President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid revealed a rift in the Southern Baptist Convention, one that threatens to destroy its decades-old public policy organization.
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission takes theological beliefs held by Southern Baptists, whose more than 46,000 churches make them the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and applies them to the public square.
It is deeply influential in the nation’s capital. ERLC staff have helped push religious freedom and human rights bills over the finish line in Congress, also focusing on conservative priorities like opposing same-sex marriage. They built support for overturning Roe v. Wade, and they’ve advanced anti-abortion laws in the years since. They walk the halls of power, meet with world leaders and maintain relationships with lawmakers across the political spectrum. They even have a friend third in the line to the presidency: House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, was once a trustee on the ERLC board.
But the ERLC is at an inflection point. Southern Baptists have been eating each other alive this summer over the commission’s purpose and whether it has a future at all. Internecine feuds are spilling into public view, pastors are fighting on social media and ERLC President Brent Leatherwood is facing immense personal and political pressure from opponents within his own faith.
After weeks of turbulence, Leatherwood emerged from an ERLC meeting this month with his board’s endorsement — which wasn’t always a given and came with a caveat.
In interviews with NOTUS, even Leatherwood’s allies acknowledged the commission’s detractors might win out in the end.
“They actually could cancel the ERLC,” said one former staffer, who asked to speak anonymously to be frank.
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For a few hours this summer, the evangelical world thought Leatherwood had been canned for saying Biden’s choice to step down from the presidential race was a “selfless act” and “the right decision for our nation.”
It’s not that Leatherwood is a Democrat — in the same statement, he criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting abortion access and same-sex marriage, and he urged Republicans to return to anti-abortion positions they’d once held. But his comments about Biden started a firestorm among Southern Baptists, some of whom thought Leatherwood had given the president too much credit.
As the criticism reached a fever pitch, the ERLC published a press release: Leatherwood had been removed from his role leading the organization.
“We received an email that the press release was going to go out, and the press release went out the very next minute,” recalled one member of the ERLC’s board of trustees, who asked to speak anonymously to be candid.
What followed was “shock” and “confusion,” he said. The news rocketed around social media, with Leatherwood’s opponents celebrating a victory over the forces of liberalism and his allies fiercely condemning the move.
But Leatherwood had never been fired.
The next morning, the ERLC released a new statement. Then-board Chair Kevin Smith had resigned after attempting Leatherwood’s removal without a vote from the board. Smith, who did not reply to multiple interview requests, apologized in a statement to Baptist Press for acting unilaterally and said he “was convinced in my mind that we had a consensus to remove Brent Leatherwood.”
In an interview, Leatherwood told NOTUS he stands behind what he wrote about Biden. The outcry against it, he said, is the latest example of how America’s political culture “has overwhelmed” the daily aspects of life.
Leatherwood also believes any Christian ethics organization will contend with chaos like this, especially in an election year.
“We’re just going to constantly encounter criticism,” he told NOTUS when asked about Smith’s effort to oust him. “This entity is always encountering resistance because we are truthfully trying to be messengers of the light in a dark world.”
Still, when that resistance is increasingly coming from other Southern Baptists, it raises questions about how the ERLC will be able to do its work. The former ERLC staffer said the episode reflects an “institution in crisis.”
“That whole thing is just a catastrophe, by any objective measure,” this person added.
Another former staffer said relentless criticism from far-right factions in recent years has made it more difficult for the commission to retain talent.
“I love the mission, but I just can’t keep banging my head against a wall,” the second former staffer recalled one departing colleague saying.
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This fight is partly about whether the ERLC — designed to be nonpartisan — is loyal enough to Republicans and Donald Trump, as many Southern Baptists would prefer it to be.
The SBC is largely aligned with Republicans. Trump spoke to the convention’s meeting in June, telling them, “You just can’t vote Democrat.” A survey this year from Lifeway Research, which is affiliated with the convention, found that 64% of lay Southern Baptists and 90% of their leaders described themselves as politically conservative.
For his part, Leatherwood came up working in Tennessee Republican politics. He hosted a slightly less popular event during this year’s SBC meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to help Trump overthrow lawful election results in 2021 to stay in power.
But this debate is more profound than that: It’s about how the commission can represent the views of a denomination that has been roiled by infighting during a deeply polarized era.
Leatherwood says he feels he has been faithful to the SBC’s positions. The ERLC relies on convention resolutions, professions of beliefs and expertise from Southern Baptist ethicists when compiling its agenda and commenting on policy issues.
“We’re not just out here, kind of freelancing on this work,” he told NOTUS. “We only act once the convention has spoken.”
He has some high-profile supporters.
“He’s done a great job,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a Southern Baptist, told NOTUS of Leatherwood last week.
But, the senator said, Leatherwood faces a tough task. “There is no person that can speak for all Southern Baptists because that’s not how the denomination is actually formed,” Lankford said.
Even when Leatherwood states a position that has support from a majority of Southern Baptists, he can face fierce opposition from a vocal minority. For example, he doesn’t think women who have abortions should be charged with murder. He believes the SBC’s past resolutions — calling for compassion for women who undergo abortions, people Southern Baptists view as victims of abortion providers — back up his stance.
Leatherwood still wants to ban abortion. But among his loudest critics are members of an “abolitionist” anti-abortion movement that would grant fetuses equal protection under the law. They allege he has “blood on his hands” for signing a letter in 2022, alongside other anti-abortion leaders, that opposed potential state laws that would prosecute women after having an abortion and called on policymakers to target abortion providers instead.
