A lot of people move to New Hampshire to find liberty. Whether they are liberty conservatives, libertarians, free-staters, or simply ex-Californians, the number of people who identify with the Live Free or Die ethos that makes New Hampshire a unique destination appears to be growing.
I believe that this is a good thing. Several months ago, I decided to create a resource to allow libertarians to learn more about the Granite State, to help them move to a place where people mean what they say when they say they love liberty, and to help them find a better life for themselves away from the authoritarian control freaks that dominate most other parts of these united States.
We want to thank Sidney Algernon for this Press Release. Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
That website is LibertyWin.org, and I believe it to be a fairly innocuous and uncontroversial but valuable tool to help anybody who believes in the freedom to get the information they need about New Hampshire. Some of the first pages on the site involved information about legislative victories, our lack of income taxes, seat-belt laws, and insurance information. It cited publicly available information. The small number of people who stumbled upon it found it to be useful.
That all changed when we had an idea to compile a list of all the churches in New Hampshire that we could to help potential movers figure out which churches would be best for them.
I’ve never been religious before, but I knew a lot of people who wanted to move to New Hampshire for more liberty were, so it seemed like a useful addition to the site. I thought a valuable addition to a mere list of churches would be to indicate if the churches were “Woke” or not. I got this idea because I read the Babylon Bee, and they occasionally pick on wokeness in churches, so I perceived this to be a problem for liberty-lovers who are Christian and a problem we might be able to solve.
Such a directory would take work, however, and I am not an expert on the various sects of Christianity. I knew that Protestants and Catholics are different, but an honest attempt to get every church in New Hampshire into an easily navigable directory would be a gargantuan task. Luckily, the work ethic of a single anonymous editor would be enough to match the workload.
Their username is “AvoidantDRS,” and over the course of several weeks, they worked tirelessly. In the end, he didn’t simply produce a mere list of churches; he had organized and put into context what I believe to be the most detailed and thorough list of churches in New Hampshire that exists. He put information in there about whether they were tied with a religious school. They had their website listed. He listed church controversies. He put on whether the church put a gay pride flag out front or not and whether they performed gay marriage ceremonies. Anything that a liberty-loving Christian would want to know, he put it in there.
It was a wonderful list, and as I watched it grow over time, noticing the amount of time it took to compile this list, to say that I was impressed would be an understatement. Once it was “Done,” however, that’s when I started to share it with other liberty groups in hope that it may prove a useful resource for movers.
Some people, however, did not appreciate the work put into the directory.
It started innocuously enough. A random reverend with a Ukraine flag in their Twitter bio complained about the list being helpful in the commission of hate crimes.
Other people on Twitter accused us of being hateful.
An Insider article spoke about extremist right-wing violence and the church directory as though the two were in some way related. This was re-published on Yahoo.
A day or so later, a political organization claiming to represent a handful of small religious groups called “The New Hampshire Council of Churches” accused us of being “white supremacists,” despite the word “race” appearing nowhere on the page. They accused us of being “Anti-LGBTQ” merely for reporting which churches included LGBT symbols on their websites.
They also performed that same rhetorical trick The Insider had used; They discussed things that had no relation to us whatsoever as though it was related, speaking about our directory as well as making claims about some group called “NSC-131” (a group that we neither knew anything about nor have anything to do with).
Their complaints were re-published on government-funded NHPR, as did MSNBC.
One thing all of these news articles seemed to have in common was that not a single one of them would simply link to the list to allow the reader to see it for themselves. I believe this is because they knew that as soon as most people actually looked at the directory, it would be obvious that it wasn’t the evil fatwah they were making it out to be, and they would be revealed as liars.
But still, we were curious about the NH Council of Churches. We did a bit of research on the person, “Reverend Heidi,” to see why they cared about a measly church directory on some website. It was very confusing to us as to why someone would lie in such a transparent way.
According to what we discovered, she is a reverend of sorts who is married to a transgendered male-to-female spouse. This is a rather unusual arrangement considering the history that Christianity has with such affairs. She also apparently is opposed to “fatphobia” and encourages unhealthy eating habits and gluttony among children. By my count, that’s both Pride and Gluttony, two of the seven deadly sins.
This isn’t a judgment of her life choices, it truly isn’t any of my business what sort of life people lead, but I’d assume that such a person is indeed very woke, for better or for worse, and it became obvious that they hated us because we had correctly identified woke churches as what they were. It was clear this woman hated us for our politics and was using theology as a weapon.
An FAQ was added to the directory, and in it, AvoidantDRS explained why he thought they were so incensed by a church directory. He said that it benefited those who wish to subvert Christianity by lying about this page.
This belief has an internal consistency that is very attractive.
Though we added an FAQ in response to the lies spread by woke liars, I will not apologize for truthful statements. I was at first alarmed at the rather cavalier manner in which Reverend Heidi seemed to have no moral qualms with directly, boldly, and blatantly lying. The shamelessness of the whole affair was rather revealing.
Because of this, I learned that Satan is, first and foremost, a liar. He is not able to create anything new. He is only capable of distorting and perverting creation. Evil does not often result in your will being accomplished; instead, evil has a tendency to bolster the good due to its own incompetence.
Such was the case here. Two months ago, I was happily atheist, with some mild Hellenistic sympathies. Working with Christians who were building a fantastic tool solely out of the goodness of their hearts was very enlightening.
When evil used the power of lying to try to break our directory, they failed. Instead of breaking our directory, they managed to expose it to thousands of people who would not have otherwise been introduced.
When NHPR and the Union Leader ran hit-pieces on the directory, even more people discovered the list. Many of them contacted us to try and submit corrections, as well as to submit churches that were missed.
The Liberty Ecclesia group for Christian Libertarians reported at least 40 new members. I greatly appreciate all these people for their corrections, additions, and other contributions that make the directory an even better tool. Anyone with additional information about the churches or who wish to submit corrections to the directory is more than welcome to reach out to us.
As for those who hate the list, who hate us, those who lied about it and called us racist, bigots, transphobes, and all the other things they accuse everyone of being these days, their evil resulted in good.
It convinced me that people like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are right about this mechanism I described. They managed to convince me that Satan isn’t some metaphorical concept, some goofy goat-legged man with horns and a pitchfork who tries to get people to shoplift. He seems to be very real, and he makes people do evil by convincing them that evil is actually good.
But the existence of Satan has another interesting implication, for if Satan is real, then that means that God should also be real. Otherwise, why would Satan’s machinations and lies constantly turn to good?
This is my way of saying that I went to church this past Sunday. I didn’t attend Reverend Heidi’s congregation, though I do wish them well. It may be easy to do under the circumstances, seeing how much benefit she accidentally brought me, but I do want to say that I forgive her for what she did.
Others have had to forgive much worse sins, but I’m new to this, so give me a break. I hope she and her congregation have many blessings in their pursuit of God.
And if you want to see the “white supremacist” directory, the one full of “transphobia,” “bigotry,” and “hate,” simply go here.
If you’re Jewish, we have a similar list for synagogues.
Both accept corrections, as we are dedicated to not simply being useful to potential movers but being truthful and factual in the content we publish. Any contributions are appreciated.
