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After walking away from Islam, content creator Eternal Bread of Life thought she had found peace in New Age beliefs. Drawn to practices like tarot cards and manifestation, she spent years pursuing what she believed was healing, self-discovery, and enlightenment.She tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey that her transition from Islam to witchcraft began when she started questioning what the Quran said was normal, like Muhammad’s child bride or his curse on women who “remove their hair from their eyebrows.”“I was getting my eyebrows threaded, and so then this made me feel really guilty, and it also just made me feel frustrated and sort of resentful,” she says, “because like why would God care so much to the point that we’re cursed for doing that?”She tells Stuckey that once she became a New Ager, she believed in “past lives, reincarnation, chakra balancing, meditation, mindfulness, psychic readings, [and] tarot cards.”“I did find a lot of peace in it. Because, you know, there is a concept of trying to find your higher self. You know, doing shadow work to, like, heal the parts of yourself that are more broken or that need work,” she explains.“Manifestation was also a big thing. And so I did find a lot of peace in it,” she adds.Astrology was one of her favorite New Age beliefs, as she felt it related most to Islam.“God created the planets, and there is some truth to astrology,” she says.“Were you reading any particular books on the subject? Were they just kind of friends influencing you? How did you kind of go down that witchcraft-New Age rabbit hole?” Stuckey asks.“It was mostly influencers online. You know, people who seemed very well versed in that kind of stuff,” she answers.“I just always — because I had been taught the Bible was corrupted, the Quran is the final revelation, it’s the word of God, I never took it seriously. I never considered it.“They basically drill it into you that Allah has no son. Jesus was just a prophet. When somebody’s telling you, like, ‘Oh, you know, Jesus loves you, Jesus, is God and He’s the son of God,’ you already have those guards up in your mind as a Muslim,” she explains.However, when she did venture into New Age beliefs, others in the space reversed course and became Christians.“They started to encounter Jesus in visions, or they had supernatural experiences, and then they immediately denounced all the New Age practice and they became a Christian,” she explains.“I thought if I was ever going to go back to an Abrahamic religion, it would be Islam,” she continues. “So I wasn't understanding. Why, like why is it Christianity?”After her favorite New Age creator went on a meditation retreat with Joe Dispenza and had a vision of Jesus during meditation three separate times, her tune changed.“He said, ‘Open your heart to me,’ and then she had … crazy experiences after that. So then after hearing her testimony, I was like, ‘Okay, I will give Christianity a chance,’” she adds.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Twenty-two years ago, something extraordinary happened in American movie theaters.Across the country, audiences sat in near silence as the final hours of the Lord’s life unfolded before them. There were no superheroes, no elaborate special effects, and no English dialogue. Instead, we watched a brutally realistic depiction of a scourged and bleeding man carrying a cross through the streets of Jerusalem toward His execution.Every person watching the film also carries a reality we prefer not to contemplate: With every passing day, we move closer to our own death and our own face-to-face encounter with the living God.I saw "The Passion of the Christ" four times on the big screen — and I was hardly alone in going back more than once. Each viewing was emotionally overwhelming. I shed plenty of tears, but none more than during this scene, as Jesus is beaten nearly beyond recognition.Shared encounterMel Gibson’s 2004 film became a cultural phenomenon. It ultimately earned more than $610 million worldwide and, for 20 years, remained the highest-grossing R-rated movie in domestic box-office history. More importantly, it became something increasingly rare in American culture: a shared encounter with the story at the heart of Christianity.Now, "The Passion" is back.From September 10 through 17, the film returns to theaters nationwide, newly remastered in 4K with Dolby Atmos sound. Audiences will also see an exclusive behind-the-scenes preview of Gibson’s long-awaited sequel, "The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One," scheduled for release in May.For those of us who saw "The Passion" in 2004, its return offers an opportunity to revisit a remarkable cinematic experience. But nostalgia isn’t the most important reason to go.An entire generation has never experienced this film in a theater.The oldest members of Gen Z were only grade-schoolers when Gibson's epic debuted. Many were toddlers or not yet born. They’ve grown up in a radically different culture from the one that encountered "The Passion of the Christ" 22 years ago.An urgent invitationThey should see it.Not simply because Mel Gibson made a powerful movie, but because of whom the movie is about: Jesus Christ. The Word incarnate. The man who walked willingly toward Calvary, stretched out His arms on a cross, and