A friend from an Amish and Mennonite background who lives among those communities in Ohio told me she is frustrated by the reluctance of some people she knows to vote. When she asks why, she hears a familiar answer: “If it’s God’s will …”

Meaning: God will determine the outcome. Apparently, that settles their part.

If we are tired of politics, let’s say so. But invoking God’s sovereignty to excuse our own passivity drags His name into a decision we made.

The reluctance she described reaches well beyond Amish and Mennonite communities. Too many Christians sit out elections while maintaining a vigorous schedule of complaining about the results.

But the “God will handle it” explanation puzzles me because we do not apply that reasoning to the rest of life. Gracie would have a few questions.

I pray for Gracie before every operation. I still drive her to the hospital. After 40 years of caregiving, I have had plenty of occasions to trust God with things I could not control. I have also filled prescriptions, asked uncomfortable questions, and challenged decisions. In all of Gracie’s 98 operations, not one surgeon has said, “You prayed for God’s will? Good. I won’t need to scrub in.”

We understand responsibility quite well when something matters to us. Why does it become so mysterious when the subject is voting?

If you have a biblical conviction against casting a particular vote, that deserves a hearing. But “God will determine the outcome” explains why we can trust Him. It does not explain why we can excuse ourselves.

Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Those neighbors live under the officials we choose. Sheriffs, school boards, county commissioners, and legislators make decisions that reach into their homes and wallets. A widow reporting fraud needs officials who take her seriously. A family caring for a disabled child needs more than a sympathetic nod.

We can argue about which candidates will serve them best. But God’s sovereignty does not explain why loving our neighbor requires nothing from us.

Jeremiah 29:7 gives us an even less comfortable instruction. God told His people to seek the welfare of the city where He had sent them into exile and to pray for it.

The city was Babylon.

They had been carried away from home. If anyone had grounds to say, “This government is somebody else’s problem,” they did. God still assigned them work where they lived: Pray for the city. Seek its welfare.

We live here. Our children are growing up here. And unlike the exiles in Babylon, we have a voice in choosing our leaders. What exactly is our excuse?

Galatians 6:10 tells us, “as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone.” Voting gives us an opportunity to influence who exercises power over our neighbors. That makes a ballot something to use thoughtfully, not something to dismiss with a religious phrase.

Scripture does not contain instructions for an American polling place. It does contain instructions for people who have neighbors and opportunities.

RELATED: Billy Crystal no longer trusts God. Christians should listen.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images

No candidate is going to usher in the kingdom of God. I would settle for one who understands the job, tells the truth, and remembers whose money he is spending. Expecting perfection is another convenient way to avoid making a choice.

Think about our brothers and sisters in countries where free elections are restricted or denied. Then imagine explaining to them that we leave our ballots unused because we trust God.

Passive citizens are ripe to become captive citizens.

Officials do not lose their authority because we lose interest. They continue making decisions, spending money, and exercising power. Our absence simply leaves the choosing to somebody else.

We are free to stay home. We should at least be honest about why. If we are indifferent, let’s call it indifference. If we are tired of politics, let’s say so. But invoking God’s sovereignty to excuse our own passivity drags His name into a decision we made.

I pray for Gracie. I still drive her to the hospital.

Pray for your country. Then do your part.

​Authority, Ballot, Christians, Elections, Love thy neighbor, Politics, Power, Voting, Country, Amish, Mennonite, Midterms, God, Scripture, Babylon, Opinion & analysis 

Megachurches are often the target of criticism. Common concerns focus on whether their size, production, and leadership models make deep discipleship, personal community, and accountability harder to sustain.

On this episode of “Live Free,” Josh Howerton, BlazeTV host and pastor of Lakepointe Church — a megachurch in Dallas, Texas, — speaks with fellow megachurch pastor Joby Martin of Eleven22 in Jacksonville, Florida, to confront some of the biggest myths surrounding megachurches.

Myth #1: If the senior pastor doesn’t know you personally, he’s not really your pastor.

Some megachurch critics argue that true shepherding requires a pastor to know his congregants personally and be able to shake their hands, for example, but Howerton and Martin argue otherwise.

Martin points out that in the Greek, pastor and shepherd are the same word.

