Rift Grows In SBC Over Support For Leftist Immigration Policy

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.

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 SBC’s Send Network has offered churches resources, including grants, to resettle migrants, which, according to World Relief, includes things like teaching them how to use credit cards, file taxes, and use their EBT card to access resources like food stamps. Though organizations like SEND and World Relief refer to these migrants as refugees, it should be pointed out that many are asylum seekers who may not ultimately be granted refugee status.

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. Gone is the term “illegal,” as well as calls to  punish “employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.” In 2006, the Southern Baptists who attended annual meetings wanted the federal government to enforce existing laws, but today they want the creation of new, more “compassionate” ones.

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. In a USA Today interview, Moore compared people who used terms like “illegal aliens and anchor babies” to those who dehumanized “unborn children by calling them embryos and fetuses.” Moore, who is now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, influenced a generation of Southern Baptist millennials to include leftist approaches to immigration under the “pro-life” banner and taught them to invoke general “image of God” or “gospel” language to justify policy approaches.

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 2017, President Trump rescinded President Obama’s DACA executive order that allowed certain migrants brought to the United States by their parents to remain. Moore then brought together 50 evangelical leaders, including four former SBC presidents, to endorse “the underlying policy aim” of DACA and urge Congress to “provide a pathway to permanent legal status and/or citizenship.”

That same year, Southern Baptist leaders Ed Stetzer and Danny Akin joined other evangelical leaders to “call on President Trump … to support refugees” in an ad sponsored by World Relief and published in The Washington Post. The message was simple. President Trump’s temporary moratorium on asylum seekers, pending a proper vetting process, was inconsistent with Christ’s compassion, and Christians who “desire[d] to receive many thousands more people” should oppose it. World Relief again sponsored a message to President Trump urging him to renew DACA and allow 700,000 illegal migrant “dreamers” to stay in the country. More Southern Baptists signed.

In an interview for the National Immigration Forum, Walter Strickland from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS), Travis Wussow from the ERLC, and Jose Ocampo, a DACA recipient on staff at Hickory Grove Baptist Church, discussed their support for DACA. Strickland stated that “standing on the side of dreamers is the job of Christians.” Ocampo highlighted the robust support he received from both his church and, apparently, from Clint Pressley, the current president of the SBC. (Pressley also reportedly supported a pathway for residency and/or citizenship.) Meanwhile, Sen. James Lankford, a Southern Baptist, proposed a bill to provide illegal migrants who qualified for DACA to gain permanent residency.

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. Since Trump became president again, the ERLC signed on to the Evangelical Immigration Table’s letter urging Trump to reinstate “sensitive locations” policies that would prohibit ICE from entering churches. Leatherwood also signed onto World Relief’s statement to “Sustain the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program.”

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.

Akin, president of Southeastern Seminary, once called immigration a “gospel issue,” suggesting a left-wing stance is required to be a faithful Christian. Yet many Southern Baptists believe the gospel hinges on Jesus’ redemptive work, not leftist politics, and are increasingly resistant to what they see as manipulative leadership.

Jon Harris is an author, producer, and cultural commentator. He hosts the “Conversations That Matter” podcast.