gave His life for humanity.That is exactly what makes this rerelease different from the return of some beloved Hollywood classic. We aren’t simply being invited to revisit a movie. We are being invited to contemplate an event that changed human history.And just maybe we need that invitation now more than ever.Look around.Wars rage. Natural disasters bring scenes of devastation into our homes. Human life is discarded through abortion and euthanasia. Families are fractured. Loneliness, addiction, and despair afflict millions. Technology connects us instantly, yet people seem increasingly incapable of understanding one another.The world is shaking. What will awaken us?RELATED: Mel Gibson's long-awaited biblical sequel is finally happening Amanda Edwards/Getty ImagesConfronting the familiarChristianity offers a startling answer. A crucified man.The central image of the Christian faith is not a throne, a sword, or a display of worldly power. It is God giving Himself away.“For God so loved the world,” Scripture tells us, “that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16)."The Passion of the Christ" forces us to confront what those familiar words mean.The scourging is difficult to watch. The road to Calvary is exhausting. The Crucifixion is horrifying, and that is precisely the point.Sin is not trivial. Love is not mere sentiment. Our redemption came at a price.Every person watching the film also carries a reality we prefer not to contemplate: With every passing day, we move closer to our own death and our own face-to-face encounter with the living God.Seen in that light, "The Passion of the Christ" is not entertainment. Instead, it’s a question: Who do you say Jesus Christ really is?The only questionIt’s a question every human being should struggle with. It’s precisely the question that has drawn Christian leaders like Cardinals Raymond Burke and Gerhard Müller, Rev. Franklin Graham, and Pastor Samuel Rodriguez to tout the film’s rerelease — and to encourage Christians to prepare spiritually for what comes next.The original film also changed what Hollywood believed was possible. Its enormous success opened new opportunities for religious filmmaking and raised expectations for how biblical stories could be portrayed on screen. The renaissance that followed eventually gave us productions such as "The Chosen," which has introduced the gospel to millions worldwide.But "The Passion" remains unique; perhaps because it refuses to make Christianity comfortable.It reminds us of Christianity’s astonishing claim: The Creator entered His creation. God became man. He suffered. He bled. He died.For you.And then comes the most important part. The story does not end at the cross. That’s why the forthcoming sequel matters.Christ dies on Good Friday. But Sunday comes.More than two decades after "The Passion of the Christ" first stunned audiences, its return offers our troubled culture another opportunity to stand at the foot of the cross.

They say diamonds are forever, but so are humans. We do not stop existing at the death of our bodies. And that is why the death of Gloria Steinem should cause us to think seriously about more than her political legacy as a leftist activist.Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She will be remembered as one of the most influential feminists of the last century, a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and a leader in the movement that made abortion a defining element of modern feminism.Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.But there is another person whose life must be remembered when we remember Steinem: the unborn child she aborted.Steinem became pregnant at 22. She had broken off an engagement and was preparing to leave for India. Abortion was illegal in Britain except in limited circumstances, but a physician, John Sharpe, helped her obtain one.Decades later, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Sharpe. She remembered his words to her: “You must promise me two things.” One was that she not reveal his name. The other was: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”Those words summarize an entire moral revolution.But what about the other life? What did that child want to do with his or her life?That child never went to India. Never went to school. Never chose a career. Never fell in love. Never held a child. Never traveled, wrote a book, changed political parties, found religion, rejected religion, made mistakes, sought forgiveness, or grew old.The philosophy supposedly centered on “choice” began by taking every choice away from someone else. There is no higher level of selfishness than to end another person’s life so that person does not get in the way of your own plans.What does this tell us about the human heart?Steinem once said, “I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a little bit of social conditioning.” She considered freedom from conventional social expectations liberating. That theme ran through her life: question inherited rules, throw off imposed roles, and determine your own destiny. In its most radical form, modern feminism treats human rules as mere social constructs and “being yourself” as acting on your desires without discipline or correction.RELATED: Chelsea Clinton put a price tag on abortion Anthony Kwan/Getty Images for MEBO GroupThere is something attractive about