“Jesus says He is the good shepherd, and David says in Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, so have you ever shaken Jesus’ hand?” he asks.

But there’s an important caveat. “Although I don’t personally shepherd all the people, all the people need to be shepherded,” says Martin, highlighting the crucial roles of supporting pastors, care teams, and other staff members.

“We accomplish the roles of the shepherd. We’re not caught up in the title of who gets the badge.”

Howerton notes how the apostle Peter in the first four books of Acts led a church of 5,000 strong. “We literally got a Bible verse that says the opposite of this,” he says.

Myth #2: Instead of getting bigger, large churches should be planting more churches.

Another common complaint about megachurches is that they grow bigger instead of planting more churches.

“Please don’t fall into the tyranny of the ‘or.’ God always works in the genius of the ‘and,’” says Martin, “because guess who all the church plants come to? The big churches.”

And the reality is, many megachurches are planting other churches.

“By the end of 2028, we will have planted 1,000 churches around the world. There are more people that attend the churches that we have planted today than how many people attend Eleven22,” Martin adds.

The same is true at Lakepointe Church, says Howerton. “We have literally personally funded, coached, and planted … over a hundred churches in the hardest-to-reach urban centers in North America by the end of this year.”

“News flash: When we plant a church, thousands of people don’t magically stop trying to come to my church,” he adds, emphasizing how church planting does not necessarily correlate to a megachurch’s numbers.

Myth #3: Because of their scale, megachurches are shallow in their discipleship.

Megachurch skeptics are quick to accuse large churches of compromising deep discipleship for numerical growth.

“I would love to introduce you to our thousand or so disciple group leaders and let you tell them that to their face,” Martin counters, noting that he’s currently preaching “verse by verse” through the book of Matthew.

“What else do you want me to do?” he asks, “and honestly, I don’t care what you want me to do. I’m not doing what you want me to do because I’m not trying to live my life for the approval of man but for the approval of Christ.”

“Galatians 1:10,” Howerton adds.

Myth #4: Megachurches are just big personality cults hyperfocused on the lead pastor.

Because megachurches are often pastored by widely known charismatic preachers, critics will accuse them of being personality cults.

Martin acknowledges that sometimes this is a real issue, but it’s not because of the size of the church but rather the failures of the pastor leading it.

“Are there some bad actors and some guys that have been terrible stewards of platforms that God has given them? Man, sadly the list is long,” he says.

“What you don’t know is the list is also long of churches that you’ve never heard of because they just don’t make the news,” he continues, “and like you’ve said a million times before, planes that land safely, they don’t make the news.”

After “[wrestling] through the parable of the talents,” Martin says he’s not sure if he’s a “two-talent guy or a five-talent guy,” but he’s certain he will not be a “a one-talent guy.”

“I got one and only life,” he says. “What do you want me to do? Preach less or tone it down or cap it?” he asks.

When people complain about the church getting too big, the question he asks is: “Who do you want me to un-invite?”

Martin notes that every time Jesus’ disciples tried to “cap it” by turning children away or attempting to control the size of the crowd, they “[got] in trouble.” But when they embraced the “feeding of the 5,000,” for example, they “[got] a high five from Jesus.”

Myth #5: Behind the scenes, megachurch pastors are greedy, abusive hypocrites.

One of the biggest accusations hurled at megachurches is that they’re pastored by men who are charismatic and engaging outwardly but greedy and abusive off the record.

“Can you go find some bad ones? Man, there’s no doubt. There’s no doubt about it. And man, it puts a blight on the name of the bride,” says Martin.

“And I fear for that man when he stands before the Lord,” adds Howerton.

However, both men, who know all the famous megachurch pastors, can also testify that the opposite is also true: often these pastors are different behind the scenes but in the best way possible.

Howerton says there are so many stories they’re “not allowed” to tell about sacrifices and generosity these megachurch pastors have demonstrated that would stun their biggest critics.

To hear the full episode, check out the video above.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH to get $20 off your subscription.

​Josh howerton, Blazetv show 

Before America had a Constitution, it had pulpits.

Pulpits that taught citizens how to think about authority, duty, and the proper limits of government. The ministers later associated with the “Black Robed Regiment” understood that biblical truth must step through the church door. They addressed public questions because they believed theology had consequences for all of life and that pastors had a responsibility not to comfort congregations but to form their biblical worldview.

