Southern Baptist Ethics Commission Trustees Back President Brent Leatherwood, Warn Against Needless Controversy

Trustees of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, affirmed their president, Brent Leatherwood, this week, less than two months after the agency issued and then retracted an announcement that he had been fired. The trustees met in a lengthy closed-door session Tuesday and issued a formal statement Wednesday. The commission has long been among the most prominent voices of the religious right, expressing the conservative views of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Incoming chair Scott Foshie said, “We strongly affirm the ERLC under the leadership of Brent Leatherwood.” He added, “The world and Southern Baptists need to hear that.” The trustees’ statement acknowledged that the commission speaks out on many contentious issues where controversy is inevitable, and said that this was all the more reason not to stir up controversy over nonessential matters.

The trustees also acknowledged that support for the organization is wavering among individual churches, which fund almost all of its budget. They backed a plan, already in the works, to create a new office that would work more closely with pastors to help them understand and guide the agency’s work.

A companion set of guidelines issued Wednesday says the commission must base its public stances on the Bible, the convention’s official faith statement, and resolutions approved by Southern Baptists at annual meetings in recent decades. If advocacy on a particular issue is likely to “upset certain segments of the SBC,” staff must evaluate the issue carefully, though they may still speak out if it is deemed essential.

The commission has taken strongly conservative positions, including strong opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and has drawn criticism from a vocal segment of the convention that wants the denomination to move further right and sees the agency as drifting left. Leatherwood has been criticized for resisting calls to support criminalizing women who seek abortions, for supporting U.S. aid for Ukraine’s military defense, and for supporting a Tennessee bill that would prevent access to firearms for people deemed a threat to others or themselves. The source notes that the firearms issue is personal to him, since his children’s school was targeted in a deadly 2023 shooting.

In July, criticism erupted after Leatherwood issued a statement commending President Joe Biden for the “selfless act” of withdrawing from the presidential race after a dismal debate performance. Numerous voices in the convention, where views favoring Republicans are overwhelmingly prevalent, denounced the statement, saying Biden acted out of political necessity rather than selflessness. Within a day, the commission’s chairman, Kevin Smith, moved to oust Leatherwood, and the agency announced he had been removed. After it emerged that Smith acted without a vote of the executive committee, as bylaws require, Smith resigned and the agency retracted its announcement (Proverbs 11:1). Two members of the executive committee declined to comment in interviews, deferring to the agency’s statements supporting Leatherwood.

Leatherwood had acknowledged the problem of wavering support even before that episode. At the convention’s annual meeting in Indianapolis in June, church representatives voted down a proposal to abolish the commission, but a notable minority supported abolition. In an official address to the commission Tuesday, Leatherwood said those results “weren’t just disappointing, they were unacceptable.” He said he was speaking not to critics, but to “the local pastor and the everyday church member who just need to better understand our mission and the work that we do.”

He said the agency has been surveying pastors and issuing lengthy guidebooks on priorities including election polarization and gender issues, and has issued a state-by-state guide to abortion-related measures on November ballots. “Our culture is not well right now,” Leatherwood said. He said partisanship has overwhelmed “so many Christians,” adding, “Mistruths and conspiracy theories, they are everywhere right now.”

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