From the article -- There are roughly 250 million Americans eligible to vote. Yet in the 2022 midterm elections, fewer than half participated. Think about that. In a nation where government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, millions chose not to make their voices heard. And Christians are not exempt from this troubling pattern. Even where churchgoers vote at higher rates than the general population, far too many remain on the sidelines.
As Americans, we have a right to vote. As Christians, we also have a responsibility to be faithful citizens.
Remember Jesus’s words, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). In our constitutional republic, citizenship carries responsibilities. Our government was not designed for spectators. It depends on the participation of the people. Jesus also called his followers the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Salt that never touches the food cannot preserve it. Light hidden from view cannot illuminate the darkness. We’re called to make a difference, not withdraw from the world around us. Voting is simply one practical way to fulfill that calling.
Our freedoms were not secured so that we could stand aside while others decide how they will be used. The ballot is not the whole of faithful citizenship, but it is one of the clearest opportunities we have to act on our convictions.
2) “Experts: American Church Must Wake Up to Dangers of Islam” (Joshua Arnold, Washington Stand)
From the article -- “Most people don’t want to say anything about Islam because they’re scared to death of being called a racist. We need to get over that,” former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann urged. “The people that have come into the United States, that are Muslim … are pushing Sharia law … are pushing dominance. … That’s the goal: it’s dominance, and it’s takeover.”
“Minneapolis was the first city in America that allowed the Muslim call to prayer,” Bachmann explained. “I called up one of our freedom organizations in Minnesota. They wouldn’t touch it because they didn’t want to be called racist. So, we tried to get pastors to do something. They wouldn’t do anything because they don’t want to be called a racist.”
“We have to get real. We’ve got to wake up and realize what this is,” she insisted. “In Congress, we were taught a fantasy view of Islam that has never existed in the history of the world. The fantasy that says Islam is a religion of peace. That’s the mantra we were all told to repeat. It doesn’t exist anywhere in history.”
3) “Birth Control Is Not A Solution To Teen Girls’ Period Problems” (Evelyn Elliott, Federalist)
From the article -- While hormonal birth control can certainly make life easier for women struggling with gynecological issues, it often cannot fix the underlying problems and masks the symptoms, leading to a further delay in diagnosis, according to Efrat Lamandre, a family nurse practitioner with a Ph.D. in integrative medicine. “When symptoms are suppressed with hormones, the real drivers — insulin resistance, inflammation, cortisol imbalance, or low thyroid function — continue unchecked,” Lamandre wrote on Substack.
Hormonal birth control can mask symptoms because it can makes a woman’s period regular, when her natural cycle may be irregular, indicating underlying problems. Many women struggling with gynecological problems wish they could find affordable alternatives to birth control, and they feel like their doctors are ignoring underlying issues. Faith Mangrobang, diagnosed with endometriosis, described the problem as like a running car with the parking brake on. “Putting on the parking brake is going to hold it there,” Faith said. “If you take it off, what happens?...is it going to just get infinitely worse?”
4) “Who Verifies Artificial Intelligence? When A.I. Learns Jew-Hate” (Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute)
From the article -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly replacing the institutions through which the West once transmitted knowledge. Students who a generation ago consulted teachers and libraries now consult with often extremely unreliable chatbots.
After submitting OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama to more than 34,000 queries about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitic tropes, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the four leading large language models (LLMs) found measurable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in every model tested.
Whatever humanity has written in sufficient volume, the machine absorbs, including its pathologies. If enough people write that the Earth is flat, AI will tell you that the Earth is flat. The contradictions never matter: the accusations are never sustained by evidence in the first place. Repetition keeps them alive, and repetition is precisely what the modern information ecosystem industrializes.
The enormity and volume of that repetition would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Iranian state media, Russian influence operations, China's gargantuan, poisonous TikTok, Hamas media outlets, Holocaust-denial platforms and legions of anonymous accounts produce a continuous stream of fabrication surrounding Israel and the Jewish people. A debunked falsehood does not vanish; it settles into thousands of web pages and waits there, inside the corpus from which the next generation of AI frontier models will "learn."
5) “Culture, Not Finances, Determines Family Size” (Joshua Arnold, Washington Stand)
From the article -- Policymakers (at least conservative ones) have recognized falling fertility rates as a crisis for some time, and officials like Viktor Orban in Hungary or J.D. Vance in the United States have proposed ways to address it. Usually, government officials try to encourage family formation through pro-natalist policies with an economic aspect: tax credits or some similar incentive.
Unfortunately, such efforts to reshape economic incentives for families have not borne the hoped-for fruit. In Hungary, the country that has implemented the most aggressive pro-natalist measures, the total fertility rate did increase slightly, from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021. But now it is sliding again, plunging all the way to 1.39 by 2024.
Encouraging families to have more children is easier said than done, and a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) suggests the most important factors are cultural, not financial. “People talk a lot about affordability as a driver of family formation, and it is,” allowed Dr. Lyman Stone, IFS senior fellow and co-author of the report. “Kids are expensive. I’ve got four. They cost something.”
“But, if you look in New York City, the ultraorthodox Jewish population there has six kids each, and their hipster neighbors have 1.6 or less,” Stone said on “Washington Watch.” “That’s not because they’re living in a different economy. That is because of cultural differences.”
Other Important Articles from the Week
* “A Republican Guide to Losing the Midterms: Eight easy steps to making Democrats great again.” (Itxu Díaz, American Spectator)
* “Franklin Graham On Christ’s Return: ‘I Believe The Time Is Near’” (Lee Weeks, Decision)
* “The anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution shows how far Europe has fallen: Seventy years ago today, Hungarians risked their lives for the very principles French rioters seek to destroy.” (Frank Furedi, spiked!)
* “The migrant child-marriage scandal that shames Germany: Morally relativistic authorities have long turned a blind eye to this regressive practice.” (Sabine Bopper-Spahl, spiked!)
* “The First Amendment: A Cornerstone of American Freedom -- The First Amendment protects five fundamental rights that help us to fulfill our God-given purpose in life.” (John Bursch, Alliance Defending Freedom)
* “In The Last Days, Moral Depravity Will Become A Human Right” (Barry Stagner, Harbinger’s Daily)