Paul Random

LA Riots, Agitators and the Timeless Tensions of Culture

An unpopular opinion carried by controversial men meets with rioters in a large city throwing a mob and bystanders into “turmoil” and then the mob “agitating” the crowds and “stirring” them up.

Am I referencing violent protests and rioters in Los Angeles taking issue over the weekend with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcing existing laws?

Yes – but also a scene straight from Luke’s pen in Acts:

But other Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd. But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil. Then they made Jason and the others post bond and let them go.

As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men.

But when the Jews in Thessalonica learned that Paul was preaching the word of God at Berea, some of them went there too, agitating the crowds and stirring them up (Acts 17:5-13).

To once again quote from the Scriptures:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9).

If the mayhem in Los Angeles looks familiar, it’s because what’s unfolding appears to be straight from a tired script going back years and even multiple millennia.

At issue this time is whether California officials will be able to ignore the law and not cooperate with the federal government with illegal immigration enforcement. Early on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out:

“California politicians must call off their rioting mob. Federal law enforcement are working to protect and safeguard American citizen from criminal illegal aliens. Why is California’s governor siding with foreign criminals?”

Luke’s narrative in Acts revolved around opposition to the apostle Paul’s and Silas’ preaching. We read that the house of Jason, a believer, was attacked. It seems emotional and physical volatility have long been the way many look to settle their differences.

The men and women entrusted and authorized to protect our homeland need our prayers. At times, it seems to be a thankless and even impossible assignment. We ask the Lord to sustain, embolden, and guide them through this difficult assignment.

We can expect agitators and violent actors to be regularly confronting law enforcement in the coming days, weeks, months and years. After all, the names change, but “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Image from Getty.

The Lone (Texas) Rangers Strike Again by Ignoring ‘Pride Night’

As in previous years, Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers remain the lone team without a scheduled “Pride Night” this month – the singular holdout in a sea of 29 other ball clubs that have all otherwise fallen in line.

Team representatives haven’t said why – but they have released a statement:

Our longstanding commitment remains the same: To make everyone feel welcome and included in Rangers baseball — in our ballpark, at every game, and in all we do — for both our fans and our employees.

We deliver on that promise across our many programs to have a positive impact across our entire community.

The Arlington, Texas-based team is owned by Ray C. Davis who is also Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Avatar Investments, L.P. (“Avatar”), a family-owned diversified investment company.

Since Davis took control of the Rangers in 2010, the club has made six postseason appearances, captured four divisional titles, three American League pennants and one World Series Championship – the first in franchise history.

Ray C. Davis has been called quiet, reserved, reclusive and even a right-wing billionaire. It’s been said he likes to fly under the radar. In fact, when Forbes published a list of the 400 most wealthy Americans (he was number 312), the magazine couldn’t find a photograph of the titan to include beside his name.

Older records from a family foundation indicate the owner has given to several Christian charities as well as the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and other politically conservative candidates and causes.

Are the Rangers making a statement by holding out?

It’s more likely they’re being careful to not offend or alienate Christian fans who object to celebrating sexual sin. Why other teams don’t share a similar sensitivity is at once unfortunate but not all that surprising.

A “herd mentality” has consumed corporate America. Threatened and bullied, many have simply capitulated and gone along to get along.

That the Texas Rangers have declined to play the game – and lived to tell about it, should embolden others to follow suit. In fact, the team even won the World Series in 2023 – one of the first years when pressure was really beginning to be applied for them to jump on the “Pride Month” propaganda bandwagon.

The original Texas Rangers, formed in 1835, were known for their toughness and tenacity. Let’s hope and pray that baseball’s version similarly holds strong and firm.

Image from Getty.

The D-Day Prayer Offered by Over One Hundred Million People

It’s possible that never before or since have so many Americans prayed together, led neither by a priest nor pastor, but by the president of the United States.

Eighty-one years ago tonight, as American troops and soldiers of the Allied Expeditionary Force descended upon the coast of France in an unprecedented military operation to wrestle control of the continent back from the Nazis, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to lead the nation in prayer.

