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:
“Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water until he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939)