Earlier this week, Lifeway Research, in a study sponsored by World Relief, purported to show “Pastors support legal immigration, split on deportation levels,” according to an article in the SBC’s Baptist Press.
In a thread on X, attorney and author Jon Whitehead breaks down what’s really happening.
Our old friends at the Evangelical Immigration Table are still trying to buy the SBC’s voice.
EIT-member World Relief just hired Lifeway to conduct a biased survey for SBC consumption, claiming “Protestant pastors” overwhelmingly support open immigration policies.
Let’s look under the hood.
Start with who paid for it. World Relief — a member of the Evangelical Immigration Table, which has spent years lobbying evangelical institutions toward open-borders immigration policy — sponsored this survey and hired Lifeway to conduct it.
Lifeway’s sampling is credible, I guess, but that doesn’t make the sponsor’s methodology neutral! It’s incredibly biased toward WR’s priors.
Start with the sample. Lifeway surveyed 667 “American Protestant pastors.”
The crosstabs — buried after the headlines — reveal that roughly 36% of the weighted sample is mainline pastors. United Methodists. Presbyterians (USA). ELCA Lutherans.
Mainline pastors support increasing legal immigration at 2x the rate of evangelical pastors. 3x as likely to call refugees a top-three global priority. 5x as likely to oppose foreign assistance cuts.
So Baptist Press is covering a survey that has very little to do with SBC or “evangelical” opinion.
Here’s what the survey claims, versus what SBC pastors likely believe.
“36% of pastors want the American Church on the forefront of refugee response.”
→ For SBC pastors: approximately 25%.
“A majority of pastors say we should increase legal immigration.”
→ For SBC pastors: a minority.
“51% oppose PEPFAR cuts.”
→ For SBC pastors: They actually support the cuts, 48% to 41%.
Some of the headlines are opposite was SBC pastors would say.
How do we know how SBC pastors would likely respond? Mostly arithmetic.
Lifeway published the evangelical vs. mainline breakdown for each question. I asked Claude to use those splits, reverse-engineer the sample composition, and reweight toward SBC pastoral demographics.
The raw data is in the survey World Relief paid for. They just didn’t want to show the lower evangelical support in the headlines.
What do SBC pastors actually care about?
The survey suggests “immigration” is a top three issue for pastors. But that’s because mainline pastors, at 41%, dragged that number up.
Only 16% of evangelicals chose immigration as a top-three global concern, taking it well out of the top 3. Definitely not top three for SBC pastors.
We can correct the samples.
We can’t correct for the biased questions, which are engineered to produce agreeable-sounding headlines, even when asked to immigration hardliners.
Technique one: motherhood statements.
“Legislation should respect the God-given dignity of every person.”
98% agree! Because no pastor is going to tell a pollster he opposes human dignity. What he thinks about deportation enforcement, asylum restrictions, or employer sanctions is never asked precisely.
World Relief gets to say “98% of pastors support our principles.”
Technique two: advocacy language baked into the question stem.
Q20, on PEPFAR: “…the program known as PEPFAR…which is credited with having saved 25 million lives, primarily in Africa.”
Q19, on Afghan deportations: “…including some Afghans who had converted to Christianity or who supported the US military…”
Q13, on global displacement: “…the number of people forced to flee their homes has nearly doubled, from 60 million to more than 120 million…”
These are written to produce a specific, compassionate responses; they’re biased, leading questions.
Technique three: never rank the real tradeoffs.
The survey never asks whether asylum eligibility should be restricted, whether employers should face penalties for hiring illegal workers, or whether sanctuary policies should be prohibited.
The one question that touched on immigration levels framed the choice as “helpful vs. harmful” before asking about quantity — priming agreement before the tradeoff arrived. None of the questions require a pastor to choose between compassion and real cost.
It’s designed to let pastors to give compassionate-sounding answers, without understanding their policy tradeoffs.
The Evangelical Immigration Table has been trying to move SBC immigration policy for fifteen years. We’ve seen this strategy before! Claim a consensus exists, manufacture the data to support it, then use it to pressure the SBC resolutions committee.
Would it surprise you to hear these numbers were released during a meeting of the ERLC’s new “Immigration Task Force?”
EIT/WR is still hoping “Lifeway” statistics will be accepted at face value, and be used as the basis for an “SBC consensus” in June.
But it’s still the same far-left groups trying to buy the SBC’s voice.
As author and cultural commentator Megan Basham points out in response to Whitehead:
