No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness. Or underplaying their challenges. Over the clanking of silverware and the smell of breakfast sausages on the sidelines of a major gathering of Southern Baptists here, several hundred pastors and other churchgoers welcomed a roster of speakers ruminating on a “teetering” nation, “sexual insanity,” “all this trans stuff” and the specter that the country’s largest Protestant denomination was on a “road to insignificance.”
“We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss ...”
Not long ago, during Donald Trump’s presidency, white evangelical Christians had taken comfort in the idea that their interests carried weight at the highest levels in Washington, in conservative Supreme Court appointments and otherwise. Even if it had taken some rationalization for them to get behind a thrice-married former casino owner who botched basic religious conventions and was eventually indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star, the Trump years were good years for these Baptists. . . . “In the West Wing, you couldn’t walk very far without bumping into bona fide, born-again believers and followers of Jesus.”
Since then, it seemed that everything else, quite literally, had gone to Hell. As nearly 13,000 delegates, known as messengers, arrived here recently for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and side events like that evening’s gathering — hosted by Liberty University in partnership with the Conservative Baptist Network, a more conservative group — it was an open question if they could do anything about it.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the signature accomplishment of the religious right, had become a major liability for the GOP, contributing to losses in a series of elections. In December, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, signed legislation codifying same-sex marriage into law — with the support of 39 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate.
There was the transgender rights movement, which pastor after pastor complained they saw seeping into their pews. A panel conversation one afternoon entitled “Re-Forming Gen Z: Sexuality, Technology and Human Formation” . . . . included how best to respond to a teenager who insists on a preferred pronoun and how to “navigate conversations with a teen who believes in God but also thinks that same-sex attraction is OK.”
“Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.”
White evangelicals are a relatively small part of the nation’s overall population, about 14 percent. But they play an outsize role in the Republican Party, to which they have been fused since the days of Ronald Reagan. . . . in general elections, they are a central part of the GOP’s base. In 2020, about 28 percent of the electorate identified as white born-again or evangelical Christian. Of those voters, more than three-quarters went for Trump.
That’s the reason every major Republican presidential contender appeared the other day at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority 2023 conference in Washington, D.C., and why Sen. Josh Hawley, speaking at the event, was probably telling the truth when he said, “There is no future for the Republican Party without Christians.”
The problem for the Republican Party, and for the church, is that religious affiliation has for years been fading. In 2020, Gallup found church membership in the United States fell below a majority for the first time. The percentage of Americans who say religion is “very important” is down more than 20 points from when Gallup first asked about it in 1965. . . . the Southern Baptist Convention, still the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost nearly half a million members last year.
“The Southern Baptist Convention is officially a denomination in decline,” Chuck Kelley, a former president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, told me when we met in the lobby of the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. . . . Kelley said the convention had “kind of turned away from evangelism to focus on the social issues.” . . . for the last four or five years, what has been the conversation at the Southern Baptist Convention?”
He ticked through some of the points of focus: A sexual abuse scandal that roiled the SBC, critical race theory, the role of women in the church and Trump. “Not,” he said, “the Great Commission.”
When I asked him what kind of influence Southern Baptists could hope to have on elections anymore, he said, “We don’t matter as much,” repeated the line and added, “We’re getting smaller.”
The big topic of conversation — the reason messengers rushed to find seats in the convention hall and one man said to another, “We should have brought popcorn” — was whether to uphold the ouster of one of the denomination’s largest megachurches, Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., for having a female pastor. At a time that it’s losing membership, I wondered, why would the denomination kick out one of its largest and best-known churches . . . Nearly everyone that I ran into felt that Warren’s church — while free to do what it liked — had no right to remain, in Southern Baptist Convention parlance, “in friendly cooperation” with the SBC. . . . Warren’s appeal had been rejected 9,437 to 1,212.
Speaking to reporters after the vote, Warren said that because there are other Baptist churches with female pastors — exactly how many is unclear — “this is going to be an inquisition now, and it’s probably going to go on for 10 years.”
“We continue to be the ‘shrinking’ Baptist convention,” he said. “It’s not really smart when you’re losing a half million members a year to intentionally kick out people who want to fellowship with you.”
Rather than moderate, the response of MAGA diehards has been to focus on invigorating the base — which is what members of the Southern Baptist Convention seem to be doing, too.
The week they met in New Orleans, messengers not only refused to re-admit Saddleback and a church in Louisville, Ky., . . . . they also approved an amendment to their constitution declaring churches have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture,” a measure that will continue to saddle the SBC with controversy before a ratification vote next year. Separately, it approved a measure condemning gender-affirming care.
“My impression,” said John Green, a longtime scholar on religion and politics and author of the book Religion and the Culture Wars, “is that they have gone further to the right.”
He said, “Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. On many other issues, they don’t feel like they’re getting their way. The new activism around transgenderism is deeply troubling to them. And what often happens in these sorts of situations is the activists double down, and they become more conservative, because in their perception, the stakes are now higher.”
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