R. Albert Mohler Jr. has declared another holy war in the Southern Baptist Convention, as if the nation’s largest Protestant denomination needed more side skirmishes among its institutional leaders.
In a recent wide-ranging and low-impact interview on the “Baptist21” podcast, Mohler, the sexagenarian president of a seminary once boasting the SBC’s highest student enrollment, takes aim at the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and its embattled president, Brent Leatherwood.
What prompted Mohler’s newfound skepticism about the commission’s place in Southern Baptist life is unclear. What is clear?
Benjamin Cole
Mohler has not once in four decades of public ministry expressed a single reservation about the institutional witness Southern Baptists hold in the nation’s capital.
Rather, he has elevated it, trained its key leaders and benefited from its resources as he’s cultivated his own growing political influence. Even a cursory examination of the resumes and curricula vitae of current and former ERLC and Southern Seminary personnel highlights a de facto revolving door of employment between the religious liberty commission and Mohler’s Louisville-based school.
During the recent podcast exchange about issues facing the convention as it approaches the annual meeting next month in Dallas, Mohler announced a previously undisclosed set of “grave doubts about the utility of the ERLC.”
And he didn’t stop there. It got bizarrely, if not ironically, personal.
“As God is my witness,” Mohler feigned through the vapors, he “wants to be a man of integrity” when talking publicly about the ERLC. Well fiddle dee dee, Miss Scarlett. Somebody get the smelling salts.
“As God is my witness,” Mohler feigned through the vapors, he “wants to be a man of integrity” when talking publicly about the ERLC.
There’s a generally applicable rule that every country parson and county seat lawyer knows intuitively: The more a witness prefaces his testimony with unsolicited reassurances of his own self-evident veracity, the more rigorously his claims should be tested against both his record and the truth.
Back to Mohler’s episodic broadside against the ERLC and its young president.
When asked about his views regarding the future viability of the ethics commission, Mohler — the “reigning intellectual” of American evangelicalism — coyly deployed the favorite tactic of every Antebellum parlor gossip.
“I’m asked about it in private,” Mohler dished.
Apparently Mohler sees a “problem” with the entity’s “legacy of leadership.”
By openly questioning the ongoing relevance of the commission’s ministry assignment and highlighting its internal leadership challenges, Mohler has emboldened calls for its abolishment and dealt a blow — perhaps fatal — to the peer administration of a sister convention entity.
Russell Moore preaching in chapel at Southern Seminary.
All of which seems strange coming from Mohler, given his outsized role in creating the ERLC in the first place.
In the 1990s, Mohler oversaw much of the convention’s program and structure committee, which shifted convention ministry assignments, abolished nearly all of its various commissions, and redistributed Cooperative Program allocations to “meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
Mohler’s hand in folding the convention’s many public policy channels into a single Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is a matter of unchallenged and documented history.
Barely a decade later, he went to the convention floor in 2009 and petitioned then-SBC President Johnny Hunt to appoint a grandiose task force with sweeping authorization to reimagine the future of the SBC’s cooperative enterprise.
Never one to underestimate the import of his own strategic impulse, Mohler heralded the “elegant simplicity” of his motion and inflated the moment as a “turning point” in convention history. The following year, Mohler’s brainchild committee delivered with great fanfare to convention messengers a “bold” agenda for missionary expanse that completely sidestepped any reference to the “utility” of the ERLC.
Instead, the 2010 report Mohler scripted glossed over the commission’s ministry assignment entirely, calling only for the convention’s churches to “renew efforts” to “preserve religious liberty.” (Note: A recent convention-authorized reassessment of the 2010 effort Mohler spearheaded acknowledges its evangelistic and ministry impotence.)
Bottom line: With two bites at the convention apple over as many decades, Mohler not once addressed a single concern regarding the commission’s utility, its place within Baptist polity, or its effective and efficient witness in the nation’s capital.
Yet now, after nearly forty years of “thinking in public,” Mohler announces rather sheepishly to the Baptist21 audience that he doesn’t even “know what a presence in D.C. for the SBC looks like.”
To which we simply say: Blessed convention, remembrance is thine!
In 1995, Mohler assured the convention that “every question” about its public policy arm had been “asked” and “every proposal evaluated.”
In 2000, Mohler was himself named “founding fellow” of the ERLC alongside other intellectual Baptist powerhouses like former Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson and New Orleans Seminary’s Steve Lemke.
In 2013, Mohler told the gathered masses during the ERLC inauguration of his protege Russell Moore — held at Capitol Hill Baptist Church no less — that the commission’s work was “well established and much respected.”
In 2014, Mohler’s seminary forged a “new partnership” with ERLC to raise up “a corps of future pastors and professors to be a gospel-focused voice … on Capitol Hill.”
And as recently as 2018, the ERLC trustees “unanimously endorsed” Mohler for its “Distinguished Christian Service” award and commended him for being a “consistent voice” in the public square.
Al Mohler (Baptist Press)
Apparently, Mohler’s personal concerns about the ERLC’s “leadership” and “utility” have a rather recent vintage.
One is left wondering what has changed.
Meanwhile, there are rumblings that current SBC President Clint Pressley — himself a former trustee chairman of Southern Seminary — has been shopping a motion to abolish the ERLC at the coming Dallas convention.
At a recent faculty breakfast in Fort Worth, for instance, Pressley told a room full of seminary professors that a successful motion to end the ERLC had to come from someone other than the cast of pastors who made a similar effort last year.
The coincidence of Pressley’s reported platform machinations and Mohler’s now public shift regarding the ERLC’s future are worth noting. Especially given Pressley’s candid acknowledgment during a forum last year that Southern Seminary’s president would be his “first call” in a convention crisis.
To be abundantly clear — and, of course, speak with integrity — I must admit that I will support every effort to defund, abolish and eliminate the ministry assignment of the ERLC at this year’s annual meeting.
What I won’t attempt, God willing, is to pretend that my support for that effort is rooted in some sweeping historical perspective on Southern Baptist’s public witness or some hidden reservation about its “utility” I’ve held close in my breast pocket for four decades.
Last year, an impromptu effort to end the ERLC garnered around 40% of messenger approval. This year, the battle over its future is certain to rage again.
And while Mohler cannot be credited with anything resembling consistency in either his personal or institutional views about the ERLC and its “problematic legacy of leadership” or “utility,” he can most certainly be credited with one persistent instinct.
He has an uncanny ability to discern the precise direction of a marching army. And he knows exactly how to time his pronouncements in a way that maintains plausible deniability while receiving, albeit quietly, the honors of a battle-savvy general the moment the blood stops flowing in the streets.
Benjamin S. Cole is a crisis communications consultant who lives in Plano, Texas, and tweets about SBC life under the pen name The Baptist Blogger. He is co-host with Mark Wingfield of BNG’s podcast, “Stuck in the Middle with You.” He is a former Congressional staffer in the U.S. Capitol and still works in political consulting.