Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice is urging pastors to speak up before the midterm elections, saying abortion and the sanctity of unborn life are theological questions that belong in the pulpit.

Rice, who also pastors Calvary Church in Clearwater, Florida, said pastors have a duty to engage.

"Should pastors engage in the political process? They absolutely should," he told Fox News. "Because there are many political issues that are, at their heart, theological issues and moral issues that strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture."

"I think the pastors need to step up," Rice said. "I think throughout American history, pastors have had a strong voice at key moments in American political history."

He named abortion, the definition of marriage, gender identity and immigration as issues on which Christians should feel compelled to vote a certain way.

"These issues are deeply, profoundly theological issues," he said. "They go back to the creation; they go back to Genesis 1 and 2. They go back to our understanding of what it means to be a human being, and our understanding of what God's creative purpose is for us as human beings."

In the same interview, Rice said the abortion issue and the sanctity of human life have been critical for Southern Baptists, because what it means to be a human being and whether human life is sacred and made in the image of God "is a deeply theological issue" and "at its core a theological issue."

He said ballot measures in this midterm, including in Virginia, keep the sanctity of human life "as relevant and as critical and as important as it has been," and that "pastors need to continue to articulate not just how to vote in these issues but why we need to vote those ways."

Rice said many Christians have been encouraged in recent decades, from outside the church and from within it, to "be more quiet" and "withdraw from the political process." He said the theological and political left never made that retreat.

"Those on the theological and political left did not withdraw, and they had no intention of doing so," he said. "And in fact, statistics show that people on the political and theological left are actually more politically engaged than those on the right. So what you had was, for a period of time, I felt like you had an almost a vacuum that kind of developed, a silence that was there with a lack of Christian leaders leaning in."

He also warned pastors not to let appeals to compassion be used to silence a defense of the law.

"There is a value of compassion, a value of wanting to care for the least of these people who are poor and oppressed and wanting to help," Rice said. "But there is also the importance of the rule of law. The protection of people who are in this country." He called it "very, very manipulative" to argue that compassion requires open immigration or a refusal to enforce immigration law. "No one would say that because you love people or care for people, you should leave the doors of your house unlocked, or you should open up the jail cells in your own community," he said.

Rice noted that Christians do more charity than any other group in the United States.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination, with more than 12 million members and more than 45,000 cooperating churches. He was elected president last summer after more than 40 years in the pastorate, including 22 at Calvary Church.