Immigration reform will be ERLC priority

The new head of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission said May 30 that immigration reform will take a high priority in his new role. 

“Just and fair immigration reform … will be a major, major touchstone of my administration,” Russell Moore told reporters in a conference call. He officially began June 1 as America’s second-largest faith group’s top spokesman for moral and policy concerns.

“We plan to stand with our brothers and sisters in Christ in calling for justice, compassion and fairness for the sojourners among us and for just and fair immigration reform,” said Moore, who leaves a post as vice president and dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Moore is featured in a quarter-million-dollar radio and billboard ad campaign paid for by the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of diverse evangelical leaders from across the political spectrum launched in June 2012.

Moore — who served on an SBC resolutions committee in 2011 that drafted a historic resolution supporting “a just and compassionate path to legal status” for undocumented immigrants — said he believes the reason for such wide diversity and acting now is because evangelicals are coming to understand that a broken immigration system is in fact a moral issue.

During the last attempt to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws in 2007, the SBC never fully embraced a bipartisan bill that died in the face of conservative opposition.

A new immigration bill has now cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee. The full Senate is expected to start debating the bill in early June, just as a bipartisan group of members of the House are trying to finalize their own version of an immigration bill.

Moore said evangelicals are more aggressive this time around because more immigrants have joined their congregations, giving members a better understanding of who they are.

And he said it reflects a broader acceptance of granting citizenship to unauthorized immigrants among conservative Americans that should be embraced by Republican critics in Congress.

(ABP, RNS)