Written by John A. Sparks |
Monday, March 13, 2023
Literally on the same day in 2017 when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ original case involving the two gay men, Scardina placed an order with Masterpiece Cakeshop for a cake to celebrate both Scardina’s birthday and transition to being a woman. Scardina first placed the order without mentioning the cake’s purpose, noting only that the cake was to be blue on the outside and pink on the inside. But during a second call on the same day, Scardina made clear the purpose of the cake for a trans celebration. At that point an employee of Masterpiece said the business could not bake such a cake. Phillips explained the reason why in testimony. He believed “that God designed people as male and female, that a person’s gender is biologically determined.” Making such a cake to celebrate a gender transition would violate his religious beliefs and force him to express views that were contrary to those beliefs. Scardina filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. 

In 1950, Eileen Barton’s rendition of “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake” became #1 on the Billboard charts. Until 2012, that song might well have been Colorado baker Jack Phillips’ favorite. But in that year, his three-decade love of baking cakes and other baked goods for those who patronized his Lakewood, Colorado Masterpiece Cakeshop turned into a decade-long nightmare of legal and cultural battles.
Today, Phillips would like nothing better than to return to the quiet hum of his baking establishment’s kitchen. Why isn’t that possible? Why can’t he resume preparing confections for customers without members of sexual minority groups demanding that he adopt and help celebrate their own peculiar view of human sexuality? Why is the state of Colorado menacing an upright citizen like Phillips with criminal complaints and fines?
Let’s briefly trace Jack Phillips’ unhappy legal trek.
In the 1970s, Phillips became a Christian and was convicted that his faith put limits on the types of customized cakes he would bake in his own private business. For example, he refused to portray witches and ghosts for Halloween or sexually suggestive images. In keeping with his Christian beliefs that marriage should be between one man and one woman, he concluded that he could not be part of the celebration of same-sex unions by artistically designing custom wedding cakes for such occasions.
Phillips’ faith commitments did not pose problems for him until 2012 when he respectfully declined a request from two gay men to bake a custom wedding cake for them. That got him in trouble with Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) and the Colorado Civil Right Commission after the pair filed a claim alleging that Phillips discriminated against them because of their sexual orientation. Phillips defended his refusal, saying that his religious liberty and his freedom of speech, including the right not to be compelled to express a certain message, were being violated. To his chagrin, the administrative law judge hearing the case ruled that Phillips either had to bake cakes for all weddings or none. Furthermore, the judge’s order required Phillips to “retrain” his staff to accept requests involving gay weddings, and to report, over a two-year period, all cake orders he refused.
To make matter worse, when Phillips appealed, the Colorado Court of Appeals supported the commission and the law judge’s findings and remedies and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, in 2018, the Supreme Court found in favor of Phillips, but only on the weakest possible grounds. Some of the Colorado Civil Rights Commissioners made outlandish public statements during proceedings about Phillips’ religious beliefs, referring to them as “despicable pieces of rhetoric” which allowed him to use his “religion to hurt others.” There were other similar statements. All of this was too much for the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, along with six other justices who joined or concurred in his opinion, said that “the Commission’s treatment of Phillip’s case violated the state’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or a religious viewpoint.” (Keep in mind that Justice Kennedy wrote the Obergefell decision making same-sex marriage the law of the land.)
The Kennedy opinion, though a temporary victory for Phillips, was based on flagrant and foolish public misconduct by the Colorado governmental body hearing his case, and which was not likely to be repeated. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s opinion failed to address the central issue of whether the recently devised use of “public accommodation laws,” like the CADA law, to advance the claims of sexual minorities for equal treatment, should override the long-standing constitutional rights of speech and free exercise of religion. The court’s failure to face head-on that set of issues meant that providers like Phillips would be open to further legal challenges. That is precisely what has happened. A transgender woman—Autumn Scardina—who was an attorney, is doggedly pursuing Phillips and Masterpiece by every legal means available.
Literally on the same day in 2017 when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ original case involving the two gay men, Scardina placed an order with Masterpiece Cakeshop for a cake to celebrate both Scardina’s birthday and transition to being a woman. Scardina first placed the order without mentioning the cake’s purpose, noting only that the cake was to be blue on the outside and pink on the inside. But during a second call on the same day, Scardina made clear the purpose of the cake for a trans celebration. At that point an employee of Masterpiece said the business could not bake such a cake. Phillips explained the reason why in testimony. He believed “that God designed people as male and female, that a person’s gender is biologically determined.” Making such a cake to celebrate a gender transition would violate his religious beliefs and force him to express views that were contrary to those beliefs.
Scardina filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Before that case could be heard, however, Phillips and Masterpiece brought an action in federal court against Colorado. Eventually, Phillips and Colorado settled by each withdrawing their respective suits. But the dispute was not ended.
Scardina then filed a civil suit on her own behalf in a state court, the current case being litigated.
