The Southern Baptist Convention will go its own way on immigration policy, the denomination’s top public policy official said Sept. 17, breaking ties with a coalition of other evangelical Christian bodies focused on the issue.
“We feel we need to take a more independent posture on our immigration-related work,” Miles Mullin, acting president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the SBC’s policy arm, told the agency’s trustees in announcing it had severed ties with the Evangelical Immigration Table, according to Baptist Press.
Southern Baptists have long advocated for immigration reform that includes secure borders and a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally. That led former ERLC President Richard Land to join other prominent evangelical leaders to found the Evangelical Immigration Table in 2012 to advocate for immigration reform based on biblical principles.
“The immigration crisis facing the nation touches every level of society,” Land said at the time. “If we as a nation are going to resolve this crisis in fair and equitable ways, we must engage all levels of civic society, perhaps most importantly, people of faith.”
Increasing criticism
The Evangelical Immigration Table, however, has come under increasing criticism in recent years, with critics claiming that liberal groups are using it to infiltrate churches. At the SBC’s annual meeting earlier this year, some messengers called for the ERLC to be shut down, in part because of its ties to the Evangelical Immigration Table.
The agency survived but the ERLC’s most recent president, Brent Leatherwood, resigned this fall, after more than a year of controversy.
Mullin, who was not available for comment, told the ERLC’s trustees that the agency has been involved in immigration reform because the issue matters to Southern Baptists, according to Baptist Press.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Bob Smietana and originally published by Religion News Service.
