The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is the public policy agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is headed by Richard Land and is headquartered in Nashville, TN with an office in Washington, DC.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. is the social and moral issues agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest non-catholic denomination in the United States, with over 16 million members in over 43,000 independent churches.
Formerly known as the Christian Life Commission, the agency has been led since inception by Dr. Richard Land. The Commission was founded in 1988 after the Southern Baptist Convention started reducing its involvement in the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty over divisions regarding the meaning of separation of church and state and the role of Baptist organisations in partisan politics.
The stated vision of the ERLC is an American society that affirms and practices Judeo-Christian values rooted in biblical authority. The stated mission of the ERLC is to awaken, inform, energize, equip, and mobilize Christians to be the catalysts for the Biblically-based transformation of their families, churches, communities, and the nation.
The agency has many ministries to carry out its stated missions including: voter-registration efforts; For Faith & Family, which produces radio programs and a monthly magazine; the Psalm 139 Project, which donates sonogram machines to crisis pregnancy centres; and a think-tank, the Research Institute.
The ERLC has offices in Nashville, Tennessee and Washington, D.C.
ERLC is involved in lobbying. Its legislative achievements include The Sudan Peace Act, The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), and The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.
Famous quotes containing the words ethics, religious, liberty and/or commission:
“Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities as well as those of other people will keep a man from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)