Will the Southern Baptist Convention have another conservative resurgence?

Interview with Jonathan Whitehead

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a big deal, whatever your religious faith or lack thereof. “As the West goes, so goes the world. As America goes, so goes the West. As Christianity goes, so goes America. As evangelicals go, so goes Christianity. As Southern Baptists go, so go evangelicals,” declared the late pastor Adrian Rogers at the 2002 SBC annual meeting.

A touch hyperbolic, but only a touch. The SBC is America’s largest Protestant denomination by far, with more than 12 million members. In contrast, its friendly competitor for influence within US evangelicalism, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), has just 400,000 members.

But unlike the PCA, the Southern Baptist Convention’s numbers are falling; its membership peaked at over 16 million in 2006. And ideological tensions are simmering, amid a perception that institutional elites have taken progressive stances at odds with many churchgoers’ beliefs.

Contestation over the SBC’s direction is nothing new. Unhappiness about its liberal leadership in the 1970s saw a new generation of Baptists take control of the denomination in a long battle starting with Rogers’ election as its president in 1979.

To look deeper into the problems the SBC faces and assess whether a second conservative resurgence is on the cards, World Politics spoke to Jonathan Whitehead, a prominent religious liberty lawyer based in Kansas City, Missouri and an influential voice within the Southern Baptist Convention.

How did you really come to know the Lord and make your faith your own? Did you grow up in the SBC?

I did. On my father’s side of the family, they were Southern Baptist for seven generations. My mother’s side came more from an independent Baptist background. And so I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. I was baptised there about age seven, and I went to a Christian school growing up.

What made my faith real? I had cancer as a child, leukemia, so that, if anything, taught me the reality of the church and the hope of the Gospel. That really cemented my faith in practical experience. So yes, I’ve grown up in and been around the Convention my whole life.

And how did you get into your current work in religious liberty law?

I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2004 you and came back and practiced in Kansas City in a very large firm, and then went to a mid-sized firm. I had always known I wanted to do something in the religious organisation space. I had studied quite a bit the organisational teachings of Henry Drucker and then Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life came out at that time. There was a lot of controversy about the ministerial housing allowance back then as a religious liberty issue. There’s this whole world of Christian organisations and I knew I wanted to be part of that.

My father, early in his career, in the early 80s, handled what turned out to be a pivotal religious liberty case for students called Widmar v. Vincent. And that case established the principle that Christian students at a public school or public university in the States have the right to use student facilities on the same basis as any other group. So they wanted to have a student Bible study, and the the University of Missouri-Kansas City said no, because of separation of church and state, we can’t allow religious worship on campus, but we can allow transcendental meditation, because that’s science not faith. That case ended up establishing an equal access principle in the schools, which was later extended by legislation and then really established some core neutrality principles of First Amendment law that we still argue about today. And now my father and I have been deeply involved in that area of law for decades.

Pivoting to the Southern Baptist Convention, looking at the statistics in terms of just how big it is as an evangelical denomination, the numbers are very impressive. And you see that there was this huge growth in the postwar era, from 6.3 million members in 1945 to more than 16 million four decades on. What explains that extraordinary expansion?

There was an extraordinary confluence of events. After the war and through the 50s and early 60s, the SBC just matched American culture to a tee.

Part of it is that before the war mainline denominations were really exhausted. At the same time, Americans thought they were throwing off grim versions of Calvinism. So you had the mainline and the social gospel movements in the 20s and 30s. You had the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, and that combined with World War I and World War II. It really felt like the mainline was hollowed out. Especially because of the influence of German higher criticism and because of fundamentalist-modernist controversy, even if they had the form of a church, they no longer believed in in the power of Scripture or Jesus as divine or even in God at all in some cases. They were running on form without the beliefs.

They had a last great gasp in the form of the Great Society, the fight against communism, and the civil rights movement. But really, after that, you see a precipitous decline in the influence of the mainline, because they don’t believe what they say. I remember how Alan Dulles [the first CIA director, from 1953 to 1961] said something like we need to be a Christian nation, even if I don’t personally believe in those things.

Whereas the Southern Baptists believed what they said, they were highly evangelistic, they had an emphasis on democracy and individual conscience, and in many ways that matched the growing secular emphasis on liberal values.

Baptists have always been quick on the draw. I remember reading some stories about early missionaries in my part of the country when it was the western frontier, and there were complaints by Presbyterian and other missionaries that the Baptists didn’t have to ask permission from anybody, they just showed up. And they were always there first. That, writ large, meant a large chunk of the what became the Southwest and the West and the Midwest were evangelised by the Baptists.

