Well, Megan Basham has done it again. She’s got a new article up in Christ Over All, where she takes a look at the ERLC, a policy advocacy group funded by the Southern Baptist denomination. She starts by talking about how good the ERLC used to be, when they focused on their original mission – protecting religious liberty, and promoting Christian values.

She talks about the role the ERLC played in getting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed and signed by BILL CLINTON, way back in 1993. The leader of the ERLC at that time was Mike Whitehead.

She writes:

The reason the ERLC was in the room where RFRA happened was because Mike Whitehead, then the ERLC’s general counsel, had deep relationships with DC insiders who had long worked on religious liberty legislation. After he signed the law, Clinton sent Whitehead a personal note, thanking him for his work crafting the measure and offering prayers for Whitehead’s teenage son, who was battling leukemia at the time.

“Our involvement in that litigation was probably the first major involvement by Southern Baptists in legislative drafting,” Whitehead told me. And because he stopped representing the ERLC two years later, it was also one of their last.

In the rest of the article, Megan talks to a variety of conservatives on Capitol Hill, and she asks them why RFRA was one of the last good things that the ERLC was able to do:

Today, Whitehead sits on the board of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal advocacy group that continues to be heavily involved in drafting federal- and state-level legislation on religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family. When he talks to friends in the Capitol about what role, if any, the ERLC is playing in supporting policies in these areas, he’s told they’re invisible. “They’ll offer comments to the press, then they’ll write that they are involved, and they’ll take credit when an issue they’re supporting prevails. But they really are not viewed as being actively helpful on advancing conservative politics on the Hill,” he said.

The 19 lawmakers and Hill staffers I contacted for this essay all echoed that assessment.

She talked to Mike Lee, who is one of the most conservative senators, according to the Heritage Foundation ratings:

[W]hen I asked Lee about any support his office has received from the Southern Baptists’ policy arm, he couldn’t remember ever hearing from them. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not meeting with staff,” he told me. “But the fact that I haven’t heard anything memorable about them means they’ve been completely absent on the big fights over big issues. I don’t recall them going against RFMA or Planned Parenthood funding or anything else.”

This would be the consistent refrain of my inquiry into how the ERLC is viewed on the Hill.

One of my favorite conservatives on Twitter is Rachel Bovard. She has a lot of connections in D.C. because she’s worked with a whole bunch of different conservative organizations to get things done. She’s currently the Vice President of Programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Megan spoke to her as well:

And what are her views on the effectiveness of the ERLC in advocating for policies that align with biblical principles? “In 12 years on the Hill I don’t ever remember hearing from the ERLC,” she said. This is particularly noteworthy because, during her time as executive director of the Senate Republican Steering Committee, Bovard ran weekly meetings of conservative movement groups and staff, where priority issues and positions on legislation were discussed. “Probably 175–200 people were on the invite list,” she told me, “and meetings regularly drew 80–100 people. [The] ERLC was never there as far as I recall.” In fact, Bovard said she never thought of the ERLC because she didn’t know they existed. “Which is odd,” she continued, “because the Steering Committee’s entire job is to be an access point for the conservative movement to the Senate.”

Megan goes on to quote a few prominent conservatives, but it’s the same story. The ERLC has as much influence pushing for Biblical principles as the SPLC, a far-left hate group. And they’re more effective at pushing for the positions the SPLC supports.

Megan spoke to Eric Teetsel, who he took over the leadership of the conservative Center for Renewing America after its founder, Russ Vought, was appointed by Donald Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget:

“As a Southern Baptist who happens to be an expert in what they’re supposed to be doing, I can tell you, they’re completely and entirely worse than useless,” he told me. “They are actively counterproductive to the ends that Southern Baptists ought to expect from an entity that purports to be the public policy arm of their convention. When it comes to protecting life, family stuff—you know, the basic conservative things where all the movement groups in town would tend to align—they’ll sign coalition letters, but that’s nothing. It’s meaningless. Those agenda items are going to happen anyway, because other groups that are more influential and effective than the ERLC are driving them. The ERLC just hops on board and takes credit.”

In the rest of the article, Megan looks at how the ERLC has affected policy in their home state of Tennessee.

Here’s what she heard about the current leader of the ERLC, Brent Leatherwood:

Though Leatherwood told The Baptist Press the ERLC supported a law to ban transgender treatments on children “as it made its way through the Tennessee legislature,” House Majority Leader William Lamberth, who was a principal architect and co-sponsor of the bill, couldn’t remember receiving that support. He did not recall any involvement from the ERLC.

