May is National Foster Care Month, a time to pray for the roughly 300,000 children in the United States foster care system, for the families walking alongside vulnerable children, and for healing in and circumstances of the biological family.
Southern Baptists and foster care
Out of love and devotion to vulnerable children, Southern Baptists and Christians at-large are active in the foster care system, often opening their homes on a moment’s notice to a child in need of shelter or safety. Southern Baptists spoke explicitly about caring for children in the foster care system at the 2009 SBC annual meeting through the resolution “On Adoption and Orphan Care.”
Attempts to undermine faith-based foster care providers
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees certain foster care funding to states, issued a federal rule that threatened to designate faith-based foster care providers as “inappropriate” for children with a self-proclaimed LGBTQ identity. The ERLC filed comments in 2023 opposing this rule.
The HHS rule was challenged in the courts and struck down by a Texas district court for violating federal laws about federal rulemaking.
Recently, the Trump administration issued a rescission of the Biden-era foster care rule. While it was struck down in the courts, the rule’s language remained in the Federal Code of Regulations, causing confusion among state and tribal foster care program agencies. In April 2026, ERLC filed comments again; this time commending the Trump administration for taking action to permanently remove this harmful, discriminatory language from our federal regulations. As the ERLC said in those comments,
“Southern Baptists desire for children to be cared for in safe and loving homes, yet it is unfair to claim religious foster homes cannot offer that environment to children regardless of their purported identity. It is further incorrect to assert that the only way to love a child identifying as LGBTQ is to affirm them. The affirmation of biological and biblical truth is not unloving; it is the truth of the Word of God that is the most loving, powerful, and redemptive force known to mankind.”
Recent advocacy for foster care families and children
Following the 2024 election, the ERLC urged the president to rescind the final rule as a top priority at the start of his term. Shortly after President Trump took office, the ERLC filed comments in response to the Office of Management and Budget’s Request for Information (RFI) on deregulation, outlining “unnecessary, unlawful, unduly burdensome, or unsound” regulations, like the 2024 Designated Placements Final Rule. In July 2025, in response to HHS’s separate RFI on deregulation, the ERLC filed comments again urging the rescission of this unlawful and burdensome regulation.
Additionally, in August, the ERLC met with officials from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to bring awareness to actions from the Biden administration that were anti-religious liberty and discriminatory to people of faith. Among the issues raised was the Biden administration’s foster care rule. Many items shared by the ERLC are discussed in the DOJ’s recent report on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government. In the report, the ERLC’s 2023 comments on the foster care rule are cited, as evidence of the rules hostility toward religious foster care families.
