A preacher at age 18, Dr. Jerry A. Johnson is now the president and CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), an organization that thinks our government protects Islam more than Christianity.
“NRB wants to be for the First Amendment, what NRA [National Rifle Association] is for the Second Amendment,” he says in this 22-minute exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The federal government is “pushing down” against Christian principles, he explains. Johnson cites concerns that the Federal Communications Commission may decide that broadcasting Christian content is not “in the public interest.” He worries the Internal Revenue Service may deny tax-exempt status to those who espouse contrary positions from the progressive orthodoxy. Hospitals and charities — often begun as Christian charities — must now perform abortions despite their moral foundations. He even fears the Department of Education may use its accreditation leverage to mandate towing the line on same-sex marriage or Islam-friendly policies.
“[You] haven’t heard the president or the State Department condemn the brutal killings of Christians in the Middle East. If some little Muslim group gets pushed around overseas, we hear about that immediately,” Johnson says.
“So, Christians in America feel like, number one, their government is not representing them as Christians. On the other side, here within the United States we feel like the government is saying ‘Whatever you do, don’t attack Islam or Muslims.’ We don’t hear them saying, you know, ‘Anytime a Muslim kills some Christians, whatever you do, don’t attack the Christians; don’t attack the Jews.’ The Judeo-Christian culture feels that the U.S. government is not looking out for their best interests. Judeo-Christian people don’t feel like the government really cares about them.”
Johnson says the same sex marriage decision by the Supreme Court was another frontal assault.
Speaking about growing signs of troubling censorship, the NRB began monitoring social media providers in 2010 with the “John Milton Project.” Some of the censorship victims NRB tracked include: Chuck Colson, Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes and Allen West. Online providers like Apple, GoFundMe, Twitter, Facebook and Google are “not the neutral platforms people think,” Johnson says. They have an agenda and Johnson calls on Christians to shame these providers for cutting the microphone on people with traditional values.
The providers are “actually choosing, in many cases, to allow the violent ones [the Islamic State] to stay on the platforms and those of us who want to critique, throwing us off. There’s this canard that somehow we’re inciting the violence if we’re call attention to it and critique and warn of it.”
Johnson calls out a group of quiet Christians, “evan-jellyfish leaders,” who keep their heads down in the cultural and political battles of our time. He thinks they overdo “civility” when “we can’t keep this republic by Christians coasting along.”
Johnson’s adds he was “shocked” when President Barack Obama wagged his finger at Republicans on civility during the State of the Union, saying the president threw “cheap shots.” “I don’t know if we’ve ever had a president in modern period to use the State of the Union to mock the other side and belittle the other side quite like that.”
In the assault being waged on constitutional governance, Johnson says the modern heroes protecting the Constitution include the tea party, libertarians, Christians and conservatives who are rising up to call for the government to stop the debt, abortions and open borders.
Those on Johnson’s “bad guys list” are secularists, misguided statists, mainstream media and those centrist and establishment politicians who call for the government to “work.” Also on Johnson’s negative list are “deceivers” who he says “do not believe in the First Amendment,” like the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Counsel for American-Islamic Relations.
Johnson ends the video interview hoping that our country, as others have, can change through revival, reformation, renewal and resurgence of Christian values.
For more on NRB and their coming annual convention — the world largest annual gathering of Christian media and professionals, in Nashville, Tenn. — go to their website, their Facebook or follow them on Twitter here, here or here.
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