three covering the chest, he’s a futuristic, pro-life evangelist and superhero who spends most of his time trying to share the gospel with the bad guys, the Red Menace.

The product of 20 years of doubt and trial and error, “Orange Peel” is the brainchild of Dan Lawlis.

“The first time I considered doing a comic book with a Christian character was over 20 years ago,” he said on his website.

“I wasn’t ready spiritually in any way to do that back then. Sometimes I’m not sure I am now. That was actually one of the most difficult things to overcome in the creation of this comic book, was feeling that I’m unworthy. Who am I to teach anyone about Christianity? However, over the years, I slowly realized that if I was going to be waiting for myself to become perfect to create a Christian comic then it was never going to happen.”

Lawlis, who has worked for Marvel and DC Comics and done advertorial work, also said he created Roman and the alternate reality of Godderth because there was a gap in the market.

On his website, Lawlis said, “I didn’t see any professional comic book artists that were creating mainstream Christian superheroes. So I started to think maybe, imperfect though I maybe, I might just be the guy for the job.”

Though Lawlis is the first to admit that his comic isn’t perfect, he’s seeking feedback and support from the pro-life community, according to Lifesitenews.

Check out Orange Peel here: http://www.orangepeel3.com/orangepeel3.com/page_13.html.