The same is true of religious liberty. Read the following article."The freedom of speech is a public absolute, and it can remain only so long as a sufficient segment of the public believes that it is and consents to uphold it. It is an absolute that can be destroyed by public opinion. This is where the danger lies." Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (145).
"The reason we have made peace with the sexual revolution is because we are captive to the love of money. Southern Baptist men and women want to live with the same standard of living as the culture around them, and, as the Spirit warns, we will grind our churches and our families to pieces to get there (Jas 4:1–4). Why does the seemingly godly deacon in a conservative Southern Baptist church in north Georgia drive his pregnant teenage daughter to Atlanta under cover of darkness to obtain an abortion? Because, however he votes his “values,” when crisis hits, he wants his daughter to have a “normal” life. He is “pro-life” with, as one feminist leader put it three exceptions: rape, incest, and my situation.
Why do Southern Baptist parents, contra Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7, encourage their young adult children to delay marriage years past the time it takes to discern whether this union would be of the Lord? Why do we smilingly tell them to wait until they can “afford” it? It is because, to our shame, we deem fornication a less awful reality than financial ruin. Why do Southern Baptist pastors speak bluntly about homosexuality and X-rated movies, but never address the question of whether institutionalized day-care is good for children, or for parents? It is because pastors know that couples would say that they could never afford to live on the provision of the husband alone. And they are right, if living means living in the neighborhoods in which they now live, with the technologies they now have. Christian pastors know that no godly woman will ever say on her deathbed, “If only I had put the children in daycare so that I could have pursued my career.” But do Southern Baptist pastors ever ask whether it might be better to live in a one-bedroom apartment or a trailer park than to follow this American dream? Rarely, because it seems so inconceivable to us that it doesn’t even seem like an option. When confronted with the challenge of a counter-cultural, family-affirming—but economically less acquisitive—life, too often we see what our inerrant Bibles define as the joyful life, and then we walk away saddened like another rich young ruler before us who wanted eternal life but wanted his possessions more (Luke 18:18–30)."
--Russell Moore
"How can Southern Baptists and other evangelicals—whether on the right or the left of the political spectrum—speak to issues of social justice and the common good without addressing what is no doubt the leading cause of “widows and orphans” in our midst? Why would Southern Baptists think and speak in one way (“muted” and “ambiguous,” in Wilcox’s words) on the issue of divorce, and quite another (full volume and unambiguous) on an issue such as homosexuality? Wilcox suggests, and I think rightly, that Southern Baptists and other conservative Protestants have been “far from untouched by the dramatic increases in divorce since the 1960s.” Wilcox writes: “It may well be that leaders and pastors are more comfortable confronting homosexuality, which probably does not affect many people in the pews, than confronting divorce, which does.” To put it bluntly, we have many more “out of the closet” multiple divorcees than “out of the closet” homosexuals in our churches. At issue here is pastoral courage. John the Baptist would put his head on a platter to speak truth to power that not even a king can have another man’s wife. John the Southern Baptist is too often not willing to put his retirement benefits on the table to say the same thing to a congregational business meeting."
--Russell Moore, "Southern Baptist Sexual Revolutionaries,"
http://moodle.sbts.edu/file.php/14845/RDM_-_SWJT_-_Southern_Baptist_Sexual_Revolutionaries.pdf
"To be blunt, those Christians who (rightly) point out that we live in a post-Christian, post-Christendom era, cannot have their cake and eat it. Being regarded as a cult was the flip side of the apostolic church coin. Standing against the dominant culture by believing that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead made the church a cult; and these claims will always be regarded as indicative of a cult mentality by the wider secular world. Do not, therefore, gleefully proclaim the death of Christendom and at the same time lament the fact that we are in danger of being perceived as a cult. History, biblical and otherwise, indicates that such a posture is incoherent."
--Carl Trueman, "Life on the Cultic Fringe," http://www.reformation21.org/articles/life-on-the-cultic-fringe.php
