The decline and fall of the Southern Baptists?

June 14, 2008

Guest Post by Morbo

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant denomination in America, claiming 16 million members. Thankfully, that number may be starting to go down.

The Washington Post reported:

The number of people baptized in Southern Baptist churches fell for the third straight year last year to the lowest level in 20 years, and membership in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination decreased by close to 40,000 to 16.27 million last year. Leaders of the convention say the numbers could represent a turning point for the organization.

The denomination’s most recent past president, the Rev. Frank S. Page, frets that the number of Southern Baptist churches could be cut in half by 2030. The flock is also graying; younger people seem less interested in the denomination.

I hope these trends continue. The SBC leadership has been rigidly fundamentalist since the early 1980s, when moderates lost control of the denomination. Under conservative leadership, the SBC functions as an arm of the Republican Party. Its pastors preach right-wing politics constantly. They obsess over same-sex marriage, legal abortion, feminism, the teaching of evolution and so on.

Some Baptist churches that aren’t even affiliated with the SBC are feeling the heat and don’t even want to use the name “Baptist” any more.

In Alexandria, Va., the Baptist Temple is considering a new name.

“We’re probably the most progressive church in the city, but ‘Baptist Temple’ sounds weird, like it’s charismatic and conservative,” said the Rev. Todd Thomason.

Now, I am aware that there are many different types of Baptists, and I know that not all Southern Baptists are far to the right. I’m acquainted with some Baptists who are strong supporters of the things many Baptists used to champion — mainly religious freedom through the separation of church and state. It was colonial-era Baptists, working alongside Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, who gave us that principle.

The leadership of the SBC long ago turned its back on that. These days, it’s just a steady diet of right-wing claptrap blasting forth from the pulpits. This undoubtedly annoys some people (even some conservatives) who believe you go to church to get closer to God, not hear GOP talking points. (How far to the right is the SBC? A recent poll of its clergy found that 1 percent plan to vote for Barack Obama.)

Add to this the SBC’s tendency to embarrass itself every year by passing resolutions calling for boycotts of the Disney empire or insisting that men should run households and its insistence that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and you can see why so many people are losing interest.

16 million is still a formidable number, but we can always hope this trend continues. As for the SBC leadership, it met recently and discussed the problem. It also voted for a new president. The Rev. Johnny Hunt is yet another conservative fundamentalist.

P.S. It is true, of course, that many mainline denominations, which tend to be more liberal on political issues, are also losing members. Maybe people are tired of hearing about politics, left or right, in church. Maybe people go to a house of worship for spiritual reasons, not for political involvement. It’s something for America’s clergy to think about.

Morbo, I have also noticed that the SBC seems to go out of its way each year to pass embarrassing resolutions embracing one nonsensical position or another.

In this year’s resolutions they attacked Planned Parenthood, opposed same-sex marriage (especially in California), came out in favor of Christmas (as opposed to “holiday festival” or other inclusive terminology), and patted themselves on the back for their “growing ethnic diversity!”

The full text of their resolutions for this year and prior years can be found here:

http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/AMResSearch.asp

  • The SBC leadership has been rigidly fundamentalist since the early 1980s, when moderates lost control of the denomination.

    Well, 1979 to be precise. The takeover was a key factor in getting Religious Right support unified behind Reagan’s election in 1980.

  • Morbo, I think you may be misinterpreting the stats.

    Just because people are leaving the SBC does not mean that they are joining less politically conservative churches. I believe in recent years, there has been a trend towards non-denominational mega-churches. These churches give pastors much more autonomy (and money) than affiliated churches.

  • These people are strong believers in tradition. In their case, it’s thetradition of moron stupidity going back to 1859, when the Southern Baptists broke away from the real Baptists over the fact the real Baptists were leaders in the abolitionist movement, and the southern Baptists believed slavery was God’s Chosen Way.

    Their problem is there just aren’t that many young women willing to submit to sex with their relatives anymore, so the kind of morons who buy the baloney aren’t being spawned now.

  • I want to bring to your attention something more important about the way the SBC calculates its “membership”: I have been a nonbeliever for many years, but I am 100% certain that my parents’ church, where I was baptized at 11 years of age, still has me on its books as a “member” there.

    Ditto with all my friends I grew up with, most of whom no longer are even Christians, much the less SB.

    The SBC is probably worse than most denominations in the way it keeps membership rolls stocked with people who haven’t darkened the door in decades. I would have to say that less than 60% of its claimed members are actually regular participants in a SB church, from personal experience.

  • There’s joy in Mudville tonight! The decline of the SBC is a bright spot on the national radar. Hopefully they will take more of their ilk with them.

  • I received most of my religious education in a Baptist church affiliated with the American Baptist Convention. It was an education, as opposed to a dogmatic programming of incontrovertible beliefs. I was baptized when I was 12, and do not recall having to make any radical professions of faith in order to do so. When I talk about my religious roots, I also have to qualify the word Baptist so that I am not placed into the box of Bible-thumping, intolerant bigot. I have since become involved with a “religion” that teaches critical thinking and encourages deep inquiry into the use of the power of the mind. I have posted on many sites that there is a philosophical, scientific approach to spirituality that embraces all paths, including Atheism and Agnosticism (which, as practiced by many advocates, also feels like relgion). The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes is the text from which the Church of Religious Science emerged. This is not Scientology and is much older than Scientology. I encourage anyone reading about the affect of religion on the American culture do some research into this teaching. Religious Scientists are not perfect and we also have our challenges within our organizations. That said, I believe that what we offer is way beyond what has been considered “mainstream religion” and is worth a look.

