Religious Leadership

Re “Are Christians Persecuted or Just Too Tightly Wound?” Commentary, Nov. 21: Cal Thomas is right on target! It’s about time religious leaders stop whining and pointing fingers at the media, politicians and liberals for being quite intent at undermining our American values. That’s a given!

The real issue is what has religious leadership done, beyond rhetorical platitudes, to defend religious principles? Maybe it’s time for these comfortable and complacent leaders of religion, who find ministry on the golf courses and in the chambers of commerce and who preach the compromising values of the democratic culture, to step out in an uncompromising fashion and challenge their respective constituents. Both have been guilty of becoming inept at articulating and disseminating clear biblical prescriptions on religious issues.

They continue to sidestep their moral station. By doing so, religious leaders must recognize that they have become nothing less than co-conspirators in the decline and demise of our American moral values. Reality check, U.S. Christians are often not victims of real persecution but of self-inflicted wounds.

GIL LEFEBVRE

Lake Arrowhead

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We are supposed to have freedom of religion in this country. Citizens are entitled to a blank page in which they can write down anything that they want and thoroughly believe in it with all the force of their being. No one has the right to edit your page.

It does give you the shivers sometimes to read what some people have written down. Deep in the text of some free-form religious text is some fine print that suggests that others do not have equal rights. The imagined suppression that Thomas speaks of is just a cover story to remove the rights of other people.

DAVID L. EASTMAN

Costa Mesa