Good riddance. That’s the only fitting response to the news that Brent Leatherwood has finally resigned from his post as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

For years, Southern Baptists have been told to treat this bloated appendage of the Convention like some noble organ keeping the body alive. In truth, it has been nothing more than a parasitic growth, siphoning off Cooperative Program dollars to fund a left-leaning lobbying apparatus that has about as much in common with the New Testament church as a D.C. cocktail party.

Leatherwood’s departure, of course, will be dressed up with all the flowery tributes about “courage” and “faithful leadership” from the same trustee class that allowed this mess to fester in the first place. They’ll talk about his “loving boldness” and “gospel witness,” and they’ll sprinkle in a few Bible verses to sanctify the obituary.

But scratch the surface of the resume, and what you really see is an operation that marched in lockstep with the very ideologies that most Southern Baptists oppose. Call it what it was, a taxpayer-funded lobby for the Democratic Party, financed not only by elite Washington donors, like George Soros, but also by the tithes and offerings of Southern Baptists in pews.

This wasn’t some sudden shift in direction, either. Leatherwood was not a reformer. He was Russell Moore’s protege. And Russell Moore, lest we forget, was the one who set the ERLC on this trajectory in the first place. He was the architect of a strategy that took secular progressive policies and baptized them in pious-sounding phrases like “human dignity” and “gospel issues.”

Moore was the one who smuggled Critical Race Theory into the Convention disguised as an “analytical tool,” who framed open borders for illegal immigrants as a Christian duty, who painted conservatives fighting for abortion abolition as cruel extremists who hate women.

Moore’s political playbook was simple, make progressive policies sound spiritual and cast anyone who opposed them as unloving. And Leatherwood, with his practiced smile and quieter tone, simply kept the machinery humming.

In 2022, Leatherwood signed a letter opposing abortion abolition in Louisiana—an open defiance of a resolution passed by SBC messengers just a year earlier demanding equal legal protection for the unborn. Instead of siding with the churches, he sided with the abortion lobby, insisting that mothers who hire the hitmen of the abortion industry are merely “victims.”

This is the same moral logic that lets a mafia boss go free while jailing the trigger man. The ERLC posture was simply to save the image, protect the optics, and neuter any law with teeth, all while preening about compassion.

And the immigration issue was the same story. Leatherwood followed Moore’s blueprint, pushing “Dreamer” amnesty and “comprehensive immigration reform”—phrases that are nothing more than Beltway euphemisms for throwing open the borders and abandoning the rule of law, essentially giving the Democrat party an entirely new voter bloc.

All of this, of course, was wrapped in sanctimonious appeals about “neighbor love” and “welcoming the stranger.” Never mind that the chaos of lawless borders destroys communities, undermines security, and exploits the very people it claims to help. The ERLC’s compassion always seems to align perfectly with progressive talking points and the priorities of the globalist class.

Then there’s the racial reconciliation industrial complex. Leatherwood didn’t dismantle Moore’s racial grievance machine—he expanded it. Partnering with Ed Litton, the plagiarist pastor who gave the SBC its most embarrassing presidency in decades, Leatherwood joined the so-called “Unify Project” as a member of its steering council.

Its mission? Keep Southern Baptists locked in an endless cycle of white guilt and performative contrition.

The DEI jargon was slathered on pretty thick. They may not dare say “Critical Race Theory” out loud anymore, but its DNA is stamped all over their initiatives. It’s the same scam corporations use to bully employees into ideological conformity, and the ERLC imported it into the church with a smile and a wink.

And when a shooter stormed a Christian school in Nashville—a tragedy that rightly shook the nation—what did Leatherwood do? Did he lead the charge to call the culture back to Christ? Did he use the moment to expose the rot of a society that slaughters children in the womb and in classrooms alike?

No.

He took to the ERLC pulpit to lobby for red-flag gun laws.

He opportunistically demanded that the government be given the power to confiscate firearms without due process. A tragedy became a soapbox for Democrat policy. And once again, the ERLC proved itself incapable of resisting the gravitational pull of the left.

The defenders will say the ERLC placed ultrasound machines in pregnancy centers, filed amicus briefs on religious liberty, and petitioned Congress to defund Planned Parenthood. Fine. Toss them a cookie. But these token achievements are little more than fig leaves covering the naked reality that the ERLC has consistently worked to blunt conservative advances while promoting progressive policies under the guise of balance and nuance. It’s basically like praising a thief for occasionally donating a dollar to charity.

The truth is, the ERLC was never supposed to exist in the first place. The SBC was designed to pool resources for missions, not to bankroll a permanent D.C. lobbying shop with a veneer of spirituality.

From Moore to Leatherwood, it has been a creature of the swamp, a bloated parasite feeding on the sacrificial giving of churches while returning little more than press releases, political compromises, and left-leaning social engineering. It’s not only a useless entity, it’s actively harmful.

Now Leatherwood is gone, and the establishment will start whispering about “the right successor,” as if a new coat of paint will fix a house built on sand. But Southern Baptists must not fall for it again. The ERLC is not a broken tool to be repaired. It is a weapon forged for the wrong war, serving the wrong master.

It has outlived its usefulness, squandered its credibility, and proven itself unfit for the task. The only faithful move left is not to reform it but to dismantle it entirely. Because as long as it exists, the ERLC will continue to do what it has always done…dress up leftist politics in church clothes and sell it to the pews at the expense of the truth.

Good riddance, Brent. And if the SBC does what is right, good riddance, ERLC. But it won’t. And the cycle will repeat.