Southern Baptists are More Conservative Than Ever
In terms of partisanship, ideology, and theology - the SBC is as far to the right as it has been in the last four decades.
The Southern Baptist Convention held their Annual Meeting in Indianapolis last week. The eyes of the religious world turned to a group of about 11,000 messengers as they voted on a variety of resolutions regarding an array of social and cultural issues. They also elected a new president who will take over for Bart Barber as he finished up his second year in office.
Let me give you three takeaways from that meeting.
The election of Clint Pressley to the Presidency. It was a crowded field of six candidates to begin the Meeting. But Pressley emerged the victor in a run off. Pressley is undoubtedly a conservative when compared to the United States as a whole, but among Southern Baptists I think it’s fair to say that he was not the most conservative candidate of the six who were on the ballot.
The passage of a resolution that opposed in-vitro fertilization. This one made a lot of headlines. You can read the full text here (PDF), it starts on page 14. For reference, only 8% of Americans think IVF is a bad thing. It’s 9% of white evangelicals. And 44% of white evangelicals said that they had used fertility treatments or knew someone who did.
The Law Amendment failed. This become somewhat of a litmus test for the direction of the Convention. The Amendment’s purpose was to clarify that the term pastor is reserved for men alone. That means that, if the Amendment passed, an SBC church who had a female serve as a women’s pastor would “not be in friendly cooperation” with the Convention and would be expelled. Opponents argued that there’s already a process to remove those churches who are flouting the SBC’s stance on women in leadership. It’s used those mechanisms to remove FBC Alexandria, Saddleback Church, and Fern Creek Baptist, among others in the last two years.
It’s hard to get a read on where the SBC is headed, honestly. Some events would lead one to believe that they are headed in a very conservative direction (like the IVF resolution), while others tend to point to a denomination that is conservative, but not fundamentalist. The failure of the Law Amendment is part of that, but also the fact that the most conservative candidate for SBC President has not won in any election in the last several years.
But make no mistake - the data says that the average Southern Baptist is further to the right today than the average Southern Baptist from thirty or forty years ago. The reason I know that is because I have data from the General Social Survey that dates back to 1984.
In the mid-1980s, among Southern Baptists, the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans by a 2 to 1 margin. But that didn’t last long. By 1995, the gap was just ten percentage points (50% to 40%). Right around the time of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, those lines crossed. From that point forward they moved apart at an incredibly rapid rate.
In 2008, 41% of Southern Baptists were Democrats. 41% were Republicans.
In 2022, 21% of Southern Baptists were Democrats. 75% were Republicans. That’s how fast things have moved in the world of white evangelical politics.
What about political ideology? It’s surprising how little this graph looks like the previous one.
For instance, there was never a time when liberal Southern Baptists outnumbered conservatives. And it was never even that close. In 1984, about 40% of SBC folks said that they were conservative. Only 20% said they were liberal. If there’s been any big movement in the ideology of Southern Baptists it’s that moderates have disappeared and are being replaced by conservatives. That’s especially the case in the last fifteen years or so.
About 45% of Southern Baptists were conservative and 40% were moderate in 2008. Then, things took a rightward turn for the Convention. Now, 64% of Southern Baptists are conservative, and moderates make up just 23% of the Convention. If there’s a leftward drift in the SBC, it doesn’t show up this data.
That lead me to a conversation that I was having with a member of the media about the Southern Baptists and their growing conservatism. We were both remarking that we knew a number of older members of the SBC and they didn’t seem to be that far to the right of the spectrum. They were conservatives, no doubt. But they were certainly not bomb throwers.
So, I had to check to see if our anecdotes line up with the data. I broke the sample into birth cohorts and tracked the share of Southern Baptists who said that they were Republicans in every year between 2008 and 2023.
The oldest Southern Baptists are the most Republican and they are also the ones that moved the most toward the GOP over the last fifteen years. For instance, among Southern Baptists born in the early part of the 1940s, 55% were Republicans in 2008. In 2023, that share had increased to 80%. There were also big jumps for those born in the 1950s, as well.
But with every successive generation of Southern Baptists, the slope of the line tends to flatten out. For instance, among SBC people born in the late 1970s, the increase in Republicanism is really small - less than five percentage points over the last fifteen years. It’s essentially the case that it’s the oldest Southern Baptists who are the most Republican today.
How about theology? There aren’t a ton of questions that can tap into that but the GSS offers one decent option.
Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible?
The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word
The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word
The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men
A majority of Southern Baptists are biblical literalists. That was true in every year of the survey dating back to 1984. The percentage did drop a bit around 2000, but it was still 55% during that time period. However in the last twenty years, literalism has surged. In the most recent survey, 75% of Southern Baptists believed that the Bible is the literal word of God - the highest percentage ever.
The share who believe that the Bible was the inspired word of God, but should not be taken literally was around 40% in the 2000s, but has declined from there. In the most recent data, this percentage dropped to 22%. While there’s no easy way to measure theological positions, by this one metric it’s fair to say that the Convention has never been more conservative than it is right now.
I wanted to see if all this had actually translated to a rightward shift of Southern Baptists on a specific issue, though. Abortion is a good one to test. The question in the Cooperative Election Study is pretty straightforward:
Do you favor or oppose making abortion illegal in all circumstances?
This is the share of Southern Baptists who were in favor of a total ban on abortion between 2015 and 2023.
This graph tells a pretty interesting story. Support for a total ban was 26% when the question was first asked in 2015, but it slowly began creeping up in the years that followed. It was 31% by 2018 and then rose a bit more, landing at 33% in 2021. But then, the percentages dropped. In 2022 and 2023, it was 27%. A drop of six percentage points that was statistically significant.
Anyone want to guess what happened? I have a likely suspect.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
The case was argued in December of 2021 and was officially published in June of 2022. That was after the 2021 survey was fielded, but before people were asked about abortion in late 2022. When Dobbs happened a small (but not insignificant) number of Southern Baptists had a different position on abortion after the fall of Roe.
It’s hard to talk to the general public about the Southern Baptist Convention because the words that I use just don’t translate to SBC land. When I say that a certain candidate for President of the Convention is a moderate, I don’t mean he’s Susan Collins. I mean he doesn’t think that women should be jailed for seeking an abortion.
There’s a troubling force happening in the discourse now - the subcultures seem to be getting more isolated. SBC Twitter is a weird alternate universe where about thirty of forty accounts hurl polemics into the digital void. Other Southern Baptists fight over it for a while and thousands of adjacent people (like me) scroll their timeline and watch the grudge match unfold in real time. A lot of that discussion is so incredibly divorced from mainstream society that I have to constantly remind myself that SBC Twitter is not real life.
Here’s what I know without a doubt. By any objective metric, the Southern Baptist Convention has never been more theologically and politically conservative than it is today. And, for some, that’s still not enough.
Code for this post can be found here.