The Split on Women's Ordination

The 1980s was a profoundly disruptive decade for the SBC. Beginning in 1979, conservative members of the denomination began a concerted effort to solidify control over the denomination's institutional structures. By electing theologically conservative presidents for a period of ten years within the hierarchical bureaucracy of the SBC, the conservative faction effectively controlled the committee on nominations that appointed Board members to all the denomination's agencies and seminaries. Insiders within the SBC wrote vociferously about the conflict that ensued between the denomination's conservative and moderate wings.Footnote ⁷ Sociological studies of the conflict further chronicled the upheaval that gripped the United States's largest Protestant denominational body.Footnote ⁸ Although the conservative and moderate coalitions disagreed on many issues, ranging from the role of Biblical higher criticism to ecumenism, recent scholarship centers the conflict around the role of women in the church, specifically on women's ordination. The consensus now is that the heart of the conflict was disagreement over whether women could be called by God to serve as pastors, bearing denominational authority through their position in local churches.Footnote ⁹

Women have been active in the denomination since the SBC was founded in 1845, when Southern slaveholders were denied appointments to the mission field within the national Triennial Convention. As scholars have noted, the founding of the Women's Missionary Union in 1888 facilitated organizing women to raise money, serve in the mission field, and even educate the next generation of Southern Baptists.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet women were not ordained until 1964 when Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, became the first congregation to appoint Addie Davis to the gospel ministry. The ordination took place with little fanfare and made relatively little news within wider Southern Baptist circles. Yet, as other ordinations continued into the 1970s, conflict over women's ordination became far more prevalent. Shirley Carter was the second woman in the SBC to receive ordination, this time in South Carolina in 1971. The following year, she made denominational news headlines when she married a former Roman Catholic priest while she was three months pregnant. As historian Elizabeth Flowers notes, “Carter's ordination carries historical value because the scandal affirmed the growing concern among many Southern Baptists that feminism was liberal values and moral [relativism] run rampant.”Footnote ¹¹ As more and more women sought ordination in the 1970s, anxiety grew over the role of women in congregational ministry and, more importantly, over what they would advocate with their newfound authority.

In 1979, the conservative faction within the SBC launched a significant campaign to reshape the denomination according to their moralistic theological outlook. Led by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, this movement galvanized conservative pastors who led large congregations that advocated more conservative social and theological positions. Adrian Rogers, pastor of the megachurch Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, became the first in a long series of conservative SBC presidents who would slowly and methodically appoint like-minded conservatives to denominational agencies. In addition to directly solidifying power through deliberate appointments within the Convention's infrastructure, conservative “messengers” (the SBC label for appointed representatives of local congregations) targeted women that year. Gene Anglin, a messenger from Texas, proposed an amendment to the SBC's constitution to ensure denominational agencies would “not recognize the ordination of women as being scriptural truth held by Baptists.”Footnote ¹² The exclusionary intent of the amendment, and its implications, were clear. While the motion failed, it telegraphed the conservative faction's priorities. From the very start of the conservative resurgence, women's ordination stood at the heart of the conflict.

The conflict reflected broader changes in the American sociopolitical landscape. At the same time that conservatives were leveraging their collective power to control and redirect the trajectory of the SBC, groups like the Moral Majority began attempting to reshape the American political landscape through the election of Ronald Reagan. The political mobilization of religious conservatives against Jimmy Carter, a progressive evangelical, paralleled the mobilization that took place within SBC. As the culture wars played out on the national political scene, they also played out in Baptist life.Footnote ¹³

When it came to women's ordination, moderates were far from outspoken, and hoped to redefine the issue as they considered other issues. For example, in 1980, when a resolution on the ordination of women came before the convention, moderates had the statement “tabled” because they argued that women's ordination was “a local church matter.”Footnote ¹⁴ Rather than explicitly affirming women in ministry, moderates pivoted to affirm the autonomy of local congregations instead. This politically calculated response appealed to a consensus based on ecclesiology to avoid polarization resulting from gender ideology. The issue was hot even though the number of women serving as clergy within the SBC remained small. According to Nancy Ammerman, although there were over five hundred ordained Southern Baptist women by the end of the decade, only around a dozen served as senior ministers.Footnote ¹⁵ This tiny minority bore the weight of worry from conservatives.

With each subsequent year, the SBC's moderate faction struggled more and more to resist the progress of the conservative campaign. Statements on women in the church from the moderate faction within the SBC were ambiguous and left open the possibility for ordination without explicitly affirming the practice. The Convention even resolved in 1983 to “encourage all Southern Baptists to continue to explore further opportunities of service for Baptist women, to ensure maximum utilization of all God-called servants of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Conservatives noted this opening, seeing it as opportunistic language for an initiative they opposed, and they offered up an amendment that would qualify the resolution, saying that “this resolution should not be interpreted as endorsing the ordination of women.”Footnote ¹⁶ It failed. Moderates won a small victory.

This moderate triumph was short-lived. The following year, when the Convention was held in Kansas City, Missouri, the conservative faction successfully passed a resolution asserting their understanding of the role of women in ministry. In this resolution, they acknowledged the different ways in which women in the New Testament answered God's calling to service in the church, but it reserved the role of pastoral leadership exclusively to men. “We encourage the service of women in all aspects of church life and work,” the statement read, “other than pastoral functions and leadership roles entailing ordination.” Of the over eight thousand ballots cast, 58 percent voted in favor of this “both sides” women-can-minister-but-not-be-ordained resolution. Conservatives believed that the impetus to ordain women was heavily influenced by “modern cultural, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends or by emotional factors.”Footnote ¹⁷ They argued that the moderate faction had too readily embraced these worldly influences when scripture should be the primary source that shapes SBC polity. For conservatives, scripture clearly ruled ordination outside the realm of possibility for women.

