Christians protest shutdowns, will defy California governor to re-open churches May 31st

By Michael Ashcraft —

Why would Christians number hugely among the anti-lockdown marchers when the Bible warns us to obey governing authorities?

First, the restrictions have hit churches hard. Pastors have been arrested for attempting to hold services, and parishioners have been issued tickets — even if they observe social distancing by having “drive in” services in which they stay in their cars in the church parking lot and listen to the sermon over the Internet.

Videos of officers handcuffing a pastor in Louisiana and handing out tickets in the parking lot have enraged Christians. It is reminiscent of the Soviet Union — or maybe even something worse: the Apocalyptic scenes of the End Times. Some point to the suggestion of Bill Gates that people worldwide will need a “digital certificate” to not lose their vaccination record, strikingly close to the 666 of the Beast.

While the End Times denouement is unavoidable, Christians react against and fight the trend towards One World government, personal tracking and restrictions on humans through microchips (a digital certificate is not a microchip).

A network of 3000 California churches representing 2.5 million congregants are defying their governor and announced they would re-open May 31, according to Fox News.

“Our churches are part of the answer, not part of the problem,” said Danny Carroll, senior pastor at Water of Life Community Church. “We’re an essential part of this whole journey and we’ve been bypassed … kicked to the curb and deemed nonessential.”

The churches are not acting alone. After videos showing police manhandling peaceful ralliers, beach-goers and park-goers embarrassed law enforcement, a number of sheriffs announced they would not carry out the governor’s orders to arrest people out of their homes or businesses.

“As a police officer for 10 years, I’m compelled to make this video. I’m speaking to my peers, fellow officers. I’ve seen officers nationwide enforcing tyrannical orders against the people. I’m hoping it’s the minority of officers, but I’m not sure anymore,” says G. Anderson posted by @standstrongart on Instagram.

“Every time I turn on the television, I’m seeing people arrested or cited for going to church or traveling on the road ways, for going surfing, opening their business, for doing nails out of their own house, using their own house as a place of business and having undercover agents go and arrest them and charge them with what? With a crime?”

The media has whipped America into a panic frenzy over COVID-19 and induced an economic shutdown that will leave millions dying of starvation around the world, says Dr. Michael Brown in piercing op-eds on the Christian Post.

“The way in which the media has pushed fear nonstop amounts to psychological warfare against the country,” David Williams, an Alabama doctor, told Brown.

As state quarantines of healthy people grind into the third month, many are questioning their effectiveness and wondering if secular officials are seizing dictatorial power, denying Constitutional freedoms and attempting to throw 2020’s election against the current president.

A recent survey of New York City found that 60% of new COVID patients had observed stay-at-home orders but got sick anyway. Sweden, which bucked the international trend and did not quarantine, isn’t any worse off with infections and deaths than other nations. Mortality rates projected by epidemiologists are coming up well short of the predicted disaster. As of this writing, hospitals are empty and nurses are being furloughed.

Where is the crush of patients who would overwhelm and break our medical system? Conservative website The Hill said the media’s barrage of news was tantamount to Chicken Little. “What if the ‘sky-is-falling’ corona virus models are wrong?” it asks in a headline.

On May 5, the originator of the quarantine model, Dr. Neil Ferguson, resigned as U.K. adviser after breaking quarantine himself for a tryst. If the guy who says we need to quarantine doesn’t lead by example, how legitimate can it be as a method of prevention?

In April 19, President Trump encouraged governors to ease restrictions and gradually return to economic activity after people have been ordered to stay home, shutting down vast swathes of the American economy and leaving millions unemployed.

While Georgia quickly resumed normal life with acceptable results, left-leaning governors have doubled down. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has said his state could linger throughout the summer or until a vaccine is developed. Vaccine development can take years, however, and there is no guarantee one will ever be developed.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York told anti-quarantine protesters they have no right to assemble. The Bill of Rights, then, gets shut down by caprice.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sent the police after Jews who went to a funeral because they weren’t observing social distancing guidelines. His police-state style hearkened back to Hitler’s Germany, detonating an abundant backlash on social media.

His and LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “snitch hotlines” to report people violating guidelines stink of KGB police state.

Against what many see as outright government tyranny, protesters have stormed capital buildings and marched in the streets with placards and chants.

Was the current havoc generated by the media alone, as Michael Brown suggests? To be sure, the media holds sensationalism as a central tenet. Panic gets readers, who attract advertisers.

But the current round of sensationalism is tinged with the anti-Trump fury of the nation’s elitists prevalent in the media. And lots of Christians are calling foul. Liberal politicians are pushing for vote-by-mail as logical safeguard against further contagion. Gov. Newsom in California unilaterally signed an executive order to end hundreds of years of traveling to polls.

A vote-by-mail plan could be rife with corruption and cheating, many think. But even if voting is clean, a New York Times survey on April 21 helped a liberal candidate win in Wisconsin. With the struggling Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and ex-candidate Hillary Clinton pushing for vote by mail, observers jump to obvious conclusions.

Hence the protests and the pushback against economic shutdown.

In some cases, media reporting on the protests has been even-handed, but others — predictably — peddle a race-baiting narrative. The Los Angeles Times fired the salvo: “Mostly white crowds” are standing up to state rules. The accompanying photo was carefully selected to omit the people of color who were at the rallies. Vox did likewise.

Since the 1970s, race-naming has been forbidden in news because it incites racial tensions. A lead that used to read “A black man was arrested for…” now reads “A man was arrested for…” If a picture was included, the reader could identify his race; if not, no. But the no-mention-race rule got thrown out the window now that another type of race-baiting has become the Left’s norm.

It’s the accusation of racism among Republicans that African American author Candace Owens says keeps blacks in the Democratic Party, even though the party espouses values that most in the black community do not support. Her book Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation encourages African Americans with conservative Christian values to dump the abortion-loving Democrats.

At recent protests in downtown Los Angeles, African American and Latino protesters were not only present, they were leading the rally for an end of the socialist-like lockdowns, contrary to the Los Angeles Times’ reporting.

“I’m going to clear the record,” said facetiously a muscle-bound African American protester, Stephen Davis, in MAGA cap in LA. “I’m clearly a white supremacist. I am clearly a Nazi. Look at this skin color. I’m the real one.”

A white protester jests that he’s working to get muscles as big, but the unidentified marcher joked back, “Well, you have a long way to go.” Since appearing at rallies all over California, Davis has been photographed and made into memes, nicknamed the MAGAhulk.

There was good will, friendship and unity in fighting a common enemy: not race but government overreach.

Actually, Christian activism is nothing new in America. It hails back to instigating the American Revolutionary War. It was preachers in the pulpits that inspired Americans to demand equal rights as their British contemporaries — or leave the the British Empire. Why wouldn’t Christians continue to fight tyranny?

Michael Ashcraft supports his free journalism by selling Trump cups on Amazon.