Spotlight Articles from 2023
What links the topics of immigration, gambling, racial unity, and prison reform? Underneath these issues is the awareness that each individual is created in the image of God and therefore possesses inherent worth and dignity. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) seeks to advance human flourishing and a just society through furthering policies that …
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Southern Baptists in 2023 find ourselves mostly out of step with the values of the wider American culture. This is especially true when it comes to sexual ethics and how best to understand marriage and the family. It’s not that Baptists have changed our views. Rather, in recent decades, our nation has drifted increasingly into …
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Where you find Baptists, you find a people devoted to the cause of religious liberty. From the earliest decades of the 17th century, Baptists like Thomas Helwys and John Murton contended for soul freedom, or the ability to choose what one believes, for all people—a campaign they conducted within the walls of Newgate prison as …
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Today, Southern Baptists as a whole are decidedly pro-life, but that was not always the case. In this brief review of Southern Baptists and the pro-life movement, I want to consider the way it was and why; the way it changed and how; and the way it is and why. The Ethics and Religious Liberty …
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The full-time presence in Washington, D.C., of Southern Baptists’ public policy entity is a recent development historically, but it has become a vital part of the convention’s engagement with the federal government. Today, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) represents Southern Baptists from Leland House on Capitol Hill. Almost 34 years after its first …
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Dating the origins of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is a fraught task. If you limit yourself to the name ERLC, then you would go back to 1997 under the presidency of Richard Land. However, Land led the Christian Life Commission from 1988–1997. And if you include those years, then you would need …
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“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus famously told his disciples—a description that points to his identity and how we can best share him with others. Christ has given his Church the privilege and responsibility of proclaiming the good news of the gospel while caring for our neighbors, speaking up for the …
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In a scathing criticism of the President’s Council on Bioethics under the Bush administration, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said in a 2008 edition of the New Republic magazine, “The problem is that ‘dignity’ is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.” This was indicative of a future that …
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