In recent years, I\u2019ve been astonished at a number of convictional reversals, wherein folks who\u2019d been solid allies in the cause of biblical\/cultural conservatism have changed sides. Some have been Southern Baptists, and others have been mainstays in the broader Evangelical world. But something happened, and now we have to watch our backs and also have the backs of the faithful taking fire from surprising sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m neither a psychologist nor the son of a psychologist, but let me ruminate a bit on what might have precipitated these defections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. When I was a seminary student, I enrolled in a missions class around the time of the Falklands War. Our teacher had served with the SBC\u2019s International Mission Board in Argentina, the invading nation. One student, using the term \u2018Falklands,\u2019 asked his opinion of the war. The missionary shot back, \u201cThey\u2019re the Malvinas! Every Argentine school child knows that.\u201d Well, excuuuse me<\/em>. Apparently, he\u2019d \u201cgone native,\u201d identifying with his target group, taking up their sensitivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Analogously, a range of commentators have had a fit over Trump and have turned their ire toward old friends who\u2019ve not found themselves in the throes of this \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome\u201d (TDS). They\u2019ve elevated the perspective of those they\u2019ve long hoped to reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. They\u2019ve shown (or discovered) who they were all along. They had good gigs in the former days, but exhaustion, \u201cepiphanies,\u201d or other opportunities have driven or drawn them to the other side. Perhaps they\u2019d been trying other perspectives on for size or style, but they finally realized those outfits weren\u2019t for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. They\u2019ve let personal relationships overturn conviction. Either they\u2019ve rushed to the side of upset family and friends, or they\u2019ve made new friends whose happiness is of surpassing concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Or they\u2019re extremely thin-skinned, ready to \u201cgo postal\u201d when their glory is questioned. Maybe they\u2019re constitutionally fragile or primed for meltdown by earlier shocks or disappointments. Perhaps they never learned to take a hit and keep going, the sort of thing you learn in team sports. Who knows?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether any or some or all were in play when Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission (ERLC) chief Russell Moore turned on Southern Baptists and stormed into the waiting arms of a non-SBTS church and Christianity Today<\/em>, I cannot say, but it\u2019s clear that the emergence of Donald Trump as a viable candidate drove Russ\u2014and, by extension, his ERLC\u2014to distraction. This was not the Russell Moore I knew when he was my provost at Southern (SBTS), a man who was both inspiring and encouraging to me. But something snapped. And, not surprisingly, the ERLC has been under fire since he rose to power in 2013 (and continues to be so) as it\u2019s gone forth under the leadership of a Moore hire, Brent Leatherwood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first became aware of the Christian Life Commission (forerunner to the ERLC) when my father-in-law and Executive Committee member, Rheubin South, came to Nashville during my Vanderbilt grad school days. He\u2019d take us newlyweds out to eat, and then we\u2019d sit in on EC meetings in the old SBC building on James Robertson Parkway. Those were the days when Foy Valentine (tenure, 1960\u20131987) pressed the denomination to shed its Jim Crow influences. He got that right, and not everybody loved it. But he also got much wrong, taking up, shaping, and fostering the causes of the \u201cmoderate\u201d party opposed to the conservative resurgence. For instance, he and his crew were comfortable with the Roe<\/em> decision allowing abortion. In that connection, one of his fellow travelers, Paul Simmons (ethics professor at SBTS), called me when I was a pastor in Arkansas, asking me to lobby against<\/em> a bill that would deny state funding for abortions. And the ERLC was working too hard to be the Kool Kids, as when they held a 1970 conference on \u201cnew morality,\u201d putting situation ethicist, Joseph Fletcher, and also a Playboy editor on the program. For this, and other reasons, the Convention was pleased to replace Valentine with Richard Land, a director with whom I worked closely as I became the VP for Convention Relations at the Executive Committee, serving from 1991 to 1995.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1989, SBC president Jerry Vines asked me chair the resolutions committee, and it was then that I came to realize the importance of the interplay between resolutions and the working of the ERLC throughout the year. I\u2019d seen the dustup over resolutions the previous year in San Antonio, and I asked Dr. Vines whether we might declare a year\u2019s moratorium for things to cool down. He explained, quite correctly that resolutions can be important tools in the hands of those shaping public policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years later, when I became an SBC spokesman in Nashville, I came to realize how vital they were. I\u2019d get calls from various press outlets asking where we stood on this or that. Sometimes, I\u2019d have a ready answer, but it was just as important to say we hadn\u2019t addressed a topic, as when one caller asked for our view on the disposition of Native American remains uncovered at new building sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, I was pleased to assure the press that we\u2019d spoken against abortion<\/a>. And decades later, in the spring of 2019, I was once again grateful that I could draw on an SBC resolution to argue against an effort to register women for the military draft. I could testify to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service that we opposed the employment of women in combat<\/a>, in part because of their shortfalls in \u201csurvivability and lethality.