Over the past five years or so, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been fighting more and more over their Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). This relatively-new subgroup of the SBC has become a proxy for the fight between the denomination’s two factions. One of those factions, the hardliner Old Guard, recently decided to go all-out in their battle. They’re this close ” to issuing a super-dramatic ultimatum about it!
Today let’s see what the fuss is all about—and why the Old Guard just can’t win.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/3/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: The ERLC will end the SBC as an entity!
Recently, a rabid culture warrior and apologist, James White, offered his Twitter followers a prediction:
If the ERLC still exists as a funded Southern Baptist agency on June 15, 2025, well, then I would assert the SBC is finished as a meaningful entity. Yes, I know, maybe they could fire EVERYONE and start over with people who are not completely dedicated to a leftist worldview, but the chances of that are very small.
Then, he snidely suggested the SBC sell the ERLC to Christianity Today.
James White is just the latest in a very long line of rabble-rousers trying to kick-start a schism in the SBC. Over the past 5-10 years, he’s achieved a small following in hardliner Calvinist/Reformed circles. Still, he’s a literal who in this fight. A number of people in his replies correctly mentioned how little he understands about SBC rules. Even people who completely agreed with him about the ERLC understood that it can’t just vanish with a wish.
Unfortunately, those who don’t keep track of SBC politics didn’t understand White’s deadline or his snide suggestion.
The SBC’s Annual Meeting takes place in mid-June, so White’s saying that if someone doesn’t eradicate the entire ERLC (or literally fire anyone there that he doesn’t like) by the end of the Annual Meeting, then “the SBC is finished as a meaningful entity.”
White suggested that Christianity Today buy the ERLC because the editor-in-chief there, Russell Moore, headed the ERLC from 2013 to 2021. Most of the hardliners’ hatred of the ERLC comes from his leadership decisions while there. They chased him out of the ERLC—and even out of the SBC itself—but they couldn’t reshape the ERLC into a hardliner culture-warrior group. So they want it destroyed.
The sheer venom spewed by hardliners like White about their enemy has been intensifying for years. Now it appears to be reaching a fever pitch. They’ve identified the ERLC as a symbol of everything they hate about their faction enemies in the SBC. If they can’t defeat it, then they certainly can’t win control over the SBC as a whole.
What’s funny is that they might be right about what the ERLC is right now—at least in terms of SBC faction warfare.
The ERLC in its earliest years
From the early 1900s, the SBC has had something like the ERLC. Sometimes it focused on “temperance” (1908-1913) and sometimes on “Social Service” (1913-1942, then 1947-1952). From 1953 to 1997, its name was the Christian Life Commission. Of interest, Foy Valentine—its leader from 1960-1987—worked tirelessly for racial justice and fully supported abortion rights. Both emphases put him in the crosshairs of the SBC’s so-called “Conservative Resurgence,” which dragged the SBC rightward politically—and fixated it on the doctrine of inerrancy,
In 1988, the board of trustees of the Christian Life Commission elected Richard Land as their president. He was one of the Resurgence’s made men, and he was elected to firmly secure the ERLC as a hardliner stronghold. In 1997, the committee’s name changed to what it is today: the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
As this committee’s leader, Land ruled it as his own personal fiefdom for 25 years. He enjoyed a vast amount of influence with Republican leaders in America, up to and including President George W. Bush in 2001.
During his time as a major SBC leader, Land helped enshrine Christian privilege into law and get America into a war with Iraq. In 2012, he also went on record saying he’d totally use a gun to blow away a bad guy—which is just oh so very perfectly Jesusy! Forget about that turn the other cheek stuff! Oh, Land loved wading into those kinds of fights.
But in 2012, he fell afoul of cultural forces he could no longer control: He suggested in his radio show that President Barack Obama was using the death of Trayvon Martin to score political points. It was the dumbest possible take anyone could make, but it was especially shocking for him to seek attention this way. Black Southern Baptist leaders like Dwight McKissic came down hard on him. At the same time, a Baptist blogger discovered Land had plagiarized some of his commentary—but it was the commentary itself that sank him.
In response to all that controversy, the SBC’s Executive Committee fired Land (or rather, allowed him to “retire“) and shut down his radio show.
Now they needed a new leader for their ERLC. And oh boy, did they ever get one.
Russell Moore as the ERLC rebound fling
Russell Moore isn’t any kind of hero. But he was definitely the anti-Richard Land the ERLC thought it needed: a kind of rebound fling that hopefully will undo some of the emotional damage caused by that last breakup. With stars in their eyes, the ERLC’s board of trustees hired him in 2013.