    I am committed to Onenes through Justice and Transformation.
    peace,
    st john

  • I’m the scion of a poor Southern Baptist family in Kentucky. Nothing scares me more than the Theocrats. I grew up listening to dozens of preachers and their hateful, judgementally theocratic version of Christianity. Any bad news for the Amrican Taliban is good news for me.

  • As mentioned in previous comments. It all depends on how they calculate their membership. Either way, if there are 40,000 less members, I can only assume that it means that many fewer contributions.

    I have no idea of how those tidings and contributions work, but if each one of them puts 3-400 dollars a year into the church’s coffers, it would amount to a pretty chunk of money.

    Money that comes right off the top, because their expenses aren’t going to be that much less.

    Since they’re aging, they’re probably left with more people on ‘fixed’ incomes, who probably can’t ‘donate’ as much as the middle generation in their 30’s – 50’s.

    It could very well be a double whammy when you look at the dollar impact.

  • Bruno, I was always taught that a Christian in good standing should give at least 10% to the church. My own family (who make less than $20K a year) tithe that much regularly, regardless of the strain it causes on their mediocre finances. Older people tend to give even more, following the idea that God rewards those who do His Work. Even though His Work seems to be buying the Reverend a new car. 😉

  • My Southern Baptist roots are in Tennessee. I learned a lot by filtering through lots of strange ideas and sermons when I was growing up. I even recall a debate about desegregating the church that was very radical for the 70s. But all that got lost.

    It seemed to me that somewhere around the time of Jim and Tammy Faye, Pat Robertson, and the rise of Jerry Falwell the Southern Baptists lost their way and forgot all about the main teachings of Christ. I avoid Baptist churches since then.

    The 2000 election shocked me in this regard. I had know idea Baptists had degenerated into this mindblowing bunch of self righteous hypocrites. Now eight years later all I see among them are money worshippers and finger pointing hypocrites. Eight years with their adored leader, Bush, and they are still bitter and angry, desirous of war, unrepentant. Just like Bush. Not like Christ.

  • Hi Morbo.

    I say bring Latin back into the Baptist services. Then we won’t know what crap they’re spouting.

  • I find irony in the fact that the SBC, the largest protestant denomination in the country, was formed because they were so keen on slavery and in 1845 had to break away from the national Baptist organization to run their own show because slavery was so gosh darn fantastic. It only took them until 1995 to officially renounce the use of the bible as a justification for slavery and white supremacy. Really decent folk.

  • This is a classic case of:

    Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

    When supposed men of god turn their back on the poor, on service, on helping, on compassion, and instead turn to supporting torture, war, greed, avarice and other things for which they would be smote, yes, ye shall reap what ye hath soweth.

    If there is a Rapture, these very people who claim righteousness will be left behind.

  • As a previous poster yet, this does not mean conservative religions are going down. Most of the major large mainline churches in the USA are on decline, with non-denominations on the rise. Pentecostal churches are on the rise everywhere for example, and they generally tend to be very conservative as well.

  • This is really the same bunch of hypocrites that preached from the pulpit that if the congregation did not vote for GW in 2004, they would be booted out of the church. How do your lilly white hands look with the blood of American soldiers on them because you backed the President that created the Iraq war and continues it.

  • I may be late to this thread, but here goes…

    I’m a Southern Baptist pastor outside of Atlanta and find myself in agreement with much of what you folks have written, especially the inaccurate record keeping of “church members.” As DM said at #7, unless his former church removed his name due to losing his contact info (and most SBC church do not), then he and all his friends are still listed as members. The original intent was keep people from being members of multiple churches at once and help SBC churches to maintain accurate roles. Over time, churches proved unwilling to adequately define what it means to be a member of a church and, as a result, refused to remove people from the membership list unless they “moved their membership” to another church. Christine Wicker has estimated (accurately in my opinion) that committed, evangelical thinking Southern Baptists probably only number around 4M, not the 16M that are currently claimed.

    It grieves me that the witness of Southern Baptists has fallen so low that each of you have the feeling that you do and most it justified. I do believe that in the future you will see individual churches (which may or may not remain strongly identified with the SBC) that are influencing their own communities in ways that more reflect the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than what you have come to know from the Southern Baptist Convention.

  • What a novel concept!!

    Going to church for “church”,
    not for “Political Science: how to be a Republican 101”.

    I go to church “for church”!!

    And I LOVE the separation of church and state!!

    Let’s remember to keep it that way, there is a VERY good reason as to why our founding fathers came up with the concept!!

  • I’m an SBC pastor from the Savannah, GA area. Lifeway compiles data from ACPs (Annual Church Profiles) to determine membership numbers. Most recently the data said there were 17.6 million SBC members, but Sunday AM attendance was about 6.8 million attenders. That means that more than 2/3 of those counted as members in SBC churches do not attend with any regularity.

    I think the decline is due to: (1) Secularization/materialism of culture, (2) Tradition bound churches, (3) Decisional regeneration (the idea that walking an aisle equates to actual regeneration), (4) Lack of passionate ministry and laity pertaining to discipleship, (5) Naturalistic agenda of Educational institutions undermining faith in college students, (6) Evangelical and Catholic scandals of the last three decades and erosion of institutional trust, and (6) Failure of SBC leadership to relate to the reality that 95% of our churches are 200 or less in membership.

    I know it’s an ecclectic list, but those are some of the broad issues IMHO.

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