In his sermon to Robert Jeffress’ First Baptist Church of Dallas on Sunday, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins claimed that the U.S. government’s supposed “hostility” to Christians in America is giving the “green light” to groups like ISIS that persecute and kill Christians abroad.

“If we step back and allow this growing intolerance of Christianity here at the hands of our own government,” he said, “Christians, listen to me friends, Christians will die in lands far away.”

Following a discussion of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision and the persecution of conservative Christians that groups like the FRC claim will result from it, Perkins told the congregation, “We have allowed our own government to send a message that Christians in America don’t care about Christianity here at home. How could they possibly care about it in the Middle East?”

He then related a horrific tale of four Christian boys being beheaded by ISIS, violence that he claimed the American government gives a “green light” to because of its “hostility” toward U.S. Christians.

“We’re not being asked to die for Christ in America. We’re simply being asked to live for Christ in America,” he said. “But when we as Christians here in America shrink back from living for Jesus and we tolerate our own government’s hostility to Christianity, terrorists and tyrants in other governments will see that as a green light to persecute and to kill our brothers and sisters, and we cannot tolerate that as Americans.”

This is just Perkins’ latest attempt to connect the Religous Right’s claims of persecution at the hands of a secular government to the violent persecution of Christians at the hands of oppressive governments and terrorist groups like ISIS.