Alliance Defending Freedom, a Religious Right legal group that resists LGBT equality and women’s access to legal abortion in the U.S. and globally, has published an interview with its new president Mike Farris on its “Freedom Matters” podcast. Farris said in the interview that he has a “clear sense of God beckoning me in this direction” and that “God has seemed to be preparing me for this for a long time.”
Farris described himself as a problem-solver by nature, and said ADF was founded to address “the general erosion of religious freedom” as well as “attacks” on marriage, human life, and the right to “preach the gospel” and “live the gospel.”
“My goal here is to win,” he said, identifying “winning” this way:
Winning means religious freedom is robustly protected. Winning means Roe versus Wade is reversed. Winning means that same-sex marriage by judicial edict is reversed, and we go back to the states and let the states make their own policy on this.
The “left elites” want to restrict religious freedom, he said, and “that battle is at a pitched fever [sic] right now.” Farris said winning won’t be easy because “the other side is well funded, well organized, smart, and they don’t play fair.” But, he said, “I believe we can win because I believe in a big God and I’ve seen Him deliver before.”
In response to a suggestion that many listeners might believe religious liberty battles were won with the election of Donald Trump, Farris said that things could actually get worse. At the state and local level, he said, some governments could be “all the more antithetical to Christian causes” as a reaction to Trump. He predicted “the persecution’s going to pick up in places like California, Massachusetts and New York…maybe Austin, Texas…I’d expect to see some persecution in places like Austin.”
