(The Economic Collapse Blog)—A lot of people out there never thought that things would get this far. In America today, churches are burning to the ground all over the country. This is happening because we have imported large numbers of people that are extremely hostile to Christianity from foreign nations and because multiple generations of our young people have been raised in our overtly anti-Christian public school system.
From kindergarten all the way through college, kids are trained to view the Christian faith through a hostile lens. Meanwhile, they are brainwashed by anti-Christian propaganda in our music, in our television shows and in our movies. In such an environment, the fact that Christian persecution is increasing should not come as a surprise to anyone.
The legal system is one of the primary tools that is being used to persecute the Christian faith in the United States.
On Monday, the Maine Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a mother can be banned from taking her daughter to church and reading the Bible to her…
The Maine Supreme Court unanimously upheld a custody order on Monday giving a father veto power over a mother’s decisions to take their daughter to church or read her the Bible, largely barring the child’s religious upbringing.
As covered last year by LifeSiteNews, the dispute is between Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen, the unmarried, separated parents of a 13-year-old girl. The father maintains that their daughter has displayed panic attacks since the mother started taking her to Calvary Chapel of Portland, stemming from fears that the rapture is drawing near and her father and sister will not make it to Heaven.
He produced a witness whose assessment of Calvary Chapel’s sermons claimed that they were potentially psychologically harmful, prompting the court to transfer full control of the child’s religious upbringing from Bickford to Bradeen.
This is absolutely insane.
The couple was never married, and the mother has custody of the daughter.
But now she has been permanently banned from taking her daughter to church because that is what the father wants.
Are we still living in America?
The attorney that represented the mother says that he plans to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court…
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver, who argued Bickford’s case before the Maine SJC, said he plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith,” said Staver in a statement, calling the opinion “disappointing” and “a serious threat to religious freedom.”
“This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.”
Hopefully the U.S. Supreme Court will be receptive.
But there is no guarantee that they will even be willing to hear this case.
I really detest what has happened to our legal system.
All over the nation, we are seeing outrageous ruling after outrageous ruling.
The far left completely and utterly dominates our courts, and that is not going to change any time soon because our law schools are absolutely packed with radical leftists.
I want to switch gears and talk about all of the church burnings that are occurring in 2026.
Churches are burning to the ground over and over again, and yet the big national news networks barely pay any attention to this phenomenon.
Sometimes, authorities catch those who are responsible. For example, a 19-year-old man was just arrested for his role in the burning of a historic church in Ohio…
A man was arrested after a historic church in Ohio went up in flames.
A 19-year-old man is facing a felony arson charge in connection with a fire that destroyed a historic vacant church on Cleveland’s east side.
Court documents show John McManamon was arraigned Wednesday morning. He is being held on a $10,000 bond.
But most of the time the arsonists are never caught.
Last Friday night, a “massive fire” suddenly consumed a Presbyterian church in Florida…
Crews battled a massive fire at Buckingham Presbyterian church on Buckingham Road in Buckingham on Friday night.
According to the Lehigh Acres Fire Control and Rescue District, the fire went through the roof of the church, and crews are still at the scene working to extinguish the fire.
The fire district said the cause of the fire will likely be handled by the Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosion Investigations because it is at a church.
A large law enforcement presence was in the area and Buckingham Road was shut down for hours before re-opening on Saturday morning.
Hopefully they will catch whoever did that.
The way churches are erupting in flames this year, you would think that they must be the most flammable buildings in our entire society.
In Mississippi, a fire that suddenly spread like wildfire absolutely gutted the activity building of a local Baptist church…
Rocky Creek Baptist Church will hold its first service Wednesday night after a fire heavily damaged part of its campus a day earlier.
Firefighters responded to the Lucedale church around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, after a fire broke out on the property on Rocky Creek Road.
The blaze gutted the church’s activity building, which houses the gym, kitchen and classrooms.
We have been witnessing incidents such as this from coast to coast, but things have been particularly bad in Michigan.
In Grand Rapids, four firefighters recently got hurt trying to fight a gigantic fire that suddenly roared to life at LaGrand Avenue Christian Reformed Church…
Four firefighters were injured while responding to a fire overnight at LaGrand Avenue Christian Reformed Church in downtown Grand Rapids.
