Southern Baptists are set to vote at their annual convention on Tuesday and Wednesday on whether to crack down on women in the pastorate and condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, in what will be a referendum on the nation's largest Protestant denomination and the role of women in American society.
The Southern Baptist Convention, with about 13 million church members nationwide, has long been a bellwether of American evangelicalism. Its conservative membership has been a powerful political force, and its debates have drawn widespread attention from outside experts and politicians this year. The denomination has experienced the same turmoil over politics and priorities that broadly divided the conservative movement after Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016.
“Given what's at stake for the Southern Baptist Convention, I hope that every single person in this room will not only vote in November but also tomorrow,” Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Liberty University think tank, told attendees at a luncheon Monday in Indianapolis, near where the annual meeting is being held.
Trump delivered a short recorded message to a “highly respected group of people” gathered at a luncheon hosted by the Danbury Institute, an emerging conservative Christian advocacy group with ties to Southern Baptists.
“You can't vote for a Democrat,” Trump said in a video message, some of whom had waited as long as two hours to hear it. “They are against religion, and they are against your religion in particular.” He assured that if Trump wins a second term, “you will come back in a way that no other group has.”
The representatives, known as “messengers,” include male pastors from more than 45,000 Southern Baptist churches across the country, as well as many church members and staff, including women.
The group is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to amend its bylaws to say Southern Baptists must have “only male pastors and elders of any kind, as required by Scripture.” The group's confession of faith already bars female pastors, and emissaries have expelled several churches in recent years over the issue, including Saddleback Church in California, one of the group's largest and most prominent congregations. The proposed amendment would tighten enforcement and take away a hallmark of Baptist church life: the right of individual Baptist churches to make their own leadership decisions.
“We understand that this is a big cultural battlefront,” said William Wolf, executive director of the Baptist Leadership Center, a new advocacy group founded out of concern that Baptists are moving leftward. “If we can't hold the line here, we won't hold the line five years from now, and then we'll be having conversations about whether to accept homosexuality in our churches.”
Wolf, 35, said he considers passing the proposed law a top priority for the group, which will co-host a luncheon on Tuesday with the theme “SBC at a Crossroads” for about 800 participants.
Messengers will also vote on whether to oppose in vitro fertilization, as anti-abortion activists seek to build on gains made after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. The resolution, introduced by a Southern Baptist seminary president and ethicist, calls on Baptists to “reaffirm the unconditional worth and right to life of all human beings, including those in the fetal stage, and to utilize only reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.”
This is the first time the denomination has asked its members to confront the issue in this way. Although the majority of representatives oppose abortion, fertility treatments are widely practiced among evangelicals. While in vitro fertilization often involves the destruction of unused embryos, many Southern Baptists consider fertility treatments fundamentally different from abortion because their goal is to create new life. Some pastors have expressed concern about returning to their churches and reporting that they voted to condemn the process that produces the children and grandchildren of their congregants.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to speak Tuesday at an event hosted by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the denomination's policy arm.
Also on the Baptist agenda will be the election of a new president and resolutions, including one calling for an end to the widespread use of non-disclosure agreements and one expressing support for Israel and condemning “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activity” on and off campus. A Southern Baptist special committee addressing sexual abuse issues is also scheduled to release its final report on Tuesday afternoon.