Critics often accuse pastors of turning biblical issues into political ones. In many cases, the sequence runs the other way.

For most of American history, pastors did not need permission from the state to speak about the moral and political questions confronting their people. They preached about slavery, war, temperance, elections, public officials, religious liberty, and national repentance because they understood the pulpit to be accountable first to God.

Restoring an old right

The modern expectation that pastors should carefully separate biblical teaching from anything deemed “political” would have been foreign to much of the American church that helped shape this country.

That context is important because the fight over the Johnson Amendment is often framed as though churches are seeking some new political privilege. We are not asking the government to give pastors a new right, but to stop restricting an old one.

The origins of the Johnson Amendment are revealing. In 1954, Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson was facing a primary challenge from Dudley Dougherty, a wealthy young Texas politician whose fierce anti-communism appealed to supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Dougherty was hardly a formidable opponent — Johnson defeated him by more than 40 points in the Democratic primary — but he had sympathizers in powerful conservative organizations, including the Committee for Constitutional Government and Facts Forum, a media operation established by Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt.

Johnson was particularly concerned about the Committee for Constitutional Government, which had circulated material promoting Dougherty. He asked his staff to investigate whether its activities violated election laws or threatened its federal tax exemption. The answer on the latter question was apparently no.

Johnson was undeterred. Having investigated whether existing law could be used against his political opponents, he now proposed changing the law itself. That July he introduced an amendment to the federal tax code barring tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in political campaigns. It passed without debate. Churches, which had played no part in Johnson’s dispute, were covered by the new restriction.

Freeing the pulpit

There was no sweeping national debate about churches corrupting elections. There were no extensive hearings over whether the American pulpit had become dangerously partisan. Johnson claimed to be confronting communist nonprofit organizations, but churches had become a source of political opposition. The law was written broadly enough, encompassing churches; they were heavily affected by its enforcement and soon began receiving letters from the IRS. The restriction ultimately extended far beyond Johnson’s immediate political dispute, reaching into the pulpits of American churches for generations.

Today, the Johnson Amendment prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, including churches, from supporting or opposing candidates in political campaigns.

This restriction is at the center of the legal challenge by National Religious Broadcasters. Churches remain free to address public policy issues, including controversial ones, but pastors face restrictions when their speech crosses into supporting or opposing a political candidate. NRB seeks to protect the freedom of churches and their pastors to speak from the pulpit without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

The broader concern is what decades of uncertainty, legal caution, and fear of enforcement have produced inside churches themselves: a deep-seated culture of self-censorship.

‘Political’ … or biblical?

Critics often accuse pastors of turning biblical issues into political ones. In many cases, the sequence runs the other way. Politicians took questions involving abortion, marriage, sexuality, race, religious liberty, and justice and turned them into partisan battlegrounds.

These were biblical questions long before they were campaign issues.

Politics does not acquire ownership of a moral question merely because politicians begin arguing about it. Scripture had something to say about marriage, government, money, justice, and human dignity long before there were Republicans, Democrats, campaign platforms, or federal agencies. The church does not surrender those subjects when they appear on a ballot.

Perhaps pastors will stop being accused of bringing politics into the pulpit when politicians stop dragging biblical questions into politics.

That does not mean churches should become campaign headquarters. They should not. The pulpit should never become an appendage of either the Republican or Democratic parties. Biblical authority is diminished whenever Scripture is bent to serve political power.

But there is an opposite error: treating “nonpartisanship” as a reason for silence whenever Scripture touches a politically controversial subject.

A pastor should be free to preach biblical truth without compromise and apply it to the real-world questions confronting his congregation. If Scripture challenges the left on abortion, sexuality, family, or religious liberty, he should say so. If it challenges the right, he should say that too. The standard is not partisan usefulness. It is biblical fidelity.

That is why NRB entered the legal challenge to the Johnson Amendment.

The district court dismissed our case on jurisdictional grounds rather than reaching the merits of the constitutional claims. The case is now on appeal. NRB will continue fighting because the government should not stand between a pastor and his responsibility before God.

RELATED: What Fulton Sheen understood about fame that today’s Christian influencers don’t

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Courage required

But the legal fight only reaches so far.

