The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), alternatively the Great Commission Baptists (GCB), is an association of Baptist Christian churches based in the United States. It is the world's largest Baptist organization and the largest Protestant and second-largest Christian body in the United States.[1][2] The SBC is a cooperation of fully autonomous, independent churches with commonly held essential beliefs that pool some resources for missions.[3][4][5]
In 1845, the Southern Baptists separated from the Triennial Convention in order to support slavery, which the southern churches regarded as "an institution of heaven".[6][7] During the 19th and most of the 20th century, it played a central role in Southern racial attitudes, supporting racial segregation and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy while opposing interracial marriage.[8] Beginning in the late 1970s, a conservative movement began to take control of the organization. By the 1990s, this movement had succeeded in taking control of the leadership of the SBC.[9] In 1995, the organization apologized for racial positions in its history.[10] Since the 1940s, it has spread across the United States, with tens of thousands of affiliated churches[8] and 41 affiliated state conventions.[11][12][13]
Churches affiliated with the association are evangelical in doctrine and practice, emphasizing the significance of the individual conversion experience. This 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.[13][14] The association forbids women from becoming pastors,[15] often citing 1 Timothy 2:12. 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.[16] Other specific beliefs based on biblical interpretation vary by congregational polity, often to balance local church autonomy.
Self-reported membership peaked in 2006 at roughly 16 million.[17] Membership has contracted by an estimated 13.6% since that year, with 2020 marking the 14th year of continuous decline.[18] Mean organization-wide weekly attendance dropped about 27% between 2006 and 2020.[17][19] The association reported increased participation and a slowing of the rate of overall membership decline for the year 2023. For the same year, nearly 13 million members were reported.[20][21][22]
The official name is the Southern Baptist Convention. The word Southern in "Southern Baptist Convention" stems from its having been organized in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, by white Baptists in the Southern United States who supported continuing the institution of slavery and split from the northern Baptists (known today as the American Baptist Churches USA), who did not support funding slave-holding evangelists from the South.[7]
In 2012, the organization adopted the descriptor Great Commission Baptists after the election of its first African American president.[23] 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".[24][25][26][27]
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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.[28] 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.[29] 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 and operated independently of the state-established Anglican churches in the South, at a time when non-Anglicans were prohibited 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.[30] New members, both black and white, were converted chiefly by Baptist preachers who traveled throughout the South during the 18th and 19th centuries, in the eras of the First and Second Great Awakenings.[31]
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.[32]
Before the American Revolution, Baptist and Methodist evangelicals in the South promoted the view of the common man's equality before God, which embraced slaves and free blacks. They challenged the hierarchies of class and race and urged planters to abolish slavery. They welcomed slaves as Baptists and accepted them as preachers.[33]
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 slave-holding elite who controlled local and colonial government in what had become a slave society by the late 18th century.[34] 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.[35]
In Virginia and in 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 South. Particularly in Virginia, many Baptist preachers were prosecuted 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.[36] 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 they were incorporated into the national constitution.
The struggle for religious tolerance erupted and played out 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 need. The vitality of the religious opposition made the conflict between "evangelical" and "gentry" styles a bitter one.[37] Scholarship suggests that the evangelical movement's strength determined its ability to mobilize power outside the conventional authority structure.[38]
In 1814, leaders such as Luther Rice helped Baptists unify nationally under what became known informally as the Triennial Convention (because it met every three years) 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.[39]
The issues surrounding slavery dominated the 19th century in the United States.[40] 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 slaves be freed.[41] 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. The southern pastors interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery and encouraged paternalistic practices by slaveholders. They preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters, and welcomed slaves and free blacks as members, though whites controlled the churches' leadership, and seating was usually segregated.[41] From the early 19th century, many Baptist preachers in the South also argued in favor of preserving the right of ministers to be slaveholders.[42]
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.[43] 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 slaves 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 that the slaveholder Elder James E. Reeve be appointed 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 introduced as a factor into deliberations about missionary appointments.[44]
In 1844, University of Alabama president Basil Manly Sr., a prominent preacher and major planter who owned 40 slaves, drafted the "Alabama Resolutions" and presented them to the Triennial Convention. They included the demand that slaveholders be eligible for denominational offices to which the Southern associations contributed financially. They were not adopted. Georgia Baptists decided to test the claimed neutrality by recommending a slaveholder 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 (so he clearly could not take slaves) and that they would not make a decision that appeared to endorse slavery. Southern Baptists considered this an infringement of their right to determine their own candidates.[45] From the southern perspective, the northern position that "slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus" effectively obligated slaveholding Southerners to leave the fellowship.[46] This difference came to a head in 1845 when representatives of the northern states refused to appoint missionaries whose families owned slaves. To continue in the work of missions, the southern Baptists separated and created the Southern Baptist Convention.[47]
