What Do Southern Baptists Care About?

An Analysis of 178 Years of SBC Resolutions

I grew up in the First Baptist Church of Salem, Illinois. It was Southern Baptist but I don’t really know how I became aware of the church’s denominational ties. Honestly, I don’t remember a moment in my life’s story where I just figured out the Protestant religious landscape. I knew I was Baptist. I knew that my church was pretty conservative, but I really didn’t know enough to put my experience in the larger context of American Christianity.

I guess it all came into sharper focus when I took a job at another First Baptist Church in the next town over. But what was different about this congregation is that they had a female pastor before. I guess that’s when everything started clicking and I started putting things together - not all Baptists are the same.

I can say this without a shadow of a doubt, though - I probably know more about the inner workings of the Southern Baptist Convention than I do all other denominations combined. And, that’s not because I have some deep and abiding passion for Southern Baptist polity. It’s more due to the fact that the SBC is, without a shadow of a doubt, the largest, most powerful and most influential denomination in the American religious landscape and has been for decades.

The Annual Meeting is the key lens through which reporters, scholars, and interested observers get a peek inside what is happening in the larger evangelical movement. It’s one of the very few religious events that nearly every major news outlet sends a reporter (or two) and the happenings at the Meeting are often on the front page of newspapers that are read by millions. I have been told that the SBC issues media passes to nearly fifty members of the media for each Annual Meeting - that’s pretty impressive.

There are two big happenings at those gatherings - the messengers elect a President, and they also vote on whether or not to adopt a handful of resolutions. Studying those resolutions can be a terrific way to put one’s ear to the ground in the evangelical world.

So, let me give you readers a peek into some early analysis of every resolution that the SBC has adopted since it gathered in 1845. That’s a total of 1,232 resolutions - all scraped from the website of the Southern Baptist Convention.