The First Amendment can protect a pastor’s freedom. It cannot produce courage. A court can remove a restraint, but it cannot make a church recover confidence in the authority of Scripture. NRB can fight for the freedom of the pulpit. Pastors must decide whether they will use it.

That question grows more urgent because Christians are being formed every day by institutions that have no hesitation about preaching their own worldview. Social media, universities, corporations, entertainment, political movements, and influencers constantly catechize Americans about morality.

When churches avoid the same subjects because they have become politically controversial, they do not create neutrality. They simply leave the work of formation to everyone else.

America does not need a more partisan pulpit. It does need a freer and more courageous one.

We are fighting to restore an old right: that of pastors to open the Bible, preach the whole counsel of God, and speak to the life of the nation without first asking the government for permission.

​Black robed regiment, Constitution, First amendment, Hl hunt, Political campaigns, Religious liberty, Scripture, Theology, Johnson amendment, Lyndon johnson, Nrb, National religious broadcasters, Christian living, Lifestyle, Law, Faith 

They said the kids would be fine. Here’s the gay-parenting research that got buried.

A peer-reviewed study reported that children with married same-sex parents had more than four times the odds of reported emotional difficulties as kids with a married mom and dad.

There’s a lot of mischief being done very quietly in the weeds of what seems like respectable scientific studies.

Oh, wait. You never heard that? Yeah, I know you never heard that.

The research that produced this finding got buried in the academic literature. And today I’m going to show you how easy it was for that correction to escape public notice — and why it matters for real families like yours.

I suspect the pro-gay establishment hopes you don’t see this.

Meet Chris from Ohio

I want you to imagine somebody who really needs reliable answers.

Let’s imagine a 20-something young lady. I’ll call her Chris. Chris from Ohio.

Chris thinks of herself as bisexual or nonbinary. In her mind, she has a real choice between partnering and co-parenting with a person of the opposite sex or a person of the same sex.

Her decision-making is going to partly depend on what she thinks it would be like to be a mom with another woman versus being a mom with a man.

So let’s keep Chris in the back of our minds. And if you’re reading this because someone you love is in this situation, or because you’ve lived it yourself, I want you to know this article is for you.

The study behind the controversy

Now, back to the study. The study reporting that children with married same-sex parents had more than four times the odds of emotional difficulties compared with children of married opposite-sex parents. That doesn’t mean Chris’ own future children would be four times as likely to have problems, but it’s certainly a finding she might want to know about.

This whole research saga started with a paper published in 2016 in the peer-reviewed journal Demography that seemed to show the kids are all right with same-sex couples as parents.

Let’s call this Study No. 1.

The researchers expected the children of same-sex married couples would look pretty much the same as the children of opposite-sex married couples. And they found what they were looking for.

This study showed no statistically significant difference in emotional difficulties between kids raised by same-sex couples and kids raised by their married mom and dad. The researchers did report a disadvantage for children with married same-sex parents on a separate behavioral-problems measure, but the emotional-difficulties finding showed no significant difference.

But in 2017, one short year later, the very same researchers analyzed a corrected and expanded version of the same dataset and found the result I already mentioned: Children of same-sex married couples had more than four times the odds of emotional difficulties.

We’ll call this Study No. 3.

I’m going to show you exactly how this happened.

What the numbers actually say

Okay, so let’s look at some numbers. I’ll highlight which figures to look at and what they mean.

For Study No. 1, showing no differences, look at Table 5.

The researchers report what are called odds ratios. You use this method when you’re trying to compare how likely something is between two or more groups.

You start with a reference category, and all the other groups are compared to that reference category.

In this case, the reference category is children raised by different-sex married couples. In other words, kids raised by ordinary married moms and dads.

Now, if the odds ratio equals 1, that means the two groups have the same odds of the outcome.

In this case, the researchers wanted to say children raised by married couples are equally likely to have emotional difficulties whether their married parents happen to be the same sex or the opposite sex.

And that’s essentially what we see in the first line of Table 5. The estimated odds ratio is close to 1, with no statistically significant difference.

This is the no-differences result.

If, on the other hand, the odds ratio is greater than 1, that means the group has higher odds of emotional difficulties than the reference group.

