By Bob Allen

Southern Baptist Convention ethics leader Russell Moore reacted with shock and disbelief to a grand jury decision in Staten Island, N.Y., not to indict a police officer captured on video using a chokehold to subdue a non-compliant but unaggressive black man that led to the man’s death.

Moore, president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said in a podcast interview less than an hour after learning about the verdict that he was “shocked and grieved” and “wondering what could possibly be the explanation” for the grand jury’s verdict that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge police officer Daniel Pantaleo with a crime in the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner in July.

Garner, a 350-pound man with a history of selling untaxed cigarettes, is seen in video taken by bystanders saying “I can’t breathe” several times before going into cardiac arrest. Medical examiners ruled the cause of death compression of the neck and chest during physical restraint, complicated by asthma, heart disease, obesity and high blood pressure.

“There is no excuse that I can think of for choking a man to death for selling illegal cigarettes,” Moore said. “This is about cigarettes. This isn’t a violent confrontation. This isn’t a threat that anybody has reported, a threat of someone being killed. This is someone being choked to death. We have it on video with the man pleading for his life. There is no excuse for that I can even contemplate or imagine right now.”

Moore, in his second year as Southern Baptists’ top spokesman for moral and religious liberty concerns, said in the 10 days since a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., reached a similar decision not to indict a white police officer in the death of an 18-year-old black man in August, he has learned that there are “some unreconstructed racists in American society,” including “some who continue to come and to sit in pews of churches and pretend as though they are disciples of Jesus Christ.”

After saying simply that Christians should talk about why white and black Americans view the events in Ferguson differently, Moore said he has gotten responses “that are right out of the White Citizen’s Council material from 1964 in my home state of Mississippi, seeing people saying there is no gospel issue involved in racial reconciliation.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “There is nothing that is clearer in the New Testament than the fact that the gospel breaks down the dividing walls that we have between one another. The gospel is what turns us away from hating our brother so much so that John says in 1 John 3 that the one who hates his brother is not of the spirit of Christ, but is of the spirit of the evil one, of the spirit of the devil. If that is not a gospel issue then I don’t know what is.”

Moore said he agrees with upholding the rule of law, but the Bible says in Romans 13 “that the sword of justice is to be wielded against evildoers.”

“Now, what we too often see still is a situation where our African-American brothers and sisters, especially brothers, in this country are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be executed, more likely to be killed,” he said. “I just wonder what the defenders of this would possibly say. I just don’t know. But I think we have to acknowledge that something is wrong with the system at this point and that something has to be done.”