Southern Baptisits - Hemorrhaging Members Due to Extremism?

Among the major denominations in America, few are as backward thinking, anti-modernity, anti-gay and focused on Bible inerrancy that the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC").  Baptists were not always so extreme and once upon a time the denomination was rather live and let live.  That started to change when what are now Southern Baptist churches broke from the national denomination because they wanted to maintain slavery.  A second extreme lurch to the right when conservative - one might argue Kool-Aid drinking elements - took control of the denomination's leadership and began to expel churches that were sufficiently reactionary (some years back my father-in-law's church left the SBC which it viewed as too extreme).  Rather than strengthening the SBC as far right leaders claimed would be the case, the tilt to backwardness seems to have hasten defections from the denomination.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the denomination's continued shrinkage.  Here are excerpts:

It’s hard to overstate the importance of soul-winning to Southern Baptists. So they’ve been hit hard by the news that the evangelical denomination’s slump in membership and baptisms has continued for the seventh year in a row. “I am grieved we are clearly losing our evangelistic effectiveness,” said Thom Rainer, president of Lifeway Christian Resources and former dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.

The troubles of the Southern Baptist Convention offer an interesting window into the long-term prospects of Christianity in America—partly because the Southern Baptists have been fretting about those prospects louder than almost anyone else. Don’t all Christians think it’s important to redeem sinners? Yes, but the act of conversion is the heart of the Southern Baptist brand.

Last year the denomination summoned a team of pastors and church officials to form the Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact and Declining Baptisms.The Task Force’s report confirmed that the denomination’s baptism rates plateaued in the 1950s, stayed constant for the next few decades, and had been inching downward for the past six years. Among the churches that reported statistics in 2012, 25 percent baptized no one at all that year.

So is this decline real? The short answer is yes—the social and intellectual authority of churches is a shadow of what it once was. . . . Effective evangelism has always required careful negotiation with the surrounding culture.. . . . Since the time of the Apostles, Christians have argued over how much compromise is too much: when does cross-cultural translation or embrace of worldly knowledge cross the line into heresy?

[A]s the culture wars hit the South with full force in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative leaders conspired to tighten the reins on their denomination. By the 1990s they had driven most moderates out of the convention and enforced a regime of biblical inerrancy and traditional gender ideology—a worldview that, if Stark and Finke were correct, should have set the SBC on a path for boundless growth. Except it hasn’t.

Stark’s and Finke’s book was panned by historians, largely because they cherry-picked statistics to divide American churches into “winners” and “losers” without nuanced attention to historical context.  If you step back and assess the big picture, few conservative churches are growing anymore . . . 

Evangelicals’ recent strategies—ranging from a hipster makeover to appeal to the Millennial crowd to the mistaken hope that millions of Latinos are leaving Catholicism and becoming conservative Protestants—cannot hold off the world-historical forces of secularization. As the historian David Hollinger has argued, even if liberal churches have lost the battle for butts in the pews, the steady advance of civil rights, the sexual revolution, and gay liberation suggest that they are winning the wider culture.

Traditional religious organizations are losing their grip on the public sphere and their influence in the lives of individuals. “All things considered, I think that religion is slowing down, in decline … everything is clearly going in the decline direction,” said Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, who has written one of the best synthetic studies of the polling data on contemporary American religion.

Christianity has been around for 2,000 years. Over the centuries, the faith’s center of gravity has shifted many times: from Palestine and Northern Africa to Rome and Byzantium; from Western Europe to America. The Southern Baptist experience is more proof that Americans’ term at the helm of Christ’s ship may be nearing an end, and the sailing is more squally than ever.

Like too many in the GOP, the leaders of the SBC have not figured out that the embrace of ignorance and bigotry are not the way to grow one's organization.