(ANALYSIS) Last week’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was as newsworthy as usual, but unusually significant. Despite its regional moniker, the SBC is active nationwide and across the globe, and “closely watched as a barometer of evangelical sentiment,” in the words of Ruth Graham at The New York Times. Liam Adams of Nashville’s The Tennessean depicted the deliberations in Indianapolis as “a turning point for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination” with its 12.9 million members. 

If so, will this turning turn out to be Southern Baptists’ migration toward neo-fundamentalism, a growing force within America’s complex and sprawling Evangelical movement at a time when conservative Protestants become more conservative, and more militantly so? 

The Baptist “messengers” took a required second vote to ratify a constitutional amendment, approved last year, specifying that to be an acceptable SBC affiliate a congregation “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder.” That would tighten and permanently enshrine a 2000 addition to the SBC’s doctrinal platform stating that “the office of pastor is limited to men.” 

READ: North Carolina Pastor Clint Pressley Elected SBC President Following Runoff

The second vote failed, but only because it fell short of the needed two-thirds. The 61 percent yes vote signaled strong grass-roots support. Moreover, speakers argued that no amendment is needed because disciplinary procedures already exist and the SBC is now ready and willing to banish congregations with female clergy. In fact, the meeting approved by an emphatic 92 percent the latest expulsion, of venerable First Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Rick Warren, retired pastor of California’s Saddleback Church that the SBC dramatically expelled last year for ordaining women, told The New Yorker: “This is a fight between fundamentalists and conservatives” in which both sides “believe that the Bible is inerrant.” Insistence that the Bible is error-free on history as well as doctrine was the first of the “five points” in original 20th Century fundamentalism. That label took on negative connotations so later conservatives mostly preferred to be called “evangelicals” or “neo-evangelicals.” 

What’s notable here is not just toughening opposition to women’s leadership but the rightward shift on governance. Historically, a central Southern Baptist principle was to embrace core Christian doctrines alongside flexibility with most policies left to each autonomous local congregation. For instance, the Alexandria church, an SBC affiliate in good standing since 1845, had ordained female clergy without trouble the past 44 years. 

Also at Indianapolis, the SBC entered the politically delicate topic of births through in vitrofertilization. A new policy statement, though vague on what individuals or government should do, declares that when an egg is fertilized a “human being” exists that must be protected. The policy objects that IVF involves widespread “freezing, stockpiling and ultimate destruction of human embryos, some of which may also be subjected to medical experimentation.” This now positions the SBC against many evangelical Protestants. 

This writer’s 1985 Time magazine cover story on fundamentalism defined it as the hard-right wing within the broad evangelical coalition of Bible-believing conservatives. Historian George Marsden, whose “Fundamentalism and American Culture,” is definitive, famously quipped that a fundamentalist is ”an evangelical who is angry about something.” Fundamentalism militantly champions the strictest interpretation of orthodoxy and insists that all true biblical conservatives agree. 

Adding “neo” to the emerging version of fundamentalists indicates that some are less demanding on traditional lifestyle no-nos (drinking, smoking, dancing, movies) and on specific End Times theology. Nor do they necessarily require previous “second-degree separation, meaning faithful churches not only shun liberalism but cut off fellow conservatives who participate with liberals in pluralistic denominations and ministries. (Mr. Evangelical, Billy Graham, typified such compromise). 

A May 21 article at MereOrthodoxy.com by editor Jake Meador sees evangelicalism breaking into four subgroups, moving from right to left the neo-fundamentalists, mainstream evangelicals, neo-evangelicals, and progressive evangelicals. He says the SBC is now undergoing “an attempted takeover from a well-moneyed group of neo-fundamentalists.”

Meador belongs to the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), and says it is becoming less unified, simultaneously pulled both further right and further left. Last week, the PCA’s national assembly was sharply divided on whether the stand against female clergy should now also specify that women are not allowed to preach. Reflecting a divided church, the assembly defeated the bill with 51.4 percent in opposition. 

Another sign of tensions was a poignant New York Times column last week by David French, a 15-year PCA member who performed valiant legal defense of conservative Christians’ rights. But he’s faced their hostility for criticizing Donald Trump. French recently left his PCA congregation, feeling “race and politics trumped truth and grace,” and was disinvited from a panel planned for last week’s assembly.

Then there’s the Anglican Church in North America, which from its founding in 2009 allowed dioceses and local congregations to have women priests. But a protest from 296 priests released May 26 pleads for a ban on women, while the Fort Worth diocese called for a moratorium on female ordinations. The  denomination’s June 26-28 assembly will elect a new archbishop who must deal with this dispute. 

Due to liberal claims that masses of U.S. conservatives are plotting to impose “Christian Nationalism,” it’s worth mention that the Indianapolis meeting defeated bids to water down a new policy statement that denounces such radical thinking. It states, “We refute the idea that God has commanded any state to establish any religion” and “reject any government coercion or enforcement of religious belief,” as well as efforts to “establish Christianity as the state religion” of the U.S. The SBC believes that “our Christian witness is better preserved by the separation of church and state.” 

Newly elected SBC President Clint Pressley of Charlotte is active in an organization that advocates men-only clergy and he favored the clampdown amendment.

With that question settled for now, Pressley and fellow  executives  face a huge ongoing crisis on how to deal with clergy accused of sexual abuse, and their victims. A task force assigned to pursue reform measures approved in 2022 went out of business filing a sour report that as yet far too little has been accomplished.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.