Southern Baptists are generous people.

Through the Cooperative Program, ordinary church members fund seminaries, missionaries, and institutions that carry the Convention’s convictions and gospel message into the world. This generosity is not transactional; it is a significant act of trust. And trust, to be well placed, requires the institutions that receive it to remain trustworthy.

This is not an argument against giving. Christians give cheerfully because God delights in it, not because institutions always deserve it. But faithful giving and watchful membership are not opposites.

Because, as history shows, when conservative Christian institutions drift into liberalism of any form, the people who trust them and fund them are always the last to know—but the first to suffer from it. 

The First Conservative Resurgence (1979-2000s)

It’s important to remember that, before the first Conservative Resurgence, the Southern Baptist Convention did not drift by accident, nor did it recover by accident.

By the 1960s and 1970s, theological liberalism had quietly taken root in SBC seminaries. Most notably, professors were questioning the historicity of Scripture. The Baptist Faith and Message 1963 was the doctrinal statement of all Southern Baptist churches at the time. While it was more thorough than the BF&M 1925, it left enough ambiguity on inerrancy that liberal scholars could work within it.

Rank-and-file Southern Baptists were growing alarmed over liberal scholarship in SBC seminaries and entities. In 1961, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Ralph Elliott published The Message of Genesis, which denied the historicity of biblical events and aligned with broader trends in biblical criticism that eroded confidence in Scripture’s full truthfulness.

The stakes were not merely academic. Seminaries do not exist in isolation; they exist to train pastors. And pastors shape congregations. When a seminary professor denies the historicity of Genesis, he is not merely publishing a controversial monograph. He is forming the men who will stand behind Southern Baptist pulpits for the next forty years. Southern Baptist tithes went to Midwestern during those dark times and helped develop pastors with similar theology. 

Theological liberalism in the classroom becomes theological confusion in the church. The ordinary Baptist in the pew may never read Ralph Elliott, but he will sit under the pastor whom Elliott’s institution trained.

The response to this liberalism was nothing less than a full-blown “battle for the Bible” in the SBC. The conservatives who led the charge devised a plan that was deliberate, time-consuming, and costly. Paige Patterson and others set forth a multi-step strategy to leverage the SBC’s existing governance structure to take control of the drifting institutions. It went broadly as follows: The SBC president appointed the Committee on Committees, which nominated the Committee on Boards, which nominated trustees of SBC entities.

A ten-year string of conservative presidents would eventually produce trustee boards controlled by proponents of inerrancy, thereby resulting in healthier, doctrinally sound institutions, pastors, and churches.

Ten years to undo the damage. And it all started with a key first step: electing the right man as the next President of the SBC. 

On June 12, 1979, in Houston, Adrian Rogers was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention—and the battle for biblical fidelity had truly begun. He was not the last. Rogers and the conservative presidents who followed promised to use their nominating powers to name only those who believed in the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility. Over the next two decades, Southern Baptist seminaries and other entities underwent dramatic change, as conservative leaders and professors replaced moderates and liberals who had held those positions for years. 

By 1993, conservative trustee appointments had produced the election of Al Mohler as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler promptly pushed out most of the moderate faculty and became a leading voice in the continued Conservative Resurgence. The capstone came in 2000. Rogers served as chairman of the committee that produced the revised Baptist Faith and Message—explicitly limiting the pastorate to men and clarifying Southern Baptists’ position on inerrancy. What the BFM 1963 left ambiguous, the 2000 refused to.

The lesson was clear and institutional: Doctrine must be guarded in the boardroom, not just the pulpit. The ordinary church member in the pew had no idea how close the SBC came to losing its theological soul. But courageous men, working through the convention’s own structures, pulled it back. The institutions were corrected. The seminaries were reformed. The confession was strengthened.

Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, it would not be the last time liberalism needed to be fought.

The Drift Returns: Three Case Studies from the 2010s

The Conservative Resurgence did not inoculate the SBC against liberal drift. It simply corrected the institutional compromise of that generation.

But institutions require constant tending, and the men who guard them are always one generation away from those who won them. 

By the 2010s, new fault lines had opened—not on the inerrancy of the Bible, but on the authority of the Bible; over issues of what constitutes a biblical approach to matters of sexuality, race, and the sanctity of human life (to name a few). The drift was quieter this time. It came not through open denial of Scripture but through ambiguity, accommodation, and the slow normalization of categories that Scripture does not permit. 