Fighting within the denomination over social issues became more intense. The conservative faction steadily marched forward, and the moderate faction began to buckle under the onslaught of conservative victories. Each year, conservatives captured the presidency and successfully appointed another slate of board members to the many SBC denominational agencies. The Convention also began reversing course on previous public stances, as in 1982 when the messengers reversed denominational course and adopted a resolution supporting a constitutional amendment to reintroduce organized prayer into public schools.Footnote ¹⁸ The 1985 Convention gathering in Texas witnessed over thirty-five thousand messengers attend to fight for denominational control—the largest of any SBC gathering in history.

The fight continued, and by the end of the 1986 gathering in Atlanta, the most progressive wing of the moderate faction began to tire and question their motivations in the conflict. Progressive churches and individuals had never quite felt comfortable in SBC denominational settings. While Southern Baptist progressives may have cooperated with more moderate members in the convention, they were not entirely enthusiastic about preserving denominational structures that had never been responsive to their priorities. The progressive wing was composed of denominational outsiders and gadflies who pastored or attended some of the most progressive churches in the SBC. The group was highly educated and included many individuals who had sought theological training outside Southern Baptist institutions.Footnote ¹⁹ If conservatives had grown frustrated with moderate control of the denomination, so too had progressives, albeit in a different way.

Whereas the frustration among conservatives led them to forcefully engage in the denomination's political processes, progressives began to withdraw from the political gamesmanship. By the end of 1986, a group of progressive laypersons and ministers from within the moderate faction began meeting to consider their options. The group sought to strategize a way that they could focus on the issues they cared about without continuing to battle the conservative juggernaut that continued to elect conservative leaders in the SBC. This group would develop what would become the Alliance of Baptists.Footnote ²⁰

Initially called the Southern Baptist Alliance, the group included a few women pastors, former missionaries, and denominational bureaucrats who lamented the current direction of the denomination. Because of the small size of progressive Southern Baptist networks, many of those gathered already knew one another by reputation or personally. The group gathered to consider what type of organization they needed to sustain them in this time in Southern Baptist life. In the process of creating something new, they asked what issues an organization would prioritize if they were in charge. In this atmosphere, the issue over women's ordination could not be avoided.

The Alliance's early discussions on how to fully support the participation of women clergy were difficult. The Alliance had to decide precisely if and how it would support women clergy. Among the twenty-four individuals present at the first organizing meeting, only four were women and two of those, Nancy Hasting Sehested and Susan Lockwood, were clergy. While some of the clergymen present at the Alliance's founding saw the issue of women's ordination as important, others prioritized different issues. Over the course of several meetings, more women, like Anne Thomas Neil, a former Southern Baptist missionary to Africa, joined the organization's early planning conversations. She pushed the Alliance to reconsider how the organization thought about gender and authority, but such proposals experienced resistance from other progressives in the group. One member of the Alliance's board of directors expressed to Neil that her opinions were “offensive [to] and unappreciated” by many of the men on the board. When Sehested and Lockwood expressed their desire that the Alliance not use the issue of women's ordination as a political tool or leverage to reach larger ends, many of the men struggled to understand why.Footnote ²¹ What became clear is that the women who helped shape the Alliance's early history sought to ensure that women and women clergy were not simply “an issue” but valued members, entering together as full-fledged participants in shaping this new organization. The distinction was more than semantic, and conversations like this were crucial for ensuring that women and women clergy did not become merely a political platform but rather leaders and decision makers within the organization's entirety.

Founding members of the Alliance did not set out to create a new denomination, and many continued to resist such a label for years after the Alliance formally separated from the SBC. Instead, they saw the Alliance as a movement that could be more responsive to the needs and issues facing progressive Southern Baptists. The organization's internal nuance sought to ensure that the Alliance was not simply re-creating SBC denominational structures that merely accommodated women clergy but rather that the new denominational body would look fundamentally different from the SBC precisely because women clergy were integral in shaping the new organization from the ground up. Despite this important internal nuance, publicly, the group quickly became typified by the issue of women's ordination, so much so that the Alliance was popularly understood as having been founded for the express purpose of supporting women clergy. A crucial development in this popular understanding came with a key decision by the SBC.

The specific turning point came with a bureaucratic decision by the SBC to restrict funding from the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board (HMB)—a major source of money available for supporting smaller congregations. The year the Alliance was founded, the board of directors of the Southern Baptist HMB reached a conservative majority. That same year, the HMB “took an historic action” regarding how it allocates its funding by voting “to prohibit the future use of Board funds to support women serving as pastors in local churches.” The conservative-majority board reasoned that its resources should be utilized to support issues consistent with “the opinion most prevalent among Southern Baptists.”Footnote ²² This decision drove many Southern Baptist moderates to support the Alliance. The new policy pitted the larger mission of the SBC against this new criterion of doctrinal purity that the conservative faction sought to enforce through the bureaucratic mechanisms of the denomination.