That spirit really captured the need of the moment. The Baptists were a funnel at just the right spot as American culture threw off a certain Puritan kind of faith.

We had the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Second Great Awakening and then after Reconstruction in the south, things were just beginning to get back together, educationally and socially for kind of the core group of Southern Baptists.

Then we really hit our stride just after World War II. We had Billy Graham; we had Carl Henry, that brilliant scholar who was behind so much of the evangelical movement. So we had expert communicators. We had people who believed in what they were selling. We had people who were equipped to talk to young soldiers trying to come back and start families after the war. The competition was the mainline and it was exhausted.

And the SBC had the structure best suited to the corporatist mindset after the war. You came back from the war, and everyone’s mental picture of a big organisation was the military. And so you had military analogies and organisations for a while, then after that, you had IBM and GM and Ford. And in some ways, the SBC out of Nashville, with their Sunday School Board, what is now Lifeway, really became expert at packaging up and distributing, not quite a franchise model, but materials and culture-exporting machines that did a really good job of spreading a fairly uniform culture among Southern Baptist churches and kind of a corporate model.

In fact, at one point I think they were the largest single zip code in the country, because they were getting so much mail just for the Baptist bookstore people asking for Sunday School material or Bible School material, ordering books or Bibles or church materials. They really were in a unique place for interacting with the culture and meeting its needs.

Looking at things now, there’s a perception that the SBC is in a state of malaise. And you see that with church membership numbers declining over the past two decades. What do you think explains that?

In some ways, the trends just kept going, and have begun to pass the Baptists by. We are kind of a minimalist version of church, right? We don’t have a pope, we don’t have bishops, we just have the congregation, and even inside that the traditional model was the pastor is just one of the other members. They have a special assignment, but they’re equal, and so there’s no hierarchy. The group decides; the majority vote wins. Holy Spirit-informed consciences are given the keys to the kingdom, with minimal church authority. If you look at the Bible closely, this is about the minimum you could come away with, until you hit individualism.

And the West has fallen through minimalist authority into individualism. For a long, long time it’s not been: ‘Why should I believe it? Because the bishop says so.’ The Baptist would have said, well, it’s what the Bible says and what most of us have decided is our interpretation of it. But we’ve fallen through that into ‘why should anyone tell me what to do?’

So as society continued down that path, even the Baptists became seen as too restrictive. By the 80s, the word Baptist was seen as meaning somebody who opposed drinking and dancing and maybe fun in general, like the Puritans had become a couple hundred years earlier. Of course, they were false impressions of both. But they were the impressions people had of them in the culture.

The SBC had always done a good job of appealing broadly to both sides of political aisle. But in recent years, over the last 30 or 40 years, our left has gone increasingly left, and it is less and less a liberal left, and more and more a progressive left. And so the SBC’s commitment to scriptural authority, Christian authority, evangelical tradition authority, local church authority, increasingly became out of step with the progressive left. Not those who say ‘we want to spend slightly more out of the public budget on on this or that to alleviate suffering’ but those who say ‘we need a radical remaking of world systems in order to liberate humankind’.

Are those political views consistent with or able to be accommodated by a traditional Christian ethic? These are evangelical concerns writ large.

The SBC in particular had a poorly handled generational handoff. We had a boomer generation of leaders, and in looking around as to who they would hand off to, it was an impulse to try to expand the base, to see ‘who will go beyond me and expand beyond?’ But sometimes that comes with the consequence of handing off to leaders who are younger and charismatic but don’t share the same core concerns. So instead of stability and growth, you get instability and fracture.

To a significant degree, the boomers in American evangelicalism handed off to a group of next generation leaders that fractured it pretty badly — I’m thinking along the lines of Russell Moore or Gregory Alan Thornbury. Or Josh Harris, who wrote that book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and isn’t a Christian anymore.

In the SBC and in evangelicalism more broadly boomer leaders handed off to people they thought were younger, more winsome versions of themselves. It turned out they just believe different things and they were not particularly well-suited to leadership. The boomers thought they’d handed off to people they thought could win the battles they had been fighting, against people like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — they thought these were the younger, shinier faces that could win Clintons and Carters on the other side of the political aisle and expand the Convention’s influence.

What they didn’t realise was that on the left, the Clintons and the Carters were increasingly rare. It’s not liberalism anymore, it’s progressivism. And you see the contradictions between progressivism and faith: In 2025 there aren’t really deeply conservative evangelical people with radically progressive political beliefs.

