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:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper. At any meeting of politicians ... how impertinent it would be to quote from the Bible! how pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“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)