\u201d I also took this opportunity to suggest it was important we note what we\u2019d be drafting women away from<\/em> (namely motherhood), but it was our denominational objection to what we\u2019d be drafting them to<\/em> that had landed me on the panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During my five-year tenure at the Executive Committee, I was staff liaison to the Resolutions Committee for each convention, and I huddled with them for hours, even days, both before and during each annual meeting. Along the way, I came to believe that resolutions did two things properly: (1) giving the messengers a way to express what they were fired up to say, e.g., opposition to homosexuals in the military; and (2) bringing things to their attention they needed to know and would immediately would want to address, e.g., the emergence of the RU486 abortion pill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the committee would overreach, leaving the messengers puzzled and even uneasy, forcing them to say, \u201cWell, I\u2019ll take your word for it,\u201d e.g., when, in 1991, they asked the Convention to side with Indians smoking peyote sacramentally since the language disallowing it was problematic. Well, okay. We\u2019re for religious liberty, but why press the messengers into a very short course and extemporaneous vote on a tricky subject?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a well-meaning instance of using<\/em> rather than serving<\/em> the messengers. You can do both in the same resolution, but the \u201ctop down\u201d approach is tiresome when you\u2019re hustled into an unfamiliar universe of discourse, or worse, an alien agenda. The notorious Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory<\/a> in Birmingham in 2019 is a case in point, but so were a range of resolutions handed down by Russell Moore and his fellow wokesters in the early 2000s, e.g., affirming the 150-year-old Dred Scott decision<\/a>, as if that were in question and as if the sentiment behind it was a matter of understandably grave concern among us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might say that Russell saw the SBC as his tool, handy for endorsing his causes. Or perhaps he saw us as his ornery teenager, needing some stern guidance. Hence, his scolding of Trump voters, saying that<\/a> \u201cevangelicals and other social conservatives . . . [must] repudiate everything they believe\u201d to support him (never mind that Moore\u2019s constituency voted overwhelming for Trump). As Mike Huckabee put it<\/a>, \u201cI am utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult them.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, Russ, be David French, but don\u2019t arrogate unto yourself the title of \u201cleader\u201d among us. And what a shame that his successor, Brent Leatherwood has \u201cled us\u201d to rebuke the Louisiana legislature for its tough abortion strictures<\/a> and to use the Covenant School shooting as an occasion to hack on gun laws<\/a> while insisting that the killer\u2019s diary should not be released<\/a>. Does he not understand that we \u201cdeplorables\u201d are struggling to change the culture\u2019s narrative that transsexuality is okay? Would he similarly fight publication of a murderous skinhead\u2019s journal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I look back to the Saturday when ERLC head Richard Land convened a group of us to hash out what we we\u2019d say to a vigilante intent on taking out an abortion doctor, one who was involved in killing unborn babies by the truckload. It was a day of genuine give and take, confirming our consensus that his act would be immoral. There were real differences among us on a number of ethical issues, but we were called together to hash things out. The dialogical nature of the enterprise was manifest, and I don\u2019t recall seeing that during the Moore regime. In the spirit of that 2015 New York Times<\/em> editorial<\/a>, it was more dicta and defamation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of dialogue, here\u2019s a list I prepared for one of my SBTS seminars, sketched out on a piece of paper over lunch between sessions. Some students were reluctant to offer comments in unfamiliar territory, so I suggested a series of questions they could use to make their way into discussions on all sorts of topics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can you give an example? (illustration) On this model, it seems to me that the ERLC would do better by leading the way in thoughtful discourse, incorporating the puzzlements and wisdom of the constituency in their deliberations. I don\u2019t mean they need to sponsor a denomination-wide debate on the advisability of settled matters, such as abortion, adultery, or plagiarism. But there are many things not proscribed in our documents, items that invite discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A couple of dozen things spring to mind right off. What if the ERLC had featured in print or online opposing views\u2014point and counterpoint\u2014regarding a vote for Trump, the viability of the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-driven church closings, the level of financial transparency advisable in churches and entities, the case for releasing the Covenant School diary, involvement with NGOs, hiring illegal migrants, abolitionism vs. incrementalism regarding abortion, Christian Nationalism, removal of Confederate statues, a preference for Christian classical schools, consumption of beverage alcohol, business boycotts, use of credit cards or mortgages, biblical strictures on divorce and remarriage, marriage history and deacon service, platform sharing with heretics, the purchase of an AR-15 \u201cassault rifle,\u201d a Netflix subscription, the purchase of expensive cars, guidelines for living wills, tithing, Halloween, and tattoos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why not enlist thoughtful voices to lay out rationales and options for our consideration, treating us like adults? Why not get a good read on the denominational constituency, instead of reading to us as children gathered at your feet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These matters of personal and church behavior are more congruent with the former agency name, the Christian Life <\/em>Commission, not the Christian Lobbying Commission. As important as statehouse and courthouse advocacy can be, we have cause to wonder if we\u2019ve turned the ERLC over to politicians (of which Leatherwood, he a former Republican leader in Tennessee, is one) instead of pastoral prophets. Their mission statement says<\/a> they\u2019re to help \u201cyou to understand the moral demands of the gospel,\u201d but they move quickly to say<\/a>, \u201cIn particular, the ERLC focuses on four main areas (life, religious liberty, marriage and family, and human dignity] where we want to bring the truth to bear on public policy<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For them, the emphasis is upon what is politically astute, not morally acute. Case in point, Leatherwood\u2019s refusal to consider any sort of legal accountability for women who seek abortion<\/a>. It\u2019s supposedly expeditious to count all of them as \u201cvictims,\u201d even the promiscuous, seductive career woman who is sleeping her way to the top, and, after a surprise, hires an abortionist so she won\u2019t be sidetracked by a baby. \u201cMove on. Nothing to see here.