This week we welcome to the Aspester John podcast, Dr. Russell Moore, a good friend of ours,

who serves as the eighth president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of

the Southern Baptist Convention.

There are so many questions related to the church and culture in our inbox, and Dr.

Moore will help us out this week on the podcast, filling in for John Piper.

And I want to begin the week by asking you, Dr. Moore, about that very thing we call religious

liberty.

And for some of the two, too, we see that religious liberty is a very good thing for the

church.

Obviously it's a good thing.

But you believe religious liberty is a root, not merely a political freedom, but a divine

right to be defended.

According to the Christian worldview, what are some transcendent principles behind religious

liberty?

Yeah.

Tony, one of the problems that I think many Christians have is that we don't know who

the villain is when we start thinking about issues of religious liberty.

I think there are a lot of Christians today who would say, let's just shrug off religious

liberty concerns, because they assume that they're in the place of Jesus and the governments

in the place of Pilate, and so let's just do what Jesus did and not speak in our own

defense and let the government impose whatever sorts of restrictions it wants to impose.

Now on the one hand, there's a good impulse behind that, and that impulse is that the

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