“From Ordaining Women to Combating White Supremacy: Oppositional Shifts in Social Attitudes between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Alliance of Baptists”

Abstract

From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists’ stance on women in ministry served as the nexus point from which the small denominational body departed from its denominational forebears in the Southern Baptist Convention. As the Alliance adopted more and more progressive theological and social ideas, Southern Baptists adopted more and more conservative counterpoints, at times in response to each other. In 2021, the divergence of these two bodies came to the fore. As members of the Alliance of Baptists adopted a new covenant statement committing the denomination to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power,” the Southern Baptists had walked away from working through their pro-slavery past and were agitating against critical race theory. Theological moves that began in a debate over women's ordination morphed into larger shifts that redefined what it meant to be a Baptist in the modern United States. How both denominational bodies came to embrace different systems of authority and governance in the late 1980s set both groups on divergent paths, leading to strikingly antithetical positions not only on issues of gender but also on issues surrounding race. The contrast further affirms that questions of gender and religious authority and questions of racism and white supremacy within denominational contexts are not isolated, separate questions but rather are deeply intertwined and related to one another. Overall, this SBC–Alliance history demonstrates how denominational bodies actively consider proximate organizations as they develop their own policies, processes, and public proclamations.