So let’s look at the results the very same set of researchers found using the corrected and expanded data in Study No. 3. That would be Table 7.

Doing the math

Now, stay with me here, because what I’m about to show you is something I suspect the academic establishment hoped you would never notice.

Look at the column labeled emotional difficulties odds ratio. For kids raised by married same-sex couples, the odds ratio is 4.16.

That means the estimated odds of reported emotional difficulties were more than four times as high as for children of opposite-sex married couples.

Odds aren’t quite the same as probabilities, and the small sample means we should be cautious about exactly how much weight to put on that figure. But it’s a substantial change from the original no-differences result.

So now let’s remember Chris from Ohio for a moment.

She may have heard about studies like the first one, saying her potential kids would be fine whether she marries a man or a woman.

She probably didn’t hear too much about this correction. You would think she has a right to know just how fragile that no-differences result really was.

So how did the researchers get from no significant difference to more than four times the odds in under a year?

From no differences to twice the odds

Now, here’s where the Ruth Institute comes into play. We had a little role to play in the background.

If you guessed that there was a Study No. 2 between Study No. 1 and Study No. 3, you win the prize.

Study No. 3 actually came about after some back-and-forth with a critic.

This critic pointed out that the National Center for Health Statistics had issued an advisory about the dataset. Some of the data had been miscoded.

Specifically, the problem involved the recorded sex of married partners. Some opposite-sex married couples had been incorrectly classified as same-sex couples. Because genuinely same-sex married couples were such a small proportion of the population, even a relatively small number of miscoded records could seriously distort the findings.

The NCHS had advised researchers against using the affected survey years to analyze same-sex married couples. But Study No. 1 had included those years.

So the critic reclassified the data, excluding the problematic years. And his reclassification obliterated the original estimate showing no difference in emotional difficulties, although the replacement estimate remained statistically uncertain.

In fact, the children of same-sex married couples had approximately twice the estimated odds of emotional difficulties. The difference wasn’t statistically significant in that small sample, but it was a substantial change from the original estimate.

You can see the results in Table 3 of Study No. 2. The panel excluding the miscoded data shows the odds ratio for same-sex married couples is now about 2 instead of 1.

The author of Study No. 2 corrected what appears to have been an honest mistake. So fair enough.

This is how science is supposed to work: back and forth. Everybody’s work can improve from this type of give and take.

But still, let’s remember Chris from Ohio, trying to decide what to do with her life. Do you think she heard about this miscoded data?

Probably not.

The biological parenthood problem

Anyway, we still haven’t gotten to the statistics showing more than four times the odds of emotional problems.

This critic pointed out another problem in the original study, Study No. 1. The authors used biological parenthood as a control variable.

Now, wait a minute. Let’s think about this for a minute.

If the focus of the study is the difference between same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents, you really have to be careful about controlling for biological parenthood.

No child of a same-sex couple will have two biological parents in that couple.

So the variable for biological parenthood may be soaking up variation that is part and parcel of being a child with same-sex parents.

That’s the critic’s argument. Researchers may reasonably want to separate the effects of biological relatedness, family stability, and parental sex. But depending on the question they’re trying to answer, controlling for biological parenthood can also remove an important part of the difference they’re studying.

The author of Study No. 2 argued that the biological-parenthood variable should be removed and the analysis redone.

By taking out biological relatedness, the estimated association between living with married same-sex parents and emotional difficulties becomes a whole lot stronger than you originally would have thought.

This is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I talk about tricks with data. There’s a lot of mischief being done very quietly in the weeds of what seems like respectable scientific studies. And I suspect the academic establishment is hoping you’ll be too lazy to figure that out.

RELATED: The 3 failed promises of gay ‘marriage’

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Out of cite

Now, who was this mystery critic, you might ask? The critic whose name I haven’t yet mentioned?

The critic the authors referred to when they wrote, in their response, that they were conducting an analysis in response to commentary by Sullins?

Who is this mysterious Sullins person? It is none other than Father D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., my colleague at the Ruth Institute.

Father Sullins has been a senior research associate with us since 2018. When he wrote this paper, he was still a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America.

But we’ll take a bit of credit, though, because we had the good sense to snag him when he retired.

