The ERLC is an Embarrassment to the SBC
It’s been a wild 24 hours for Southern Baptists. First, we were told that Brent Leatherwood had been removed from his position as President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Then, we were told that he wasn’t—and that Kevin Smith was to blame.
Don’t buy it. Brent might still hold the job, but Kevin Smith made the right call. He had support from the ERLC’s Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees—until he didn’t.
How should Southern Baptists understand what’s going on? We strongly believe that whatever happened, Leatherwood still needs to resign or be fired (again). In order to explain why that’s the case, let’s first consider how congregationalism functions in SBC life.
Southern Baptists, Congregationalism, and the Convention
In his sermon at the 2024 Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference, Pastor Jimmy Scroggins amusingly described the process that Southern Baptist churches typically follow when hiring a new pastor. We like to think we are being biblical in such important decisions, but the truth is that we are more likely being professional or “congregational.”
Of course, the most pertinent part of congregationalism is the vote, which is intended to show the will of the body present at the church, organization, or association’s business.
However, one feature of congregationalism is that when you play, you set yourself up to lose. The people you preside over or will preside over believe, and perhaps rightly so, that you are only as good as your latest victory or failure.
Previous failures usually do not factor into the decision to move forward in hiring a new pastor, though, unless they were evident in the interviews, visits, and “preaching in light of a call.” You can never be completely sure which way that vote will go, but most Baptists believe that vote is nevertheless the best thing we have this side of heaven as representative of the will of the body.
The first time one of us (Chris) was called to pastor a particular church, he was warned that the vote would be low. It was, but not as low as it had been with previous hires. He received a 96% vote, with something like 10 “No” votes. That was “bad,” but still good enough to get him in without any real worries. The second church he pastored, for context, voted him in at “100%” (without taking a second vote, as churches sometimes do).
Pastors and would-be pastors differ in their opinions on what constitutes a successful vote, as do the particular churches themselves; context is not everything, but context matters a lot. Still, if you receive, say, a 75% vote and think that means you should waltz into the pulpit the following Sunday, with very rare exception, you are probably not being wise. A 75% vote means a quarter of your church is opposed to you, the direction of the church in hiring you, or something much worse that is almost certainly going to create problems that begin your very first day on the job.
Churches take a lot of other votes, too. Imagine a church has already hired a pastor, and things get dicey. Suddenly, his ministry, his job, his house, his reputation, and his geography are all on the line. He decides, whether wise or not, to take a “vote of confidence.” Suppose he receives 75% of the vote. Now, pretend you are that pastor. Would you stay, knowing that a quarter of your church no longer supports you?
Or how about if you, as the pastor of that church, propose some policy, some slate of ministry position candidates, some building or budget decision, and it receives only a 75% vote? That may not necessarily lead you to leave the church, but you can be sure that a significant portion of your church has left your lead. A vote like that, in most cases, is a major cause for concern, especially if it is about you.
What if the church does not vote on the lead pastor, though? What if the vote is to shut down the whole church? Some gray-haired deacon gets up in the middle of your member meeting and makes a motion to close its doors, even though everyone can see your church has a big budget, plenty of paid staff members, and relative “success,” or so you think.
Suppose some elderly man does that, and you think he is being unnecessarily divisive, but then, when the vote is taken, 75% of the church votes the man’s motion down. That means a quarter of the people in your church want to close its doors. And what is worse is that those who argued in favor of the motion cited all the things you have done as a pastor.
Why this illustration? Let me explain.
The Southern Baptist Convention is not an easy organization to figure out. Outsiders frequently make mistakes in describing or critiquing its polity. Some even believe the “C’” in “SBC’” stands for “Church.” The Southern Baptist Church, they will say, must be held accountable. And so, it must, except the SBC is not a single church governed from the top down, but a convention of churches, governed, in theory, from the bottom up, by something akin to congregationalism, at least, in part. But imagine with us for a moment that the “C” did stand for “Church” rather than “Convention.” What would follow?
What if the SBC were like a church? In fact, it is. It is congregationalism applied at the Convention level. There can be honest critiques of the way in which our congregational polity functions in Southern Baptist life, but the truth is that this is how most SBC churches operate. A 75% vote isn’t a win—it’s essentially a vote of “no confidence.”
Enter the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission and Brent Leatherwood.
Brent Leatherwood Has Lost the Trust of Southern Baptists
The (still) current president of the ERLC is Brent Leatherwood, successor to Russell Moore—who is now head of the very left-leaning evangelical publication Christianity Today.
