On Tuesday, June 15, Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler addressed the topic of religious liberty as part of the "Baptists Thinking Biblically: A Conversation on Religious Liberty" event.
On the late-night stage at Music City Center in Nashville, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president was joined by Andrew Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and associate dean of the Southern Baptist School of Theology.
Baptist Press published highlights from the theological discourse. Some of the more notable ones are as follows:
Baptists, according to Mohler, are tempted to do two things in the name of religious liberty.
"Number one is ... to argue for religious liberty for the right people and not for the wrong people without recognizing that unless religious liberty is within constitutional bounds for all, then you have a de facto state-sanctioned church," he explained.
"The other thing I think Baptists mess up is that when we become dominant in a culture, we tend to lapse into cultural Christianity, and then we discover that there's really no confession or conversion here. That's one of the reasons why people in the South are so surprised [about what] is going on with social transformation because they thought all these people were Christians. Well, it turns out, no, they actually weren't," he added.
According to Mohler, such individuals simply behaved in the manner as Christians because society indicated that was how they were meant to act, and now that society has told them not to act in that capacity, they have stopped.
Mohler then questioned Walker about the value of religious liberty "if no one wants to live according to the Scriptures."
Christians, according to Walker, will have a chance to persuade their neighbors to respect God by appealing to the order of things and the laws of nature.
"We've got to be able to have those arguments at our disposal to bring them into the public square to say to the world, 'We're not the weird ones for believing that males and females are biological categories that are fixed and unalterable,'" he said.
Religious liberty, according to Walker, is fundamentally about the freedom to preach the Gospel without being hindered by any obstacles.
He also made reference to the events in book of Jeremiah to illustrate that looking out for the general well-being of a city does not necessarily imply working out social transformation in order to achieve a certain form of "utopia." Rather, it means "slow, plodding work of forming families, getting rooted in your communities."
Religious liberty, according to Walker, is fundamentally about the freedom to preach the Gospel without being hindered by any obstacles.
"It's the ability to receive the Gospel with as few hindrances as possible, and it's about the ability to live out the aspects of the Gospel in the shape of our obedience," he said.
Mohler also tackled the concept of religious liberty.
He stated that throughout history of Western civilization, religious freedom sprang from a culture dedicated to humanity's perception of the image of God, and from a "conversionist faith" that, while veiled during the Middle Ages, nevertheless distinguished between those who professed the faith and those who did not.
The "freedom to reject belief in God" was not included in the original definition of religious liberty, according to Mohler, "because that wasn't even an intellectual choice." Specifically, it signified the freedom "not to be coerced - especially after the Reformation - into a particular confession, be it Catholic or Protestant."
The idea that evangelicals would be living in a different society next year if the Equality Act becomes law was also brought up by Mohler.
As Mohler puts it: "I don't think the average evangelical understands that their Christian school could basically be put out of existence. You can say, 'Well, that would never happen with the Supreme Court.' Well, let's put it this way: That means that nothing is stopping the absolute denial of religious liberty except some majority of justices on the Supreme Court, we hope."
Walker reacted to this by stating that if conservatives and Christians rely on the U.S. Supreme Court as a last resort, they are placing their faith in a "false hope." He said that by the time a case reaches that stage, all other options have been exhausted due to the degradation of the culture.