And as before, the chain held: What was accommodated by liberal leadership in our institutions eventually reached, and hurt, the Southern Baptists in the pew.

Case Study 1: Sexuality and the Nashville Statement / Revoice Fault Line

In August 2017, a coalition of evangelical leaders gathered in Nashville and drafted a statement on biblical sexuality. The Nashville Statement was not an act of theological creativity; it was a defensive response. It affirmed what Scripture had always taught: Marriage is between one man and one woman, that homosexual conduct is sinful, and that adoption of “a homosexual or transgender self-conception” is inconsistent with God’s purposes. The fact that such a statement needed drafting at all was itself a symptom of drift already underway. 

The following year made the problem plain. In 2018, the Revoice Conference convened with the stated purpose of “supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, same-sex-attracted, and other LGBT Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic, Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.” The conference had direct SBC-adjacent roots. Founder Nate Collins earned his doctorate from Southern Seminary in 2017 and was employed there in various capacities—including as an instructor of New Testament—from 2014 until the spring of 2018. 

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is the entity that lobbies on behalf of Southern Baptists’ interests on Capitol Hill. Their response was telling. Karen Swallow Prior, an ERLC research fellow, endorsed the conference’s stated goals. Prior said, “Now more than ever, the church must love and support our Christian brothers and sisters who are same-sex attracted, yet desire to live biblically faithful lives, whether in singleness or marriage. I’m encouraged that Revoice is here to meet this great need in the church.” 

When a messenger on the floor of the 2018 Annual Meeting in Dallas asked Russell Moore (the president of the ERLC from 2013 to 2021) whether the ERLC would disavow Revoice, Moore responded that he did not know about the Revoice Conference, then offered a lengthy defense of Prior. He said, “Karen Swallow Prior has committed herself to go anywhere and everywhere to stand up and tell the truth about God’s word [concerning] human sexuality,” adding that he knew no one “more committed to the biblical message that marriage is between a man and a woman and that sexual immorality leads not just to bad consequences but to hell.”

The following year, Karen Prior co-edited Cultural Engagement (Zondervan, 2019) with Joshua D. Chatraw, which was published during her ERLC fellowship. It included a chapter by Matthew Vines arguing that Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality in Romans 1 reflected an outdated patriarchal logic rather than timeless moral truth. She was subsequently removed from her ERLC fellowship.

The ERLC eventually posted a cautionary article, of which a spokesman said, “This represents the entire organization’s concerns with the Revoice Conference.” The piece was thoughtful. The timing was not. An institution that employs a research fellow who endorses a conference ought not need public pressure to respond to it. 

The ordinary Southern Baptist sitting in the pew on Sunday morning knew none of this. He assumed the convention’s ethics entity was holding the line on human sexuality. He had no reason to think otherwise. What he could not see was that the institution his church helped fund employed fellows who endorsed conferences built on categories the Nashville Statement had just rejected—and its president was defending them from the floor of the annual meeting. 

What enters the institution does not stay there. It trains the pastors. It shapes the counseling. It forms the categories that eventually arrive, quietly and without announcement, in the local church. 

Case Study 2: Social Justice and the CRT Fault Line

The Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, released in September 2018, was the second defensive response in as many years. Signed by hundreds of evangelical leaders, it rejected the intrusion of social justice frameworks—including critical race theory¹ and intersectionality²—into evangelical churches and institutions. Once again, the statement did not emerge from a healthy institution. It emerged from one already showing symptoms.

The clearest institutional proof came the following year. At the 2019 Annual Meeting in Birmingham, Pastor Stephen Feinstein of California submitted a resolution with a straightforward purpose: To denounce critical race theory and intersectionality as ideologies incompatible with the gospel. His original resolution explicitly denounced intersectionality and critical race theory as typically understood, warning Christians against them. The Resolutions Committee accepted it but rewrote it entirely. The resolution was “edited.” The committee turned it into a document stating that critical race theory and intersectionality “should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture” — a subtle change that gave tacit institutional approval to CRT’s use in SBC life. 