that message. Human beings should question unjust traditions. But there is a darker possibility. What if the moral law we are overthrowing is not merely “social conditioning”? What if some acts really are wrong regardless of what society says? Steinem’s questioning was not merely philosophical curiosity. It echoed the sin of Genesis 3: the desire to become one’s own god, even to claim power over the life of another human being.The most frightening capacity of the human mind is not ignorance. It is self-justification. We can take something terrible and give it a noble name.Steinem did not merely defend her abortion reluctantly. She later described it as taking “responsibility for my own life.” She said she tried to make herself feel guilty by imagining how old her child would have been. It is as if Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had stopped midway through “Crime and Punishment,” still convinced that murder could elevate him above ordinary morality.That is chilling precisely because the child disappears from the moral calculation.Her life. Her responsibility. Her choice. Her future.But another human being had a life too.What does this say about the movement that followed her?Steinem did not keep this reasoning private. She helped make it a political philosophy.Millions of Americans were taught to describe abortion in the language of liberation, autonomy, and reproductive freedom. The unborn child became almost linguistically invisible. We learned to talk endlessly about the woman’s future while refusing to talk about the future being deliberately ended.That is how moral revolutions work. They do not normally begin by convincing people to celebrate evil as evil. They rename it as something good.Murder becomes “choice.”The destruction of a human life becomes “health care.”And denying another human being her entire future becomes “doing what you want with your life.”RELATED: ‘That far’ always becomes here Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesThe lesson of Steinem’s life is therefore larger than Steinem. She became influential because millions of people found that reasoning persuasive. A culture embraced the astonishing proposition that equality could be advanced by denying the most defenseless human beings even the equality of being allowed to live.And now comes the question death forces upon us.Christians believe Gloria Steinem still exists. We also believe her child still exists. Death does not make our actions disappear. It removes our ability to distract ourselves from them.Imagine the question that child could ask: Mom, why did you kill me? Why was your future worth more than mine? Why did you get to “do what you want to do with your life” while deciding that I would never get to do anything with mine?And widen the circle. What of the millions whose deaths were justified by the political movement Steinem helped lead? What happens when slogans about “reproductive freedom” meet the human beings whose lives those slogans helped extinguish?Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.And it makes repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God infinitely more urgent.The great question is not whether history praises us after we die. It is whether the God who gave life agrees with what we did with it. Steinem now stands before His judgment seat.

Imagine America in 2032. The forms remain. There's still a Congress. Still a Supreme Court. We all carry on with our campaigns, debates, yard signs, cable panels, and concession speeches. Children are still told they live in a democracy.But the substance has changed. The Court has been expanded and brought to political heel. Election rules have been totally federalized. Mass mail voting is permanent. New states have added new senators. The bureaucracy is no longer merely hostile to the political opposition; it is fully "fortified" against removal. Banks, universities, corporations, platforms, and prosecutors all understand the same rule: Opposition is permitted, but only as theater.Our road divides. Which future will it be?A Republican may run. A conservative may speak. A dissident may complain. But the machinery effortlessly ensures none of it matters very much, if the voices are even heard.This is the future now gathering inside the Democratic Party. Its energy has left the old, once-familiar liberalism of free speech, hard work, earthy patriotism, and equal citizenship. What pulses now is the politics of the DSA: racial spoils, censorship, open borders, anti-police politics, climate command economics, anti-Western foreign policy, and bureaucratic control. The recent socialist victories in New York and Colorado are not local curiosities. They're previews of coming attractions.In this future, DEI returns, not as a national faculty lounge but as ruthlessly, preemptively enforced federal law. Race communism becomes the operating system of government, education, finance, hiring, medicine, housing, and contracting. Private property is no longer treated as sacred but as morally suspicious. Wealth taxes impose “fairness.” Reparations stake permanent claims against the dwindling producer class. Upward mobility vanishes for those lacking inside connections. "Privilege" means guilt, and guilt means punishment.And yet America does not collapse all at once. Managed downward, its factories go elsewhere and its