Within the Southern Baptist Convention ( SBC ), a growing divide has developed over the past ten years as denominational leaders have increasingly viewed left-leaning border policies as a Christian imperative.
Last year, Baptist Press, the official announcement service of the SBC, published an article by Trevin Wax, a vice chairman at the SBC’s North American Mission Board, in which he defended his congregation’s involvement in “refugee relocation” against those he claimed had a “deep misunderstanding of how disaster relief, foster care or refugee resettlement takes place”.
This comes on the heels of the Center for Baptist Leadership ( a conservative element in the SBC ) discovering that the SBC’s Send Relief, in partnership with World Relief,” took nearly$ 70, 000 in Biden State Department funds” for “refugee resettlement”.
The SBC’s Send Network has offered churches tools, including offers, to absorb workers, which, according to World Relief, includes items like teaching them how to use credit cards, document fees, and use their EBT cards to access resources like food stamps. Although institutions like SEND and World Relief refer to these immigrants as refugees, it should be noted that many of them are asylum seekers and may not receive refugee status in the long run.
As people of America’s largest Protestant religion prepare for their monthly meeting in June, the wrong lines emerging over this problem are not new, and they are likely to continue to grow. Southern Baptist voters are typically politically conservative, and they made up 82 percent of evangelical voters who favored Donald Trump as president in 2024. However, the denomination’s leadership has made immigrant assistance a Christian love test, leading to the denomination’s opposition to conservative border policies.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift from supporting asylum seekers to politically speaking up. The SBC’s 2023 resolution,” On Wisely Engaging Immigration,” is significantly different from a 2006 resolution that calls for the government to” care for migrants” and uses immigration to diversify churches. Gone is the term “illegal”, as well as calls to , punish “employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants”. In 2006, the Southern Baptists who attended annual meetings wanted the federal government to enforce existing laws, but today they want the creation of new, more” compassionate” ones.
Russell Moore, the current president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission ( ERLC ), largely orchestrated this change, which is now being carried out by his immediate successor Brent Leatherwood. In a USA Today interview, Moore compared those who dehumanized “unborn children” by calling them embryos and fetuses to those who used terms like “illegal aliens and anchor babies.” Moore, who is now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, influenced a generation of Southern Baptist millennials to include leftist approaches to immigration under the “pro-life” banner and taught them to invoke general “image of God” or “gospel” language to justify policy approaches.
Moore was awarded a grant from the National Immigration Forum for his 2015 participation in an “immigration reform campaign,” according to Capstone Report. The Open Societies Foundation named Southern Baptists as recipients of funding for “refugee advocacy” that year. President Trump rescinded President Obama’s DACA executive order in 2017, which made it illegal for some immigrants brought to the United States by their parents to remain. Moore then brought together 50 evangelical leaders, including four former SBC presidents, to endorse” the underlying policy aim” of DACA and urge Congress to “provide a pathway to permanent legal status and/or citizenship”.
In an advertisement sponsored by World Relief and published in The Washington Post that same year, Southern Baptist leaders Ed Stetzer and Danny Akin joined other evangelical leaders to” call on President Trump to support refugees.” The message was simple. President Trump’s temporary moratorium on asylum seekers, pending a proper vetting process, was inconsistent with Christ’s compassion, and Christians who “desire]d ] to receive many thousands more people” should oppose it. In a new campaign, World Relief urged President Trump to renew DACA and allow 700,000 “dreamers” of illegal immigration to remain in the country. More Southern Baptists signed.
Walter Strickland from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary ( SEBTS), Travis Wussow from the ERLC, and Jose Ocampo, a DACA recipient on staff at Hickory Grove Baptist Church, discussed their support for DACA in an interview with the National Immigration Forum. According to Stickland, Christians have the responsibility of supporting the interests of dreamers. Ocampo highlighted the robust support he received from both his church and, apparently, from Clint Pressley, the current president of the SBC. ( Pressley also reportedly supported a pathway for residency and/or citizenship. ) Meanwhile, Sen. James Lankford, a Southern Baptist, proposed a bill to provide illegal migrants who qualified for DACA to gain permanent residency.
An Evangelical Call for Restitution-Based Immigration Reform published by the Evangelical Immigration Table was signed by denomination leaders in 2019 like Leatherwood and Dean Inserra. The statement portrayed deportation as unjust, insinuated the United States government was to blame for separating families, and supported a restitution-based “pathway to Legal Permanent Residency” for illegal migrants.
Despite the fact that illegal immigrants crossed the border in record numbers over Joe Biden’s presidency for the next four years, the SBC hardly intervened in any immigration-related issues. Then, in a bizarre move, Leatherwood and the ERLC endorsed Lankford’s” Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act,” which forbids Homeland Security from exercising emergency authority to deal with border crises if weekly crossings were under 21, 000 encounters per week. Since Trump has retake office as president, the ERLC has approved the letter from the ERLC urging Trump to reinstate” sensitive locations” policies that would forbid ICE from entering churches. Leatherwood also signed onto World Relief’s statement to” Sustain the U. S. Refugee Resettlement Program”.
Clearly, a rift is emerging in the SBC between Trump-supporting members and leaders opposing his policies. The Trump administration has turned down the USAID incentive, but organizations that benefited from government misfortune will try to reestablish a connection. The question is whether conservative members will continue to support Send and other organizations ‘ presidents who don’t hold them accountable.
Akin, president of Southeastern Seminary, once called immigration a “gospel issue”, suggesting a left-wing stance is required to be a faithful Christian. Many Southern Baptists think the gospel depends on Jesus ‘ redemptive work, not on leftist politics, and are becoming more and less comfortable with what they perceive as manipulative leadership.
Jon Harris is an author, producer, and cultural commentator. He hosts the” Conversations That Matter” podcast.