The SBC's decision regarding eligibility for HMB funding was crucial. Southern Baptist women clergy most often served in small congregations, and the HMB was often a key source of financial support for these churches. Being small and often rural, these congregations were more likely to be financially vulnerable and therefore dependent on the larger pool of available resources. Conservatives may have stated that the decision to withhold funding was a means of ensuring denominational monies went to religiously sanctioned causes, but moderates saw the decision for what it was: a form of coercion that infringed on congregational autonomy. As a result of the decision, small and financially vulnerable congregations would be disincentivized in calling a woman to lead their church for fear of losing HMB support.

Through this clever change of rules, conservatives found an organizational means to financially starve not only the practices they deemed objectionable but also staunch the potential proliferation of their most likely sources of opposition. Following the agency's decision, Alliance president Henry Crouch received multiple letters of support from individuals seeking membership who hoped the Alliance would fund congregations with women clergy. The pressure became so great that the Alliance sent a letter of protest to the HMB's trustees, saying, “[B]y withholding aid from churches with women pastors, the board has, by policy, attempted to limit the freedom of the local congregation to choose its pastor.”Footnote ²³ Like many moderates within the SBC, the Alliance framed its understanding of supporting women in ministry from its belief in the autonomy of the local church. In short, as the SBC increasingly used centralized bureaucratic procedures to limit and hinder opportunities for women clergy, it became an important and driving issue motivating development of the Alliance.Footnote ²⁴

In organizing their denominations, Baptists in the United States practice a form of congregational polity emphasizing that every Baptist congregation operates and makes decisions independently from other Baptist congregations. Enacting the principle of local autonomy created denominational tensions for maintaining a shared sense of religious orthodoxy, while at the same time allowing for intriguing opportunities to advance socially progressive attitudes. To sidestep criticism about explicit support for the ordination of women, the moderate faction within the SBC often merely gestured toward an implicit support for such a practice grounded in the belief that each congregation is autonomous. These oblique measures never overcame the impediments of conservatism as pressures grew to secure a shared ideological conformity over the whole. In contrast, the Alliance's founding covenant made support for women clergy explicit, committing itself to “[t]he freedom of the local church under the authority of Jesus Christ to shape its own life and mission, call its own leadership, and ordain whom it perceives as gifted for ministry, male or female.” The final declaration of “male or female” clearly differentiated the Alliance from more moderate Southern Baptist voices who deferred to Baptist polity more so than prioritizing opportunities for women clergy.Footnote ²⁵ The covenant established an oppositional identity in relation to the SBC from the start.

The Gap of Social Issues

As the denominational development of the SBC and the Alliance demonstrates, social attitudes go beyond stated beliefs and take on power through organizational initiatives. This is because the practices involved in decision making and implementation of stances involve the legitimation of authority over dissension from competing authorities, which affect the allocation of valuable resources, including the capacity for influence. Moreover, stances taken at one point in time inevitably will have consequences for future stances that could not have been fully anticipated yet carry momentum based on priorities successfully enacted in the past that expand opportunities for invoking and effectuating those priorities through bureaucratic procedures. In the founding of the Alliance, support for women clergy had immediate consequences on the allocation of authority.

Recognizing, like the SBC, that denominational authority could define shared standards of congregational cooperation, the Alliance not only accentuated support for women in ministry but also prioritized representation at the executive level, keeping a contrast with the governing structure of the SBC in mind. Anne Thomas Neil pushed the new organization to strive for greater gender equity among the board of directors. For example, in 1987, out of 246 possible positions, the SBC nominated only 20 women (about 8 percent). In contrast, the Alliance worked to ensure greater representation on its board of directors, nominating many more within its own organization, and, by 1992, 39 of 107 elected board members were women (about 37 percent). Whereas the ideals of a progressive minority within the SBC had once been diffused throughout the massive denominational body, now these congregations and individuals were concentrated in a single, collective group with a new means to implement their priorities. As a result, the Alliance had the opportunity to think about how it would address and confront issues organizationally that had been off-limits within the larger SBC. Possibilities quickly multiplied. Rather than a linear progression from one social issue to another, concurrent issues bubbled up together among the constituency.

Advocacy for women clergy became a gateway to consider other and more progressive causes because it forced the Alliance to raise questions about how its decision-making processes could be more inclusive. The focus on women's representation on the board consequently opened the door to other forms of organizational restructuring and representation. Moreover, the nature of representation itself broadened as Neil continued to push the organization not only to think about gender representation but also to consider vocational and racial representation. As the organization expanded its horizons beyond women's ordination, it began to leverage the possibilities of their new denominational body for other opportunities to advocate for social change. So, while the Alliance made support for women clergy explicit in its covenant statement through the lens of the autonomy of the local church, such a stance had immediate consequences for the organization's position on other issues. The firm and intentional affirmation of women clergy as an explicit contrast to the SBC led to the creation of an organizational foundation that was unintentionally receptive to considering the Baptist response to many other social issues, from sexuality to ecumenism to race and more.

