A core part of the Southern Baptist mythos is that we are unique amongst American mainlines because even after almost all of our institutions had fallen to liberalism, the Conservative Resurgence, a grassroots uprising, arrived on the scene and pulled the denomination back from the brink. We succeeded where so many others failed because of our unique polity that allows for grassroots uprisings. In 2004, twenty-five years after the start of the Conservative Resurgence,Jim Richards, a state executive in Texas, declared,“Because of the foresight of our founders, the polity of the convention allowed for Mom and Pop Baptist to have a voice.”[1] The story is true as far as it goes, and praise God for that. America’s largest Protestant denomination, with truly market-moving resources and institutions, has been spared the outright heresy and apostasy of the other mainline denominations with whom we used to travel.
1. Tammi Reed Ledbetter, “Conservative Resurgence, at 25, Called a ‘Take Back’ to SBC Roots,” Baptist Press, June 15, 2004.
But there is another part of the story—a point about polity. In the standard telling, the old, stultified, out-of-touch liberal elites of the convention were running what amounted to an oligarchy utterly unrepresentative of rank-and-file “Billy Baptist.” The Conservative Resurgence, on this account, was not only a return to biblical doctrine; it was also a return to a more legitimate polity, one more responsive to the convictions of the churches.
There are reasons to suspect the opposite may be true: that even while the SBC has enjoyed a formal recommitment to the fundamentals of the faith, its governance and polity have steadily degraded since the Conservative Resurgence. If that were the case, what would it look like? How would we know?
Michels and the Logic of Oligarchy
2. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Free Press, 1962).
Robert Michels, the German-born Italian sociologist, coined the term “iron law of oligarchy” in his 1911 book Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy.[2] Drawing on his observations of the German Social Democratic Party, Michels argued that all organizations—even those explicitly founded on democratic principles—tend toward oligarchy (rule by a small elite). His summary of the principle remains famous: “Who says organization, says oligarchy.”[3]
3. Michels, Political Parties, 365.
Why does this happen? Because large organizations require specialization, bureaucracy, division of labor, procedural expertise, and centralized control over communication and decision-making. Over time, leaders accumulate institutional knowledge, status, and practical authority, while ordinary members become more passive, more deferential, or simply less able to keep up. The result is not necessarily corruption in the melodramatic sense. It is something more ordinary and therefore more durable: a structure in which leaders increasingly prioritize organizational continuity, managerial control, and self-preservation over the original ideals or demands of the rank and file.
In practice, certain signs recur. Decision-making becomes more centralized. Leaders become harder to challenge. Internal criticism is treated as a threat to unity or stability. Bureaucracy expands. The organization becomes more cautious, more self-protective, more managerial. The ideal of member participation remains formally intact, but it is gradually absorbed into a system that now exists, in large part, to reproduce itself.
Read through that lens, recent SBC history becomes more legible. The vicious fights that have defined Southern Baptist life since 1979 do not simply reveal one set of convictions defeating another. They reveal a denomination in which successive leadership classes have become more adept at leveraging convention resources to secure their own persistence. The Moderate Institutionalism of the 1970s gave way to the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, which in turn gave way to the Cultural Engagement regime of the 2010s and 2020s. At each stage, leaders became more entrenched, less open to outside correction, and more practiced at using the machinery of the convention to protect their position.
In what follows, I will explain this thesis and cast vision for the kinds of reforms that would bring true structural renewal to our polity.
From Resurgence to Establishment
In the 1970s, SBC entities were dominated by what might fairly be called the Moderate Institutionalists, embodied in figures such as Jimmy Allen. Having enjoyed massive postwar growth, the midcentury SBC functionally operated as a mainline denomination—as historian E. Glenn Hinson famously called it, “the Catholic Church of the South.”[4] These leaders were not all theological liberals by any means, but they did favor a broad tent and often carried progressive political instincts. Not all Moderate Institutionalists were Jimmy Carter-style Baptists, but their vision of the convention certainly made room for Jimmy Carter-style Baptists. At that point, elite SBC institutions were, on the whole, much closer in spirit to United Methodism than to anything resembling contemporary Southern Baptist life.
4. More completely, Hinson wrote about the institutionalism of the SBC: “To be quite blunt, Southern Baptists have already ceased to be Baptist. By that I mean they have relinquished the elements of their tradition which have, in the past, characterized Baptists: voluntariness, religious liberty, separation of church and state, and voluntary association to discharge the world mission of Christ. We have become ‘the Catholic Church of the South,’ by which I mean nothing pejorative but simply that we have become so numerically dominant that we no longer think like Baptists.” E. Glenn Hinson, “‘Thomas Merton, My Brother’: The Impact of Thomas Merton on My Life and Thought,” The Merton Annual 11 (1998), 95.
Yet despite their strong position, the Moderate Institutionalists failed to read the cultural moment of the late 1970s, as evangelicals moved decisively away from progressive politics and, correspondingly, liberal theology. They seem not to have fully reckoned with just how evangelical the SBC had become. Just as importantly, they failed to mobilize and weaponize the resources of the convention in ways that would buttress their own incumbency. That left them vulnerable to disciplined, hard-nosed grassroots activism.
