Here is Samuel Smith writing at the Christian Post about how the Church has “fundamentally failed” in the information war:
As the United States celebrated National Religious Freedom Day Tuesday, former Congressman Frank Wolf, the original author of the International Religious Freedom Act, offered a very pessimistic view about the future of religious freedom in America and around the globe. And he believes the Church has done very little to help.
“[O]verall, the Church has fundamentally failed,” Wolf, who served two decades representing Virginia’s 10th congressional district and now serves as a senior fellow at the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, said Tuesday on the “Washington Watch” radio program. “Most churches used to have a Religious Freedom Sunday where they would bring in somebody from Sudan and China. And now, they are almost all gone.
“Unless there is change in the hearts and minds of people, I think the fundamental failure has been the Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, ‘If you don’t speak and you don’t act …’ I don’t see the Church speaking and I don’t see the Church acting.”
While expressing disappointment with the Church failing to raise awareness about religious freedom and persecution issues at home and abroad, Wolf added that some pastors, priests and rabbis may need to do what Martin Luther King Jr. did.
“I think we need some men like Martin Luther King,” he said. “I think we need pastors to go to jail.
“They may very well have to go to jail to wake up this country.”
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins hosted the special Religious Freedom Day broadcast. When he asked Wolf, who authored the International Religious Freedom Act in 1993 and is the namesake of the new version of the law passed in December 2016, if he believed religious freedom in the world today is “better protected” than it was 50 years ago, the former congressman said he believes religious freedom around the world is at “greater risk.”
Read more: The Christian Post