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Written by J. V. Fesko |
Friday, August 30, 2024
The only symbols that should be present are those that belong to Christ—word, sacrament, and prayer. I used to hide the American flag, therefore, so that my congregation knew that as a congregation we belong to Christ and no one else. I’m sure that the idea of removing the American flag from the sanctuary might fray a few feathers. But think of this from another perspective. What if you were visiting a legitimate church in another country, say Romania. How would you feel to see the Romanian flag unfurled in the sanctuary? How would you feel if the congregation, in celebration of a national Romanian holiday, began to sing their national anthem? Would you feel out of place?

I believe I am a patriotic American citizen. I pay my taxes, love my country, and my family has paid a costly price to preserve the freedom we all enjoy. I have a posthumous Bronze Star with a Combat “V” and a Purple Heart that hang in my home—a small memorial to my namesake, a family member who was killed in action. That being said, a few members of my congregation over the years noticed a peculiar habit of mine. Not many in the church noticed this, but long before our worship service started, I walked up on stage (we met in a Middle School auditorium), and I moved the American flag behind the curtains out of sight. Once the service was over and we were cleaning up, I moved the American flag back into its prominent place. Over the years I had a few people ask me why I hid the flag.
I certainly didn’t hide the flag because I was unpatriotic or ashamed of my country. Rather, I didn’t want the congregation to be confused. Our church, though it met in the United States of America, wasn’t an American church. Every church of Jesus Christ belongs to him, it is his body. Hence, no one country or people group can lay claim to his people. Far too many American Christians forget this.
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Written by Forrest L. Marion |
Monday, January 10, 2022
The activities of the Red Guards in the 1960’s under the auspices of the . . . Cultural Revolution had certain interesting characteristics. The major slogan these young students were acting upon was to ‘smash the old and make room for the new.’ Tens of thousands of high school and university students traveled all over China, especially to such big cities as Peking, Shanghai, Canton. . . . They stormed some of the most treasured Chinese cultural sites – Buddhist temples, Protestant and Catholic churches – invaded the libraries, and desecrated the graves of their ancestors.

Fifty years ago, a scholarly study of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China serves as a case study to those in America today who may remain unable to perceive or unwilling to admit the religious nature of the neo-Marxist-based movement in our own culture. In recent months, a number of articles and blogs have shed light on the secular quasi-religion currently ravaging America, some of them in the pages of The Aquila Report. Perhaps today’s neo-Marxists’ reluctance to admit the religious nature of their movement is because Marxism is supposed to be a purely secular, a-theistic, non-religious movement. Bible readers will know, however, that as God has placed eternity in man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11), so must mankind in all ages be found to worship something or someone. The present writing uses several excerpts to make clear that this is no cherry-picked interpretation of past events. Some readers may even be surprised to learn that the study from 1971 that I draw from was published by the University of California Press at Berkeley – not exactly a hotbed of conservatism, then or now.
Nineteen sixty-six marked 17 years since the Communists had secured mainland China, having kicked out the Nationalists who withdrew to Taiwan where the Republic of China government was reestablished and remains to this day, albeit under increasing near-daily threats from the mainland. The year 1966 also witnessed the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). Five years later, Asian Survey published an article entitled, “The Role of Religion in Communist Chinese Society.” The writer, Lucy Jen Huang, a sociology professor at Illinois State University, collected her materials for the article from reports, editorials, newspapers, and official documents “published in Mainland China and intended for internal Chinese consumption,” supplemented with firsthand accounts provided by emigres from China and Western visitors to the mainland.
Huang noted that beginning in 1949,
Communist leaders, via the newspapers and monthly magazines, launched a diligent campaign against religion in which it was argued that religion and superstition were similar in that all religious activities were superstitious, but that not all superstitions were religious activities. . . . As long as class and class struggle are present, the struggle against religious superstitions will always be associated with the class struggle.[1]  
While the nature of the “struggle” – in reality, one small part of the war against God described in Psalm 2 – has shifted largely from class to other concerns in contemporary America, it was clear from the founding of the PRC that religious activities were to be equated with superstition.
Referring to the start of the Cultural Revolution, Huang wrote, “Every religious revival movement requires the true believers to spread the ‘word,’ in this case mainly selection[s] from the little red book, Quotations of Mao Tse-tung. Soon after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards [students, mainly], in the role of missionaries and disciples of the religious movement, traveled all over China.” A Canton news article recounted that the Red Guards in their missionary work, “. . . spared time every day to help the teenagers and children study quotations from Chairman Mao, teach them to sing revolutionary songs, and help the residents do household work.”
Lucy Jen Huang continued:
Maoism, by this time, had taken the form of extreme adulation of the great leader, sage, poet, philosopher, military genius, statesman, worthy successor to the mightiest of Emperors, and the great prophet of Marxist-Leninist thought. The worship of Mao could be discerned in the report on [the] Red Guards’ visit to his birthplace in Hunan Province. The house where Chairman Mao lived had been carefully preserved and an exhibition hall has been built near it. . . . Red Guards wrote the following pledges in the guest book: ‘We shall give our lives to defend Mao Tse-tung’s ideas! Henceforth, we live to implement Mao Tse-tung’s thought!’ . . . ‘Neither mountains of swords nor oceans of flame hold any fear for us as we work under your guidance. We shall follow you always. Let the seas dry up and the rocks crumble, but our hearts will never change.’
