Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist Convention, alternatively the Great Commission Baptists, is a Christian denomination based in the United States. It is the world's largest Baptist organization, the largest Protestant, and the second-largest Christian body in the United States. The SBC is a cooperation of fully autonomous, independent churches with commonly held essential beliefs that pool some resources for missions.
Churches affiliated with the denomination are evangelical in doctrine and practice, emphasizing the significance of the individual conversion experience. This conversion is then affirmed by the person being completely immersed in water for a believer's baptism. Baptism is believed to be separate from salvation and is a public and symbolic expression of faith, burial of previous life, and resurrection to new life; it is not a requirement for salvation. The denomination has a male pastorate, often citing 1 Timothy 2:12 as the reason it does not ordain women. All affiliated churches deny the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, saying that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, and also that all sexual relations should occur only within the confines of marriage. Other specific beliefs based on biblical interpretation vary by congregational polity, often to balance local church autonomy.
In 1845, the Southern Baptists separated from the Triennial Convention to uphold the institution of slavery, as American society divided over slavery preceding the American Civil War. In 1995, the denomination apologized for racial positions in its history, and at present, the Southern Baptist Convention is racially diverse, with one in four congregations having a nonwhite majority. Since the 1940s, it has spread across the United States, with tens of thousands of affiliated churches and 41 affiliated state conventions. Beginning in the late 1970s, a conservative movement began to take control of the organization, and it succeeded in taking control of the SBC leadership by the 1990s.
Self-reported membership peaked in 2006 at roughly 16 million. Membership has contracted by an estimated 13.6% since that year, with 2020 marking the 14th year of continuous decline. Mean organization-wide weekly attendance dropped about 27% between 2006 and 2020. The Convention reported increased participation and a slowing of the rate of overall membership decline in 2024, with 12,722,266 members reported.
Name
The official name is the Southern Baptist Convention. The word Southern in "Southern Baptist Convention" stems from its 1845 organization in Augusta, Georgia, by white Baptists in the Southern United States who supported continuing the institution of slavery and split from the northern Baptists, who did not support funding evangelists engaging in slavery in the Southern United States.In 2012, the organization adopted the descriptor Great Commission Baptists after the election of its first African American president. Additionally, in 2020, some leaders of the Southern Baptists wanted to change its name to "Great Commission Baptists" to distance itself from its white supremacist foundation, and because it is no longer a specifically Southern church. Several churches affiliated with the denomination have also begun to identify as "Great Commission Baptists".
History
Colonial era
Most early Baptists in the British colonies came from England in the 17th century, after conflict with the Church of England for their dissenting religious views. In 1638, Roger Williams founded the first Baptist church in British America at the Providence Plantations, the first permanent European American settlement also founded by Williams in Rhode Island. The oldest Baptist church in the South, First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina, was organized in 1682 under the leadership of William Screven. A Baptist church was formed in Virginia in 1715 through the preaching of Robert Norden and another in North Carolina in 1727 through the ministry of Paul Palmer.The Baptists adhered to a congregationalist polity. They operated independently of the state-established Anglican churches in the Southern United States at a time when states prohibited non-Anglicans from holding political office. By 1740, about eight Baptist churches existed in the colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, with an estimated 300 to 400 members. New members, both black and white, were converted chiefly by Baptist preachers who traveled throughout the Southern United States during the 18th and 19th centuries, in the eras of the First and Second Great Awakenings.
Black churches were founded in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia before the American Revolution. Some black congregations kept their independence even after whites tried to exercise more authority after Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.
American Revolution period
Before the American Revolution, Baptist and Methodist evangelicals in the Southern United States promoted the view of the common person's equality before God, which embraced enslaved people and free blacks. They challenged the hierarchies of class and race and urged planters to abolish slavery. They welcomed enslaved people as Baptists and accepted them as preachers.During this time, there was a sharp division between the austerity of the plain-living Baptists, attracted initially from yeomen and common planters, and the opulence of the Anglican planters—the enslaving elite who controlled local and colonial government in what had become an enslaved society by the late 18th century. The gentry interpreted Baptist church discipline as political radicalism, but it served to ameliorate disorder. The Baptists intensely monitored each other's moral conduct, watching especially for sexual transgressions, cursing, and excessive drinking; they expelled members who would not reform.