It is important to note how the attitude toward women was translated into organizational practice. Like moderates within the SBC, the Alliance believed that the ultimate authority to call a woman to preach the Gospel resided in the local church. Such a conviction regarding church governance, however, was further tested for Southern Baptists beginning in the early 1990s as issues of human sexuality became increasingly prominent. The AIDS epidemic, in particular, provided fodder for more conservative Baptists to stigmatize gay and lesbian individuals, but not all Baptists responded to gay and lesbian individuals the same way. If the Alliance affirmed women clergy as part of their broader belief in the autonomy of the local congregation, how should they react if a congregation affirmed a gay or lesbian individual? As the Alliance began to study issues of human sexuality, it did so against the backdrop of its affirmation of women in ministry.

Essentially, conflicts surrounding the acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals within local congregations served as an extension of conflicts surrounding the acceptance of women clergy. If the Alliance accepted that local congregations had the authority to call women to serve as clergy members, what made calling gay and lesbian individuals to do the same any different? The conservative faction within the SBC placed clear limitations on the gender of pastoral authority, confining denominational ordination to men only, and then easily expanded these heteronormative restrictions to the question of admitting gay and lesbian people as members. The Alliance, on the other hand, made the decision that local congregations are uniquely suited to best understand their own pastoral needs, even if those needs necessitated calling a woman. By extension, the Alliance reasoned that welcoming gay and lesbian individuals into the community of faith was also a decision that local congregations were more uniquely suited to make. The initial distinction from the SBC had profound consequences.

By 1990, Alliance executive director Stan Hastey began encountering questions about the organization's stance on human sexuality. He recognized that “the Alliance is being looked to by gays and lesbians as a haven or, perhaps, as a potential haven, depending on our willingness to address their concerns.”Footnote ²⁶ Soon, two congregations, Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Pullen Memorial Baptist in nearby Raleigh, churches that maintained affiliations with both the Alliance and the SBC, took decisions that would force both denominational bodies to directly engage questions of sexuality. In March of 1992, Pullen hosted a ceremony to celebrate a same-sex union. The following month, Binkley licensed a gay divinity student to preach the Gospel. These decisions from two Baptist congregations drew sharp media attention within the denomination as well as in the secular press. If women clergy were the focus of Southern Baptist conflict in the 1980s, the 1990s added the dimension of sexuality.Footnote ²⁷

Controversy over sexuality offered the SBC an opportunity to further distinguish itself. The SBC responded publicly to Binkley and Pullen at its Annual Convention in June of 1992. At that gathering, the messengers voted to “admonish” and “withdraw fellowship” from the two congregations.Footnote ²⁸ They also took advantage of this moment to amend the SBC's constitution. Following “the appearance of elation regarding withdrawing fellowship from” Binkley and Pullen, the Convention adopted a recommendation to revise the denomination's constitution to clarify that churches that are not in friendly cooperation with the Convention include “churches which act to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.”Footnote ²⁹ This unequivocal statement meant that, just as the autonomy of the local church did not extend to the ordination of women, it also did not extend to the acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals, either for marriage or ordination.

Again, social attitudes become real in denominations through bureaucratic processes that force deliberation, enact values that differentiate from other ecclesial bodies, and, eventually, make stances binding to all members. Compared to the SBC, the Alliance's 1992 annual gathering took a far different approach to engaging questions of human sexuality. Prior to the gathering, Mahan Siler, the pastor at Pullen, expressed reservations about leading a breakout session on the church and homosexuality. He had led the session at previous gatherings, but the issue of sexuality had not reached such a public and frenzied state. The board of directors, however, encouraged him to proceed. Executive director Stan Hastey declared, “If we go down over [sexuality], we go down.”Footnote ³⁰ The strong stance taken by the SBC could not be ignored; the members of the young organization sought to follow their convictions over their desire for self-preservation. As a result of such agitation over the issue of sexuality at the gathering, the Alliance appointed a Task Force on Human Sexuality that was tasked with drafting a statement and providing recommendations on implementation. When the Task Force submitted its work in 1994, the board of directors was not unanimous in its acceptance nor was most of the membership in agreement. Although the Alliance did not endorse a full affirmation of gay and lesbian individuals at this time, these deliberations resulted in the denomination adopting a hiring policy of nondiscrimination for all staff and board members. The policy acknowledged that not everyone in the Alliance held the same beliefs, but the denomination would not prohibit gay and lesbian individuals from fully participating at any level in the organization.Footnote ³¹

Although the denomination sanctioned certain attitudes, the Alliance continued to place an emphasis on local congregations to accomplish its mission rather than relying solely on the enforcement of standards by a large, hierarchical denomination. The emphasis on local congregations prompted other structural dynamics in its development. For example, the practice of local autonomy ensured that the Alliance would need to rely on cooperation and partnership for leveraging funding and constructing coalitions of influence. Whereas the SBC eschewed ecumenical organizations like the National Council of Churches in favor of a more independent and hierarchical denominational body, the Alliance sought to shape itself as an interdependent and cooperative organization. Clearly, the SBC had long relied on its size to avoid partnerships, choosing instead to create independent infrastructure. But ecumenical partnerships prompted the Alliance to rethink its relationship with other religious bodies. The Alliance's founding covenant committed the body to “the larger body of Christ” and not simply the SBC or even Baptist life more broadly. The organization's first executive director, Stan Hastey, made developing relationships with the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) and the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC) a priority. The ABCUSA traced its roots back to the Triennial Convention from which the SBC broke in 1845, and the PNBC had formed in the mid-twentieth century as a historically Black Baptist denominational group committed to the Civil Rights movement.Footnote ³² Increasingly, attitudes exerted by the executive board of the Alliance were affected by its dependence on a growing network of organizational connections.

