An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Scott Colter as leader of the Center for Baptist Leadership. In fact, Colter retweeted the statement from the Center for Baptist Leadership, which is headed by William Wolfe.
The far-right in the Southern Baptist Convention — which doesn’t like to be called “far-right” — has launched a new campaign against the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
The chief complaint this time is that the Nashville-based agency is too “woke” and has no meaningful influence with the Trump administration.
Hating on the ERLC is nothing new. The complaints go back to the 2016 presidential election when then ERLC head Russell Moore denounced Republican candidate Donald Trump as morally unfit for office.
The nation’s largest Protestant denomination swings pretty conservative, and a majority of its pastors and members form the white evangelical base of Trump’s success story. In time, Moore was pressured out of that role — not just because he was and remains a never-Trumper but also because he sided with survivors of clergy sexual abuse calling for major reform in the SBC.
Brent Leatherwood
His successor, the lesser-known Brent Leatherwood, has been equally unpopular with the most conservative side of the SBC, which has made repeated attempts to fire or defund the agency altogether.
The latest of those was a motion at last summer’s SBC annual meeting to abolish the ethics agency. Doing so would have required a two-thirds majority vote over two consecutive years, and the motion by Tom Ascol of Florida got only about 25% of the vote.
ERLC critics
In today’s SBC, the far-right most often is rallied by Calvinists, who see the world in stark binaries and very little gray. You’re either for their agenda or you’re against it. And they are all in on Trump and MAGA, while being against women in leadership roles, stridently against abortion and gun control and homosexuality.
Ironically, one of the chief antagonists toward the ERLC is a woman, conservative columnist and book author Megan Basham. Her book Shepherds for Sale, published last year amid much controversy, takes a hit at the ERLC.
And on March 27 she published an article on the online forum Christ Over All that declares the ERLC is invisible and inconsequential in the Age of Trump. That article is being shared widely on social media by critics of the agency.
A week later, another of the ERLC’s chief critics, the Center for Baptist Leadership, published a “Statement of Support for the Rule of Law, the Deportation of Illegal Aliens, and a Response to Baptist Press and the ERLC.” That group is led by William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official and graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The Center for Baptist Leadership statement
In this statement, Wolfe and the Center link criticism of the SBC’s news service, Baptist Press, with support for the Trump administration’s immigration policies and disdain for the ERLC.
“The Center for Baptist Leadership wholeheartedly supports the rule of law and its impartial application to all people,” the statement begins. “As Romans 13:1 commands us, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”
It also joins the conservative argument that empathy is weakness and accuses Baptist Press of publishing “multiple articles seeking to weaponize empathy and encourage Baptists (and all Christians) to side with illegal alien lawbreakers against the Trump administration’s reasonable and judicious immigration enforcement policies.”
The statement complains about Baptist Press reporting on ethnic fellowships within the SBC asking for kinder treatment of immigrants from the Trump administration and berates Leatherwood for merely commenting on the story.
“This is little more than weaponized empathy applied through a CRT-focused lens.”
“This is little more than weaponized empathy applied through a CRT-focused lens. It both undermines Scripture and encourages Christians to embrace anarchy over respecting the rule of law and to prioritize illegal aliens over their citizen neighbors in America,” the statement declares.
“We denounce these efforts by the ERLC and Baptist Press to subvert America’s national sovereignty in the name of Southern Baptists, promote lawlessness and foster further division in the SBC along ethnic lines by using language laden with the unbiblical framing of CRT and intersectionality as applied to immigration policies.”
Trump’s deportation agenda is not “contrary to the revealed will of God,” the statement says, drawing on a line from the Baptist Faith and Message doctrinal statement. “Therefore, in keeping with the Scriptures and our statement of faith, immigration laws in America should be obeyed by all.
“Furthermore, we support the Trump Administration’s committed efforts to protect American citizens and our national sovereignty through the mass apprehension and deportation of illegal aliens, regardless of their ethnicity or religious affiliation.”
Trump, the statement declares, is fulfilling Romans 13:4 to be “God’s servant for your good” and “to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”
Basham gets it wrong and right
Megan Basham
Basham, meanwhile, begins her argument against the ERLC with some selective amnesia about SBC history. She overstates the influence the SBC Christian Life Commission (previous name of the ERLC) had in the 1993 passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
She is correct in saying RFRA was a needed landmark bill to protect religious liberty, but she neglects to mention that one of the main organizers of this effort was BJC — the religious liberty group the SBC had kicked to the curb three years earlier for being too liberal.
She cites the SBC being at the table in RFRA negotiations as a high-water mark of effective influence in Washington, D.C., while ignoring that RFRA never would have happened without the coalescing leadership of BJC. And while ignoring the fact that the SBC was quite late to the conversation on RFRA.
The back story here is that leaders of the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC hated BJC and its then leader, James Dunn, with equal passion to how today’s far-right in the SBC hates Russell Moore and Brent Leatherwood. They did not like BJC’s support for a traditional Baptist view of church-state separation and they wanted the religious liberty watchdog agency to get involved in the anti-abortion debate.
“Leaders of the ‘conservative resurgence’ hated James Dunn with equal passion to how today’s far-right in the SBC hates Russell Moore and Brent Leatherwood.”
After the SBC stopped funding BJC — a coalition of Baptist denominations — the mission statement of the Christian Life Commission was changed to include more direct advocacy for conservative political causes. Soon after, the entity’s name was changed to Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to codify this new mandate, with a heavy emphasis on abortion.
Basham may be right, however, in saying today’s ERLC is a lightweight in Washington, D.C., politics. After all, it’s hard to compete with the powerhouses of the nondenominational Religious Right such as Family Research Council, Family Policy Alliance, Alliance Defending Freedom and others spawned by Focus on the Family.
Washington politics is yet another place where parachurch ministries have trounced denominational entities in influence. There is no denominational agency in Washington that carries the influence of the nondenominational powerhouses.
Ironically, Basham cites Michael Whitehead as a symbol of the ERLC’s former influence in Washington. He was legal counsel for the SBC agency after the split with BJC. And she rightly says of Whitehead: He “sits on the board of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal advocacy group that continues to be heavily involved in drafting federal- and state-level legislation on religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.”
Whitehead and his son, Jonathan Whitehead, also a lawyer, continue to be heavily involved in far-right SBC politics today. The younger Whitehead currently serves as an ERLC trustee.
According to Basham, the elder Whitehead says the ERLC has zero visibility in the capital city.
“They’ll offer comments to the press, then they’ll write that they are involved, and they’ll take credit when an issue they’re supporting prevails. But they really are not viewed as being actively helpful on advancing conservative politics on the Hill,” he told her.
Eric Teetsel
What’s worse, she continues, is that she interviewed 19 lawmakers and Hill staffers who “all echoed that assessment.”
One of the Capitol Hill insiders she references is Eric Teetsel, who previously served as chief of staff for Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, then as director of faith outreach for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential run and eventually as vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation — creators of Project 2025.
“Unlike many sources I spoke to on the Hill, Teetsel is familiar with the ERLC. Very familiar. And that familiarity has not bred confidence,” she says.
“They’re completely and entirely worse than useless.”
“As a Southern Baptist who happens to be an expert in what they’re supposed to be doing, I can tell you, they’re completely and entirely worse than useless,” he told her. “They are actively counterproductive to the ends that Southern Baptists ought to expect from an entity that purports to be the public policy arm of their convention. When it comes to protecting life, family stuff — you know, the basic conservative things where all the movement groups in town would tend to align — they’ll sign coalition letters, but that’s nothing. It’s meaningless. Those agenda items are going to happen anyway, because other groups that are more influential and effective than the ERLC are driving them. The ERLC just hops on board and takes credit.”
Then Basham takes on Leatherwood for championing some forms of gun control (he had a child at the Nashville school where a shooter killed six people in 2023). Leatherwood’s critics from the far-right have argued for two years now that Leatherwood’s personal experience as a parent has shaded his view on an issue the SBC doesn’t agree with him on and has not asked him to address.
Basham also links that to other “woke” ideas she sees the ERLC dabbling in: “He provides regular comments to legacy media outlets only too-happy to have an opportunity to highlight evangelical leadership seeming to oppose the GOP on progressive-coded issues. The ERLC continues to be heavily involved with the George Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table, registering opposition to President Trump’s border policies. And while not as vocally anti-Trump as Moore, Leatherwood has stirred controversy by echoing highly questionable Democratic talking points, like praising President Biden’s selflessness when his party forced him out of the presidential race.”
That latter issue regarding Biden got Leatherwood fired for a day by the chairman of his board acting alone. The full board later reinstated Leatherwood.
On the whole, though, Basham has opened up a new line of attack against Leatherwood and the ERLC that could be the most effective offensive yet: The SBC needs bolder and more visible representation in Washington.
“If Southern Baptists are to have a policy arm, it should be one where its presence and influence have consequence among our nation’s leaders,” she writes. “Whether seen as partners or opponents, they should know that the ERLC is a force to be reckoned with.”
What’s old is new again. Southern Baptist leaders in 1990 and 1991 said the very same thing, and that’s how the ERLC came to exist.
Related articles:
What’s old is new again: Conservatives threaten funding over SBC’s ethics agency
The TheoBros can’t quit Russell Moore | Analysis by Mark Wingfield
BJC changes bylaws to trim SBC members