Anyhow, notice something about the sentence referring to Father Sullins in the authors’ revised paper. It does not give the customary parenthetical citation with his name and the publication date of the article they’re talking about.

When I first saw this, I thought, “What?”

I scurried back to the references page looking for the full citation to a paper by Sullins. I was shocked to find that his paper, the one to which they’re responding, is not even listed in the references.

Well, that is not only bad science, that is bad manners.

How rude.

Anyway, at least Father Paul got them to redo their calculations. But if somebody wanted to put these papers side by side, the way we’ve done here, it would not be easy to do.

I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you think this is an oversight.

Unsettled science

The academic establishment is committed to the no-differences viewpoint.

You can see why I think so in that missing citation. You can see it in the fact that studies showing no differences get plenty of media airtime, while corrections and contrary findings stay quietly hidden in academic journals.

Those are facts readers deserve to know.

And that brings us back to Chris from Ohio.

Perhaps someone like Chris is reading this today. Perhaps someone reading knows somebody who learned from experience that same-sex parenting was not as easy as you had been led to believe.

I want to say to any of you in that situation: I am sorry. This should not have happened to you.

And I want you to know today that you’re probably not the only person going through this. The science about same-sex parenting is not nearly as settled as you’ve been led to believe.

Please share this article. You’ll be doing something the academic establishment too often fails to do. You’ll be giving Chris from Ohio the information she actually needs and deserves.

​Lifestyle, Gay marriage, Gay parenting, Family, Lgbt, Traditional marriage, The ruth institute, Christianity, Father paul sullins, Countering ‘pride’ 

Of the 350 million people living in America, more than 250 million use the world’s largest online marketplace. That marketplace is Amazon, and it has been keeping a file on each of them. A new report describes just how personal and damning Amazon’s dossiers can be.

The company builds highly complex customer profiles by analyzing your purchases. These profiles run the gamut, including inferences about customers’ ages, relationships, body types, clothing sizes, food preferences, and daily routines. For example, as Futurism noted, one customer who sought to identify what Amazon knew about her found that she reads Kindle books in the bathroom. Amazon was right. The question was how it knew. Another customer was described as having “no friends,” while a third, according to the Verge, found a comment suggesting her posterior was, shall we say, aesthetically unappealing.

Disclosure is the cost of doing business in 2026.

Decades ago, the average American could drive out to a general store and buy a hammer and nails. When all was said and done, all that fellow would have divulged was that he bought practical essentials with the cash he kept in his jeans. The fact that no one else knew any more about him than that was a happy byproduct of a system in which commerce and surveillance didn’t intersect the way they do now. Our grandfathers locked the door when they got home and drew the blinds. They knew that what happened in the house stayed in the house.

Those days are long gone.

When you purchase a bottle of vitamins, Amazon knows, or thinks it knows, what ails you. It sizes up your children by the books you buy them. Your Amazon account knows your shoe size. It knows what you were snacking on in the middle of the night last Tuesday, and it connects that with other purchases and extrapolates, building a picture of your life so intimate and complete that it amounts to a sort of digital twin, a simulacrum so adept at predicting your behavior that the company can nudge it in the directions of its choosing.

Some might suggest that this is nothing new. Companies have always tracked us. But what is new is how casually people agree to this arrangement. Yes, you provide Amazon with your credit or debit card number when you make a purchase. Of course. How else will you pay for that juicer you probably don’t need? Your street address, too, naturally. Someone has to plop it on your welcome mat. And that is fine; such disclosure is the cost of doing business in 2026, the price of admission to the modern marketplace. But Amazon goes much farther. Purchases of back-pain ointment can become evidence that you are slouchy, grumpy, and uncoordinated. Multiple orders of coffee beans might paint you as a lonely, possibly out-of-shape insomniac.

RELATED: Seattle votes to ban grocery ‘surveillance pricing’. Your data shouldn’t set your food bill.

Seattle votes to ban grocery ‘surveillance pricing’. Your data shouldn’t set your food bill. urbazon/Getty Images

Amazon is a monopoly, which means it wields a kind of power heretofore seen only in governments. It controls the flow of goods and services and the transmission of information. With this power comes responsibility, and by weaponizing such intimate data, Amazon can abuse it in the most irresponsible and unethical way.

