Religious Liberty – Page 19

Southern Baptist Convention Affirms Biblical Views on Marriage, Gender-Identity

Jun 12, 2025Jerry CoxMarriageReligious Freedom, Religious Liberty, SAFE Act, Same-Sex Marriage, Transgender

The Associated Press reports the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming marriage as the union of one man and one woman and opposing transgender ideology during its annual meeting in Dallas on Tuesday.

The convention also hosted a conversation with Tennessee’s attorney general and with an Alliance Defending Freedom attorney regarding laws that protect children from sex-change procedures.

This month marks ten years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges decision that struck down state marriage laws nationwide.

From 2004 to 2015, voters in more than three-fifths of the country democratically passed laws and amendments defining marriage in their respective states. In most cases, those measures defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Obergefell ruling nullified all of those state laws.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s resolution affirms biblical marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and it calls for the reversal of the supreme court’s bad Obergefell ruling. It also opposes the normalization of transgender ideology.

Some member of the media have seemed surprised the Sothern Baptist Convention would approve a resolution like this, but there really should not be anything shocking about a Christian denomination holding Christian beliefs on marriage and gender-identity.

In 2004, the SBC approved a pro-marriage resolution saying, “The union of one man and one woman is the only form of marriage prescribed in the Bible as God’s perfect design for the family.” That resolution also called for passage of a federal marriage amendment defining marriage in America as the union of one man and one woman.

In 2014, the convention approved a resolution affirming “God’s good design that gender identity is determined by biological sex and not by one’s self-perception.”

In light of that, the SBC’s latest resolution isn’t exactly new.

Support for same-sex marriage has actually declined in recent years, and about half the states —including Arkansas — have passed laws protecting children from sex-change procedures. Many of the world’s leading health experts have found these procedures are dangerous. Americans have also expressed widespread backlash against corporations that pander to pro-LGBT groups.

Reversing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision does not seem likely right now, but the same thing seemed true of Roe v. Wade 50 years ago. We appreciate the Southern Baptist Convention maintaining its biblical convictions regarding marriage and gender-identity.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Court Battle Brews Over Arkansas’ Ten Commandments Law

Jun 12, 2025Jerry CoxReligious FreedomReligious Freedom, Religious Liberty, Ten Commandments

On Wednesday the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven families in Northwest Arkansas to block a new state law placing the Ten Commandments in schools and public buildings across the state.

Some years ago Arkansas passed a law requiring a copy of the national motto, “In God We Trust” to be displayed in public schools and other public buildings.

Act 573 of 2025 by Sen. Jim Dotson (R — Bentonville) and Rep. Alyssa Brown (R — Heber Springs) requires a historical copy of the Ten Commandments to be displayed as well.

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that items that are important to our nation’s history — like the Ten Commandments or the national motto — may be honored and recognized publicly without running afoul of the First Amendment.

The Ten Commandments are one of the earliest examples of the rule of law in human history, and they have had a profound impact in shaping America’s concept of the rule of law as well.

Act 573 simply recognizes their significance. The measure received strong support in the Arkansas Legislature earlier this year, and the governor signed it into law on April 14. Act 573 is slated to take effect later this summer.

However, on Wednesday the ACLU sued the Fayetteville School District, the Springdale School District, the Bentonville School District, and the Siloam Springs School District to block Act 573.

The ACLU’s lawsuit claims,

“Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library—rendering them unavoidable—unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture. It also sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments—or, more precisely, to the specific version of the Ten Commandments that Act 573 requires schools to display—do not belong in their own school community and pressures them to refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state’s religious preferences.”

Hanging a copy of the Ten Commandments on the wall of a school or library does not “pressure” anyone, and it certainly is not “harmful” or “divisive.”

Besides being culturally and historically significant, copies of the Ten Commandments have often appeared in artwork at courthouses and similar locations around the country.

During her testimony in support of Act 573 last April, Rep. Alyssa Brown noted that the U.S. Supreme Court uses a “longstanding history and tradition test” to decide if it is constitutional to display something like a copy of the Ten Commandments. Rep. Brown said “the Ten Commandments without a doubt will pass this longstanding history and tradition test.”

We believe our federal courts ultimately will agree and uphold Act 573 as constitutional.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Politics on Sunday Morning: Guest Column

May 30, 2025Shane MorrisChurch, Religious FreedomChurch, Church Statistics, Religious Freedom, Religious Liberty

Talk to the average critic of the evangelical church—perhaps someone who has “deconstructed” and now resents their religious upbringing—and one of the first complaints they have is that Christians are too political. Especially since 2016, it has become common to smear conservative Christians for being more interested in “making America great again” than in making disciples.

This perception of evangelicals (that their churches are too political) is so strong that sociologist Christian Smith cited it in his recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete as one of the main reasons for the long-term decline in church attendance.

Here’s the irony: Evangelical churches aren’t in fact that political by the typical definition of the term, nor do their members want them to be. That public perception is basically a myth.

Summarizing several recent and large surveys, statistician Ryan Burge showed that “very few houses of worship are talking about political issues on a regular basis,” and even the recognizable pastors on social media doing a lot of culture warring are “outliers.”

In its 2022 Health of Congregations Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asked regular church attenders how often their pastors talk about a variety of issues. 90% said their clergy never or rarely talk about election or voter fraud. 92% said their churches never or rarely talk about President Trump. Only 9% said their clergy often bring up abortion, while 58% said the topic never or rarely comes up.

The most frequently discussed “political” topics across all congregations were poverty and inequality, with 66% saying their churches sometimes or often bring up these subjects. But that could just be from reading the Gospels!

Looking specifically at evangelicals, the popular wisdom that they idolize politics doesn’t hold up. Only 9% said that their church is more divided by politics today than it was five years ago—lower than the number of non-evangelicals and Catholics who saw such division in their churches. And just 14% of evangelicals agreed with the statement, “I wish my church talked more about political division in this country,” compared with 86% who disagreed.

Far from rallying their political tribe, most evangelicals appear to prefer their pastor stick with preaching the word of God. Burge remarked:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. … You just don’t see a lot of church going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

When compared with surveys of how the unchurched perceive Christians, the disconnect is glaring. It turns out quite a few non-churchgoing Americans have no idea what goes on inside churches. As Burge concluded:

Doing a lot of public-facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning. The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis.

This raises a couple of interesting questions. Should we be talking more about politics from the pulpit? And if so, what qualifies as “politics”?

As I said recently on Breakpoint, there’s a clear difference between pastors commenting on foreign policy and being willing to oppose the killing of unborn babies. One is nuanced and requires great expertise while the other is a very clear-cut moral issue. Not all issues that get labeled “political” are created equal.

But on a deeper level, maybe we should rethink what counts as “political.” In the sense that loving our neighbors, exercising dominion over God’s world, and stewarding our citizenship are earthly duties of Christians, Christianity could be called deeply and unavoidably “political.”

Without ever bringing up candidates, debating elections, or drawing up tribal battle lines, pastors and teachers who do their job by telling the whole story of redemption are saying a few things in no uncertain terms: that Christ is sovereign over all of human existence, that this world and the way we choose to live in it matter to Him, and that He intends His gospel and its effects to permeate society, culture, and government. That sounds political, by any reasonable definition.

None of this means evangelicals who answered this survey are wrong for wanting to focus on the Word of God, or that we should spend every Sunday culture-warring and discussing the latest headlines. Far from it! What it does mean is that Christianity has unavoidable implications for the here and now, and that even as we keep the main thing the main thing in our churches, we should never forget that our worship has implications beyond them. Otherwise, we’ll be just as mistaken as those who say we worship politics.