The Religious Right Won’t Stop at IVF. Its Grim Future Was on Full Display This Week. (2024)

On a street corner outside the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Indianapolis this week, a small contingent from Baptist Women in Ministry, a group of Baptists from various denominations, held colorful signs reading “Women Were the First Preachers” and “Break Barriers Not Spirits.” A few passersby covertly gave them a thumbs-up.

Around the corner, a man shouted into a mic and portable speaker, warning believers not to buy into the “garbage” that men are just trying to beat women down and maintain their own power. “Don’t be caught up in the emotional psychobabble,” he pleaded. “Those are the tools of the enemy, not the tools of the Word of God.”

In an even tone, Rev. Dr. Meredith Stone, BWIM’s executive director, read hundreds of prayers aloud, messages of solidarity with Baptist women sent in from around the world. Stone told me she saw prayer as a form of resistance.

There was reason for organized resistance this week. SBC came razor-close to adopting an amendment that would remove churches with female pastors from the convention. In the aftermath, the SBC’s resolution to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization hasbeen getting headlines, but a look at the entire annual meeting shows that gender and sexuality are at the heart of the denomination’s battles over its future.

Nearly 11,000 SBC “messengers,” representatives from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, preached and voted on church resolutions and a significant amendment that proposed to limit women’s roles and expand what it means for Southern Baptists to be “pro-life.” Gender anxiety wove through SBC’s annual meeting, along with dire warnings that the world is trying to push the entity toward the theological left.

On Tuesday, the historic First Baptist Church of Alexandria was removed from the SBC due to its belief that women can be ministers. The church first ordained a woman in 1980 and has appointed women to prominent ministry and pastoral roles ever since. It currently has a female pastor for children and women.

Ninety-two percent of Southern Baptist messengers voted to expel the church.

On Wednesday, messengers considered what has become known as the Law Amendment (an eponym for the amendment’s sponsor, Virginia pastor Mike Law). The measure would formally exclude from the SBC any churches that affirm, appoint, or employ women as pastors of any kind. Women have quietly served Southern Baptist churches for generations, and although a few bigger-name congregations such as Saddleback Church (ousted last year) started ordaining women more recently, more than 1,800 women have leadership roles at over 1,000 Southern Baptist churches.

Pastor Ryan Fullerton of Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, spoke in favor of the amendment, saying that it would clarify that only men are qualified to hold the office of pastor. “Culture is attacking gender on all fronts,” he said. “Every pastor and disciple in this room knows the ravages of the LGBTQIA agenda” and its effects on youth in their churches, he added. “What better way to express our countercultural commitment to the goodness of God’s word than to affirm God’s creation order in relation to the office of pastor?”

Messengers in attendance cast their votes via paper ballot, and the room—and believers across the country—waited for the results.

Politics Are Never Far Away

The high-profile Southern Baptist gathering attracted a visit from former Vice President Mike Pence and a virtual video message from former President Donald Trump (delivered on the same day Trump met, online, with his probation officer). Trump’s prerecorded speech was hosted at the Indiana Roof Ballroom by the recently formed Danbury Institute, a coalition of conservative churches that maintains that abortion is “child sacrifice on the altar of self.” The institute says it will not rest until abortion is “eradicated entirely.” Although the event was not part of the SBC’s official schedule, it was listed on the annual meeting’s website and attracted many convention attendees.

The Danbury Institute’s gathering this week featured ample American flags and dire warnings about the country’s current social moment. Speakers struck a series of notes that would be familiar to people following our recent culture wars: Public schools are a place of indoctrination for non-Christian ideas, doctors are performing sex-change surgeries on minors, and “men dressed as women are invading spaces once regarded as safe for women and children,” such as public libraries and female locker rooms. The foreboding welcome video included images of drag queens as ominous examples.

The event included Promise Keepers’ new CEO, Shane Winnings, who spoke about how “we need strong men now more than ever.” Promise Keepers, the ’90s organization that idealized Christian manhood, is in the process of something of a relaunch. Earlier this month, the group came out with a “Proclamation on Godly Masculinity,” arguing that the cultural emasculation of men and captivity by “the lies of Satan” have confused gender roles, leading to moral decline and sexual perversion. In August, Promise Keepers will host an arena-sized gathering with a lineup of speakers that includes the founder of Turning Point USA and veteran online culture warrior Charlie Kirk.

At the close of the event, Trump, in his short video, warned, “You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular.”

For his part, Pence told a ballroom full of Southern Baptists Wednesday how his faith informed his political decisions. This was a group gathered over boxed lunches, hoping to hear how to engage politically in a Christian way in this, our polarized age. When Pence described a lasting difference of opinion with Trump over whether Pence could have overturned the 2020 presidential election, he was met with a standing ovation from the crowd for upholding the Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021. Otherwise, Pence focused largely on the issue of abortion, saying he disagreed with many Republican candidates (though he didn’t say so, this contingent includes Trump) who suggest that abortion law be left to the states. The former vice president called for a nationwide abortion ban.

“I think the destiny of the nation is inextricably linked to whether we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law,” Pence said. He said he believes that the country needs to return to an era of “traditional moral values”—a time before the new “gender ideology” that has taken hold.

Personhood

Although the SBC has faced record-breaking declines in membership in recent years, hitting its lowest enrollment in nearly half a century, it remains the largest evangelical faith group in the country. Its members are deeply conservative and highly mobilized voters.