capital, fearing crushing exit taxes, simply hides. Energy costs are surcharged to the moon. Police retreat, schools decay, families shrink, and the dollar weakens. Our best people stop building and start hedging. And China takes full advantage. The country still has symbols, ceremonies, flags, and slogans. But underneath them is a nation poorer and angrier, more censored, racialized, and frightened. A "managed democracy," as the Russians call it, in which elections continue, but real political reversal becomes nearly impossible.That's one future. Now imagine another.Civilization renewedPopulist nationalists hold Congress and the White House. The Court is preserved. Elections are secured. The border stays closed. The intelligence community and the administrative state are brought back under elected control. Equal citizenship replaces racial spoils. Cheap energy remains, and fuels, national policy. Building becomes honorable, durable, and beautiful again.The wind at its sails, the country turns outward with confidence. The Monroe Doctrine is revived for the 21st century. China is pushed back from the Western Hemisphere. America finds and supports more Bukeles and Mileis — leaders who restore order, unshackle markets, defend sovereignty, and repel socialist decline and decay. Europe is no longer encouraged to censor its own people in the name of democracy. The peoples of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and the rest of the West are allowed to speak and vote without managerial supervision.RELATED: A swarm of hidden Chinese bots are built to control what you think NurPhoto/Getty Images America also begins to think civilizationally again. We realize the West cannot afford to treat every historic Christian nation as a permanent enemy while China organizes the non-Western world into a rival economic and strategic bloc. A wiser American strategy, where possible and on terms favorable to American interests, aims to pull countries such as Russia back toward the broader family of Western civilization rather than leave them as raw material for Beijing’s empire. Peace, trade, energy cooperation, commodity flows, technology markets, and a larger sphere of nations aligned against Chinese world dominance doesn't solve America’s debt problem, but the resulting American economic growth can. Cheaper energy. Larger markets. More efficient and defensible force postures. It all makes for a less fragmented, much less deracinated West. If America is going to pay down its debt rather than inflate it away or surrender its sovereignty to creditors, it needs a bigger, stronger, more productive civilization behind it — not a shrinking coalition of guilt-ridden post-national states managing decline.In this future, America wins.Reclaiming our machinesMeanwhile, an irony lays in wait. AI and robots, the very technologies so often described as dehumanizing, may be what finally allow human beings to live human lives again. For two centuries, modernity has promised liberation while chaining families to commutes, paperwork, credential mills, medical costs, school failures, housing shortages, industrial drudgery, and the endless anxiety of keeping up. As a result, many Americans view another wave of highly hyped change with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.But properly ordered, the machine can give time back for the soul. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive, exhausting work. AI can help tutor the child, assist the doctor, accelerate the engineer, guide the farmer, protect the soldier, and multiply the builder. Automation need not mean a cold world of isolated consumers watched by rigged algorithms. In a sane civilization, it can mean parents home earlier, children taught better, elders cared for longer, towns rebuilt faster, medicine delivered sooner, and ordinary people freed from scarcity enough to rediscover family, faith, friendship, craftsmanship, worship, and wonder. The machine, if governed by men who still know what man is for, can help restore the conditions of real life.A return to the soul transforms our vision of the future. The menace and alienation drains away from images of robot aides in every classroom; robot surgeons and AI doctors; 3D-printed schools, hospitals, homes, and factories; and nuclear reactors providing clean, sovereign, abundant energy. With rebuilt American manufacturing, accelerated scientific discovery, and an economy where American workers once again build, supervise, own, maintain, secure, and profit from their ingenuity, the most productive economy in human history beckons.No third wayAnd so our road divides. Which future will it be? There is no third option where the comfortable get to keep their illusions, and the machinery keeps tightening but liberty somehow survives. There is no version of the future in which the groups who want to rewrite the rules gain the power to do so and then politely decline.That's why the next two years of elections are not normal. They're not just about which rear ends fill which seats. They're about whether elected offices will lose the ability to change the direction of the country at all.Whatever differences divide our friends and allies, we need to win now, while winning still means something. Or we can explain to our children and grandchildren why we stood by and watched the door close on their future.