Ending abortion and guarding religious freedom in a time of changing sexual mores topped the 2024 federal political priorities by the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Funded by Southern Baptists, the Nashville-based Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission lobbies in Washington and analyzes public policy on behalf of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Socially conservative, but not always as conservative as some of the convention’s louder voices on social media might want, the commission can end up being a kind of punching bag, said Ryan Burge, a pastor and political scientist at Eastern Illinois University.
“The ERLC basically tries to be like normie Republicans — like George W. Bush Republicans,” Burge said by phone Monday. “And the people who hate it are the Matt Gaetzes and the Lauren Boeberts of the SBC world,” referring to members of Congress from Florida and Colorado, respectively.
According to Burge, the vast majority of Southern Baptists likely don’t think about the commission or know what it is, but its policy agenda items are explicitly tied to resolutions Southern Baptist delegates have passed over the years.
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This year, as in the past, abortion topped the list of priorities.
The commission backs legislation that would make medical abortions more difficult to access, and it opposes the use of public funds to help someone cross state lines to get a legal abortion.
“The ERLC will advocate for legislation that further restricts the availability of abortion across the country as we work toward completely ending abortion, including addressing any factors that may contribute to any perceived need for it,” the commission’s agenda said.
Affirming the principle of church-state separation, the commission said the church should not resort to civil powers to carry on its work. And on what it characterizes as the other side of the church-state coin, it resists what it says are efforts to “codify the demands of the sexual revolution” by making sexual orientation and gender identity protected classes under civil rights law alongside longstanding categories like race and gender.
The proposed Equality Act would ban discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation or gender identity in employment, housing, lodging, education, credit, jury service and in federally funded programs.
“Though this bill is unlikely to pass in this Congress, the ERLC believes that this bill represents the most significant threat to religious liberty ever considered in Congress,” the agenda said, arguing it would curtail religious freedom protections and “steamroll the consciences” of millions.
Churches have special tax-free status in the U.S., and some of the commission’s 2024 agenda is devoted to nonprofit law.
Noting, for example, that since Congress in 2017 substantially increased the size of the standard tax deduction — thus making people less inclined to itemize deductions by tallying, for example, their charitable giving — the commission backs a proposal to make tax-deductible donations more financially attractive.
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The agenda covers a wide range of social terrain as well. The commission advocates for restrictions on youth social media use in schools, for more parental control of curriculum, and it opposes the expansion of legal marijuana and physician-assisted suicide.
On criminal justice, the commission said it will advocate for approaches that focus on fairness, rehabilitation and “recognize the dignity of those in prison.”
On immigration, it supports a permanent solution to get “dreamers” — children brought into the U.S. by undocumented parents — a path to permanent status. It also encourages more refugee resettlement in the U.S.
Like many observers across the political spectrum, the commission describes the immigration dynamics at the Southern border as untenable. With the text of a major bipartisan U.S. immigration bill released Monday, the commission’s chief, Brent Leatherwood, said on social media the group would analyze the proposal and offer resources and analysis Tuesday.
In an interview with Baptist Press published Friday, Leatherwood compared the commission’s lobbying work in Washington to that of missionaries sent abroad and pastors planting churches around the nation.
“We tend to look at the public square as a missions field,” he said.
Contact Andrew Schwartz at aschwartz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.