The Alliance's commitment to reaching out beyond its denominational circles was in stark contrast to SBC partnerships. Cooperation often entailed compromise and, given the denomination's sheer size, it often chose to act independently and consistently with its rigid hierarchy. By contrast, the Alliance's organization was not large enough to always act on its own. Moreover, the initial commitment to women in ministry stimulated different approaches to structure and power. Whereas, throughout the 1980s, conservatives and moderates alike looked to the men who held the SBC presidency as the principal arbiters of power within the denomination, the Alliance repositioned authority from a singular individual to a board of directors, one that was characterized by a more equitable distribution between both men and women. Gender equity alone was not determinative of the Alliance's new stance; rather, it was the explicit empowerment of women with executive authority, a principle that was especially affirmed in 1989 when Anne Thomas Neil became the Alliance's third president.

As the Alliance grew, it looked beyond Baptist groups for partnership, favoring affinities consonant with their social values over Baptist identity. For example, in 2001, the organization became the thirty-sixth member body of the National Council of Churches, one of the longest standing Christian ecumenical bodies in the United States. The Alliance also began conversations with the Christian Church Disciples of Christ (DoC) as well as the United Church of Christ (UCC), striving toward mutual recognition of each denomination's clergy and sacrament. While full communion between the DoC and UCC was never reached, the meetings marked a significant departure from the way the Southern Baptists related to other Christian denominational groups. Rather than assuming control and maintaining purity through its independence, the Alliance chose to make decisions in cooperation and coordination with other denominational bodies.Footnote ³³

This commitment to interdependence and cooperation shaped the Alliance's approach to missions as well. The SBC had always maintained a strong commitment to sending missionaries to other parts of the world to convert persons to Christianity. The Alliance, however, restructured its practices, questioning the adequacy of a unidirectional model determining where U.S. missionaries should be sent to other parts of the world. SBC's “sending” paradigm tended to obscure the realities that Christians around the world were conducting important ministries in their local communities. Just as the conservative faction in the SBC disregarded the autonomy of liberal congregations to call women clergy, SBC missionary practices tended to overlook the vibrancy and ministries of Christian communities around the world.Footnote ³⁴ Recognizing the importance of local context, the Alliance fostered partnerships with small Baptist groups around the world built on mutuality. The collaboration with the Fraternidad de Iglesias Bautistas de Cuba, a small Cuban Baptist group, became one of the most enduring partnerships. The Fraternidad had separated from the Western Baptist Convention in Cuba in 1989 and became the Alliance's first international partner group. The two denominational bodies regularly sent representatives to one another's meetings as well as coordinated congregational partnerships between U.S. and Cuban churches. Rather than traditional, colonial missions where U.S. missionaries held the power within the relationship, the Alliance's relationship with the Fraternidad effectively modeled an alternative approach to thinking about international ministry and partnership.Footnote ³⁵

As the Alliance reconsidered its structure in light of the SBC, the organization had the opportunity to address parts of Southern Baptist history that would not have been possible in the larger denomination. In 1990, the progressives within the Alliance used their newfound executive authority to issue a statement repudiating their SBC past by apologizing for their denomination's efforts to condone and perpetuate “the sin of slavery prior to and during the Civil War.”Footnote ³⁶ Adopted in St. Louis, the statement further distinguished the Alliance's identity in relation to the SBC by stating that white Southern Baptists have “never publicly repented” for their actions. It is important to note that, rather than wield this executive authority to issue a statement on women, the supposed basis for the denominational split, the Alliance chose to focus on their denomination's original sin. While such a statement may have been impossible for the progressives to get passed in the SBC, it was attainable within the smaller denominational context. In the same way that Alliance congregations saw the inclusion of women as an important component of shaping their mission in the world, the new denominational group looked to an equitable and intentional inclusion of Black Americans as well.

For many in the Alliance, the greatest barrier to reaching out to Black Christians in the United States was the SBC's historic affirmation of slave holding. Repenting of the ways in which the Alliance had been shaped by a denomination built on slavery served as a preliminary step in achieving greater cooperation, partnership, and even membership among Black Americans. The Alliance's 1990 “Call to Repentance” was significant because the young organization was learning how to wield its bureaucratic authority, but it also inspired action within wider Southern Baptist circles. In the statement, the organization issued a challenge for the SBC, meeting in New Orleans that year, to adopt a similar statement. Just as the HMB had acted in ways that might pressure small congregations to second-guess calling a woman clergyperson, the Alliance sought to pressure the larger SBC to act on its history. While an SBC statement was not forthcoming that year, a new coalescence of attitudes was taking shape.

The Alliance's repentance on its history of slavery prompted later responses from the SBC as well as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), a more moderate SBC breakaway group. In 1992, following verdicts of the four Los Angeles police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, the CBF issued a similar statement. In fact, the CBF's statement was modeled on the Alliance statement, copying sentences, structure, and language. The CBF represented a less progressive and more moderate segment of Southern Baptist life. After the Alliance's creation, they continued to fight for executive authority within the SBC for several more years, to no avail. Like the Alliance, the CBF was also coming to terms with the creation of new bureaucratic structures. Unlike the Alliance, however, CBF's membership was more focused on returning executive authority to the moderate leadership that had guided the denomination in the decades prior to the 1980s. This difference in decision making shaped how the two bodies wielded their authority as denominations. Whereas for the Alliance this would be the first of many statements, 1992 would yield one of the only statements the CBF would ever pass in its history to date. According to historian and denominational leader Aaron Weaver, numerous individuals spoke against CBF's “Statement of Confession and Repentance.” The following year, the denomination adopted a new constitution that “prohibited resolutions and similar motions from being introduced from the floor of an Assembly business session.”Footnote ³⁷ In so doing, the CBF limited its ability to address larger social issues, leaving such statements to the initiative of local congregations.

