For those of us who survived the 1960s, we can recall the August 1969 festival known as Woodstock. Billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” the anticipated crowd of 50,000 instead grew to somewhere near a half a million people. All trying to survive those three days in less than ideal circumstances. 

It’s a topic that’s showing up more and more in books, thought pieces, news outlets, podcasts, and blogs, inside and outside the church: the secularization of America. Pew Research and Gallup (to name a few) have recently highlighted the rise of the “nones” (religiously unaffiliated) across the nation, specifically in the last several years.

Most schools are actively indoctrinating our children with falsehoods about all kinds of things. These falsehoods range from sexuality to racism to economics to our nation’s founding, even to math and science and medicine and the environment.

Given the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of our state and so much of our nation, we might ask, “Are we as conservative Christians in Illinois good for nothing?” It may feel that no matter what we do, our witness and work bear no fruit. But it does not need to be that way.

We invite you and faithful Christians across the state to join us in prayer for our state and nation. Understanding that the problems and challenges that we face as a culture are not political in nature, but primarily spiritual. As such, fervent prayer and fasting is the best way to engage in this spiritual warfare.

In a sense, many of today's conservative Christians have an inferiority complex. Just mention higher education, the mainstream media, or the political dynamics of any major city in the U.S., and you'll likely be met with a series of sighs and slow head-shakes about how rigged everything seems to be against conservative voices.

We know that the many cultural battles we face today are spiritual battles that cannot be won by relying on our own strength and methods. In truth, these battles must first and continually be waged through prayer to our holy, righteous and merciful God. Please consider volunteering to be part of the IFI Prayer Team.

Academia is being infected with the virus of absurdity. Theology, philosophy, arts, and social sciences have all been infiltrated with truth-denying ideologies which, starting out as seemingly innocent statements, eventually turn into denial of some of the most basic and objectively verifiable statements known to man. And while it's one thing for the arts and the humanities to fall victim to modern fallacies, it's extra shocking when "hard" sciences start to cave as well.

“America's Chaplain” and Illinois Pastor, Steve Lee, now has a GiveSendGo account to collect funds for his legal defense: www.GiveSendGo.com/ChaplainLee. We at Illinois Family Institute have been raising funds for him too, collecting tax-deductible donations at www.IllinoisFamily.org/Contribute and letting people designate to the Pastor Lee Legal Defense cause.

Self-loathing is a peculiar and tragic phenomenon.  The Bible states that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it,” (Ephesians 5:29 NKJV), so there is something particularly ugly about radical feminists fomenting self-hatred in young women. The Bible is correct.  We do love ourselves, but a conflict arises when we see things in ourselves that we don’t like, even though those things may be phantoms of Leftists’ corrupted imaginations.

Some phrase origins are hard to pinpoint such as “dropping like flies.”  A story in the May 1902 edition of the Atlanta Constitution might have said it first, “I saw men and women rushing back and forth within the flames. They would run along, then came the choking smoke and they would drop like dead flies.” 

The Mosaic law is one giant picture book. Turn to almost any page and you'll find imagery teaching you about God. You'll find specifications for the priesthood illustrating Christ's mediation and showing how holy God is. You'll find records of the Israelites' many blunders into sin that show us just how serious our own blunders are.

Teacher union lobbyists and government employees work against every school choice bill and scholarship program they can; they reject the need for parental control over their children’s education. In doing so, they flatly dismiss the ability of parents to educate their own children or even to make viable decisions on their behalf.

The 1980 The Blues Brothers movie centered on a quest to raise property tax money to save an orphanage from being closed down. Though targeted by a homicidal mystery woman, Neo-Nazis, and a country western band, and relentlessly pursued by Illinois State Troopers, they repeatedly reminded themselves that they were on “a mission from God.”

Earlier this week, Governor Pritzker and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona visited an after-school program at Fairview Elementary School in Springfield. This was just one stop on Cardona’s five-state midwestern bus tour to promote the Biden Administration’s new “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” education agenda.