Contact: Linda Murphy, 619-390-9886
WASHINGTON, July 14 /
Christian Newswire/ -- Tim LaHaye, co-author and originator of the fabulously successful
Left Behind (R) series, and his fiction co-author, Craig Parshall. Best-selling novelist and religious rights attorney, say that the Obama Administration may be killing religious freedom by redefinition. In their blog,
EdgeOfApocalypseToday.com they note:
"There is a shadow growing over religious freedom in America ... We are talking about the Obama Administration's subtle, but apparently deliberate use of a language-sleight-of-hand, substituting the phrase 'freedom of worship' for 'freedom of religion.' That new phrase has been used consistently in several speeches by President Obama, and by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in speeches in December and January. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted this shift and complained about it in its 2010 report ...
"So, what is the big problem? Simply this: the phrase 'freedom of worship' follows an international concept that departs from our First Amendment understanding of religious freedom. Under international law, 'worship' is a limited right, and connotes activities within a church body, but can exclude public evangelism. The UN Declaration of Human Rights protects 'teaching, practice, worship and observance' but fails to protect public preaching. The United Nation's 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance uses the same approach on matters of religion. Article 9 of the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms allows evangelism to be banned on the basis of protecting 'public order.' In 1997 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that under Article 9 Christians could be prosecuted for efforts to evangelize.
"In our new futuristic novel, Edge of Apocalypse, we give a picture of America that, sadly, is beginning to look more and more like the headlines of today rather than forecasts about the future. In our fiction story, the United States has signed onto an international treaty that radically restricts the right of Christians to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This fictional treaty closely resembles the real-life defamation of religion' resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March of 2009."
LaHaye and Parshall note that the Obama Administration's new direction of leaning toward an international standard of religious freedom could spell disaster for Christians who take seriously the Great Commission to preach the Gospel to the whole world.