Three years following the CBF's statement, the SBC issued their own racial statement, also modeled after the Alliance's. According to former Alliance executive director Stan Hastey, Jere Allen, an individual Alliance supporter and member of the SBC, used the Alliance's “Call to Repentance” as the basis for bringing a statement before the Convention's resolutions committee.Footnote ³⁸ By the time the Convention adopted the statement in 1995, 150 years after the SBC was formed, a number of key changes were apparent. The statement issued an apology “to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously.”Footnote ³⁹

These statements from the Alliance, the CBF, and the SBC provide an opportunity to consider the ways in which these three denominational structures were diverging from one another. They offer a glimpse into how these denominational groups were beginning to wield executive authority differently. The statements recognize that the historical sins of slavery continue to influence the United States's racial landscape to the present day. They also commit themselves to “eradicate racism in all its forms.”Footnote ⁴⁰ But the conclusions and purpose of the statements reveal the greatest divergence. The messengers of the SBC concluded their statement by pledging themselves to “our commitment to the Great Commission task of making disciples of all peoples,” whereas the Alliance's and CBF's statements concluded by pledging to “seek out” greater participation from African American Christians.Footnote ⁴¹ The Alliance likewise sought to convince the SBC to issue a similar statement and voiced regret “that at the present time our Alliance has few members or participating churches from among African Americans.” It vowed to be more “sensitive to African American church concerns.”Footnote ⁴² The SBC utilized the statement to seek forgiveness and to reaffirm the denomination's commitment to the Great Commission and evangelization. Around this time, the SBC also made tentative gestures affirming the few churches that successfully displayed an exceptionally diverse membership and therefore held up as concretely exemplifying the domestic outreach they most desired.Footnote ⁴³ Wielding denominational authority in this way cost the SBC nothing, and it resulted in a reaffirmation of the denomination's focus. The Alliance, on the other hand, ended with a desire for the organization to look racially different—a proposition that had the potential to radically change the organization's focus.

The passing of these resolutions reveals the ways in which the Alliance and SBC were quickly diverging from one another institutionally, guided by attempts to mutually distinguish each other. When the Alliance passed its statement in 1990, it was still called the Southern Baptist Alliance. The statement served to identify the young organization's progressive identity over and against the increasingly conservative SBC. In the five years between the Alliance's and SBC's statements, both the Alliance and CBF would officially break ties with the larger denomination. This was a volatile period in which all three organizations—the Alliance, the CBF, and the SBC—were seeking to clarify their identities. The struggle over identity between these denominations frames the SBC apology over slavery as a reactionary document. The intent was less a reflection on SBC's own history and more on the task of differentiating its own organization from the more moderate CBF and the more progressive Alliance. In a striking contrast, the SBC's statement further reaffirms the rightness of its own position by concluding with a call to make all peoples more like themselves, whereas the Alliance's statement concludes with a call to seek out Christians across the globe who were racially and ethnically not like themselves. Viewed in this way, the apologies by Southern Baptist denominations in the early 1990s over the sins of slavery were not apologies at all. They were documents that can be read as racialized statements delineating degrees of whiteness within fragmenting Southern Baptist circles.

The Chasm of Racial Justice

By the twenty-first century, the two organizations were no longer merely drifting apart from one another—they were clearly and distinctly at odds. In 2000, the SBC, having now purged moderates and progressives from the denomination, adopted a revised Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M)—the denomination's guiding statement of belief. Previous iterations of the BF&M had been passed in similarly volatile periods. The first version in 1925 was adopted at the height of the modernist–fundamentalist conflict, and the second version in 1963 was adopted during the Civil Rights movement, just when Southern Baptists were particularly convulsed over issues of academic freedom and biblical higher criticism. This more recent version of the BF&M, adopted in 2000, affirmed theologically conservative doctrines around the inerrancy of scripture to the divinely ordained structure of the family, firmly institutionalizing the beliefs of the denomination's conservative faction. Although the statement included a new recognition that “Christians should oppose racism,” in addition to several other social ills, the BF&M 2000 marked a distinct moment in the larger trajectory of the conflicts of the 1980s. Rather than a signal toward racial awareness, the revised statement was a marker of conservative victory. Embedded in the statement was an ethos that allowed conservatives to envision an idealized form of the SBC, one that would shape the denomination's response to the succeeding cultural changes of the next century.