The SBC hardliners liked Moore at first. One, David Mitzenmacher even wrote in March about his early impressions of Moore. He came with sterling credentials that made him seem perfect for the job. In fact, he was the dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under Al Mohler. Mohler, like all of the SBC seminary leaders, was also a made man of the Resurgence (though the hardliners hate him now!). That degree of closeness to the Resurgence gave Moore a serious leg up against any competitors for the job. Moore had written well-regarded posts and books that used theology to justify evangelical culture-war positions.
As far as anybody in SBC leadership could tell, Moore held all the correct political opinions, too. Best of all, he was fairly young and largely an outsider in their faction warfare—which the SBC hoped they could parlay into attracting younger faces to the denomination.
Nobody in SBC leadership could have suspected what would happen next.
The part where everybody starts hating Russell Moore
Even knowing evangelicals like I do, it was incredible to see the sheer firestorm Moore started with one simple opinion: He didn’t think Donald Trump was a good candidate for evangelicals to support in the 2016 elections. He thought that evangelicals’ support for Trump would destroy their evangelistic credibility and erode their power in the cultural sphere.
That’s it. That was his one serious deviation from the party line. And he was completely correct on both counts, which had to just chap the hardliners’ asses even harder.
SBC pastors began badmouthing him as soon as he expressed his opinion about Trump. Some of those pastors even began hinting they might withhold funds from the SBC’s all-important Cooperative Program (CP), which funds denominational projects like its seminaries, missionaries, the Executive Committee, and of course the ERLC itself.
But Russell Moore did not back down. Instead, he doubled down. And when the SBC’s sex abuse megascandal emerged, he pissed off the hardliners even more by supporting sex abuse victims and sex abuse reform. The hardliners wanted to ignore them all and do nothing, but the guy on the public-facing ERLC throne defied them.
Finally in 2021, the hardliners chased him out of the role—and out of the SBC entirely. He went to Christianity Today and learned absolutely nothing about how the SBC had gotten so messed up. But his successor, Brent Leatherwood, wasn’t much better from the hardliners’ point of view.
Kevin Smith, the chair of the ERLC trustee board, even tried to fire Leatherwood. But that stunt failed and Smith had to resign instead.
That incident proved one thing beyond all doubt: The hardliners had lost all control of the ERLC. It now belonged to the very-slightly-more-moderate faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives.
And there’s nothing control-hungry people hate more than losing one of their toys. The more a toy defies them, the more intensely they want to repossess or destroy it.
If they can’t control something, evangelical hardliners will do their best to destroy it
I’m sharing this history because I want to give context to James White’s ignorant tweet. He hates the ERLC because its leaders disagree with him. If he can’t control it, he wants it destroyed. And there are a whole lot of SBC hardliners just like him with the same attitude.
About a week ago, Harris Rigby, an evangelical blogger, wrote a Substack article that really puts hardliners’ paranoia on clear display: “Let’s talk about the Soros-funded groups that manipulated the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist leaders who helped them.”
That’s one hell of a title, isn’t it! But it’s what these guys think. Last summer, Megan Basham (the new generation’s answer to pseudohistorian David Barton) published Shepherds for Sale, which accused Pretend Progressive leaders like J.D. Greear of working with evil rich Jews like George Soros to hijack the SBC and make evangelicals liberal. However, these aren’t new accusations. For years, I’ve seen hardliner SBC sites say the exact same things about the exact same people. One of the hardliners’ most hilarious moves is snarling false accusations at their enemies in contradiction to Jesus’ direct orders for his followers.
But she offered these stale opinions in ways that made hardliners feel validated. One of the smoking guns these guys thought they had was a 2017 policy paper (available here) from the National Immigration Forum (NIF) Action Fund. It outlines strategies for persuading more evangelicals to support immigration. Hardliners insist it PROVES YES PROVES that Soros is totally behind the Pretend Progressives, even though—according to Baptist Press itself in 2020—Soros funding was indirect through a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), EIT funding amounted to 2% of the NIF’s budget, EIT funding has never touched the ERLC itself, and nothing about the 2017 memo’s contents sounds even remotely off-limits or conspiratorial.
Despite facts being easily found, these rumors just will not die. SBC hardliners will grab at any straws, no matter how tenuous, to get their followers on board with the plan to destroy the ERLC. When other SBC people debunk these wild claims, the hardline people and sites just call them liars.
