Do evangelicals have ‘narrow vision’ of religious liberty?

Loss of the historic Baptist commitment to religious liberty has left U.S. evangelicals ill-prepared for current threats to the free exercise of religion, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, suggested April 11. “I think one of the problems is that for a long time evangelical Christianity, at the lay populist level, has had a narrow vision of religious liberty, because we haven’t had a lot of threats to it in a real sense,” he said. “You have some people who haven’t thought through that what our Baptist forebears were saying is right — that religious liberty is an image-of-God issue; it’s not a who-has-the-most-votes issue.

“That means we’re the people who ought to be saying the loudest: ‘We don’t want the mayor and the city council to say that a mosque can’t be in our town,’” he said. “The mayor and the city council that can say that is a mayor and a city council … that has too much power.

“And then secondly we’ve had a lot of people who have cried wolf over situations,” he continued. “They’ve cried persecution when there is no persecution.” (ABP)