Unlike the pastors in the pictures above, the people in Southern Baptist pews do not think about Brent every day. They do not think about him every Sunday. They may hardly ever think of him at all, except, perhaps, when he says something controversial, or they see him at the SBC Annual Meeting. Then, they think of him, and those thoughts are not positive.
Several times in the past, messengers to the SBC have voted down motions in their annual meetings (which are analogous to a local church’s business meetings) to either defund or abolish the ERLC.
Now, one might make the easy mistake of thinking these supposedly misguided motions are from fake people. They are the product of “fabricated moral outrage,” especially the sort we find online. After all, as SBC entity leaders assure us each year, “people on the internet” are all a clueless, nasty lot, and we should pay them no mind.
Still, this sort of motion has not come up only once, and it has not come up only once since Brent Leatherwood became the entity’s president. Let us be honest: this motion, and especially the sentiment to defund or abolish the ERLC, comes up all the time. Apparently, these people can no longer be relegated to their parent’s basement. These “keyboard warriors” are apparently so opposed to Brent Leatherwood and the organization he leads that they are willing to show up and vote to abolish the entire thing. Note that a motion was brought forth in Indy not merely to defund or reallocate money in relation to the ERLC but to abolish the entity completely.
And this motion was so crazy, stupid, and evil that virtually everyone voted against it, right? Right?
Well, if you could call 75% of the messengers (to use the numbers from the analogy above) “virtually everyone,” then maybe. But you cannot say that is “virtually everyone” when even 25% of the body is against you or, more accurately, in favor of totally abolishing the entity for which you are responsible!
And, perhaps even more importantly, it wasn’t just 25% of the vote. Some estimate the number of Southern Baptist messengers who voted in favor of Tom Ascol’s motion to abolish the ERLC was 35-45%. Something is seriously wrong with that sort of number, and Brent Leatherwood is the main party responsible for it.
Therefore, he should step down immediately.
The Track Record: Leatherwood Works Against SBC Interests
The ERLC (ostensibly) exists to assist SBC churches in navigating the intersection of faith and public life. The president of the ERLC should demonstrate some modicum of concern to represent Southern Baptist interests broadly as he accomplishes this mission. In as much as that concern would limit the activities of the ERLC and its president, such limitations would provide appropriate accountability and guardrails.
And yet, biblical accountability does not appear to be something Brent Leatherwood thinks he owes large segments of the SBC body.
In recent days, Leatherwood, accompanied by ERLC staff, was confronted outside a presser he had recently held as he continued to lobby against the release of the Nashville transgender terrorist shooter manifesto.
The incidents at Covenant School were tragic, and these are sincere victims of unspeakable evil. But being a victim does not give one the moral high ground to conceal the truth in a national issue of great importance, such as targeted violence against Christians, contrary to what Russell Moore would have you believe. Nor is Leatherwood qualified to lead the ERLC simply because he is a “Christian man who lived through his children barely surviving a school shooting,” also contrary to Moore.
Leatherwood cannot pretend that he is broadly representing Southern Baptists on this issue. Yet he carries on, seemingly using staff resources to argue a position many of the people he serves strongly disagree with.
Leatherwood has continued lobbying against the interests of large portions of his constituency, a pattern he inherited from his predecessor, the aforementioned Moore. Not long ago, he sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson in support of the continued diversion of billions of American dollars to fund war in Ukraine. Speaker Johnson has lost the support of many in his own party over this issue, and presumably many Southern Baptists as well.
Yet Leatherwood plows ahead, undeterred.
In February of this year, SBC entity heads at the IMB, NAMB, and Send Relief listened to Southern Baptists’ feedback and denied funding to the Abuse Response Commission (ARC), an outside organization with unclear operating parameters. But Leatherwood’s response at the ERLC? He knows better than Southern Baptists and stepped in with funding for ARC, likely violating SBC polity.
In sharp contrast to war funding for Ukraine, Leatherwood used his position at the ERLC to lobby for gun control in the state of Tennessee in 2023. Does any honest observer think Leatherwood’s support of red flag laws broadly represents the opinions of Southern Baptists?
Most egregiously, in 2022, Leatherwood led the ERLC to sign a letter in opposition to Louisiana legislation seeking to criminalize abortion and protect the unborn. This was in direct defiance of the will of the SBC messengers expressed in a 2021 resolution on abortion.
Brent Leatherwood has violated the trust of far too many of the men and women in the SBC pews to remain an effective leader of the SBC’s public policy arm.
For the good of the SBC, he should resign.
No Trust in the Trustees
If Leatherwood will not make himself accountable to the people of the SBC, where should that accountability come from? In the SBC system, trustees of each convention entity are appointed and tasked with representing the interests of the SBC membership.