The messengers, delegates from cooperating churches, voted for it. But most of the messengers likely did not understand what they were voting on — the vast majority of Southern Baptists had probably never heard of CRT or intersectionality, much less understood those terms well enough to make an informed decision on which way to vote. It was brought to a vote near the end of the conference, so the time for discussion was limited. The resolution submitted to protect the convention became, through institutional maneuvering, a document that granted legitimacy to the very ideology it was meant to reject. 

The seminary dimension compounded the damage. CRT language had not merely appeared in public discourse—it had seeped into Bible colleges and some seminaries. Pastor Feinstein himself said he submitted the resolution after becoming alarmed by stories from his own parishioners, whose children had returned home from Bible college speaking the language of white privilege and critical theory. The Council of Seminary Presidents eventually issued a joint statement in 2020 declaring CRT incompatible with the BFM 2000, but by then, confusion had already spread, and the institutional damage was done.  

The chain held again: What entered the institution entered the seminary. What entered the seminary entered the pastor. What entered the pastor entered the pew. Ordinary Southern Baptist families sitting in Sunday school classes had no idea that the categories fracturing their conversations about race had been quietly legitimized at the annual meeting by a rewritten resolution many messengers did not understand. They just felt the confusion—and wondered why their church suddenly felt different. 

Case Study 3: Abortion and the ERLC’s Betrayal

In June 2021, the Southern Baptist Convention met in Nashville. The Resolutions Committee had declined to bring an abortion abolition resolution to the floor. The messengers overruled them. A day after overruling the Resolutions Committee, messengers adopted a resolution calling for “abolishing abortion immediately, without exception or compromise.” It was a remarkable moment—ordinary Southern Baptists had to fight their own institutional machinery to speak. And when they finally did, they spoke with unmistakable clarity: Abortion is murder, and they rejected any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of preborn neighbors. 

The ERLC responded by doing the opposite.

In May 2022, Brent Leatherwood—then Acting President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—signed an open letter to state legislators alongside National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony List, March for Life, and other major pro-life organizations. The letter declared unequivocally that the signatories opposed any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women and stood firmly against including such penalties in legislation. The timing was not incidental. The letter was published on May 12, 2022—the day the Louisiana legislature was voting on the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act, the first abortion abolition bill in the nation ever to be voted out of committee and brought to a floor vote.

This same letter was used repeatedly as evidence that pro-life organizations opposed equal protection legislation in states like Missouri, Kentucky, and North Dakota. This letter, which contradicts the messengers’ resolution at the 2021 annual meeting, has been used to defeat abolition bills for years now.

The institution funded by ordinary Southern Baptist church members had published a letter opposing equal protection the day before the most significant abortion abolition vote in American history. The bill did not pass.

The confrontation came one month later. On June 15, 2022, during the SBC annual meeting’s ERLC report, Brian Gunter—pastor of First Baptist Church of Livingston, Louisiana, and the man primarily responsible for helping to bring the Louisiana abolition bill to the floor—stood and asked Leatherwood directly, “Is it really your position that the mother who willfully kills her own child by abortion is never guilty before God and she should never face any consequences under the law?” Leatherwood’s reply was unambiguous: “You’re not going to get me to say that I want to throw mothers behind bars. That is not the view of this entity. That is not the view of this Convention.”

Gunter previously said publicly what the present exchange made plain: “When I saw that the same organization from the Southern Baptist Convention, that my church funds, had signed on to a letter to kill the very bill that I had been working so hard to pass in my state legislature and end abortion in Louisiana, I felt betrayed. My church members faithfully give their dollars. And then the Southern Baptist Convention’s ERLC worked to kill the bill that their pastor had worked so hard to pass.” 

Leatherwood spoke as if the convention were behind him. It was not. The messengers had said so the previous year in Nashville.  

The chain held one more time—and this time, the cost was measured not in theological confusion, but in legislation that failed, in children who were not protected, and in pastors who returned home from state capitols having lost bills their own convention’s ethics arm had helped defeat. The ordinary church member giving faithfully on Sunday morning had no idea. He assumed the ERLC shared what the messengers had just resolved. He had no reason to think otherwise.

That is the cost of institutional drift. It is always paid downstream.

A Second Conservative Resurgence? — Hopeful, Not Certain

Thankfully, as the drift has begun again in the SBC over the last decade, the messengers have not been silent. 