Others are frustrated that he supports red flag laws intended to prevent gun violence, which Leatherwood’s family experienced firsthand in 2023 when his children survived a school shooting. Leatherwood and other parents from the school sought to keep the shooter’s manifesto from being published, citing fears that it would motivate similar attacks and that its dissemination would retraumatize their kids.
But for critics on the right, that’s also become a matter of tension. The shooter may have identified as transgender, according to law enforcement, so by arguing to hold back the manifesto, conservatives saw Leatherwood as either protecting the “LGBTQ agenda” or simply blocking them from prime talking point material. (The ERLC has said any parents who advocated to block the shooter’s writings from being published were doing so in their personal capacities.)
Another sore point is the war in Ukraine. Leatherwood sent a letter earlier this year calling on congressional leaders to back Ukraine, as lawmakers debated a roughly $95 billion package to help defend Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. In that letter, he noted Ukrainian Baptists have faced persecution by Russian troops, pointed to a 2022 SBC resolution that expressed solidarity with Ukrainians and condemned the GOP’s politicization of helping a longtime American ally.
Pastor Ben Wright of Texas, who served on his state SBC ethics and public policy committee, is one Southern Baptist who didn’t think the convention had spoken clearly enough for the ERLC to argue directly for a bill to send weapons of war to Ukraine.
Southern Baptists, he said, could have any number of concerns about that beyond partisan ideology. “It may be simply that they object to funding wars, which is not a crazy position for Christians to take,” Wright told NOTUS in an interview.
Leatherwood, however, thought the issue was firmly in ERLC’s wheelhouse. The Ukraine funding bill was an appropriations package, he said, and “that is practically something that we deal with and interact with on a daily basis.”
“Hundreds of Baptist buildings, and who knows how many Baptist bodies of individuals, have been obliterated by Russian bombs,” Leatherwood told NOTUS. “So no, the SBC is actually very clear on this. We want the Russians to lose, and we want Ukrainians to once again be able to live in freedom.”
This summer, these issues fueled an effort to defund the ERLC, after similar attempts in 2018 and 2022. Nobody knows the true vote breakdown — it was a room of more than 10,000 people, and it wasn’t a formal, tallied measure. But the consensus view, according to pastors who spoke with NOTUS, is that support for the resolution fell somewhere in the 30% to 40% range.
The vote seemed to ratchet up tensions among ERLC trustees. Another member of the trustee board, who asked to speak anonymously, said it caused some members to start thinking, “‘We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to take some action.’”
It’s not new for the ERLC to receive pushback. The commission used to receive angry messages over the office fax machine in the early 2000s from people complaining about its pro-refugee stances and alleging it was part of a sinister new-world government. And after then-ERLC President Russell Moore said in 2016 that Trump’s campaign had cast light on America’s “pent-up nativism and bigotry,” the commission faced constant opposition from Trump loyalists.
Moore left the ERLC in 2021 amid fierce infighting. In a letter he wrote to the board of trustees, he described a campaign of intimidation against him for wanting to address racism and sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches. Some SBC leaders, Moore wrote, wanted him to live in “psychological terror.” (His staff declined an interview request for this story on his behalf.)
So Leatherwood isn’t surprised by turbulence. Nor was he surprised by the violent threat he received last year, which he said prompted local police to send an officer to his home. And he said it hasn’t changed his view that the ERLC is essential to the SBC’s mission: “For well over a hundred years now, the SBC has said the public square in America — the halls of Congress, the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court, the political and policy system that makes up our civic system — all of that also is included in that vision of Acts 1:8,” he said, referring to Jesus Christ’s instructions for his disciples to take the gospel to the world.
After the vote, the ERLC is trying to build more trust in its work. It recently published a frequently asked questions page, responding to the most common concerns about the commission. And Leatherwood told NOTUS the team may launch a new “office of church engagement.”
“We need to redouble our efforts to make sure that we are communicating first and foremost with churches,” he said.
ERLC trustees reiterated their support for Leatherwood after their annual board meeting this month, where the statements announcing and then reversing his firing loomed large. “We affirm and support that the ERLC president and staff continue the excellent work in which they are engaged,” they wrote.
Still, they urged caution for how the commission treads in “this polarized political environment.”
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Some pastors think the ERLC should generally say less on issues that are in the political spotlight to try to keep the peace.
Wright, the pastor from Texas, said he has voted to dissolve the ERLC twice, including in June. He worries disputes over controversial policy stances can endanger the money the convention uses for international missions, church planting and its seminaries. Churches upset about the ERLC’s positions might quit giving to the cooperative fund entirely, just 1.65% of which goes to the ERLC each year.
His advice? Don’t weigh in on as many issues — especially divisive ones. “It would mean that they aren’t advocating for as many specific pieces of legislation,” he told NOTUS. “But they could still advocate for the principles.”
Still, Wright conceded that even if the commission speaks less often, it will probably always be “controversial at some level.”
“A major reason for the fractures in the SBC related to the ERLC is that we idolize our partisan allegiances,” Wright said. “It’s the idolatry in our hearts that makes the ERLC’s job more difficult than it really needs to be.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS. Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Editor’s Note: Haley once briefly discussed her reporting on a 2021 episode of an ERLC podcast, which was co-hosted by Mr. Leatherwood. She had not otherwise interacted with him prior to reporting this story.