\u201d Indeed, if they\u2019re taken by this mindset, then let\u2019s go with a lower case \u2018e,\u2019 as in eRLC. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, it\u2019s good that they speak up for continuation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act<\/a> and condemn the Communist Chinese persecution of Uyghurs<\/a>. But wouldn\u2019t it be better to call themselves the Ethics and Public Policy Commission (ePP*C*), since \u201cpublic policy\u201d is a real passion and religious liberty is only one of four foci? Which brings us to another question: \u201cHow much of their work concerns religious liberty?\u201d A quick look at the site shows a series they\u2019ve deployed on mental health<\/a>. Important matter with some nice work, but how does it fit their program assignment? Wouldn\u2019t that better fit the LifeWay bailiwick or the work of seminary counseling programs? And what next, a treatise on missiology or pneumatology? Sure, everything connects somehow, but they seem to be all over the place, suggesting that the Commission has commissioned itself to do its own thing. So, I\u2019d suggest the ePP*C*. (Yes, there\u2019s an EPPC in Washington DC\u2014the Ethics and Public Policy Center\u2014but our fonts would differentiate the two.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I submit that they would do a great service to the denomination by helping us think through everyday things biblically, acknowledging that \u201cCome let us reason together\u201d can be a better approach than \u201cMy way is Yahweh\u201d on matters of well-meaning but non-trivial disagreement among Southern Baptists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this vein, I\u2019d also suggest that the ERLC supply resolutions they as an organization plan to propose to the messengers several months before the annual meeting, soliciting both favorable and \u201ccounterpoint\u201d essays for publication, so messengers don\u2019t have to make flash-bang decisions without having read respectful postings of dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe the Executive Committee could publish these. Or, on rotation, we might give this editorial task to LifeWay and the seminaries, so they could solicit\/produce\/publish full-blown, quality discussions of the matters at hand. Maybe LifeWay could use their polling capacity to run things up the flag pole to see who salutes. The point being that the ERLC would be constrained to prove it when they said they represented Southern Baptists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t see that we\u2019re there yet. Disinclined to platform serious ethical dialogue across the board, from the personal to the cultural, they ask us to acquiesce to their perspectives. Why would we continue to do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They are called the Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission. But is that what they do? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"They are called the Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission. But is that what they do? ","_seopress_robots_index":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[32,12,1969,38],"tags":[957,610,1690,1656,82,371,1413,1422,488,1634,181],"scripture-reference":[],"post_folder":[],"ppma_author":[64],"class_list":["post-18890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-concise","category-march-2025","category-theme","tag-critical-race-theory-crt","tag-denominations","tag-erlc","tag-ethics-and-religious-liberty-commission-erlc","tag-political-theology","tag-public-policy","tag-public-religion","tag-religious-liberty","tag-russell-moore","tag-sbc","tag-southern-baptist-convention-sbc"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Coppenger-Article-scaled-e1741298944324.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-01-13 11:41:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"authors":[{"term_id":64,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"mark-coppenger","display_name":"Mark Coppenger","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Mark-Coppenger.jpeg","url2x":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Mark-Coppenger.jpeg"},"author_category":"","job_title":"","church_city_state":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","church_site":"","user_url":"","description":"Mark Coppenger<\/b> (BA, Ouachita; PhD, Vanderbilt; MDiv, SWBTS) retired in 2019 as Professor of Christian Philosophy and Ethics at SBTS. He\u2019s also taught full-time at Wheaton and MBTS, and covered adjunct courses at Vanderbilt, Elmhurst, and TIU. He\u2019s served as senior pastor for churches in Arkansas and Illinois; held denominational posts in Indiana and Tennessee; and retired as a USAR infantry officer in 1998. He currently is a member at Redemption City Church in Franklin, TN, where he volunteers in a number of roles. A selection of his writings is found at markcoppenger.com<\/a>."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18895,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18890\/revisions\/18895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18890"},{"taxonomy":"scripture-reference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/scripture-reference?post=18890"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=18890"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christoverall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=18890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Looking Back<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Can We Talk?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
What\u2019s at stake? What difference does it make? (application)
Where are you going with this? (destination)
But wouldn\u2019t that mean . . .? (implication)
What exactly do you mean by . . .? (clarification)
So, it\u2019s kind of like . . .? (analogy; comparison)
But what about . . .? (counterexample)
Wouldn\u2019t it be better to look at it this way? (alternative paradigm)
So, you\u2019re saying . . .? (summarization)
But how does this square with . . . ? (cohesion)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nWhat\u2019s in a Name? From the CLC to the ERLC to the ePP*C*<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Something\u2019s Got to Give<\/h2>\n\n\n\n