Nashville (CNN) Despite the Supreme Court decision in June that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, leading evangelicals vowed this week that the fight to keep marriage between a man and a woman is not over.
“In mandating same-sex marriage for all 50 states, the Supreme Court didn’t just get marriage wrong, it got government wrong,” Jennifer Marshall, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a D.C.-based conservative think tank, told a gathering of evangelicals in Nashville on Wednesday.
Leading Christian and political conservatives met at the Gospel and Politics: The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission National Conference. The group is the political and policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian group in the country.
The conference was the second one this week by the Christian group. Leader Russell Moore interviewed presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio at a missions conference Tuesday.
Moore previously told CNN that the fight to reverse the Supreme Court’s recent ruling will be a
“This will not be resolved by a presidential election or two,” he said following the ruling. “This is a 100-year struggle in front of us in terms of what the definition of marriage and family means and should mean.”
Moore, who has met with President Barack Obama, reinforced that sentiment this week, telling the crowd to stay engaged despite widespread sentiment that the fight over same-sex marriage is finished in the wake of the high court’s ruling.
“Citizenship is an office in this country that all of us is invested in,” he said. “We engage politically. We engage socially, but we don’t forget who we are.”
To believe that conservative Christians have lost the fight against same-sex marriage is misguided, Marshall said.
“For the Christian, fatalism is a flaw. Cynicism is sin,” she said. “Replace a sense of resignation with a sense of responsibility for the future.”
Moore said Christians should not view cultural shifts on marriages as victims, but to acknowledge that times have changed.
“You and I are not in threat of persecution in America,” he said. “But we have seen in American society that the illusion of a Christian majority is now gone.”
No to same sex marriages
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Jul. 26, CMC – A Christian denomination with 52 churches in the Eastern Caribbean has passed with unanimous support a resolution opposing same-sex marriages.
At a meeting last week, the Evangelical Church of the West Indies also declared its facilities off limits for the conduct of same-sex marriages and said it will discipline any of its ministers who perform such ceremonies.
“… the Evangelical church in each of its constituencies believe and adhere to God’s divine fiat concerning marriage as being between and man and a woman,” the church says in the resolution passed at its Biennial Regional General Council.
The church, which also has congregations in New York, Canada, and French Guyana, said it believes that there is “a devilish plan and deliberate actions to subvert and change God’s declared principles of ‘a man and a woman’ to ‘two persons’”.
“We know that any such subversion or change is detrimental, destructive and diabolic,” the church said, adding that it rejects totally and unequivocally any such subversion or change.
The church further resolved that none of its ministers or pastors will perform, encourage, or support any such “marriages so called, nor will we allow any of our churches or buildings or premises be used for the same.
“Further, … any of our ministers or pastors who so acts, will be disciplined and we will seek to have his marriage license revolved…”
The church said it believes “the grace of Jehovah God provided by the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ is available and is able to bring salvation and transformation to any such person of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community or any one who practices any form of homosexuality and any other perversion of biblically unacceptable sexual lifestyle.
“We therefore resolve to treat such persons with love, compassion and make every effort to extend the Grave of God to them,” the resolution said.
Sex acts among members of the same sex and same-sex marriages are illegal in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