Composed days earlier with the help of FDR’s daughter and son-in-law, the words to the prayer had been published in the country’s newspapers. Inspired by the president’s worn copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the wide distribution was intended to allow for Americans to recite the words of divine petition along with their president.

It’s estimated that 100 million Americans tuned in at 10 p.m. eastern time. The audience size is even more impressive when you consider the entire population of the country was just 130 million people.

Prayer has long been the most powerful yet often underused of all human acts. That we have the privilege and capability to communicate directly with the Creator of all things is too implausible for some and too intimidating for others. And yet that’s precisely what we’re able to do — anywhere, anytime and about anything.

FDR’s “D-Day Prayer” would be cited and recited for the remainder of the war, but even these many decades later, its petitions and pleas to God hold up well in a fractured and fragile America.

Could President Trump lead and compel so many to bring their hurts and hopes, their fears and frustrations to the Almighty? Would the ACLU even allow it? Perhaps not, but that doesn’t stop each of us from asking God to intervene and show us the way forward.

In the opening words of his prayer, President Roosevelt qualified the D-Day invasion as “a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”

We might not be literally facing down the barrel of a gun today, but make no mistake: there is an ideological, philosophical and spiritual battle going on. FDR asked God for “strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith” — and that’s what’s still needed 81 years later to face our troubles.

There is a battle raging for the hearts and minds of our children and for the convictions of their parents. There is an all-out assault on reality. There is a struggle over the basic understanding of the most fundamental of truths regarding male and female, the sanctity of life, the value of marriage, the rights of parents and our religious freedom, to name only a few issues.

“They will need Thy blessings,” prayed FDR. “Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.”

Clashes of culture require patience and persistence. Yes, we vote. But we also must live responsibly, lovingly, graciously, and cooperatively. In the words of the playwright Marcus Porcius Cato, “Fate rewards those who earn it.”

FDR prayed, “For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.”

It’s long been a lie that people of the Christian faith engage culture to establish a theocracy. Instead we pour ourselves into the effort because societies that welcome faith thrive — and those that reject it fail.

President Roosevelt concluded by asking God to “conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies” and to ward off the “schemings of unworthy men.” No matter your party or your politics, that should be a prayer we can recite with one accord.

Image credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

America is No Accident

Have you ever stopped and thought how different America might be if certain events had turned out differently?

What if the colonists had lost the American Revolution? What if the Confederacy had prevailed against the Union Army? What if President Kennedy had survived the assassin’s bullet – or President Reagan had not?

At the core of these “what if?” questions is an ageless and fundamental curiosity. Do our choices in life really matter – or is God behind the curtain pulling all the strings?

Or put more bluntly: Is it God or is it man who is in the middle of all things?

Or could it be that yes, God is in charge, but as His servants, our actions do matter and have consequences?

In many ways, the answers to these speculative and theological questions are what’s behind a new movie being released next week, The American Miracle: Our Nation is No Accident.

This patriotic study boasts an impressive cast: Pat Boone, Kevin Sorbo, Nicole C. Mullen, Cameron Arnett, and James Arnold Taylor. Incidentally, Boone and Sorbo both play Thomas Jefferson at his various ages of life. It’s a screenplay adapted from a book of the same name by Michael Medved, the syndicated radio host and author.

“I wrote The American Miracle because I had become convinced, studying American history, that the country was different and special,” Medved recently shared.

“And because one of the messages that I got from my late father, beginning when I was a very little boy, was that it was impossible to understand our country and how our country had emerged out of really nothing to be this dominant feature in the world – to imagine that without what all of the Founders believed in, which was the idea of divine Providence.”

Secularists or outright atheists attribute America’s fortunes to human activity or mere coincidence. For example, they claim that the descending summer fog of 1776 during the American Revolution was atmospheric happenstance not, as Washington described, “the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men.”