Similar to the SBC's refurbished BF&M, the Alliance's founding covenant served as its moral compass. The covenant had taken on an almost mythic quality. Anne Thomas Neil wistfully said of her first reaction to the covenant, “I read these seven principles and then I read them again. I knew I had been waiting since my early childhood for this moment. To be honest, I never expected to see the formation of such a community of faith in my lifetime.” Another leader described reading the covenant as a “cool, moist wind on my parched spirit.” Founding member Alan Neely reflected on the document in the early 2000s and approvingly stated that it “represented the essence of theological, social, and political liberalism.” Among other things, the covenant committed the organization to the “best methods of modern biblical study,” “the larger body of Christ,” and “social and economic justice.” Furthermore, it named local autonomy and women's ordination and made them explicit, declaring that churches were free to “call [their] own leadership, and ordain whom [they] perceive as gifted for ministry, male or female.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Most importantly, the Alliance covenant was a decisive repudiation of the SBC. Alliance founders had generated a list of all that they “deplored” within the larger denomination, and then, at the prompting of founding member Mahan Siler, the group created an inverse list of what they supported. This inverse list became the basis of the Alliance's founding covenant, once again revealing how the denominational identity took shape in relation to the SBC. According to Siler, the covenant was “more response than reaction.” From the beginning, he remembered, the Alliance “worked at self-definition.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The organization saw itself as setting its own terms of identity. While such an ideal may have been present, the founders consistently brought their experiences from the SBC to bear on the construction of the new organization.

The founding covenant had accomplished much by institutionalizing a commitment not just regarding the “issue” of women's ordination but also, and more importantly, to achieving parity in the executive authority exercised by women in the denomination. A firm ecclesiology centering local church autonomy served to affirm the legitimacy and importance of women who often served in small and rural congregations, sites, and regions that had lacked influence in the structure of the SBC. Commitment to inclusion of women and local church autonomy also resulted in an expansion of representation with respect to broader questions of gender and sexuality. Finally, as an expression of independence, it set the stage for further efforts to distance itself from the SBC's racial past, clearing obstacles that prevented greater inclusion to nonwhite populations, especially African American Christians.

In 2004, the Alliance further solidified its distance from the SBC when it adopted a statement affirming same-sex marriage. The SBC took notice, and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Moher described the decision “as no surprise.” Mohler even commended the Alliance for “its candor and honesty on the issue.” Seeing the statement as consistent and consequential, he contended that the Alliance's statement was “the logical extension of the group's denial of biblical inerrancy and its subversion of biblical authority.”Footnote ⁴⁶ When Alliance congregation First Baptist Church Greenville became “open and affirming” over a decade later, Mohler similarly wrote, “Once a church or denomination is untethered from the inerrancy of the Bible, there is no brake on the relativizing effects of cultural pressure.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Mohler was not alone in his assessment. For many Southern Baptists, the issue of same-sex marriage comes down to biblical interpretation and hermeneutics. For them, the moderate wing that birthed the Alliance simply failed to hold scripture in high enough regard. Looking past the abstracted theological background, the divergence in attitudes between the Alliance and the SBC began with the issue of women clergy. The SBC came to confidently affirm its more developed conservatism on women's ordination as a reflection on their faithfulness to scripture. As Mohler phrased this conviction in 2017, when writing about the more moderate CBF's engagement with issues of human sexuality, “This is also the logical consequence of adopting a hermeneutic that allows for the service of women as pastors.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The greater prominence of issues of sexuality and gender identity within wider American culture were not the only issues on which the Alliance and the SBC were bifurcating. There were also the percolations of a racial reckoning. In 2006, the Alliance held its annual gathering in Birmingham, Alabama, with a theme around racial reconciliation. As Alliance member and future president Michael-Ray Mathews explained, the organization was looking to do more in racial justice but “didn't know how to express it institutionally.” The organization set aside money for training around racial bias, but the 2008 recession coupled with Alliance staff turn-over got in the way of the organization addressing issues of racial injustice in a more systematic way. The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and the increased attention to police violence against people of color, created a social moment in which Alliance leaders had to confront their lack of racial diversity. That same year, out of frustration with the lack of organizational progress, Mathews helped to establish the Racial Justice and Multiculturalism Community within the Alliance—a group that would bring greater awareness to the issues surrounding race within the broader organization specifically among board members and staff.Footnote ⁴⁹ He understood that if the organization were to change, that change would have to happen starting at the executive level.

The Alliance's covenant had provided a reliable charter for the founders of the denomination. As noted previously, the inclusion and welcome of women clergy had necessitated a restructuring of how the young organization thought about power and leadership. This restructuring was successful. By 2015, 42 percent of Alliance congregations were pastored or co-pastored by women, and 58.5 percent of all Alliance-endorsed chaplains and counselors were women.Footnote ⁵⁰ Increasingly, however, the Alliance came to recognize that this restructuring was inadequate to address contemporary issues of transgender rights and white supremacy. The election of President Trump in 2016, a white backlash against the Obama presidency, only put a finer point on the Alliance's inability to grow beyond its predominantly white founding. As the organization wrestled with how to respond to these issues, the work done to include women clergy provided a framework for how to consider further changes to tackle these newer issues. Now, the issues of gender, sexuality, and race became increasingly intertwined in the Alliance, each mutually reinforcing the stance toward important social issues as they became prominent.