[…]One issue that did not find the ERLC so motivated was protecting women’s private spaces. Lamberth’s colleague, Tennessee Representative Monty Fritts, told me the ERLC was similarly MIA on a bill he sponsored to keep men out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and prisons. Again, this is an issue the ERLC regularly highlights in its appeals to Southern Baptists for support. Fritts also said that while many ministries and faith groups in Tennessee backed his proposal to officially name July a month of prayer and fasting, the ERLC was not one of them.

And this anecdote from a prominent conservative about Russell Moore was interesting:

Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the policy nonprofit, North Carolina Values Coalition, served on the ERLC’s board from 2012 to 2019 and had a front-row seat to the entity’s shift in focus under the leadership of Moore. “We had this meeting of the executive committee, which I was on, before the convention started,” she remembered, “and Russell Moore was going through his agenda, and he had made some statements that the SBC was going to change its tone and that the culture wars were over. Instead of stuff like abortion and gay marriage, we were going to focus on issues like immigration, sexual abuse, and racial injustice.”

And:

The ERLC continues to be heavily involved with the George Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table, registering opposition to President Trump’s border policies.

My impression after reading the article was that the ERLC does nothing to support Bible-based policy, and everything to support secular left policy. They just aren’t very good at having a Biblical worldview. They don’t know how to convince anyone else of what the Bible says, using evidence that those non-Christians would find convincing. They’re just obsessed with agreeing with the secular left, because they love the praise from men more than the praise from God. Simple.

Have a read, and see what you think.

I’ve noticed that Dr. Jay Richards has been talking a lot about the role that government plays in guiding the health of American citizens. I am so far behind on this, so I have to catch up. Basically, there is concern that government agencies are guiding Americans poorly because they are too close to Big Pharma and Big Food. And it is causing us a lot of health problems.

Well, I noticed that Jay wrote an article for Daily Signal about MAHA, and I think it’s a really good article to explain what the Trump administration is supposed to solve.

First, he explains how we got here:

Although RFK, Jr. is famous—or infamous, depending on your view—for his criticisms of vaccines, that wasn’t the theme of his lengthy speech. He spoke instead about an unholy alliance—a cartel—of industries, corporate media, government regulatory agencies, and even nonprofit “charities” that is making us fat and sick. This problem doesn’t fit the simple taxonomy of “public” and “private” or “left” and “right” that served us well during the Cold War.

Kennedy has been a voice in the wilderness warning about this cartel for years. Most Americans first became aware of it during the 2020 pandemic. Here’s the basic story: COVID-19 itself was likely the product of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s bad enough. But Communist China didn’t act alone. This work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and laundered through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

One point is that critics of the cartel were suppressed:

Once the virus was out, the absurd and counterproductive lockdowns and hygiene theater were pushed by global entities such as the World Health Organization. Domestically, Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked to undermine independent experts who criticized the federal bureaucrats’ favored policies.

Collins and Fauci even orchestrated the publication of a deceptive article in Nature that claimed the virus had a natural origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal entities, including the Biden White House, pressured social media platforms to censor even the best-credentialed dissenters.

Attentive Americans soon learned that public health, as a field, focuses on nudging whole populations, rather than seeking the health of individual patients.

Another key point – the cartel companies cannot be sued for any damages they cause:

Certain pharmaceutical companies—which pay royalties to many NIH staff, including Collins and Fauci—enjoyed a suspiciously fast and less than rigorous approval process for their mRNA “vaccines.” Vaccine mandates then created a massive artificial market for the drugs. And drug companies’ immunity from legal liability allowed them to enjoy the financial benefits of these policies without facing the downside risks from any long-term harm to those who took the vaccines.

Many Americans started to mistrust their doctors, because they were pushing drugs and surgeries on their children:

Then, during the lockdowns, the growing awareness of the “gender-industrial complex”— media, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and others who push ghoulish “gender-affirming” interventions on people distressed about their sexed bodies—further reinforced the lack of credibility of private and public health authorities.

Jay says that these symptoms – lockdowns, mandates, persecution of scientific dissent – are all the work of “the cartel”, which is composed of actors from Big Government, Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Media.

Jay then switches over to the specific problems that the cartel is alleged to have caused:

In his speech, Kennedy devoted many paragraphs to the “chronic disease epidemic”—including ever higher rates, even among children, of Type II diabetes and obesity, and of Alzheimer’s, which some now refer to as “Type III diabetes.”

[…]He spoke of “an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid,” including: “ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.”

He also spoke of the massive spikes in the use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs.

So, that’s the problem that Kennedy and his allies in the Trump administration need to solve.

For me, two of the biggest red flags are 1) the persecution of qualified dissenting scientists, and 2) the threats of ending the employment of people who don’t want to take medications where the manyfacture is immune to being sued. Those factors right there alerted me to the existence of “the cartel”, and now I’m just hoping that Kennedy is the right person to do something about it. I’m not convinced that he is, but I think it’s positive that Jay thinks he is.