Don Wildmon
AFA/AFR founder
March 2003 – For the past several weeks I have been reading the first two volumes ™of a history of Christianity titled The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years. I found the books to be extremely interesting and informative. They cover Christian history from the resurrection to the year 250.
Two of the astounding facts about the early Church were the persecution they faced and the baseness of the society in which they lived. When charged with the crime of being a Christian, they had a choice of death or denying the charge. To deny the charge consisted of “merely throwing a pinch of incense on a civic altar; but to refuse indicated contempt of the emperor and merited capital punishment,” said historian Joseph Wilson Trigg.
Thousands of the early Christians died because of their faith, when all they had to do to live was to drop a pinch of incense on an altar. Their deaths were some of the most horrendous imaginable. Yet die they did, when only a pinch of incense could have prevented all the torture and suffering and death.
Nearly unnoticed recently was the recognition of homosexual marriage by The September 11 Compensation Fund. The fund, headed by Kenneth Feinberg – a former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) – awarded Peggy Neff, the lesbian partner of Sheila Hein, who died in the terrorist attacks, $557,000 in benefits. An agency of the U.S. Government officially recognized homosexual “partnerships” as being the equivalent of marriage between a man and woman. In years to come we will see the importance of this one act. It went nearly unreported by the media – for obvious reasons – and by the current administration.
I’m afraid that the leadership in the Church – and in the government – isn’t willing to face the “torture” by the media and the liberal elite, and (is willing to simply drop their pinch of incense on the altar of political correctness.
In ancient Roman society, many leaders in the church did not hesitate to drop their pinch of incense to save their lives. However, there were others, a much smaller number – both leaders and common people – who were unwilling to drop the pinch of incense to save their lives and lose their souls.
If marriage between two men or two women is okay, then what is wrong with marriage between two men and one woman, or three men, or four men and three women? In time, some will ask the question of why marriage at all? Why not just give people the right to move in and out as they please with whomever they please for whatever reason they please? The definition of family becomes whatever one wants it to be.
For the past five decades, members of the entertainment media – and, to a large degree, the news media – have been pushing an agenda of sex without morality. They have been extremely successful. And during it all, the institutional Church has ignored the problem. The institutional Church has dropped its pinch of incense in order to avoid the persecution.
I often wonder what I would have done had I been a Christian during those early years. I cannot truthfully answer that question. But one question I can answer is this: I will not drop the pinch of incense at the altar of political correctness in this society.
The problem with dropping a pinch of incense is that eventually one is pressured to drop the entire bowl of incense. Those who hate Christianity aren’t satisfied with just a pinch. They want it all. 
