The Southern Baptist Convention is the latest Christian denomination to fracture over liberal theology, this time about immigration. Will the denomination survive this struggle and right the ship, or will we begin to see a mass exodus as Bible-believing churches go elsewhere?

From The Federalist. Over the past decade, a growing divide has emerged within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), as denominational leaders have increasingly framed left-leaning border policies as a Christian imperative.

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Who is praying on the wall?

Last week, Baptist Press, the official news service of the SBC, published an article by Trevin Wax, a vice president at the SBC’s North American Mission Board, in which he defended his denomination’s participation in “refugee resettlement” against those he claimed have a “deep misunderstanding of how disaster relief, foster care or refugee resettlement takes place.”

This comes on the heels of the Center for Baptist Leadership (a conservative element in the SBC) discovering that the SBC’s Send Relief, in partnership with World Relief, “took nearly $70,000 in Biden State Department funds” for “refugee resettlement.” …

The fault lines emerging over this issue are not new, and they are likely to grow as members of America’s largest Protestant denomination prepare for their annual meeting in June. Southern Baptist voters tend to be politically conservative and were part of the 82 percent of evangelicals who favored Donald Trump for president in 2024. However, the denomination’s leadership class has made immigrant assistance a test of Christian love and thus driven the denomination into opposing conservative border policies.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift away from charity alone and toward politically advocating for asylum seekers. The SBC’s 2023 resolution “On Wisely Engaging Immigration” is much different from a similar resolution from 2006 in that it gives the government the responsibility to “care for migrants” and promotes using immigration to diversify churches. …

This shift was largely engineered by the now-former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), Russell Moore, and is carried on today by his successor Brent Leatherwood. …

According to Capstone Report, Moore received grant money from the National Immigration Forum for participating in an “immigration reform campaign” in 2015. That same year, the Open Societies Foundation identified Southern Baptists as recipients of funding for “refugee advocacy.” …

In 2019, denomination leaders like Leatherwood and Dean Inserra signed an Evangelical Call for Restitution-Based Immigration Reform published by the Evangelical Immigration Table. The statement portrayed deportation as unjust, insinuated the United States government was to blame for separating families, and supported a restitution-based “pathway to Legal Permanent Residency” for illegal migrants.

For the next four years, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the SBC took hardly any action on immigration issues despite the fact that illegal migrants poured across the border at record numbers. Then suddenly, Leatherwood and the ERLC took a strong stand in February 2024 to support Lankford’s “Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act,” which prohibited Homeland Security from continuing to exercise emergency authority to respond to the border crisis if the weekly crossings were under 21,000 encounters per week. …

Clearly, a rift is emerging in the SBC between Trump-supporting members and leaders opposing his policies. The USAID incentive has been turned off by the Trump administration, but groups that benefitted from government gravy will try to reestablish a connection. The question is whether conservative members will keep funding groups like the ERLC and electing presidents who fail to hold groups like Send accountable. …

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(Excerpt from The Federalist. Photo Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)