The pattern of response has been building for years. Motions to defund or abolish the ERLC moved from fringe concern to serious floor business. In 2025, nearly half (42.84%) of the messengers voted, on record, to abolish the ERLC entirely—numbers that revealed not merely dissatisfaction with one individual, but profound opposition to the entity’s direction. On July 31, 2025, Brent Leatherwood resigned as ERLC president, ending nearly nine years of service to the organization. The Moore-Leatherwood era was over. 

At the 2024 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, the messengers elected Clint Pressley as SBC president—and reelected him overwhelmingly in Dallas in 2025, with 92.64% of the vote. Pressley has emphasized Southern Baptists’ confession of faith and cooperative ministry model throughout his presidency, calling the convention to “Hold Fast” to the faith. The mood is different. The signals are real.

This looks, in some respects, like the beginning of a second Conservative Resurgence. The language of confession, cooperation, and doctrinal fidelity is returning to the convention’s center. The institutions most associated with drift are under pressure or in transition. The men who fought hardest for faithful reform are gaining ground.

But the word “looks” is doing important work in that sentence.

The first Conservative Resurgence was not won in a single annual meeting. It took decades of sustained effort, carefully executed strategy, and men willing to bear the cost of faithfulness over years, not cycles. The current moment is promising. It is not yet proven. New leadership at the ERLC does not automatically mean a new direction. A conservative convention president does not automatically produce conservative entity trustees. And the next generation of seminary graduates—trained in the institutions of the drift years—is already entering pulpits across the country. 

This may be a second Conservative Resurgence, but it is too early to crown it as one. While Pressley has been a reprieve, there is more to be done. Much more. Now, Florida pastor Willy Rice is running to succeed Pressley on a more robust platform of “Baptist renewal.” Willy’s vision, if implemented, could be the catalyst needed to spark a true second “resurgence.”

But what Southern Baptists owe this moment is not triumphalism but watchfulness—the same watchfulness that ordinary church members should have been exercising all along. 

Christ Doesn’t Drift

The history traced in this article is not primarily a story about institutions. It is a story about people—ordinary Southern Baptists who gave faithfully, trusted genuinely, and bore costs they never knew were being incurred on their behalf. The seminary drift of the 1970s shaped the pastors of the 1980s. The ERLC’s accommodation of homosexuality shaped the counseling of the 2010s. The open letter of 2022 helped kill legislation that ordinary pro-life Baptists assumed their convention was fighting to pass. The chain is long. The cost is real. And it is always paid in the pew.

This is not a reason for despair, nor a reason for cynicism. It is an opportunity for a clearer future—one that’s aware of our recent drift. 

Southern Baptists should support the current reform efforts. They should give cheerfully through the Cooperative Program. They should pray for their convention’s leaders, engage their annual meetings, and hold their institutions accountable—not with suspicion, but with the kind of informed, expectant watchfulness that faithful stewardship requires. 

The messengers who overruled their own Resolutions Committee in Nashville to pass an abolition resolution were not radicals. They were members doing what members are supposed to do: Refusing to let the institution speak for them when it would not speak faithfully.

But the deepest anchor cannot be the SBC’s ability to correct itself. Institutions are instruments. Resurgences are mercies. Conservative presidents are servants and occasionally insurgents, but never saviors. The Southern Baptist Convention has drifted before, and without vigilance, it will drift again. No confession, however carefully worded, no resolution, however clearly passed, no president, however faithful once elected—none of these is sufficient foundation for the ordinary church member’s confidence. 

Only Christ is. He does not drift with the culture. He does not accommodate the spirit of the age. He does not sign open letters that undermine what His people have resolved. His lordship over the church is not subject to the vote of a Resolutions Committee, the signature of an entity president, or the slow institutional drift of a generation that forgot what it was guarding.

Support the Second Conservative Resurgence. Pray for it. Work for it. Come to Orlando and vote for it.

But place your hope in the One whose kingdom cannot be compromised by institutional cowardice, and whose church will stand long after every denomination has run its course.

The institutions must be held. But Christ alone holds us.

1. A framework originating in legal academia (Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al.) that holds that racism is not merely individual prejudice but systemic, structural, and embedded in law, institutions, and culture—and that it is the ordinary, baseline condition of American society rather than an aberration. ↩︎
2. A framework (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989) holding that identity categories—race, sex, class, sexuality, disability—overlap and compound one another, producing layered and distinct experiences of oppression that cannot be understood by examining any single category in isolation. ↩︎