Southern Baptist Convention President Clint Pressley said today on social media he is disheartened by efforts to soften the Republican Party’s platform stance against abortion.
Pressley, a former Mobile pastor who is now senior pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., expressed his dissatisfaction on the X social media platform:
“I am disheartened by what’s happened in the GOP,” Pressley wrote. “The GOP platform may be subject to change, but God’s word is not. Southern Baptists ‘contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death’ and will insist that elected officials do the same.”
The Republican National Committee on moved Monday to adopt a party platform that reflects former President Donald Trump’s position opposing a federal abortion ban and ceding limits to states, omitting the explicit basis for a national ban for the first time in 40 years.
Trump imposed his priorities on the RNC’s platform committee as he seeks to steer clear during his campaign of strict abortion language, even while taking credit for setting up the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court. Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted in the majority to overturn the 1973 precedent that established a national right to have an abortion.
Pressley, who was previously pastor of the Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile from 2004-2010, was elected in June as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