A spokesperson for the Grand Rapids Fire Department told News 8 that the fire started around 11 p.m. Wednesday night on Oakes Street and Sheldon Boulevard. On social media, LaGrave Avenue CRC confirmed the fire happened at the former Seventh Day Adventist building on their campus and there was no risk to the church’s main building.
This sort of thing has been occurring so frequently all over the state of Michigan.
Here is another recent example…
A west Michigan church suffered major damage early Monday morning after fire broke out just before 4 a.m., destroying the gymnasium and causing extensive smoke and water damage throughout the building.
A passerby spotted the flames and called 911 at 3:41 a.m. Byron Township Fire, along with multiple mutual aid departments including Wyoming Fire, responded to the scene.
Pastor Chad DeJong of Byron Center Bible Church arrived around 6 a.m. and immediately knew the damage would be severe.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why there are so many church fires in the state of Michigan.
Of course the same thing could be said about the dramatic increase in church fires in western Europe.
The big media outlets don’t seem to care, but if a mosque suddenly caught fire it would be front page news everywhere.
In this day and age, it is open season on Christians.
In Idaho, when the owner of a coffee shop discovered that a group of customers had gathered to discuss pro-life issues, he kicked them out…
The founder of a well-known pro-life organization has gone viral in recent days after reportedly being kicked out of an Idaho coffee shop after the owner learned she was holding a meeting there.
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, shared a video of what purportedly took place at Wydaho Roasters last month — and that video went viral.
Hawkins told CBN News that coffee shop owner Jim Sheehan made his displeasure known after she, her son, and others met to discuss pro-life issues inside Wydaho Roasters. Her son’s goal has been to rally people against Proposition 1, an abortion measure that will be on the ballot in November.
This happened in supposedly “deep red” Idaho.
In blue states, the level of hostility toward Christian beliefs can be far worse.
Even if you don’t say anything, you can still get persecuted if you just try to live out your faith.
In Missouri, a Christian grandmother decided that she was going to serve her community by feeding people breakfast for free…
Kathy Kite, a resident of Harrisburg, Missouri, began welcoming locals into her home for breakfast back in May after the community’s convenience store stopped serving breakfast following COVID.
Kite works at H-Town, the local convenience store and gas station, and said residents had repeatedly expressed interest in finding a new place to have breakfast. She lives nearby, so she decided to offer an alternative by cooking for her friends and offering up the food for free.
“I told the old guys that come in there in the mornings that like to play cards, and drink coffee, and eat breakfast, and say they didn’t have any more — I’m like, ‘You guys can come to my house and I’ll do it,’” Kite told CBN News.
People that are willing to make hard sacrifices like that to serve others are the backbone of our nation.
Eventually, approximately 20 to 25 people (including young kids) started to come to her house for breakfast…
At first, it was just a few people. But others soon began to come after her loving act was advertised on social media, with 20-25 people regularly coming to her home in the morning; some parents even brought their kids to her house for food before school. Kite gets up at 3:30 a.m. to prepare for the day.
“And it just kind of exploded from there,” Kite said.
In the old days, going to grandma’s house for breakfast was a cherished tradition.
But now it is a crime.
The control freaks that run things in the area soon sent her a letter insisting that she needed to obtain a commercial kitchen license to continue feeding people breakfast…
But Kite’s breakfast gatherings eventually caught the attention of government officials, with Columbia city officials from the Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services Department reportedly sending a letter telling her she needed a commercial kitchen license to continue operating.
This is a perfect example of what is wrong with this country.
In other parts of the U.S., authorities have literally made it illegal to feed the homeless.
Those that have made such laws should be ashamed of themselves.
Nobody is going to stop me from having compassion on a fellow human being.
And nobody is going to stop me from worshipping God the way that I choose.
I am sure that the legal system will continue to be extremely hostile to us, I am sure that more churches will go up in flames, and I am sure that the entertainment industry will continue to mock us in thousands of different ways.
But they will not win, because the God that created all things can never be defeated.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