There’ve been other problems too. The kind of corporate, almost franchise model of the SBC started feeling old in the age of the internet and the venture capitalist. That led to quite a bit of institutional distrust. There’s been some institutional opacity, a lack of transparency. Then you couple that with those theological concerns over the past five or 10 years.

The SBC is not falling off as fast as other evangelical groups, so that is something of a point of pride. But you’re right, we do seem to be over the hump of the growth years. I think we spent the 80s and 90s in consolidation mode. I don’t know that we were really converting people to Christianity. I think we were attracting people from other evangelical traditions. But now even that trick has worn out. So we are left asking what we’re going to do without momentum behind us.

It seems to me that you've hit on something very strange. A lot of evangelical leaders don’t seem to get the Great Awokening — how left-liberalism became left-progressivism driven by this revolutionary fervour. And how its adherents really hate evangelical Christians.

It looks like a fair amount of what Russell Moore — and I know he’s left the SBC now — was trying to do with his political comments was to get people who really, really hate evangelicals to hate them less, similar to what Pope Francis was doing with Catholicism. No doubt it came from good intentions. But it’s clear that this doesn’t attract people who are inclined to be attracted to your denomination. What do you think explains this?

I think that's right. You end up upsetting your base and not winning anybody new. Regardless of principles, that’s not a winning strategy.

I do think that in the South, amongst that third generation, there is a feeling of regret that their grandparents or parents got it wrong in some ways in the 60s — they view the struggle for civil rights as a missed opportunity for Southern Baptists and Southern culture generally. So I think they'd like to get a do over on that. But it’s like they just decided: ‘Ok, we’re young Christians now, and surely nobody has tried caring like we care; no one has tried being earnest as we are being earnest’.

It was tragically under-thought-through approach, because you were no longer in conversation with the black church of the 60s. You’re now in conversation with progressive radicals. Again, we produced a generation that was ready to debate the Bill Clintons of the world, when the Bill Clintons were gone. Instead, you’re talking to people who say you need to be anti-racist and that being anti-racist means being affirmatively discriminatory. That is a radical difference from the civil rights movement of the 60s.

They just weren’t prepared for the discussion. They didn’t have any understanding of the arguments about what’s really going on. And so we end up in the mid-2010s with people in the SBC starting to say ‘well, maybe, maybe black liberation theology has multiple elements for us; maybe James H. Cone would be a helpful theologian for us’.

People would use that phrase ‘eat the meat, spit out the bones’. But this material wasn’t very meaty. I mean, whereas the SBC believes the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, Cone did not. These things were always going to be a little bit like oil and water.

I find it so strange how some within the SBC, and within evangelical Christianity in the US more broadly, seem to be treating these very progressive, and certainly very American notions as if they’re biblical. Is all this just a case of what George Will called 60s envy?

It’s equally strange how a lot of Big Eva, as Carl Trueman called it, seems so keen to win some standing among US elites, given that US elites are looking pretty shabby right now. I mean, I remember being very enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008. In Obama’s first term liberal elites had this real aura of impressiveness. They had — for want of a much better phrase in the context of this discussion — a certain power and glory to them. Whereas now, in the wake of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they don’t, to say the least. What’s going on there?

Somebody said the market for racism in the United States far outstrips the supply; everybody wants to relive the thrill of being right in a moral crusade. Even if you came 60 years too late, you still want to relive the same moral courage of standing up with the protesters of Birmingham, Alabama over the Jim Crow laws that don’t exist in the present United States, so we have to find something to do.

I think you’re right in terms of how odd it was that the younger generation thought: ‘We can have our cake and eat it too. We can appeal to the conservatives, but we can also appeal to the liberals. You can see the conversion impulse behind that. — to win the world, not just our neighbourhood. And then you had the influence of [the PCA’s] Tim Keller, who obviously focused very much on the cities and reaching educated elites and educated culture makers. And he was good in that world of the 1990s and 2000s.

But, yes, from the right looking left, you see what looks like an educated elite. But if you’re behind the facade, you know it’s being hollowed out. The left is being eaten up. Not only is it insufficient to conserve a national identity or support families, it’s also insufficient to provide whatever sense of liberation the progressive left think they’re after. The elites got hollowed out by progressivism. They ceased being a good elite.

In so many ways, Southern Baptist elites, evangelical elites of a certain time and place, just kind of by osmosis, attracted some of the same bad habits, and became concerned more about reaching particular groups than supporting their base. They became hyper-focused on reaching elite institutions, elite people, and often willing to subordinate doctoral concerns in order to reach them.