The ERLC has 34 trustees representing states across our country. With the exception of Jon Whitehead, there has been little public pushback or inquiry from trustees regarding the clear disconnect between ERLC priorities and the SBC constituents the entity is tasked with serving. One would think that each of the issues mentioned above would warrant significant discussion from ERLC trustees as they steward accountability for the convention, but that does not seem to be the case. If Leatherwood can no longer effectively lead the ERLC, it is the trustees’ responsibility to address this situation and remove him from leadership.
The effectiveness of the trustee system is another open issue for the SBC. Public scandals come and go from the news, and the SBC trustees appear to have little public voice in challenging and directing the entities they oversee.
- Where were the trustees in the midst of a decades-long financial scandal at SWBTS?
- How many SEBTS trustees have spoken out concerning incursions of wokeness at that institution in the years surrounding the Resolution 9 controversy?
- What have the NAMB trustees publicly done to question multiple instances of egalitarian compromise at that organization over the last few years?
Some corrections undoubtedly happen behind closed doors, but the SBC is not receiving the level of accountability it needs to retain the long-term trust of its membership. It may be that trustees do not feel free to speak publicly for fear of reprisal. One would think there are multiple trustees who strongly disagree with recent actions at the ERLC but have remained silent. If the criteria for trustee appointment is primarily denominational networking, as opposed to the ability to provide skillful accountability, we should expect the yes-men brigade to continue within our trustee system.
When it comes to the ERLC, it is time for direct action. When accountability from the entity and trustees both fail, the SBC structure allows for direct accountability from its members via the messengers of the annual SBC convention.
The ERLC can be defunded or abolished from the floor of the annual convention, and an organized effort should be undertaken to do so.
Past measures have sought to disband the ERLC altogether, and this is a conversation worth having. The SBC is better off without a public policy apparatus than an undisciplined one that causes division within the convention. However, disbanding an SBC entity is much more involved than defunding it. In the near term, we can restore trust by making sure no tither dollars go to the ERLC to oppose the views of many Southern Baptists.
Another avenue for restoring trust in the trustee system would be for increased entity transparency. Efforts have been undertaken to require SBC entities to release at minimum 990-level financial disclosures. This is not a full answer to entity accountability, but it is a strong step in the right direction. With increased financial transparency, trustees will be emboldened to ask better questions in public and direct the entities as they have been tasked.
Ultimately, the trust of the SBC trustees can only be restored with increased transparency and better appointments. Six years of divisive presidential leadership and the appointments of Greear, Litton, and Barber have stacked our trustee boards with men and women who seemingly view their jobs as cheerleaders for the Convention entities as they hurl down a slippery slope into liberalism.
For trust to be restored, we need real accountability. Whatever transpired over the last 24 hours, accountability was notably absent.
Conclusion: Brent Needs to Go—and the ERLC Trustees Need Reform
Broader structural issues aside, the events of this week have made one thing clear. Brent Leatherwood has lost the broad trust of the SBC membership and should resign or be fired. Even the former Chair of the ERLC trustees, Kevin Smith (along with those trustees who initially supported Smith’s effort to chastise or remove Brent before they magically didn’t), agrees.
Again, when it comes to congregational polity, you are only as good as your most recent win or failure. Brent Leatherwood is long on triumphalism but short on victories. What is he holding onto at this point? Is the ERLC a calling, or just another career?
To put it bluntly, if Leatherwood were the pastor of an SBC church, he would know, in no uncertain terms, that he had lost the trust of his congregation. It was time for him to move on. And yet he has instead dug his heels in and is apparently willing to burn it all down just to keep his plush gig.
Instead of working to save his own skin, he should do the right thing and selflessly step down with the dignity he still has. Southern Baptists want to believe the best about our leadership, for once.
But we feel the shift. Southern Baptists are no longer giving these selfish leaders the benefit of the doubt. We were very public in our opposition to Ed Litton in his sermon plagiarism scandal. Some of us caught a lot of flak for it. The greater worry was never the plagiarism. Small details tell big stories of deeper problems. These repeated unforced errors cannot go on. Where are this person’s credentials? Why is this person a leftist? Who is he to tell the SBC what they should believe on almost any issue, much less controversial political topics? The people with the power in the SBC should be asking these questions and doing the difficult but right thing so that otherwise busy pastors like us do not have to.
Kevin Smith was right, even if, perhaps—as it is still unclear—he didn’t go about it in the exact right way.
Brent might have rallied his master, Russell Moore, to protect him this time.
But the inescapable reality still stands: Brent Leatherwood should resign or be fired—again.
