For years, we’ve watched the radical, anti-God left wage an unrelenting war to destroy our great country while weak-kneed establishment figures and silent church leaders sat on the sidelines. The Marxists have infiltrated our schools, our government, and yes, even our churches.
Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice is absolutely dropping MOABs on the secular left and their enablers. In a powerful new declaration, Rice is firing back against the absurd, un-American demands that pastors must “stay out of politics.”
Instead of caving to the woke mob, Rice is urgently calling on Christian leaders across the nation to STEP UP, find their courage, and get aggressively involved ahead of the most important midterm elections of our lifetimes.
In an interview with Fox News, Rice laid out exactly what is at stake. He boldly argues that the radical left’s favorite pet projects, abortion on demand, the destruction of traditional marriage, the sick gender identity agenda targeting our innocent children, and the lawless open-borders immigration crisis, are not merely political disagreements.
He said they are deeply theological issues. And they demand a fierce, uncompromising pastoral voice in the public square. He said the political and theological left never left the public square, and the silence of too many Christian leaders helped create the vacuum Americans are living with now.
Willy Rice: “But to answer your question, should pastors engage in the political process? They absolutely should, because there are many political issues that are, at their heart, theological issues and moral issues that strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.
So, I’m Willie Rice. I pastor Calvary Church in Clearwater, Florida, and pastored for over 40 years, and here at this church for over 20 years — 22 years, actually — and was elected president of the SBC last summer.
And as you know, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in America, with over 12 million members and somewhere over 45,000 churches that cooperate with the Southern Baptist Convention. So it is an influential part of American evangelical life and has been for many, many years.
I think the pastors need to step up. I think throughout American history, pastors have had a strong voice at key moments in American political history, even into revolutionary times — maybe especially in the founding of our country.
And it’s quite interesting, over the last several years, among many conservative — you know, and by conservative, I’m not talking politically there as much as I’m talking theologically.
I’m talking about historic Christian orthodoxy. Many Bible-believing conservative evangelicals were actually being encouraged to be more quiet, to withdraw from the political process.
Some of those voices came externally, from pressure saying, “You shouldn’t mix religion and politics,” but some of those voices came internally from those who said, “In order to be faithful in our mission, we need to decouple, divorce ourselves, as it were, from some controversial political issues.”
Now, the interesting thing is that those on the theological and political left did not do so, and they had no intention of doing so. And, in fact, statistics show that people on the political and theological left are actually more politically engaged than those on the right.
So, for a period of time, I felt like you had almost a vacuum that kind of developed, a silence that was there with a lack of Christian leaders leaning in. Now, some of that has changed in recent years as people have found their voice again and engaged.
But to answer your question, should pastors engage in the political process? They absolutely should, because there are many political issues that are, at their heart, theological issues and moral issues that strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.
The immigration issue does challenge us because there are conflicting values.
There is a value of compassion, a value of wanting to care for the least of these, people who are poor and oppressed, and wanting to help, genuinely wanting to love.
Christian people give more, they serve more, they have more charities, ministries, including those that are directed at immigrants and people who are refugees and experience all kinds of crises, from political to natural disasters.
But there is also the importance of the rule of law and the protection of people who are in this country. And what you’ve had is sometimes a very cynical use by some people in power of trying to manipulate Christians by saying, “Since you must demonstrate compassion, therefore you must embrace open immigration, or you must not insist on the enforcement of the immigration laws.”
But when you think about it, that is very, very manipulative.
No one would say that because you love people or care for people, you should leave the doors of your house unlocked, or you should open up the jail cells in your own community. That’s not in any way illogical.
A person can love people, care for people, and also believe there ought to be a jail here in our county and in our city for people who do wrong. A person can love people and care for people and want humans of all kinds and all races to flourish, but also believe that a nation has not just the right, but the responsibility, to have laws to protect its own citizens and to regulate who comes in a country for all kinds of reasons.
That’s for the good of the people in the country, as well as for the good of the people who want to immigrate in that country.
People who are harmed in illegal immigration are often those who are the immigrants who are trafficked in ways that are cruel and inhumane.
The abortion issue, the sanctity of human life, has been a critical issue for us because what it means to be a human being, and whether human life is sacred, made in the image of God, is a deeply theological issue. I mean, it is, at its core, a theological issue.
And, of course, even in this midterm, there are amendments on the ballot. There are amendments on the ballot in places like Virginia, and the issue of the sanctity of human life is as relevant and as critical and as important as it has ever been.
Pastors need to continue to articulate not just how to vote in these issues, but why we need to vote those ways.
And there have been a host of issues, issues such as the redefinition of marriage, issues such as the identity of gender, the whole transgender movement. These issues are deeply, profoundly theological issues. They go back to the creation. They go back to Genesis 1 and 2.
They go back to our understanding of what it means to be a human being and our understanding of what God’s creative purpose is for us as human beings.”