Freedom used to mean having the power to act for yourself. Today, it must also mean being free from others’ judgments about you. We all have a basic, if implicit, right to control how much personal information others collect and how they use it. But to exercise that right, you must first know what they know about you. That means greater transparency, a fairer balance of information between companies and their customers, and a way to challenge institutions when they get things wrong. A woman purchasing coffee beans may not be an insomniac but instead live in a home with multiple people who drink multiple cups of coffee a day.

But Amazon, with its current harvesting and inference system, doesn’t care about nuance. A man purchasing “Mein Kampf” simply because he is interested in the evolution of one of the most evil historical figures ever to walk the face of the earth might find himself recast as a white supremacist with a penchant for goose-stepping. In the not-too-distant future, browsing alone could trigger pre-crime algorithms.

Thankfully, all is not lost. As Futurism reports, Amazon lets users review some of its guesses and questionable assumptions about them. To do so via desktop:

Go to Account & Lists, then Account. Scroll down and select the option to “manage your information,” then either the profile option or the personalization option. In the Amazon app, you can find this feature by following this particular route: Profile icon > Account > Shopping preferences > About you.Check the other options in that section too, in particular around privacy settings and advertising preferences, to make sure Amazon isn’t collecting and using information you don’t want it to use.

This won’t stop all personal information collection, and it may not delete all such data, but it can limit the extent of that process.

Ultimately, each individual must decide how much info he is comfortable sharing with Amazon and whether the benefits justify the trade-off. In other words, is free two-day shipping really worth sacrificing your privacy and basic dignity?

​Amazon, Tech 

Kighley Medrano was born and raised in the Mormon church but became an evangelical Christian after she married her husband. Today, she uses her platform to share her testimony of leaving the LDS church and to expose problems with Mormon theology by contrasting it with the biblical gospel.

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Kighley told Allie Beth Stuckey that the religion of Mormonism has “satanic underpinnings” and that the angel Moroni — who, according to LSD faith, directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates — is a demon.

“In the Mormon temple … to receive your endowments, there is a video that everyone has to watch,” Kighley says, explaining that the video is about the fall of Adam and Eve.

At one point in the video, she says, Satan breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience to put on their “aprons,” which have “fig leaves” on them. Not only are Mormons “buried in their fig-leaf aprons,” which Kighley says is “undoing … the work of Christ,” but “the only time that you’re told to do anything in the temple is from Satan.”

On top of that, Mormonism has “re-erected the temple,” she says.

“There is a veil that is put back up, and there is a holy of holies. It’s called the celestial room, and that is where God’s spirit dwells,” Kighley tells Allie. “So, they’ve undone the work of Christ even in that.”

“Even though, yes, the word ‘Jesus’ is in the name, the undoing of the work of Christ is so evident throughout the Mormon religion and teachings,” she adds, calling it “satanic.”

The revelation that caused “an immediate paradigm shift” for Kighley, however, was when she was taught how the Bible describes Satan.

While she was still part of the Mormon faith, Kighley’s daughter befriended another girl, whose mother had left the LDS church for Christianity. One day while their daughters played, they had a deep discussion over their differing faiths.

“I said, ‘OK, so then what about, “By your fruits you will know them”? Generally, the Mormon church produces good, moral families; good, moral children. What about that? What about the fruits?’” Kighley recounts.

“And she said, ‘I agree that generally the Mormon church produces good, moral families and children, and it looks really good on the outside, but Satan comes dressed as an angel of light.’”

Kighley says that at the time of this conversation, she was unaware that this was verbatim from Scripture.

“When she said that, immediately the angel Moroni popped into my brain, and it was like just the lights flipped on, scales fell from my eyes, and an immediate paradigm shift happened,” she says. “And I knew that the angel Moroni was a demon.”

To hear more of Allie and Kighley’s conversation, watch the episode above.

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Driven primarily by Halloween, October is the peak month for horror movie viewership. BlazeTV hosts Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau both enjoy a good spooky flick, especially during pumpkin season.

On this episode of “Stu and Dave Do America,” the duo along with special guest and horror movie expert Angela Boggs rank their top five horror movies in descending order.

