At this week’s “Future Conference” at Jim Garlow’s church in San Diego, the Family Research Council’s Kenyn Cureton hosted a session on how to set up church “cultural impact teams” aimed at getting churches involved in political battles. But Cureton reminded his audience that as much as they get involved in politics, fights over issues like reproductive rights and LGBT equality are ultimately “a spiritual battle” against Satan, and their adversaries are not “the people who are pushing these ungodly agendas” but the “malevolent master” who controls them:

The battle is a spiritual battle and it’s won or lost on our knees, folks, I’m telling you. When you think about what we’re up against, I mean, who’s behind it? The Bible says we wrestle not against flesh and blood, right? Who’s behind the effort to snuff out human life through embryo-destructive research and abortion? Who’s behind the effort to indoctrinate our children with these alternative lifestyles, redefine marriage, and even ruin our military? Who’s behind the effort to drive God out government, Christ out of culture and faith out of public life? Who’s behind that? I mean, it’s pretty easy for us to understand as believers, it’s the Devil. So, always remember that those people who are pushing these ungodly agendas, they’re not the real enemy. We need to have compassion on them and love them and try to win them to Jesus and bring them to the foot of the cross so they can be set free by the grace of God, amen, because they are simply pawns in the hand of a malevolent master, they’re caught in the snare of Satan and they need to be set free, right? So we need to be on our knees about this thing, because if we just fight this in the flesh, we ain’t gonna win.

This, he said, means that in addition to working to change public policy, churches should maintain teams of “intercessors” to pray for God’s involvement in their political battles.

FRC’s president, Tony Perkins, has similarly called LGBT rights advocates “pawns” of the Devil, despite claiming that his group would never demonize gay people .