It is a fair time to ask if the “modern” ERLC experiment is working. If our political theology remains divided, letting a few voices set policy only deepens the rift. If our political theology is unified, letting our outliers frustrate progress will bring division, too. 

Having grown up as the child of an Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) staffer and having served as an ERLC Trustee for eight years, I’ve witnessed the Commission’s transition from a Nashville-based ethics group to a Southern Baptists’ public policy voice.

While the ERLC has notable achievements—such as its role in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) and the Nashville Statement (2017)—recent trends suggest its controversies are growing. At the 2024 SBC Annual Meeting, nearly 40% of messengers voted to abolish the ERLC.

No SBC entity has ever lost so much messenger support and survived without fundamental reorganization or reform.

Have we, the Convention, given the ERLC an assignment that produces division and anger?  Can it produce unity for a Cooperative Program missions and education effort?  I have spent my time as an ERLC Trustee seeking to uphold the best possible version of the Messengers’ assignments.  But it is time for a fresh assessment of the modern experiment.

I see three recurring issues at the heart of messenger anger:

1. Unbiblical Political Theology: The legacy of Russell Moore’s ‘Kingdom consensus’ has fostered a vague political inclusiveness that undermines clear doctrinal distinctions, resulting in division rather than unity.
2. Uncertainty About Success: Without clear metrics, it is difficult for Trustees to distinguish between active engagement and effectiveness. Whenever success is unclear, so is failure.
3. Unauthorized Statements: The ERLC often speaks to the public beyond its mandate, representing positions the SBC has not adopted, which further fractures unity.

1. Unbiblical Political Theology

A key issue today is the problem of unbiblical political theology in the SBC—a legacy of former ERLC President Russell Moore. Moore’s attempt to craft a ‘Kingdom consensus’ failed because it avoided taking a clear stand on policy matters that required one. The result only deepens our divisions by imposing a vague, muddied, politically inclusive program in search of an “evangelical witness.”

Until this ‘Kingdom consensus’ is rejected, this unbiblical political theology will divide us.

A key to understanding today’s mess is Moore’s doctoral thesis, published in 2004 as The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective. In it, Moore claimed that a new “Kingdom consensus” among evangelicals offered “a renewed theological foundation for evangelical engagement in the social and political realms.”^[1] “Gospel centrality” was a kind of glue that could overcome divergent views of almost any kind—whether cultural, political, or denominational.

In hindsight, the idea was a ruinous failure. Moore failed to develop the necessary theological tools for assessing political outcomes. In the conclusion to the book, he asserts that the “emerging evangelical consensus” would succeed where Progressivism had failed, because the new evangelicals recognized that “the disparate traditions are based on partial truths,” and “unlike Rauschenbusch…evangelical theology did not start with a social or political agenda, and then seek to find a theology to fit it.”^[2]

A conservative reader might assume that a gospel foundation would have avoided the Social Gospel entirely. But Moore was stating that Rauschenbusch’s politics might have succeeded with better theological foundation.

Instead of contradicting the Social Gospel, Moore’s Kingdom was a roadmap to Social Gospel 2.0.

Without critical theological foundations, Moore’s project collapsed. It made “good progressives”—those on the political left—a necessary part of a “gospel witness,” even at the expense of concrete results wherein success could be measured.  Under such a system, the value of, say, the fall of Roe v. Wade is hard to quantify, since it was mostly a victory for all Evangelicals.   In contrast, for Moore, a movement without evangelical progressives was obvious ‘proof’ of “politics” above “gospel witness.”

Thus, Moore and his disciples continually hunt for imaginary “orthodox evangelicals” with modern liberal politics. They venerate Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who claimed Baptist faith but refused to use his role to counter Roe v. Wade, so called gay marriage, and female pastors. They praise “evangelical” scientist Francis Collins who does not affirm a historical Adam. They lament any break with “social justice” proponents who claim a Gospel motivation. A political version of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became the test for whether a Christian is meets the requirements of a proper “evangelical witness.”

Moore’s political theology is not limited to Moore. It has many disciples in Evangelical institutions.

Andrew Walker recently criticized “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction” a statement signed by Dr. Moore, Beth Moore, Richard Mouw, and a who’s who of the Evangelical left. Walker observed:

This statement seems to assume that the gospel is the solution to political fracture. It is and isn’t. That sounds controversial, but stay with me….Yes, I need my political foe to ultimately understand that Christ is Lord. But I also need my political foe defeated if they’re wrong with regard to the substance of what politics is and political morality requires: political justice done to procure and advance the institutions of creation order necessary for the common good.

The gospel can unite political foes if and only if the one who has the wrong political morality has his error rectified in light of Christ. Until a political foe stops opposing God’s authority over creation order, he is indeed a political foe, and power should be wielded against him so he can stop doing harm.

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