Family Research Council President Tony Perkins wrapped up his group’s annual “Watchmen on the Wall” pastors’ conference by warning the conservative pastors in the audience that although they “may have five years” before they are dragged “kicking and screaming” out of their churches if the Supreme Court strikes down same-sex marriage bans, they should start preparing their congregations for “persecution.”
“We are about to be challenged to the very core of what it means to be a Christian,” he said. “If the court hands down this decision redefining marriage for America, they’re not going to come and take you, dragging and kicking and screaming out of your church in the next six months. You may have five years.”
“But let me tell you who’s going to face it first,” he said. “It’s your folks that are sitting in the pew.”
He said that pastors should tell their congregations that there is no middle ground on gay rights and that “they live all for God or they don’t live for him at all.” It’s “time to teach them” to “resist unrighteous and unlawful government,” he added.
Perkins told them that he was not being hateful because “I love God and I love people.”
“I cannot think of anything that would be a greater display of hate than to know the truth and not speak it,” he said.
Later in his speech, Perkins repeated his claim that the supposed persecution of Christians in America resulting from LGBT equality and reproductive rights is encouraging the violent oppression of Christians in the Middle East by groups like ISIS.
“Understand that we don’t live in a vacuum here in America,” he said. “What we do here has consequences elsewhere. If we step back and allow this growing intolerance of Christianity here at home at the hands of our own government, Christians will die at the hands of terrorists and tyrants in faraway places. If we are silent about the intolerance here at home, we have given the green flag for those abroad to target and persecute our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
