Southern Baptist Convention leader Russell Moore said Christians do not need to fear the gospel’s ineffectiveness even if religious liberties erode and the United States continues its moral decay.
Moore made the remarks during the SBC’s annual convention this year being held in Baltimore.
Christian leaders Rick Warren, David Platt and Samuel Rodriguez joined Moore, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, to discuss key issues facing religious liberty in the United States.
They focused on Hobby Lobby’s case against Obamacare‘s birth control coverage mandate, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“If we lose this case, the gospel is not lost,” Moore said. “If the United States of America crumbles away, the gospel is not lost.”
However, Moore said that many Christians “shrug off” the issue of religious liberty because they don’t understand they are responsible to defend it.
“The question is not only, ‘Are we going to be persecuted?’ The question is, ‘Are we going to be persecutors?'” he said. “And so if we shrug this off, what we’re doing is we’re consigning future generations, we’re consigning people’s consciences to a tyranny that we are going to be held accountable for.”
Hobby Lobby—which is owned by the Greens, a family of evangelical Christians—has refused to abide by the federal government’s contraception coverage mandate, which requires employers to provide abortion-inducing drugs to their workers.
The high court is expected to announce its ruling before it adjourns in late June or early July.
“I’m spending all of my time right now making sure that we stay out of jail,” Moore said during the discussion. “But there is one thing worse than going to jail, and that’s staying out of jail and sacrificing the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Still, Moore and Warren predicted Hobby Lobby would win.
The Southern Baptist Convention also elected Arkansas megachurch pastor Ronnie Floyd to lead the nation’s largest protestant denomination.
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