NASHVILLE — 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 long one.
“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.”
