The resignation of Brent Leatherwood on July 31 marks a day of reckoning for the wayward Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), fresh off a June vote in which nearly 43 percent of Southern Baptist messengers, representing the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., demanded the entity’s abolition.
It’s not hard to see why. The ERLC is the politically compromised arm of evangelical elites who rake in money from well-meaning conservative Christians and utilize it against our values.
Betrayal After Betrayal
In May 2022, Louisiana Southern Baptist Pastor Brian Gunter successfully recruited state representatives to sponsor the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act. The bill passed committee 7-2 along party lines and was scheduled for a floor hearing, the first abortion abolition legislation anywhere in the country to make it that far. Sadly, Gunter was about to face opposition from his own denomination’s leadership.
I, along with hundreds of Louisiana abolitionists, was in attendance at the Louisiana Capitol the morning of the floor vote when a murmur began among the crowd. An “Open Letter to State Lawmakers” urging them to oppose the bill had just been published by a coalition of ostensibly Christian and pro-life organizations — among them Brent Leatherwood.
Following the publication of the letter, Republicans helped defeat the bill. Self-managed abortion remains legal in Louisiana today, partly due to Leatherwood’s treachery. As I stood among those abolitionists, the betrayal hit like a gut punch: Our own denomination’s leaders sided against life and the SBC’s 2021 Resolution on Abolishing Abortion.
In 2023, Leatherwood betrayed gun owners when, in response to the Nashville Christian school shooting that killed six people, he lobbied for red flag gun laws, which permit the state to seize the guns of citizens who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime. Leatherwood also fought to keep the shooter’s manifesto from becoming public, even calling a law enforcement officer who released the writings a “viper” who “absolutely has to” be arrested. Why would a conservative leader want to hide a manifesto revealing anti-Christian hatred and left-wing politics?
In conjunction with other member organizations of the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), the ERLC released a statement in July supporting Rep. Maria Salazar’s DIGNITY Act to provide extended legal status to illegal aliens. This is merely the latest example of Leatherwood and the ERLC’s long history of campaigning for amnesty alongside the EIT, which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
In 2024, Leatherwood was briefly fired by the ERLC board chairman after praising President Joe Biden for the “selfless act” of withdrawing from the election and putting “the needs of the nation above his personal ambition.” Never mind that it was quite obviously a Kamala Harris-orchestrated palace coup that Joe and Jill Biden opposed. The firing was reversed hours later after a pressure campaign that included Leatherwood’s predecessor, Russell Moore.
Leatherwood appears to relish the opportunity to praise Democrats and signal his hyper-winsome, bipartisan spirit. When Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (a judge/queer-themed musical performer so far left that even Justice Sonia Sotomayor is astonished) was confirmed, Leatherwood said, “I’m hopeful we can pull back from our partisan or philosophical preferences for a brief moment and just appreciate this for what it is: history.”
All of this is part of a larger project of evangelical elites to diminish Christian support for the Republican Party and garner respectable status among the political elites, all the while funded by millions of Southern Baptist widows’ mites. In 2022, the ERLC published an article arguing that Christians should not align with either party and that there are Biblical reasons to vote Democrat. In his resignation, Leatherwood described his third-way politics as “a balance of conviction and kindness,” but it is really nothing more than a political balance between minimal faithfulness and pandering to the regime.
A New Direction
Leatherwood’s leadership at the ERLC closely mirrored the disastrous tenure of his mentor, Russell Moore. For conservatives, Moore’s 2021 resignation was a joyous day that ultimately turned out to be a pyrrhic victory, as Moore’s protégé, Leatherwood, was hired to replace him.
Since then, Moore transitioned from a subversive liberal who concealed his true convictions to obtain influence in a conservative institution into an outspoken left-wing activist who edits a “Christian” publication whose staff, between 2015 and 2022, donated exclusively to Democrats. He also joined with David French and Curtis Chang to create a left-wing small group curriculum funded by secular, left-wing foundations to infiltrate the church. It will come as no surprise to see Leatherwood similarly pull down the mask over the next five years.
During that time, the ERLC cannot be led by another Moore acolyte. As Center for Baptist Leadership Executive Director William Wolfe put it, “It is time to put the theology and tactics of the Moore-Leatherwood era firmly behind us. The last decade of the ERLC’s divisive posturing has strained its relationship with the churches it is meant to serve.”
Such failures predictably recur in organizations that fail to prioritize faithfulness and zealously guard against leftward drift. The conditions created by the last century have facilitated a culture where major institutions tend to drift left by default, unless intentionally and forcefully kept faithful by leaders who reject all moral compromise. Institutions thrive on faithfulness but perish on flattery, turning watchdogs into lapdogs for the powers they should challenge. When leaders shift their focus from accountability before God to craving respectability and relevance among elites, they succumb to the enticements of pleasing a watching world rather than fearing the watching Lord.
To safeguard against such drift, the ERLC and SBC should, first, prioritize leaders who demonstrate unwavering Scriptural and confessional alignment and a profound fear of the Lord, vetting ideas through pastors and pews, rather than elite endorsements. Second, they should establish robust accountability structures to guard against leftist drift, including fiscal and decisional transparency before trustees who eschew the rubber stamp and represent Billy Baptists. Third, they should tie decisions explicitly to biblical mandates and SBC positions with transparent decision-making processes, rejecting vague appeals to “kingdom work” as cover. And fourth, they should cultivate a culture of biblically faithful, prophetic confrontation, training the next generation of leaders to value God’s eternal approval over temporal invitations.
The ERLC’s board should break free from its pattern of hiring subversive moderates who later prove to be left-wing activists. They should hire a resolute conservative and convictional Baptist, someone with a long track record of standing firmly against the spirit of the age without compromise, and who understands his role as advocating for the interests of rank-and-file Southern Baptists in the political realm rather than representing elite sensibilities to Southern Baptists.
Day one actions of the next president should include revoking all support for the depraved “Open Letter to State Lawmakers” and exiting membership from the Evangelical Immigration Table. The egregious failures of the last 12 years necessitate the board hiring a leader willing to implement swift course corrections.