Medved and his friend and collaborator, Tim Mahoney, feel otherwise. In coordination and cooperation with Heroic Films, they’re committed to “telling true stories of God acting in history, shedding light on the lives of heroic people and events that have shaped our past and inspire our future.”

A Fathom event, the movie is being released for a limited three-day engagement: June 9, 10 and 11.

You can watch the trailer here.

As Christians, we know the Lord can do anything – and has repeatedly demonstrated His willingness to step in from time to time in supernatural ways and shape, direct or determine earthly outcomes.

In the Bible, we read about God sending angels to do His bidding (2 Chronicles 32:21) in war, or literally splitting the Red Sea in two (Exodus 14:26-28) and then closing the raging, drowning waters onto Pharoah’s army. Then there was the time He stopped the sun and moon from spinning so that Joshua and the Israelites could continue fighting with the aid of daylight (Joshua 10:12-14). In the New Testament, we know that Jesus can easily control the wind and the waves (Matthew 8:23-27).

But that was then, and this is now, right? Does the Lord still intervene in the mundane affairs of men and women?

Of course He does.

Instead of seeing circumstances as matters of coincidence, we should be willing to see them as signs of God’s sovereignty. Rather than calling it luck – why not interpret it as the Lord’s perfect plan?

If you have your doubts, The American Miracle is a good place to start. If you don’t, it’s a great way to affirm and encourage your deeply held convictions.

Image credit: Heroic Films

Dez Bryant: Pride Month Propaganda is ‘Far From Right’

The typical social media feed grew a lot more colorful earlier this week as entities from corporations and professional sports teams to countless individuals switched out profile photos and logos to coincide with the beginning of Pride Month.

Thankfully, not everybody is ready to surrender the rainbow. Our friend Allie Beth Stuckey proclaimed, “Happy Noahic Covenant Month. Love seeing symbols of God’s mercy everywhere!”

Sadly, the NFL doesn’t see it that way. They switched out their traditional logo to include the rainbow and have even produced and distributed a video that states:

“Football is gay. Football is lesbian. Football is beautiful. Football is queer. Football is transgender. Football is for everyone.”

This statement was too much for Dez Bryant, the former Dallas Cowboys receiver.

“These are wild statements to make,” Bryant wrote on X. “Excuse my silliness. I’m going to proudly tell my boys football is none of these things. I have nothing against Gays, but this is far from right.”

He then added:

“It’s gay players in the NFL … but forcing it in people’s faces… especially children… can send the wrong message… Football is a real community, like the gay community. Imagine telling gays they have to advocate for straight people… they probably would have a problem.”

He’s right, but that Bryant feels compelled to offer the caveat that his comments don’t reflect animus towards homosexuals just shows how much progress the radical propogandists have made in trying to intimidate and silence any difference of opinion.

First launched in 1970 on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, it was President Bill Clinton who formally proclaimed June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” on June 2, 2000.

Over the last quarter-century, “pride” events have morphed from days to multiple months. Billion-dollar corporations like the NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball have all fallen in line. If you were hoping to escape the ideological radicalism by retreating to the innocence of a ballgame, good luck during this month and even well beyond.

Dez Bryant didn’t share what he would tell his sons about what football really is, but he hasn’t been shy about sharing what he’s learned in church.

“I learned more about myself today in church,” he once wrote on X. “Regardless of your upbringing, good or bad, keep the honor of authority in the forefront of your life because there is blessing when you choose to honor in spite of the circumstances.”

The former NFL start then shared Deuteronomy 5:16:

“Give honor to your father and your mother, as you have been ordered by the Lord your God; so that your life may be long and all may be well for you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”

He added:

“Instead of us looking at the commandments as old fashioned we should look at them as well fashioned. I hope everyone is having a blessed Sunday.

Dez Bryant is catching grief for his “pride month” comments this week, but we need more people of influence to offer an alternative perspective, to counter the propagandists, and most importantly, acknowledge that it is never right to praise what the Lord says is wrong.

Image from Getty.