This Baptist, That Baptist: The Expanding Difference between Conservative and Progressive Baptists
A new article demonstrates how neither conservatism nor liberalism exist solely as dogmatic beliefs; rather, denominational leaders define their theological identities in opposition to each other.
How Many Kinds of Baptists…?
Many people already know much about the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. But what prompts an article that places the histories of both the SBC and the break-away group that became the Alliance of Baptists together? For this reason: One cannot understand the decisions and pronouncements of the twenty-first century SBC without understanding its relationship to the significantly smaller Alliance.
I was very excited today to see this new issue of the the journal Religion and American Culture just published, announced by email and social media:
The issue features an article co-written by historian Andrew Gardner and myself titled “From Ordaining Women to Combating White Supremacy: Oppositional Shifts in Social Attitudes between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Alliance of Baptists.”
I met my co-author Andrew Gardner as part of my work with the Alliance and found that he had done deep archival research tracing the development of this new group from its break from the SBC in the 1980s. As I got to know this history better, it struck me how intertwined the SBC and the Alliance had been. Indeed, once the Alliance was established, neither the SBC nor the Alliance could ignore each other.
Most people seem to attribute denominational differences to an abstract notion of “theology,” however the focus on beliefs, or, worse, a supposed devolution of “liberalism” that drifts away from an unchanging tradition, radically distorts the actual development of their differences. Simply put, beliefs alone do not account for divergent denominational histories.
As I prodded ideas with Andrew, I suggested that the SBC and the Alliance could be understood as oppositional identities, organizations that defined themselves in relation to each other in order to make sure people understood that they were different from each other. Recent research on oppositional identity fascinated me, with some of the most interesting research based on the growth of the craft beer industry. This literature from management and organizational scholars is recent, yet quite extensive, and draws on older ideas on the challenge of creating organizational identities, the competition for scarce resources (like members and money), and the awareness of the relative density of organizational networks.
Resourced from sociological theory of organizations, the concept of oppositional identity connects with broader questions of organizational ecology and identity.
Organizations must distinguish themselves — and religious organizations (whether congregations, organizations, or parachurch ministries) have always found ways to reveal how they are different from, and often better than, other similar organizations, including the organizations they originated from.
In the 1980s, turmoil grew significantly in the SBC. Conservatives were leveraging their collective power to control the priorities of the denomination. The question of women’s ordination was central, but the rifts were deeper than a single issue. Rather than a theological issue, it was an organizational process that proved to be the catalyst. The turning point came with a bureaucratic decision by the SBC to restrict funding from the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, a major source of funding for smaller churches to deny the use of Board funds to support women pastors in local churches. From our article:
Through this clever change of rules, conservatives found an organizational means to financially starve not only the practices they deemed objectionable but also staunch the potential proliferation of their most likely sources of opposition.
What was then known as the Southern Baptist Alliance was born. Today, with 30-plus years of history from that original split, the comparative histories of the SBC and the Alliance of Baptists provide an opportunity to view the ways religious organizations pay attention to each other and, often explicitly, develop their stances on social issues in direct relation to their seeming “opposite.” As we write:
The Alliance covenant was a decisive repudiation of the SBC. Alliance founders had generated a list of all that they “deplored” within the larger denomination, and then, at the prompting of founding member Mahan Siler, the group created an inverse list of what they supported. This inverse list became the basis of the Alliance’s founding covenant, once again revealing how the denominational identity took shape in relation to the SBC. [Indeed] the founders consistently brought their experiences from the SBC to bear on the construction of the new organization.
The initial split over women’s ordination soon became a gap on social issues, and eventually grew to a yawning chasm on issues of race and white supremacy:
In reimagining the organization’s power structures to be distinct from (and often in contrast to) the SBC—starting with the Alliance’s inclusion of women and women clergy in the denomination’s board of directors—the organization set a bureaucratic precedent that representation would be an important component for determining a more equitable decision-making process to guide the authority of the denomination.
As the Alliance grew more progressive, the SBC grew more conservative, often in direct response to distinguish itself from the Alliance.
SBC denominational leaders like Al Mohler are well aware of the Alliance. Indeed:
The decisions and stances of the two organizations are predicated on their respective awareness that the alternative and oppositive position exists and is embodied organizationally.
The fact that the SBC and the Alliance are both “Baptist” and share a long history necessitates that the two organizations must find ways to clearly distinguish themselves.
Shared attitudes do not grow in a vacuum. They are actualized in denominations through distinctively bureaucratic processes of deliberation. These enacted values distinguish religious organizations and become the basis for loyalty and adherence among the members they govern. As we write:
Certainly, denominational bodies may not hold the influence they once did within American culture, but they continue to serve as vehicles of power and exert bureaucratic authority over congregations, galvanizing collective positions on social issues, and acting in relation to other historically adjacent bodies competing for adherents and, ultimately, donations.
The Alliance’s denominational independence did not mean isolation; it meant freedom to deploy powerful mechanisms of bureaucracy to legitimate and routinize new charismatic imperatives.
Although the SBC and the Alliance both exhibit bureaucratic processes, the manner in which they are enacted are not the same. The SBC leaned on its size to enforce centrally programmed standards while the Alliance fostered local church involvement. The SBC could poise themselves as independent in its actions, while the smaller Alliance fostered networks and partnerships. Rather than maintaining long-standing relationships that centered white men at the highest positions of leadership, the Alliance sought for diversity and inclusivity, successfully bringing in women and those of differently marginalized communities (e.g., race, sexual orientation) into a cooperative vision of shared power.
[T]he Alliance’s affirmation of women in ministry fostered an organizational logic that resulted in the desire for an interracial denominational community, one that actively networked with likeminded organizational partners with broadly shared values over issues of discrimination, justice, and oppression.
Both the SBC and the Alliance reveal how denominations continue to be important for the power they exert over significant bodies of people. As “organizations of organizations,” they provide leadership and cogency that often pressure their constituency to model themselves as coherent and faithful to the whole.
In the end, the comparative history of the SBC and the Alliance provides a lens into understanding how religious organizations actualize their idealized standards, platforming their public identities, often by distinguishing themselves from their “opposite.”
As we write in our concluding paragraph:
Another way to say this is that orthodoxy can only be accomplished via institutional mechanisms that verify and legitimate such orthodoxy.
Much more is found in our full article, and I encourage you to access a library where you can read the whole piece, which includes a lengthy set of references for further reading.
Note: The article initially appeared online in November 2022.