Given how targeted and coordinated the hardliners’ attacks are, as well as the out-of-left-field names showing up in these attacks, I’m fully expecting the hardliners to be funded by someone evangelicals would dislike even more than George Soros. I don’t know who that might be, but I still bet there’s something going on there.
A ramping-up of accusations—and the big gun inerrancy enters play
Last year, hardliners tried to defund and disband the ERLC, but that effort failed dramatically. I’ve no doubt they’ll try again at the Annual Meeting this year. This year, the number of articles hardliners are posting—and their social media accounts—indicate they are more riled-up about the ERLC now than they have ever been. Not even a post last month from Richard Land himself defending the ERLC will help at this point.
In March, David Schrock of the site Christ Over All pulled out hardliners’ biggest gun, inerrancy, to destroy the ERLC. He’s joined by a number of other hardliners in this effort. David Mitzenmacher demanded in March that the SBC denounce Russell Moore because that’s what he thinks 1 Peter 5:2 and bunches of other Bible verses tell inerrantists to do. (And remember, Moore isn’t even in the SBC anymore!)
They’re using this strategy on purpose, of course. Generally speaking, it works on evangelicals. It has a long history of working. Hardliners have no doubt it’ll work again now to destroy the ERLC.
In order to win the Conservative Resurgence, its architects first had to convince evangelicals that they needed to adopt this doctrine. The term just indicates belief in the Bible being completely without errors or flaws—and also completely authoritative for Christians.
Because evangelicals have accepted this false doctrine, all inerrancy preachers need to do to sway audiences is find some way to shoehorn Bible verses into whatever they want to do. It really is that easy! (When two competing inerrancy preachers fight, as is the case here with pro-ERLC and anti-ERLC Baptists, the winner is whoever agrees most with the judging onlookers.)
Once evangelicals embrace an opinion agreeing with their doctrinal worldview, they label it “biblical.” That makes all other opinions non-biblical, which in turn makes them disobedient to Jesus.
In his post, Schrock promises readers “a biblical, historical, and practical look at what Christians, and specifically Southern Baptists, have done and could do to engage the public square.” With that many dogwhistles, you can bet he’ll somehow land on hardliners’ desires being what Jesus wants for the SBC. Schrock also printed a number of one-sided, obviously dishonest “questions” he wanted Brent Leatherwood to answer. But I’d be really surprised to see Leatherwood humoring this crank.
But here’s the really funny thing about this entire squabble
Every person involved in today’s story has some very serious flaws. For the most part, these are nearly identical flaws, too. The two factions in the SBC differ so little in their opinions that outsiders might even be confused about what differentiates them. And no matter who wins this squabble, the hardliner Old Guard or the Pretend Progressives, Team Humanity loses.
I really do not like it when terrible people force me to defend other terrible people. I’ve already had to do that for J.D. Greear, who got liberally smeared (figuratively but also actually) in Megan Basham’s dumb book as a Soros-funded Democratic secret agent. Look, Greear is a creepy two-faced weasel, but these particular accusations obviously are the stuff of fantasy fiction. It’s a shame the truth no longer matters to evangelicals.
But I console myself by remembering this one thing:
Every single time the flocks must vote on anything at their Annual Meetings for about the past 8 years, they have voted against hardliner initiatives.
Yes. The flocks want to support sex abuse victims and to reform the denomination so vulnerable people are safer in SBC churches. They want to make the SBC less racist. And so on and so forth. Though the Pretend Progressives have done next to nothing to fulfill their promises, even making the promises alone is enough to earn them votes at every Annual Meeting.
As a result, Old Guard hasn’t won a serious fight over territory since around 2018. No wonder they’re so big mad. The ERLC is a raised middle finger to their ambitions. It stands as a proxy to their entire battle for control over the SBC. There may be a lot of Old Guard guys infesting SBC churches, but there are a lot more evangelicals sympathetic to the Pretend Progressives’ platforms.
I’m waiting with bated breath to see how the Annual Meeting shakes out next week in Dallas. It’s gonna be lit.
NEXT UP: The isolation and dysfunction of evangelical couples in ministry.
DISCORD ANNOUNCEMENTS: On Friday 6/6 at 6pm PT, we start our LOTR marathon (Peter Jackson’s trilogy, of course). The next day, on Saturday 6/7 at 7pm PT, I’m holding a watch party for the first two Alpha Course videos. You’re invited to both! More deets in the Discord (case-sensitive invite code: 8pkasaySuD). See you next time!
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