WASHINGTON (NRB) — The most basic liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are today “confused, contorted, and sometimes even condemned,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr. to Christian leaders gathered Thursday (May 3) for the National Religious Broadcasters’ First Amendment Lunch in Washington, D.C.
“Religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the freedom of the press — along with the other rights recognized and respected within the Bill of Rights — are all threatened even as other rights are marginalized,” said Mohler, who is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, during the event on Capitol Hill, sponsored by In Touch Ministries and held on the National Day of Prayer.
“Even more distressingly, a new regime of invented rights threatens to replace the rights that are clearly enumerated within the text of the Constitution,” he said.
Speaking specially to invited guests who were in Washington for events related to the National Day of Prayer, Mohler shared how religious liberty “becomes fragile in a secular age,” as do all liberties.
Religious liberty, he suggested, is viewed today by some as “problematic and out-of-date” and “injurious to human freedom, sexual liberty, transgender liberation, and a host of new imperatives.”
Some people think the freedom of religion is no longer a right, but a privilege, he added.
Mohler quoted a 2016 official report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in which the chairman, Martin R. Castro, writes, “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”
Mohler noted: “The commission’s report included both religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes as if they are merely terms of art — linguistic constructions without any objective reality. We are now witnessing a great and inevitable collision between religious liberty and newly declared and invented sexual liberties.”
He went on to share past statements that predicted the inevitable conflict, and recent events that illustrate how the collision is now taking place.
Before concluding, Mohler encouraged Christian leaders to hold on to the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and to defend these truths “that should be, but often are not, recognized as self-evident.”
And to the generation of young people who are committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ but assume that the defense of religious liberty is political, Mohler said they also need to be committed to the free propagation and voicing of the gospel, without which sinners will not hear the gospel.
“We’re in a fight that’s worth fighting,” Mohler said. “And we understand that as we contend for the freedom of religion, and the freedom of speech, and the freedom of press, again, we’re doing this not just for ourselves and for our children; not just for our churches, but for the world.”
He concluded: “Let’s pray that God will give us wisdom to hold these truths in perilous times.”
Steve Gaines, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, after the event called Mohler’s address was the “greatest word I’ve ever heard on religious liberty. Grateful for him.”
Gaines, who is also an NRB member, gave the benediction at the event.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited with permission from NRB communications staff for the specific purposes of Southern Seminary. The original, full report appears here.