A split over Donald Trump and slew of sexual-abuse scandals have left Southern Baptists in crisis
ago in Houston, Texas, a group of conservative pastors pulled off a heist at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention that reshaped both America’s biggest Protestant denomination and its national politics. Liberal Baptists, who had dared question the literal truth of the Genesis myth, were denied leadership positions and, in due course, driven out. “Biblical inerrancy” was the conservatives’ war-cry.
That was an understatement. The confidence that fuelled the 1979 resurgence is long gone. The convention’s membership of 15m, concentrated in the Bible belt, is its lowest in 30 years, and falling. Half of Southern Baptist children leave the faith; annual baptisms—which reached a high in the mid-1970s, when the moderates were ascendant—are at their lowest level in almost a century.
Though the revivalist hopes that attended the conservative resurgence were long ago dispelled, its enduring combination of fundamentalism and politicisation gave Southern Baptists two sorts of comfort. From the former, a hardened conviction of being heaven-bound even if the rest of society was going south; from the latter, the significant boon of presidential power every other cycle. Today’s crises have whipped both comfort blankets away.
Even before the scandals broke, leading evangelical women such as Beth Moore were straining against the doctrine of “complementarianism” . The impunity that hundreds of powerful male abusers long enjoyed has made this seem even less supportable—especially as leading complementarianists, such as Paige Patterson, an architect of the resurgence, were among those tainted by the scandals.
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