Evangelicals long to be seen as spiritual advisors to the culture. For so long, they identified themselves as in a particular social location between the left and the right. They were not too far right, they were not too far left — but as the left moved farther left, they felt the pull to go with them.

So they started defining themselves by emotion and social location. By that, I mean thinking: ‘Do Republicans and Democrats talk to me? Do I make both sides happy? Do I make both sides feel bad?’ And so that kind of person would say: ‘Well, I probably do it right if everybody is mad at me part of the time.’ But if you do that you're defining yourself not by truth, but by social location.

Of course, it’s important to think about social location — as Paul said about being all things to all people. But you have to understand the arguments they’re asking you to accept in order to be socially acceptable — and I think in the case of so many evangelicals unfamiliar with their progressive arguments about sexuality and gender and race, they quickly gave away the farm on principles before they really understood the argument.

And that led to all kinds of mischief working its way out inside our institutions over the past 10 years.

Could you please explain what’s happened at the denomination’s last two annual meetings with the Law Amendment on female pastors and the push to abolish the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, on the grounds that it has “become increasingly distant from the values and concerns of the churches that finance it”?

In some ways, it does very much feel like a replay of the 70s creation of the conservative resurgence in the SBC, and that of the religious right. Both grew out of a feeling by conservative Bible-believing evangelicals that their elites were not representing them.

So my parents would have voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 because he was an evangelical, right? You’re putting a person with our values and our vision into office. And what happened Carter got there? He ended up allowing the IRS and the FCC and others to intrude into religious life in America in unprecedented ways, and — coupled with the looming abortion issue — that caused lots of conservatives to say, ‘it’s not enough just to vote for the evangelical; it’s not enough to that our institutions claim to have these beliefs, they have to act on them’.

Carter really was a lightning rod for failing to act in the ways his conservative Christian base expected him to act. That resulted in the growth of people saying, ‘we're going to go all in on actual consistency on conservative outcomes’.

It feels like we're at that point again — except at this point, it’s not liberals like Jimmy Carter, it’s evangelical leaders who thought they could grow the movement by mouthing academically popular pieties that ended up with them saying a lot more than I think they intended.

The question is, are we in the early 70s, or are we in the late 80s? Have we missed the opportunity or not? The conservatives have come close on several times. With the motion to abolish the ERLC this year, that lost by about 57 percent to 43 percent. That’s still the most significant vote to abolish or defund an entity ever without the entity actually going away. I think that’ll have positive effects, but it wasn’t a majority.

With regard to the Law Amendment, as you said, there has been an effort to give formal instruction to the Credentials Committee, which is the group that decides disputes about who could be a messenger, as we call them, meaning they’re in co-operation with the Convention. So the Credentials Committee handled several cases involving churches, usually not with a female lead pastor, but with some staff member with the name pastor and the Baptist faith. And the SBC statement of faith is clear that the office of pastor is limited to men. So there was an effort to give the Credentials Committee clear instruction that even on these subordinate offices, the committee should enforce the statement of faith. And there was some pushback against that.

The committee pointed to Rick Warren, with his hugely successful Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, which started ordaining women as pastors, and the committee acted and removed them from the list of cooperating churches. But there have been several other cases that people pointed out, saying ‘hey, I found this church, I have reported it to the committee, they clearly have pastors on staff, female pastors on staff, and the committee has failed to act’. So the Law Amendment was the motion to put the statement of faith into operation in the constitution requiring the Credentials Committee to act. And there was been some pushback from institutionalists who say, ‘well, we don’t want to add things willy nilly to the constitution, and it's already working’.

The Law Amendment passed in 2023. But the rule is that to amend the constitution, you need it to pass by two thirds at two successive conventions. It passed by two thirds in 2023, then in 2024 it failed to get the two thirds. It got 60 percent — it was it was very close to passing. This year, it was brought up again after the Credentials Committee made some additional errors in many people’s eyes. Again it came in at 60/40, so it’ll probably take a break.

I think there's growing recognition amongst conservatives that they're going to have to co-operate. But there’s also growing recognition, amongst what I would call rank and file Southern Baptists, that there are problems. They weren’t quite sure what to make of the academic debates. They tend to trust their leaders. They like being Southern Baptist. They don’t want to feel bad about being Southern Baptist. But they now see that there are problems.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with a group called Center for Baptist Leadership that has tried to be kind of a grassroots organising effort to encourage people to go to the annual meetings. But it remains to be seen how those efforts will turn out.

Photo credit: Southern Baptist Convention, Wikimedia Creative Commons