By 2017, the covenant was thirty years old. A newer and younger generation of Alliance members, with little connection to the organization's history, began to question the institutional scaffolding provided by the Alliance covenant to address newer issues. The organization hosted an event entitled “Why Baptist?” inviting younger Alliance members to reflect on select principles within the covenant. The event was styled after the Alliance's inaugural gathering in 1987 and hosted in the same building on the campus of Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.Footnote ⁵¹ In 2017, however, the salient social issues had shifted, and participants offered deconstructive reflections on the covenant, highlighting its limitations. Whereas, at the Alliance's founding, the explicit reference to “male or female” had offered organizational scaffolding to support women in ministry, now this binary language was a limitation. Rights for transgender and nonbinary people were front and center at that year's gathering as North Carolina had passed a bill restricting the use of gender-segregated bathrooms based on an individual's biological sex assigned at birth. Kyndra Frazier, associate pastor of First Corinthians Baptist Church in New York City, said, “I believe that 30 years ago it was clear that there were two genders. . . . Now not so much.”Footnote ⁵² After Frazier had offered her critique of the covenant's language, the event proceeded and Allyson Robinson, a transgender Baptist minister, offered her reflection on the next covenant principle.Footnote ⁵³

As the Alliance challenged its own perspective on sexuality, the SBC was taking the opposite position. In 2014, the Convention adopted a resolution declaring that “intersexuality” and “gender identity confusion” should be attributed to “the reality of human fallenness.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Two years later, the Convention offered public support to eleven attorneys general who were seeking to overturn the Obama administration's guidance on public schools allowing transgender students to use the gendered bathroom that aligned with their gender identity. While the Convention did not acknowledge North Carolina's “Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act,” their sympathy to the bill was implied. The 2016 resolution called on “elected officials to pass laws at every level of government that protect the free exercise of religion.” Messengers at that year's gathering sought to press their ideological advantage and ensure that the federal government would not “discriminate against people of faith because of their convictions regarding marriage.”Footnote ⁵⁵ SBC sentiments on sexuality were readily ensconced in familiar frameworks of heteronormativity and “family values” politics.

As can be readily seen when looking at happenings of both denominations, the Alliance debated whether its own institutional infrastructure needed to change to keep pace with a changing social reality, while the SBC doubled down on preserving its dogmatically sanctioned identity. The Convention expressed the need to love and care for transgender persons, but denominational messengers were fearful of what the changing U.S. culture meant for their own public reputation and social status. Despite being the nation's largest Protestant denomination, the SBC appealed to government officials for protection from discrimination. In response to social developments, the Alliance became more introspective regarding internal shortcomings, while the SBC became more aggressive against perceived external dangers.

Following the “Why Baptist?” gathering in the fall of 2017, the Alliance's board of directors voted to appoint a covenant Re-visioning Working Group to “fashion a renewed statement of Alliance of Baptists identity which will articulate the dreams and hopes for the global church envisioned by today's leaders.” The executive committee articulated an additional stipulation that the working group would “bring forth a revised covenant and mission statement . . . which articulates a commitment to eradicating the language of white male heterosexual supremacy.” The working group needed to ensure that any statement was “inclusive of all gender identities and sexual orientations” and expressed a commitment to “social, racial, and economic justice” (emphasis added). This decision of the board marked a concerted effort to bring the denomination more in line with its current justice commitments to be more responsive to future issues as they arose.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the Alliance planned to adopt a new covenant statement in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic delayed adoption of the new statement until April 2021. The new covenant offered welcome and affirmation for “all persons with full respect to gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic identities.” Unlike the previous covenant, the new document offered “lament” for the ways the Baptists have too often “cherished independence from one another more than responsibility to one another,” a critique of the denomination's earlier emphasis on “freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It also committed the organization to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Through this new covenant and mission statement, the Alliance sought to use its denominational authority to cast a more progressive vision for its individual and congregational members, revising its institutional scaffolding to support new convictions.

As the Alliance was revising its founding covenant to better speak out against racism and white supremacy, many within the SBC continued to rely on the BF&M to distinguish and uphold the denomination's conservative identity. In 2019, the Convention adopted a resolution on critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality that sought to identify these “frameworks” and “analytical tools” as subordinate to Scripture.Footnote ⁵⁹ For some members within the convention, such a statement did not go far enough, and it helped to spur the creation of a new conservative faction within the denomination called the Conservative Baptist Network of Southern Baptists. At the 2021 Annual Convention of the SBC, members of this movement sought to install their own president against what they defined as the Convention's new “moderates.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The meaning of orthodoxy continued to shift rightward, resonating with a newly vocal Christian Right that had been bolstered during the Trump presidency.Footnote ⁶¹ They proposed another resolution: “On the Incompatibility of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality with The Baptist Faith and Message.” It described CRT and intersectionality as “ideologies rooted in Neo-Marxist and postmodern worldviews” that are “incompatible with Scripture.”Footnote ⁶² The Convention ultimately did not pass this resolution. It instead adopted a more generic statement that does not name CRT or intersectionality specifically but still rejected “any theory or worldview that finds the ultimate identity of human beings in ethnicity or in any other group dynamic.”Footnote ⁶³ The language mirrored that found in similar statements that had been promoted by conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and adopted as legislation overseeing public school curriculum choices in states across the country.Footnote ⁶⁴

The rejected statement of the more conservative faction within the SBC is revealing because it shows that the rise of conservatism within the denomination was never about faithfulness to the teachings of Scripture. It was about power and control of the denomination's institutions. More specifically, the resolution was framed around the Convention's adherence not to Scripture but to the BF&M—the statement designed to orient and guide denominational institutions. The creation of newly declared factions of moderates and conservatives, who all adhere to the inerrancy of Scripture, reveals that the bureaucratic power that comes from the nation's largest Protestant denomination is still attractive and coveted.