Bible readers perhaps will reflect on several passages of Scripture, of which the aforementioned is but a cheap plastic, soul-destroying imitation.
The article described activities engaged in by the young Red Guards:
. . . the heart and soul of the younger generation of Chinese was aroused by this Maoist religious experience. . . . Red Guards were set loose in the streets of Peking to demand that the traffic lights be changed so that red signaled ‘Go’ and green ‘Stop’; to rename the great Peking Square from ‘Heavenly Place’ to ‘East is Red’; to smash stamp collectors’ shops as ‘Bourgeois’; to break into people’s homes and toss out non-revolutionary pointed shoes and sport shirts. Persecution of the unbelievers can be traced in a Red Guard document entitled ‘One Hundred Examples for Breaking the Old and Establishing the New.’  
Sadly, American readers may substitute their own terms for today’s Red Guards let loose in their streets, not of Peking, Shanghai, and Canton, but Portland, Seattle, and Chicago – smashing shops, breaking the old and seeking vainly, if not hypocritically, to establish the new (utopia).
In terms frighteningly and disgustingly familiar to many Americans today, Huang summarized the devastations in China:
The activities of the Red Guards in the 1960’s under the auspices of the . . . Cultural Revolution had certain interesting characteristics. The major slogan these young students were acting upon was to ‘smash the old and make room for the new.’ Tens of thousands of high school and university students traveled all over China, especially to such big cities as Peking, Shanghai, Canton. . . . They stormed some of the most treasured Chinese cultural sites – Buddhist temples, Protestant and Catholic churches – invaded the libraries, and desecrated the graves of their ancestors. They smashed the statues and crosses, burned the Buddhas, and fed books into the flames. When they broke into Peking’s Roman Catholic Church, tore the crucifix from the altar and set up a plaster bust of Mao, the symbolism of the deification of Mao was complete. 
In conclusion, Huang pointed out part of the contradictory nature of the quasi-religion of Maoism:
The official policy of the Maoist regime has been anti-religious and anti-superstitious in nature. However, paradoxically, there are undeniably religious dimensions in the official tactics and ideology resembling the very phenomena of religion and superstition which the regime claims to oppose. Mao, as the symbol of god and prophet; Maoism the Bible, in the form of quotations of Mao Tse-tung; and the faith in Mao and his teachings, which have supposedly achieved superhuman feats and miracles, have stirred the religious zeal of Mao’s followers.
As was to be the case with the disciples of Wokeism in America fifty years later,
For many followers of Maoism they may have found in the Communist regime a seeming dedication to justice, international brotherhood . . . and tireless service to mankind. They are no longer confused and alienated. But for others who are overly idealistic and impractical, Maoism may turn out to be ‘the God that failed.’ It has challenged and fired their enthusiasm but may be unable to satisfy their cherished dreams and idealism.
One writer in 2021, questioning how “siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates [could] turn on one another so viciously?” concluded that Mao’s “Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a civil war.” Perhaps 40 percent of China’s population in those days was fifteen years of age or under; nearly half were under twenty years, and they provided most of the Red Guards. Some estimates list as many as 1.5 million killed in China, 36 million persecuted, and tens of millions in addition affected “in a countryside upheaval” that lasted from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. By 1981, the Chinese Communist Party called the Cultural Revolution an error, but deflected the blame from Mao toward his wife and his closest associates. The supposed “worthy successor to the mightiest of Emperors” could not suffer loss of reputation – at least not shortly after his death.[2]
For the student of the Bible, perhaps much of the assessment of China’s Cultural Revolution is as unsurprising as it is disheartening, except perhaps in the degree of its ruthlessness, vileness, and destructiveness. But the main point here is simply to recognize that, regardless of what Wokeism’s participants or observers may claim in 2021, it – like Maoism fifty years ago – is, in essence, a religion, and a false religion at that. But as is the case for all men in all ages, the follower of any worldly –ism – including Wokeism – is called to repent and believe the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and he shall be saved.
And for any that have believed the gospel but have been led astray by false teachers, heed the words of John to the angel of the church in Sardis: “Remember therefore what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent. If therefore you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you” (Revelation 3:3).
Forrest Marion is a ruling elder in Eastwood Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Montgomery, Ala.

[1] Lucy Jen Huang, “The Role of Religion in Communist Chinese Society,” Asian Survey, vol. XI, no. 7 (Jul. 1971): 695. Unless cited otherwise, all quotations in the remainder of the present writing are taken from Huang’s article, pp. 698-701, 707-708.
[2] Pankaj Mishra, “What Are The Cultural Revolution’s Lessons For Our Current Moment? The New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2021.