In Virginia and most southern colonies before the American Revolution, the Church of England was the established church and supported by general taxes, as it was in England. It opposed the rapid spread of Baptists in the Southern United States. Particularly, Virginia prosecuted many Baptist preachers for "disturbing the peace" by preaching without licenses from the Anglican Church. Patrick Henry and James Madison defended Baptist preachers before the American Revolution in cases considered significant in the history of religious freedom. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786 by the Virginia General Assembly. Madison later applied his ideas and those of the Virginia document related to religious freedom during the Constitutional Convention, when he ensured that delegates incorporated them into the United States Constitution.
The struggle for religious tolerance erupted during the American Revolution, as the Baptists worked to disestablish the Anglican churches in the South. The Baptists protested vigorously; the resulting social disorder resulted chiefly from the ruling gentry's disregard for public needs. The vitality of the religious opposition made the conflict between "evangelical" and "gentry" styles bitter. Scholarship suggests that the evangelical movement's strength determined its ability to mobilize power outside the conventional authority structure.
National unification and regional division
In 1814, leaders such as Luther Rice helped Baptists unify nationally under what became known informally as the Triennial Convention based in Philadelphia. It allowed them to join their resources to support missions abroad. The Home Mission Society, affiliated with the Triennial Convention, was established in 1832 to support missions in U.S. frontier territories. By the mid-19th century, there were many social, cultural, economic, and political differences among business owners of the North, farmers of the West, and planters of the South. The most divisive conflict was primarily over the issue of slavery and, secondarily, over missions.Divisions over slavery
The issues surrounding slavery dominated the 19th century in the United States. This created tension between Baptists in northern and southern U.S. states over the issue of manumission. In the two decades after the American Revolution during the Second Great Awakening, northern Baptist preachers, as well as the Quakers and Methodists, increasingly argued that enslavers must free the people they enslaved. Although most Baptists in the 19th century south were yeomen farmers and common planters, the Baptists also began to attract major planters among their membership. Many southern ministers interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery and encouraged paternalistic practices by enslavers. They preached to enslaved people to accept their places and obey their enslavers and welcomed enslaved people and free blacks as members; whites controlled the churches' leadership and usually segregated church seating. From the early 19th century, many Baptist preachers in the Southern United States also argued in favor of preserving the right of ministers to be enslavers.File:Gillfield Baptist Church.jpg|thumb|Gillfield Baptist Church was the most prominent Black American congregation within the Portsmouth Association of the Triennial Convention, preceding the establishment of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Black congregations were sometimes the largest in their regions. For instance, by 1821, Gillfield Baptist in Petersburg, Virginia, had the largest congregation within the Portsmouth Association. At 441 members, it was more than twice as large as the next-biggest church. Before Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831, Gillfield had a black preacher. Afterward, the state legislature insisted that white men oversee black congregations. Gillfield could not call a black preacher until after the American Civil War and emancipation. After Turner's rebellion, whites worked to exert more control over black congregations and passed laws requiring white ministers to lead or be present at religious meetings. Many enslaved people evaded these restrictions.
The Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society adopted a kind of neutrality concerning slavery, neither condoning nor condemning it. During the "Georgia Test Case" of 1844, the Georgia State Convention proposed the appointment of the enslaver Elder James E. Reeve as a missionary. The Foreign Mission Board refused to approve his appointment, recognizing the case as a challenge and not wanting to violate their neutrality on slavery. They said that slavery should not be a factor in deliberations about missionary appointments.
In 1844, University of Alabama president Basil Manly Sr., a prominent preacher and major planter who enslaved 40 people, drafted the "Alabama Resolutions" and presented them to the Triennial Convention. They included the demand that enslavers be eligible for denominational offices to which the Southern associations contributed financially. They were not adopted. Many Baptists in Georgia decided to test the claimed neutrality by recommending an enslaver to the Home Mission Society as a missionary. The Home Mission Society's board refused to appoint him, noting that missionaries were not allowed to take servants with them and that they would not make a decision that appeared to endorse slavery. Many southern Baptists considered this an infringement of their right to determine candidates. From the perspective of many southerners, the northern position that "slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus" effectively obligated enslavers to secede from the Triennial Convention. This difference came to a head in 1845 when representatives of the northern states refused to appoint missionaries whose families enslaved people. To continue in the work of missions, many southern Baptists separated and founded the Southern Baptist Convention.