The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) announced Monday evening that its president Brent Leatherwood suddenly lost his job—only to retract the statement the next morning.
The board of trustees stated on Tuesday that the decision had been made without an authorized meeting or vote and that Leatherwood “remains the President of the ERLC and has our support moving forward.”
The chair of the ERLC board of trustees, Kevin Smith, took responsibility for the unilateral move and has resigned.
In remarks to Baptist Press on Tuesday, Smith said he believed there was consensus to remove Leatherwood, and “in an effort to deal with it expeditiously, I acted in good faith but without a formal vote of the Executive Committee.”
“This was an error on my part, and I accept full responsibility,” he said.
The initial statement from the ERLC had given no reasoning for Leatherwood’s termination but came a day after he issued remarks applauding President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race.
“I deeply appreciate everyone who has reached out, especially our trustees who were absolutely bewildered at what took place yesterday and jumped in to set the record straight,” Leatherwood wrote on X on Tuesday. “More to come.”
Leatherwood has been on staff with the ERLC—the public policy and advocacy arm for Southern Baptists—for the past seven years and has been president of the entity since 2021. Just a few hours before his termination was announced Monday evening, Leatherwood was still working and sharing ERLC resources on social media.
In a press release sent out around 8 p.m. Monday, the ERLC announced the executive committee of the board of trustees had removed Leatherwood “in accordance with our bylaws.”
The bylaws allow the executive committee to remove officers without a full trustee vote, so ERLC staff members went ahead and issued the press release when directed to, assuming “they were acting under the appropriate authority of the board,” they later said.
Once the news was out, it was clear people within the ERLC were learning about Leatherwood’s removal for the first time, and Smith had acted on his own.
On Tuesday morning, Smith apologized in a since-deleted post on X:
The trustees of the @erlc steward the entity on behalf of Southern Baptists. In leading them, I made a consequential procedural mistake. The exec cmte and other trustees are Christ-honoring volunteers, who give much.
The mistake was mine; I apologize.
Smith, a pastor in Florida and former executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware, had served on the ERLC board since 2018. He told Baptist Press, “I love the SBC. I love the ERLC. And I trust the Executive Committee to take the best course of action moving forward.”
After the retraction, the executive commitee of trustees clarified the reasoning for the “destabilizing” “flurry of activities” this week:
To be clear, this retraction was about following the procedures laid out in the bylaws of the ERLC, not about responding to pressure from outside organizations. As people who must give an account to God and Southern Baptists for how we have stewarded this commission, we have worked to ensure that every action taken follows the appropriate procedures affirmed by Southern Baptists.
An increasingly vocal minority of Southern Baptists have called for the defunding of the ERLC year after year. Some of their ire has been directed at Leatherwood for his unwillingness to endorse an abolitionist pro-life stance that would criminalize mothers who abort and for his calls for gun reform after his children survived the 2023 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville.
Yet Leatherwood also has a reputation as an effective and respected leader for Southern Baptists in Washington, DC. At an ERLC luncheon last month, former vice president Mike Pence recognized Leatherwood in particular, saying it was only with his advocacy and partnership that the previous Trump administration was able to advance certain pro-life and religious liberty measures.
The announcement regarding Leatherwood’s removal had pleased some critics but mostly confused Southern Baptists since it came suddenly, outside of a scheduled meeting, and without explanation.
The last time—and only time in recent memory—that an SBC entity president was fired by trustees was in 2018, when Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s board ousted Paige Patterson after a 13-hour-long meeting.
Several Southern Baptist pastors had called for prayer and clarity, affirming the work of ERLC, while others saw the removal as a justified response. The Center for Baptist Leadership—an ultra-conservative group calling for “institutional revitalization within the SBC”—accused Leatherwood of failing to represent their interests and called out his recent comments on Biden.
Over the weekend, Leatherwood had been quoted in Baptist Press as saying, “Despite what some partisans will say, to walk away from power is a selfless act—the kind that has become all too rare in our culture.” He also wrote an article for the publication calling it “an astonishing moment for American history.”
At the SBC annual meeting in June, Founders Ministry president and Florida pastor Tom Ascol made a motion to abolish the ERLC for becoming “increasingly distant from the values and concerns of the churches that finance it.” The motion—like previous proposals to abolish or defund the entity—failed to receive a majority vote on the floor, though a significant minority raised their ballots.
The ERLC received over $3 million from the SBC’s Cooperative Program last fiscal year, about 1.6 percent of the $191.8 million in Southern Baptist giving that was distributed to denominational entities and activities.
In Leatherwood’s address to the annual meeting, he said, “The work of this Commission is not just rooted in this Convention, it is responsive to this Convention,” bringing up ERLC resources addressing gender confusion and political engagement as well as its advocacy around pro-life policies, international aid, and conscience rights.
“While the executive committee recognizes a wide range of opinions on the work of the ERLC, most visible in a recent attempt to abolish the organization at the 2024 SBC annual meeting, the executive committee does not believe that this discontent rises to the level of a dismissable offense,” the executive commitee said in a clarification on Tuesday.
“Further, any insinuations that the events of the previous days are the result of a moral failing on Brent’s part are wholly false. We find Brent Leatherwood to be a man of utmost moral and ethical integrity.”
Leatherwood succeeded Russell Moore, who led the ERLC until his resignation in 2021.
Moore also faced backlash for his advocacy and messaging, particularly around Donald Trump. He now serves as editor in chief of Christianity Today.
This is a breaking news story and has been updated.
