This edited collection positions itself as the successor to sociologist Nancy Ammerman’s landmark 1990 book, Baptist Battles, and her follow-up work, 1993s Southern Baptists Observed. Ammerman’s studies took stock of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) about a decade into the “conservative takeover” of the denomination, which began at the 1979 meeting in Houston. Drawing on surveys of hundreds of Southern Baptists, Ammerman detailed the theological and cultural diversity of the SBC, which made the denomination’s sharp rightward turn in the 1980s such a bitter pill to swallow for moderate and liberal Southern Baptists. Contributors to this volume, mostly historians, rely on speeches, publications, and other archival documents produced by Southern Baptist leaders in the generation since Ammerman’s work. They find a denomination wrestling with the legacies of slavery and racism, amplified focus on sexuality and gender, and a deepening relationship with the U.S. political right.
Editor Keith Harper’s introduction lays out a helpful chronology of the conservative resurgence, dividing it into three parts: the buildup (pre-1979), the “battle for the gavel” (1979–1991), and phase three (post-1991): “a new and better SBC?” Harper’s question mark suggests that conservatives’ dreams for the denomination they now control were not fully realized. Baptist membership began declining in the early 21st century—a surprise to conservatives who thought their resurgence would stimulate growth. Contributions by Melody Maxwell and Andrew Christopher Smith, both directors of Baptist study centers, examine this decline. Maxwell helpfully illustrates how doctrinal orthodoxy has supplanted cooperation as a guiding motif for Southern Baptist churches, particularly around issues of gender and sexuality. Smith creatively documents the secularization of Baptist hospitals and universities to show how Southern Baptist institutions lost their particularity. Both developments—insistence on certain forms of orthodoxy and a secularizing culture—have contributed to Southern Baptists’ numerical decline.
The second section of the book features a pair of brilliant investigations about how Southern Baptists defined fidelity to scripture. Betsy Flowers shows how biblical “inerrancy signifies the particular beliefs and customs conservative evangelicals have held as most valuable to their faith” (86). For Southern Baptists after the conservative resurgence, those beliefs overwhelmingly had to do with the role of women—specifically, the need for wifely submission and rejection of female ordination. Bill Leonard, meanwhile, expertly connects the “hermeneutics of White supremacy” (128) to the more-recent “hermeneutics of complementarity” (129). Leonard’s chapter makes a compelling case that today’s complementarians (who insist on distinct roles for men and women) draw from the same interpretive tradition that inspired yesterday’s defenders of slavery and segregation.
The three chapters that comprise the third section of the book, by historians Barry Hankins, Alan Scott Willis, and Alison Collis Greene, each build on Leonard’s chapter in some way. Hankins insightfully outlines competing impulses within today’s SBC, showing how debates over religious liberty, race, immigration, and sexual abuse have driven the denomination. While most Southern Baptists have supported Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant policies, dissenters like Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and J.D. Greear have distanced themselves from the Trumpiest impulses of the SBC (a distancing that led both Moores to leave the denomination). Willis examines SBC seminary presidents’ stand against critical race theory, which, at least since 2018, has seemed a far greater concern for denominational leaders than the SBC’s legacy of slavery and racism.
Greene’s precise, passionate chapter draws on her Southern Baptist upbringing, which illustrated to her the lingering power of racism in the denomination. Greene examines Southern Seminary’s 2018 “Report on Slavery and Racism,” sponsored by the influential seminary president, R. Albert Mohler. The report, notes Greene, is meticulous in its documentation of Southern’s complicity with slavery and racism—until it reaches 1964. Once Southern’s narrative enters the period of living memory, when current leaders of the SBC might be held to account, the report dissembles. Greene also notes the report’s lack of black voices, who sharpen the connections between historic defenses of racism and its continuing effect among white Christians. The following chapter, by black Baptist scholar Sandy Dwayne Martin, notes both the persistence of racism and some more hopeful instances of Baptist progress on racial issues.
Ultimately, this volume paints a picture of a denomination in trouble, if not outright crisis. The numerical decline of Southern Baptists after the conservative resurgence has undermined conservatives’ belief that theological liberalism was to blame for the decline of mainline Protestant denominations. More disturbingly, extensive documentation of sexual abuse within SBC churches—covered in several of the chapters—has suggested a link between the denomination’s complementarian theology and the silencing of female and child victims. The rise of Donald Trump, along with his widespread support among SBC members, has stymied a straightforward reckoning with these issues. Trump’s attempts to restore white Christian dominance promises Southern Baptists restored power without compromising with liberal and secularizing forces, while Trump’s history of sexual abuse shows that powerful men need not pay a penalty for these particular sins. Both internal and external critics have pointed out the incompatibility of such impulses with the gospel. These critics do not seem to be winning arguments with SBC leaders, however.
Southern Baptists Re-Observed is an important and timely account of the SBC in the age of Trump. It thoroughly documents the downstream effects of the conservative resurgence. The contributors to this volume neither pull their punches nor ignore nuances in the recent SBC story. The result is a book rich with important insights about the rightward turn of America’s largest Protestant denomination.