That conservatism and mobilization explains the convention’s efforts to more narrowly define what it means to be pro-life. The resolution concerning IVF was prompted by what Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called a “lack of political will to stand behind” an anti-abortion stance that extends to conception.

Authored by Mohler, the resolution explained how IVF routinely generates more embryos than can be safely implanted, resulting in the “freezing, stockpiling, and ultimate destruction of human embryos.” SBC messengers voted for the measure, reaffirming the humanity of an estimated 1.5million “in an embryonic stage.” It was a move, as the resolution stated, to encourage Southern Baptists to advocate for the government to “restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being,” including “frozen embryonic human beings.”

Mohler also noted, at a talk Monday, “Much of the market for [IVF] is actually not even found among heterosexual married couples.” But, he said, the redefinition of marriage, gender, and “all things in light of the LGBTQ movement also means that there are people who can now have children alienated from that natural process,” the union of husband and wife “in the institution of marriage, in the larger institution of the natural family.”

Backlash Against Women?

The effort to define “complementary” male and female gender roles was repeatedly contrasted rhetorically with what speakers described as a looming cultural “transgender ideology.” In this worldview, the combined worry makes sense: If gender roles are fluid, male authority becomes transferable. This is highly dangerous if you believe that men are designed by God to lead.

For a community that also believes that hom*osexual relationships are sinful, there’s added urgency in defining male and female as a set dyad, with women needing the leadership of men.

Advocates for the Law Amendment warned that “historically, female pastors are an early step toward liberalism” and that the “same interpretive method that leads to female pastors also leads to practicing hom*osexual pastors.”

The effort to eliminate women-led churches, even as the SBC loses members, followed a multiyear effort to force the convention to contend with its sexual abuse crisis, a public reckoning led predominantly by outspoken women survivors whose revelations toppled some of the most powerful men across the faith group. Their advocacy and ample media attention to their stories pushed the SBC to hire external investigators and ultimately release a list of alleged abusers. Subsequently, the Department of Justice began to look into the sexual abuse and cover-up within the SBC. The 22-month investigation recently yielded an indictment of former Southern Baptist seminary professor and pastor Matthew Queen for obstructing justice in a federal grand jury investigation by falsifying records. (Queen has pleaded not guilty.)

Jules Woodson, a Southern Baptist sexual assault survivor and advocate, said in an interview that she sees connections between the various resolutions affecting women introduced at this year’s convention and women’s recent push for reform. “They have proven that powerful men in charge can’t be trusted … yet they are hindering any attempt for women to bring meaningful change.”

On Wednesday, messengers elected a new president, Clint Pressley, a man who supports the Law Amendment and opposes the creation of a Ministry Check website to track abusive leaders—something sexual abuse survivors have been demanding since 2007.

Stone, from Baptist Women in Ministry, sighed over “how many times people just don’t believe women,” whether women say they have been abused, have been traumatized, are hurting, she said, or have received a calling from God to the ministry. “It’s denigrating to your personhood. It makes you question yourself and question God.”

What happened at the SBC’s annual meeting is a microcosm of the broader culture-wide backlash against the #MeToo movement. #ChurchToo, a movement that revealed abuses of power within churches across the nation and within the SBC, briefly put women at the fore, demanding better of men more accustomed to defining the course, men whose interests prevented them from confronting known abuses and too often prioritized silencing victims.

And yet, Wednesday morning ended with a surprise: the Law Amendment failed to reach the needed two-thirds majority threshold to pass, with 61.45 percent voting to ban churches with women pastors and 38.38 percent voting against the amendment.

This result might seem encouraging to those in favor of women’s leadership, but some of the 38.38 percent opposed the Law Amendment not because of egalitarianism but because they felt that it was redundant. Way back in 2000, the SBC had codified its position on women clergy in its governing document, the Baptist Faith and Message. Then, this year and last year, individual churches with women pastors had successfully been removed. Those who had supported the Law Amendment argued that despite the convention’s decades-old stance on the matter, over 1,000 SBC churches had female pastors and the Credentials Committee—tasked with determining which churches were in “friendly cooperation”—had shown a reluctance to act against them.

For the clergy from Baptist Women in Ministry who stood outside the SBC praying, who were dismissed and sniped at, but who also received gestures of solidarity as the week went on, the vote was cautiously welcomed. In a statement, they gave appreciation for the Southern Baptist messengers who voted against the amendment out of support for women.

After following the debate that led to the vote, though, Stone said she thought that “women in ministry were used as props for the display of extreme conservativism, in order to advance the power of a faction within SBC.”

She said she believed that women pastors will continue to be diminished and demeaned and that those observing the conflict will have heard “the incorrect message that they do not have equal value to God and the church.”

At the heart of this year’s annual meeting of the SBC were two major conservative initiatives: one aiming to treat embryos as equal; another to further mark out women as less qualified for leadership, by God’s design. What you might miss if you weren’t following closely: In the course of the debates over these two issues, the cloud of fear surrounding queer and trans people grew thicker; the conviction to fight abortion everywhere, and in every case, grew deeper. The apparent danger of a leftward slide in the SBC appears thwarted, as a new tide rises: “biblical manhood,” promising a remedy for our culture’s woes.