Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
#PrayForHobbyLobby: Intercession on Religious Liberty and the Supreme Court
#PrayForHobbyLobby: Intercession on Religious Liberty and the Supreme Court
Jan 17, 2026 5:56 PM

On Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. ET, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, both of which will have a profound impact on the future of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in America.

Thus,Hobby Lobby supporters across the country have been invited to offer their prayers in support of pany, and I encourage you to participate.You can help spread the word by changing the avatar on your social media accounts and posting with the hashtag #PrayForHobbyLobby. Although the Court will be hearing arguments tomorrow, I would encourage us to begin our intercession today.

Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission explains:

The government is telling the Hobby Lobby owners, the Green family, that their free exercise rights aren’t relevant because they run a corporation. They’re telling these Anabaptist woodworkers and the Catholic Little Sisters of the Poor and ministries of all sorts all over the country that what’s at stake is just the signing of some papers, the payment of some money.

Our government has treated free exercise of religion as though it were a tattered house standing in the way of a government construction of a railroad; there to be bought off or plowed out of the way, in the name of progress …

…We cannot accept the theology lesson the government has sought to teach us, that religion is simply a matter of what happens during the scheduled times of our services, and is left there in the foyer during the rest of the week.

I wrote last week that Hobby Lobby is ina fiery furnace of sorts. Let us pray that, in this pressing hour a Fourth Man stands close by, offering peace and protection according to a different system altogether. For the future of religious liberty and the free society, yes, but also for the further empowerment of our God-given callings, vocations, and activities in business, the family, the church, and beyond.

The ERLC providesthis helpful guide to help guide and focus our prayers:

God wants people to be free to seek him and to serve him (Acts 17:24-28).Pray for a favorable e. The cherished principle of religious freedom should receive the strongest constitutional protection it deserves.God is Lord of the conscience, not government (Acts 5:29).Pray that the justices of the Supreme Court will understand the importance of the separation of the state from the church.God can give understanding to make sound decisions (Prov.2:6-8).Pray for those who disagree with us, that God would help them understand and respect the consciences of people of faith.God can turn the hearts and minds of the justices to do his will (Prov.21:1).Pray for the Supreme Court justices, that they would be receptive to the arguments being made passionately before them.God can guide the mind and speech (Exod.4:11-12).Pray for lead attorney, Paul Clement, who will be arguing on behalf of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood. Ask God to give him clarity and wisdom, for his arguments to be persuasiveness, and for God to give him favor before the justices.

For more background on the case and its reach and implications, check out the mentary posted here on the blog:

Explainer: The Hobby Lobby Amicus BriefsHobby Lobby Owners Speak Out on HHS Mandate‘Little Victims Of The State:’ Steam-Rolling Religious Liberty In AmericaHHS Mandate: Does This Sound Like Freedom?HHS Mandate: Hobby Lobby Explains Its StanceFaith On The Line: Catholic Businessman Battles HHS MandateReligious Liberty and Business as Culture-MakingHobby Lobby in the Fiery FurnaceNotre Dame To Comply With HHS MandateGov. Jindal: The Silent War on Religious LibertyEconomic Martyrdom and the Great Irony of ProgressivismWhat Does Religious Liberty Stand Upon?Do We Need To ‘Check Our Faith At The Door?’

[product sku=”1032″]

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Tim Keller Lives
It has been reported that Dr. Timothy J. Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, teacher, bestselling author, and most importantly, preacher of the gospel, is dead. Don’t believe it. Read More… I’ve been a Christian for almost half a century, sometimes with a critical spirit toward sermons. So I’ll now write something I’ve never written before and never expect to write again: the best preacher I’ve ever heard “died” last Friday. I’ll refer to Tim Keller in...
A Campus Satire for Our Time
Lee Oser takes on woke witch-hunts, corporate corruption, DEI checkpoints, and HR mandates in a novel that will have you both laughing and asking which headlines these plot points were cribbed from. Read More… As far back as the 1960s, novelist Philip Roth declared that reality in the United States was outpacing the creative capacities of the writer of fiction. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” he wrote back then, “and the culture tosses up figures daily that are...
Keep The Covenant on Your Moviegoing Radar This Memorial Day
When politicians let you down and high principles are abandoned, it’s good to be reminded that there is a group of dedicated Americans for whom Semper Fi is not a cliché but a credo. Read More… This Memorial Day, there is one movie in theaters that addresses directly the experiences of veterans. While American families are entertained by the Super Mario Bros. movie, now a billion-dollar proposition worldwide, people who prefer more true-to-life action can see the movie I mend,...
End the Fed’s Cat-and-Mouse Game to Tame Inflation
An increasingly politicized and power-hungry Federal Reserve is doing the economy, and the average American, little good with its short-term “fixes” for inflation. We need to return to restraint and independence from shifting ideological winds. Read More… Nine times. If you’ve seen the classic ’80s film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you recognize and can hear the principal’s voice. Ferris, an overconfident and overzealous teenager, has managed to ditch school with his two pals—again. The movie depicts a classic cat-and-mouse game...
Don’t Divinize the State
Integralists’ bid bine church and state will result in reaction and violence against the Church, its leaders and pastors, and laypeople. Better to pursue genuine Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Read More… One consequence of what Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce calls our present “age of secularization” is the paradoxical modern tendency of atheists to divinize politics and the state. What the Church once undid, ideology would rejoin. In its extreme form, we see this in fascism, Nazism, munism....
Are High School Debates Rigged Against Conservative Teens?
Should conservative and Christian high school students continue to debate on the national level even if the judges are biased against them? Yes. Read More… I keep rereading James Fishback’s essay on high school debate. Published May 25 in the Free Press, he called out the national circuit of high school debate for being partisan, polarized, and punitive toward any students with sane, moderate, or conservative arguments. In a way, he’s right. I’ve coached students at the Durham Academy Cavalier...
Hong Kong Court Denies Jimmy Lai’s Petition to Terminate Trial
The ruling is the latest setback for Jimmy Lai’s legal defense in his National Security Law trial. Read More… The Hong Kong High Court has rejected a request by pro-democracy activist and newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai to terminate his ing trial under the city’s so-called National Security Law (NSL), according to Reuters. Lai, a well-known figure in Hong Kong’s media industry, has been fighting tirelessly for his freedom amid the challenging political climate. The trial, which centers on charges related...
Liberty Is Not the Product of Any One Religion
A debate over whether Christianity is necessity for freedom and democracy to flourish misses the point: no one religion has a monopoly on planting the seeds for liberty. Instead, freedom is the very essence of what it means to be human. Grasping this will make cooperation between civilizations more likely. Read More… Paul D. Miller, a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University, has argued in a recent essay in Christianity Today that Christianity is not necessary...
Jimmy Lai Denied U.K. Human Rights Lawyer—Again
The Nobel Peace Prize–nominated Hong Konger has been dealt another legal blow in his defense against “foreign-collusion” charges under the Beijing-inspired National Security Law. Read More… Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance has rejected Jimmy Lai’s appeal challenging the denial of access to U.K. counsel. In November of last year, a national mittee denied Lai, a U.K. citizen, the right to add King’s Counsel Tim Owen, a veteran U.K. lawyer specializing in the rights of political prisoners, to his defense...
What Is Liberty’s Global Future?
A new Freedom House report on Free, Partly Free, and Not Free countries is out, and liberty appears to be on the decline. Yet there is still hope that 2023 can turn out to be a turning point toward greater liberty and democracy, one country at a time. Read More… For those of us old enough to have grown up during the Cold War, 1989 stood out as the era’s transformational miracle year. Hungary recognized the 1956 revolutionaries and opened...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved