In advance of our 2025 Annual Meeting in Dallas, the Southern Baptist rumor mill says to expect a motion to defund the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the SBC. This rumor is all the more believable since similar motions have been made repeatedly in the recent history of the Convention.
The question before the Convention in these previous motions, all of which have failed, is not a question of any one policy, or even of the overall direction of the ERLC. The question is whether we should have an ERLC at all.
I unapologetically believe that the work of our mission boards is and should be prioritized over our other common endeavors. I would go further to say that theological education is more necessary to the health of our churches than is the work of the ERLC. I will not argue that the ERLC is our most important entity.
I can safely say this, though: We need the ERLC more than we ever have needed it.
It is difficult to pin down a date when the ERLC was started. To do so, you have to choose which successor groups count as a beginning of the ERLC. But whichever of the possible dates you may choose, we can observe two things to be true.
First, the ERLC was established at a time when not one person in the United States of America had any trouble answering the question, "What is a woman?" or "What is a man?" Not a single state in the United States of America would grant a no-fault divorce. This was an America in which someone like Wilbur Mills, the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, could lose his political career just because he was seen in the company of a stripper. Abortion was illegal coast-to-coast. People were justified in trusting that their children could go to VBS and not be molested by a volunteer or a pastor.
In that environment, Southern Baptists concluded that we needed a Southern Baptist entity advocating for ethics.
In contrast, look at the moral chaos around us today. And before someone accuses me of "trying to bring back the 1950s" and chastises me for hearkening back to a decade filled with racism, let me say that I'm not having any of it. Our discourse is chock full of racism and antisemitism right now, only without stable two-parent homes, without dignity in civic life, and without sexual morality. I cannot fathom how anyone could conclude that we have less need for a Southern Baptist entity advocating for ethics than we had when the ERLC was founded.
Second, the ERLC was established at a time when Americans were overwhelmingly convinced about the rightfulness and importance of religious liberty. E. Y. Mullins, writing about the "Axioms of Religion," treated religious liberty as a foregone conclusion, barely articulating even a modicum of a rationale for it, naively concluding that no such defense was needed in an America in which everyone had conceded the truth and necessity of religious liberty (you'll find a better effort put forth by Roger Williams). The American ideal set itself up in opposition, at first against the state churches of Europe, and later against the state atheism of global communism. To be an American was to believe in strong, free churches operating within a strong, free state.
In that environment, Southern Baptists concluded that we needed a Southern Baptist entity advocating for religious liberty.
In contrast, the state of affairs today is far more bleak. States like Colorado and Washington persist, even in the face of adverse Supreme Court rulings, in their demonic persecution of Christians in their philosophical effort to subjugate Christianity to the competing infertlility religion exemplified by SOGI laws. Oregon v Smith is still the law of the land, and although the judicial branch gives every evidence of being robustly committed to RFRA and RLUIPA, these are mere congressional statutes, and not constitutional amendments—highly vulnerable to any Democratic majority in Congress. Or will it even require a Democratic majority? After all, we live in a time when the Republican President of the United States is fighting in the courts to protect abortion-by-medication. One congressional vote to repeal RFRA and RLUIPA and the whole framework of American religious liberty could be in grave peril.
And this is not the only threat. We live at a time when people pretending to be Baptists…even pretending to be Southern Baptists…openly declare their interest in the establishment of state Christianity and repudiate Article XVII of The Baptist Faith & Message. If we could go back to the days when the ERLC was founded and predict that this state of affairs would come to be in 2025, they would have laughed us out of the meeting hall.
Less need today for an entity advocating for religious liberty? How could anyone even start to make that case?
And so, it seems to me that the only way to argue that we do not need the ERLC today is to argue that it was a fool's errand to begin with. If we take that position, it will put us at odds with not only our spiritual great-grandparents and our spiritual grandparents, but also with our spiritual parents. During the Conservative Resurgence, the generation ahead of us worked so hard to wrest the ERLC out of the hands of leadership that was advocating for abortion on demand and was inviting pornographers to speak at ethics conferences. They did that because they saw needs that their forebears had identified long ago. Those needs are even greater now. That's why I will not support any efforts to mothball the ERLC.