Dave’s list:

Dave, who briefly studied film in college, says the following are his favorite horror movies based on what he personally enjoys watching.

5. John Carpenter’s 1982 classic “The Thing,” starring Kurt Russell. The film follows a group of researchers at an isolated Antarctic station who encounter a shape-shifting alien that perfectly imitates living organisms, forcing them into paranoia as they try to discern who is still human.

4. “The Cabin in the Woods” (2011), directed by Drew Goddard, starring Chris Hemsworth. The plot revolves around five college friends who spend a weekend at a remote cabin, only to discover that they’re being manipulated as part of a much larger, ritualistic horror scenario.

3. “Evil Dead II” — the second film in the franchise — directed by Sam Raimi in 1987, starring Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams. Williams, the central character throughout the original trilogy, returns in this film to face even more extreme Deadite horrors, including a possession of his own hand.

2. “American Psycho” (2000), directed by Mary Harron, starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, and Reese Witherspoon. The plot centers on a wealthy, status-obsessed Wall Street banker who secretly leads a double life as a serial killer, committing increasingly violent murders while maintaining a perfect outward image.

1. “The Shining” (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. This iconic horror film follows the Torrance family as they spend the winter as caretakers of an isolated hotel. The father slowly descends into madness under the influence of the hotel’s dark supernatural forces.

Stu’s list:

While Stu isn’t a horror movie megafan like Dave and Angela, he enjoys the occasional scary film, including:

5. The original 1996 “Scream” movie directed by Wes Craven. The film, which kicked off a long-running franchise, follows a masked killer as he terrorizes the teenagers of a small town by phoning them with horror-movie trivia questions before attacking.

4. “Signs” (2002), written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. It centers on a former priest and his family living on a rural farm who discover that the mysterious crop circles in their cornfield are actually signs of an extraterrestrial invasion.

3. “Misery” (1990), directed by Rob Reiner, starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. Based on the Stephen King novel, the film is about a famous novelist who is rescued from a car crash by his number-one fan; she then holds him captive in her remote home and forces him to rewrite his latest book to her satisfaction.

2. The original 1978 “Halloween” film, directed by John Carpenter and starring Jamie Lee Curtis. The movie, which launched a major long-running franchise, introduces escaped mental patient Michael Meyers, who returns to his hometown on Halloween night and begins stalking and killing babysitters, while his psychiatrist races to stop him.

1. “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” (1982) — the third installment in the series — directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, starring Tom Atkins. Famous for being the outlier in the series, this film does not include the iconic Meyers and instead follows a doctor as he investigates a series of murders linked to a toy company that plans to kill children across America using cursed Halloween masks triggered by a TV commercial.

Angela’s list:

Angela, host of “Angela Does Horror,” where she posts horror reviews, watch-alongs, recommendations, and discussions, is a horror film superfan. Her top five list, she says, is intentionally “quirky and different” but still gets her “in the Halloween spirit every year.”

5. “1408” (2007) directed by Mikael Håfström, starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. The film follows a skeptical author who debunks haunted hotels; he checks into the infamous room 1408 at a New York hotel and is forced to confront genuine supernatural terror.

4. Indie horror film “Starry Eyes” (2014), which had a limited U.S. theatrical release. The plot revolves around an aspiring actress in Los Angeles who makes a dark deal with a sinister film production company in exchange for the fame she’s desperate to achieve.

3. “Unfriended: Dark Web” (2018), written and directed by Stephen Susco. The low-budget studio horror, which got a theatrical release, follows a group of friends on a video chat as they discover that one of them has stolen a laptop connected to the dark web. The original owners begin systematically targeting and killing them while they watch helplessly.

2. “Late Night with the Devil” (2023), directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes. This independent film that was also theatrically released is a found-footage-style film revolving around a struggling late-night talk show host in 1977, who tries to boost his ratings with a live Halloween special featuring a possessed girl, only for the broadcast to unleash real demonic forces on air.

1. “As Above, So Below” (2014), directed by John Erick Dowdle. Presented in found-footage style, the film takes place in the catacombs of Paris, as a team of explorers searching for the philosopher’s stone becomes trapped in a nightmarish labyrinth where their personal sins and fears are turned against them.

To hear the panel go into depth about their top horror picks, check out the episode above.

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