A top leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has resigned from a new interfaith coalition, saying some fellow Southern Baptists felt it was inappropriate for him to support the building of mosques.

Richard Land, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told organizers at the Anti-Defamation League that “many Southern Baptists share my deep commitment to religious freedom and the right of Muslims to have places of worship.” At the same time, “they also feel that a Southern Baptist denominational leader filing suit to allow individual mosques to be built is ‘a bridge too far.”‘

Land told the ADL in a Jan. 14 letter that he had received a “spirited response” to his support of a disputed mosque project in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and some fellow Baptists viewed it as promotion of Islam.

Huffington Post, 26 January 2011

See also Think Progress, 25 January 2011

For the background to the ADL’s campaign, see “ADL changes its tune on mosques”, Salon, 25 January 2011

For Pamela Geller’s rant against the ADL’s Abe Foxman and his “latest dhimmi-jew stunt”, see Atlas Shrugs, 25 January 2011