The ERLC Helped Kill a Bill to End Abortion in Louisiana and Never Repented. No Amount of “Defund Planned Parenthood” Campaigns Can Atone for That.
Southern Baptists broadly oppose abortion and want to see it ended. They don’t just want it to be “unthinkable” or “unnecessary,” they want it to be illegal. They rightly recognize that the unjustified taking of innocent preborn life is murder that should not be permitted under the laws of our nation.
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the SBC’s public policy arm, is the primary entity tasked with advancing a policy goal like this for Southern Baptists. If you are paying any attention at all to the ERLC’s public messaging right now, you can find them making a big deal about their efforts to encourage the Trump Administration and Congress to “defund Planned Parenthood.”
While ending the flow of taxpayer funding to abortion providers, like Planned Parenthood, is a good goal, the truth is that this was already a stated policy objective for the Trump Administration and something that Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr., committed to pursuing in follow-up questions from Senator Chuck Grassley.
Whether the Trump Administration ultimately follows through on this remains to be seen. But the reality is they had committed to pursuing this regardless of the ERLC. Of course, Southern Baptists, whether they are card-carrying abolitionists or not, want to see much more done than just defunding Planned Parenthood.
However, hidden behind the photo-ops and public relations campaign on an issue that will proceed with or without their involvement, the ERLC has a history of working against legislation that would end abortion.
The future of the ERLC will be considered and debated this summer in Dallas during the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting.
But to make informed decisions about the future of that entity, messengers must be aware of past and present efforts from the ERLC to subvert the complete end of legal abortion, contrary to the express will of Southern Baptists.
Why This Matters
Some messengers may enter the Annual Meeting in Dallas this year sincerely believing that abortion is a settled issue. Many will come from conservative states that claim to have fully banned abortion after the Supreme Court moved to overturn Roe v. Wade three years ago.
But even though certain states have closed their surgical abortion facilities, there is no state in which abortion has been truly banned. As shown by a report last year from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, baby murder endures in conservative states, especially because of loopholes that allow women to self-induce their abortions with methods such as mail-order abortion pills.
In other words, even as Roe v. Wade removed the excuse that Republican state lawmakers had to avoid abolishing abortion, there are still significant numbers of children murdered across the nation under the cover of law, including in states that claim to have banned abortion.
Where Southern Baptists Stand
Southern Baptists have made very clear that they desire the abolition of abortion in our nation.
As articulated by a resolution advanced four years ago at the 2021 Annual Meeting in Nashville, Southern Baptists affirm with natural and special revelation that “as God’s image-bearers, all humans both display His divine worth, power, and attributes, and possess equal, objective worth before God.” The inescapable truth is that “to murder any preborn image-bearer is a sin.”
Therefore, Southern Baptists across the country must remind “governing authorities at every level” that they have “a duty before God to uphold justice, asserting their God-ordained and constitutional authority to establish equal protection under the law for all, born and preborn.”
The messengers have made abundantly and undeniably clear that they oppose any form of legalized abortion, and that they desire equal protection under the law for preborn children.
So, how did Brent Leatherwood and the ERLC respond to that?
What the ERLC Did
Despite this call for equal protection and the abolition of abortion, leaders of the ERLC have subverted, and continue to subvert, efforts from Southern Baptists to achieve that objective.
Southern Baptist grassroots activists, pastors, and state lawmakers were the leading voices behind a bill three years ago to abolish abortion in Louisiana. The legislation, which was scheduled for a floor vote mere days after the opinion that would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public, would have simply applied the exact same homicide laws already protecting born people to protect preborn people as well.
Advocates of the bill, which had advanced resoundingly out of committee, reported that they also had the votes to advance this key legislation out of the Louisiana House.
But on the morning that the legislation was to receive a vote, national pro-life organizations circulated a now-infamous letter pressuring lawmakers to avoid passing the bill, mainly under the assertion that women who willfully solicit abortions to murder their children should never be penalized.
ERLC President Brent Leatherwood was prominently featured as a signatory of that letter.
While messengers may have heard of that affair in Louisiana, they may not know that in the three years since that letter was circulated, the same document has been continually used to subvert efforts to establish equal protection under the law for preborn children across the country.
This letter, signed by Brent Leatherwood on behalf of Southern Baptists and in direct contradiction to the duly passed 2021 resolution, was used to oppose bills to end abortion in states like Missouri and Kentucky, as well as a resolution for the Republican platform in North Dakota that would have told lawmakers to codify equal protection.
When questioned by Louisiana pastor Brian Gunter about why Leatherwood worked to kill a bill that would have ended abortion in his home state, Leatherwood dodged the question and failed to articulate a biblically defensible understanding of abortion, murder, and justice. You can watch that interchange here.
Despite continued calls from Southern Baptists to remove his name from the document, which directly contradicts the express will of the messengers to establish equal protection and end abortion, Leatherwood has refused those calls.
As such, the political weight and name of the Southern Baptist Convention continue to be horrifically used and abused as a cudgel against bills to end abortion across America.
The ERLC Double-Down
During the annual meeting last year in Indianapolis, a motion was made to abolish the ERLC because of its long history of such subversions, and a sizable minority (approximately 40%) of messengers voted in favor of ending the ERLC rather than continuing to be misrepresented in the public square.
Knowing the threats to their existence, leaders at the ERLC have embarked on something of an image rehabilitation tour since Indianapolis, signaling to messengers ahead of the annual meeting in Dallas that they can be trusted with the public policy interests of Southern Baptists.
As with several other issues, the entity has not only failed to answer such concerns about their work on the abortion issue, but has doubled down on their stance against equal protection.
One frequently asked questions page from the ERLC released last year defended their stance against “criminalizing women,” baselessly claiming that such a position is indeed “the wrong approach to pro-life policies because of the danger it poses to the goal of truly ending abortion.” But they did not mention the thousands of self-induced abortions enabled each year by that stance.
That same page addressed the question of whether the ERLC supported “pro-choice legislation in Louisiana.” The premise of the question was a clear misrepresentation, because the ERLC was not receiving criticism for supporting “pro-choice legislation,” but for helping to kill legisation to outlaw abortion. They claimed that Southern Baptists in the state have “passed laws that have outlawed abortion,” even as self-induced abortion remains legal for women in Louisiana, thanks in part to their subversion.
Leaders of the ERLC regularly emphasize their Psalm 139 Project, which exists to fund ultrasound machines at crisis pregnancy centers. Again, this is a noble project, and providing women with ultrasounds to encourage life is something to be celebrated. But that’s not the primary mission of the ERLC. Many other nonprofits offer similar services. Is it too much to ask that good work like providing ultrasounds be carried out by an ERLC that does not also work against bills to end abortion completely and protect preborn children in states where such legislation is feasible?
The ERLC also continues to promote mere regulations on abortion that fall short of ending abortion and securing equal protection for the preborn. In their state policy agenda released last year, ERLC leaders named a few “examples of legislation we are encouraged to see filed this year.” Those included a fourteen-week purported abortion ban in Wisconsin, which would have left the vast majority of preborn children unprotected, as well as a born-alive protection bill in Kansas, which would have only protected preborn children who were the victims of an unsuccessful attempted murder. The bills intentionally refused to abolish abortion and codify equal protection.
What Baptists Should Do
Southern Baptists face a number of pivotal choices this summer in Dallas. Among other significant issues, like a third vote on the Law Amendment and efforts to secure long-overdue financial transparency, messengers will also be asked to decide on the future of the ERLC.
Sorrowfully, the ERLC and its leadership have shown a very consistent pattern of failing to represent the true interests of Southern Baptists in the public square. That failure has included the issue of abortion. Because of the ERLC, our nation is further away from abolishing abortion, and there is no sign of the ERLC adopting a biblical approach to that core issue anytime soon.
Some have recently suggested that all the ERLC needs is another motion instructing it to only take “positions articulated by the convention’s most recently adopted statement of faith and resolutions adopted by the convention.” But this clearly won’t work. The SBC adopted a position in favor of legislation to criminalize abortion in 2021, and less than a year later, Brent Leatherwood not only ignored that resolution but took public action as the ERLC President to oppose it.
The SBC shouldn’t have to hold the hand of an entity head to ensure they execute on the mission given to them by Southern Baptists. More motions won’t fix the problems with the ERLC. Only new leadership can do that.
Since the ERLC has subverted the abolition of abortion, the ERLC should itself be completely reformed, with new trustees, new leadership, and a new mission. If not, the ERLC itself should be abolished.
If messengers desire for the actual interests of the Southern Baptists across the country to be represented in the public square, including and especially on abortion, the fastest and most effective mechanism is successfully passing the first of two votes to abolish the ERLC in Dallas.
