On Friday, televangelist James Robison slammed efforts to “redefine marriage” as “wars against the creation itself” that “we should oppose with all our might.”

Robison wrote on his website that the campaign for marriage equality is a “totalitarian” push to quash religious expression and increase the size of government.

Conjugal marriage and the family are the two most basic human institutions. They exist in every time and place, and they pre-exist the state. The state does not determine what marriage and family are, but they must recognize them. That’s why political attempts to redefine marriage and family are not tolerant but totalitarian. They are wars against the creation itself, and we should oppose them with all our might.

At the same time we must support policies that encourage healthy families. This requires discernment, since every half-baked bill proposed in Congress claims to be pro-family. But many policies create incentives that harm the family. Divorce rates, out-of-wedlock births, and fatherless homes have risen in every class in the United States in the last fifty years, but the decay has been catastrophic in poor communities where the welfare state has mostly replaced the traditional roles of the father and the church. This tragic unintended consequence suggests a rule of thumb: If a policy surrenders territory to the state that ought to be part of civil society, that policy will harm rather than help families in the long run.

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Secularism and progressivism, however, deny that we can know God and morality. They seek to quarantine both to a ghetto of private religious faith. This has created a secular and relativistic public square, which is exactly the opposite of what the Founders intended. We must reverse this trend and defend the truth that man has real moral knowledge, which is the foundation of just government.

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Faith encourages the virtues that help sustain the free society. It gives us hope in the future, which is under the providence of God, while preventing us from falling for utopian fantasies like the communist illusions that killed scores of millions of people in the twentieth century.

We must correct the false stereotype that faith feeds theocracy and defend the freedom of believers to apply their faith to the concerns of the day.