By John & Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
December 23, 2025
Every Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of a child born into oppression-an occupied land, a climate of political fear, and a government quick to crush anything that threatened its authority.
Two thousand years later, the parallels are unmistakable.
If Jesus were born in modern America, under a government obsessed with surveillance, crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, religious nationalism, and absolute obedience to a head-of-state rather than the rule of law, would he survive long enough to preach about love, forgiveness and salvation ? Would his message of peace, mercy, and resistance to empire be branded as extremism?