The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ledger Doesn’t Balance
(ANALYSIS) I’ve said offhand a few times that PR people are not my favorite folks on Earth and there’s a reason for that. Their job and my job are not the same job. Actually, many times they are diametrically opposed to each other. Folks who work in public relations want to cast their organization in the best light possible. I want to try and get to the unvarnished truth about what’s actually going on behind the headline numbers.
This is on full display when a university releases its enrollment numbers and they aren’t very good. The headline may be something like, “<UNIVERSITY> experiences a 7% increase in transfer students.” Then you actually read over the report and the first couple of paragraphs are about peripheral metrics that point in a positive direction.
Buried near the end is the actual number that we all really care about: overall enrollment, which is often down by a significant percentage. The press release is not actually lying, it’s just burying the bad news under a mountain of words that could be seen as positive.
Denominational reporting tends to be less opaque, but it still tends toward emphasizing the positive trends. For instance when the Baptist Press released their annual article about updated Southern Baptist Convention numbers it had the headline, “Southern Baptists see attendance, baptism gains amid membership declines.” I can actually appreciate how this one was presented – the good news up front but also not totally minimizing the continued downward trend in SBC membership.
You can probably guess where I’m headed: I’m going to tell you the truth about what’s happening in the Southern Baptist Convention. I can summarize my views pretty succinctly — there’s nothing in the most recent numbers that changes my view of where the SBC is headed in the future.
Let’s start, as we always do, with the broadest look at SBC membership data. I started this chart right after the end of World War II.
I’ve said this on many occasions, but the rise of the SBC from 1945 through 1990 will never ever be replicated again in the history of American religion. The denomination recorded 5.8M members right as all those GIs were coming home from defeating the Axis powers. As the United States began the 1990s, the SBC had swelled to 15M members.
In many years, they were adding a quarter million new folks per year. That’s five thousand people being added to the membership files every single week for a period of 45 years. Insane to consider that momentum.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.