The architects of the Conservative Resurgence learned the lesson. By borrowing techniques from electoral politics—turnout campaigns, presidential strategy, trustee appointments—Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, and others assembled an impressive winning streak in convention presidential elections and the appointments that followed from them. By the 1990s, they had effectively captured the denomination’s institutional machinery. Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, they consolidated those gains and formalized them, culminating in the adoption of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, which re-anchored the SBC’s theological conservatism.
But the generational handoff after the Conservative Resurgence was always going to be difficult. One source of tension was theological: many of the younger leaders—including Al Mohler and those around him—were Calvinists, while most of the Conservative Resurgence architects, as well as most of the grassroots church networks that had fueled the movement, were Arminian. As the specter of theological liberalism receded and Calvinism expanded, especially in the seminaries, soteriology became a major flashpoint between the younger leadership class and many older veterans of the Resurgence.
The second, and perhaps more consequential, source of tension concerned cultural posture. Many of the younger leaders preferred Tim Keller’s model of cultural engagement and were uneasy with the older generation’s culture-war instincts. When Russell Moore, a Calvinist and Mohler protégé, took over the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in 2013 and began emphasizing issues such as immigration reform, environmentalism, and criminal justice reform, backlash intensified. That backlash reached a fever pitch during the Trump years, when Moore adopted an openly hostile posture toward the administration even though more than 80 percent of rank-and-file Southern Baptists supported the president.[5]
5. Michael Lipka and Gregory A. Smith, “White Evangelical Approval of Trump Slips, but Eight-in-Ten Say They Would Vote for Him,” Pew Research Center, July 1, 2020.
Similar tensions surfaced when J. D. Greear won the presidency and began implementing DEI-style appointment rules; when Kevin Ezell, head of the North American Mission Board, used a rapidly growing machine to push preferred policies and personnel decisions into state conventions and mission boards; and when Critical Race Theory was seen to have gained a hearing in two of the younger, Calvinist-aligned seminaries. By the late 2010s, many of the architects of the Conservative Resurgence had begun to rethink the succession plan.
6. Despite the article’s title, note the last update in “EC Approves Guidepost Contract, Agrees to Waive Privilege in 44-31 Vote,” MBC Pathway, October 5, 2021; “SBC Executive Committee Breaks Deadlock to Waive Privilege, Loses 10% of Board,” The Baptist Paper, October 27, 2021.
But by then it was probably too late. The handoff to the Cultural Engagers was already well underway when an all-out war among would-be SBC elites erupted—complete with leaked recordings, scandals, smears, and opposition research laundered through secular media. That struggle culminated in the 2021 convention in Nashville, where the Cultural Engagers scored their most decisive victory, aided by the extraordinary turnout around the issue of a supposed cover-up of the abuse crisis. The alleged abuse crisis—an issue elevated through the coordination of the lawyer and abuse activist Rachael Denhollander, the now-formerly-Baptist Russell Moore, and a number of sympathetic secular journalists—became a convenient wedge with which to dislodge aging veterans of the Conservative Resurgence who had tried to reclaim control from the Cultural Engagers. More than fifteen percent of the Executive Committee resigned after the body voted that each member would have to waive attorney-client privilege individually.[6] That mass resignation, in turn, opened the way for a wave of appointments made under the heavy influence of J. D. Greear.
Yet just as the Cultural Engagers reached the apex of their power, the cultural winds shifted again. The fallout from COVID, the George Floyd riots, the contested 2020 election, and the peak-wokeness phase of the Biden years generated much higher lay engagement on political and cultural questions. The Cultural Engagement model itself began to come under sharper scrutiny, especially as some of its public exemplars, such as Francis Collins, became symbols of scandal or compromise. The result is that the five years since Nashville have been among the most turbulent in SBC life since the early days of the Conservative Resurgence.
7. Scott Barkley, “Southern Baptists Vote to Keep ERLC,” Baptist Press, June 11, 2025.
And almost immediately after securing power through a populist wedge issue, the Cultural Engagers found themselves on the establishment side of nearly every major controversy in SBC life. Grassroots attempts to increase financial transparency—especially around NAMB—were ruled out of order by controversial but unappealable parliamentarian rulings in successive years, even as outside reporting highlighted that a significant portion of convention messengers appeared to be present through NAMB-supported networks. Repeated efforts to abolish the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—driven chiefly by discontent with the continuation of Russell Moore’s style of public engagement—continued to gain ground and, in 2025, drew the support of roughly 43 percent of messengers.[7]
8. Bart Barber, interview by Heath Lambert, FBC Jacksonville, Fla., January 30, 2024, quoted in Bob Allen, “Barber Discusses Sexual Abuse, Law Amendment,” Baptist Standard, January 30, 2024.
The Cultural Engagers also faced an immediate challenge from grassroots efforts to clarify the SBC’s professed complementarianism. The so-called Law Amendment fell short of the required two-thirds vote at the Indianapolis convention in 2024 after then-president Bart Barber,[8] along with J. D. Greear[9] and several entity heads—most notably NAMB’s Kevin Ezell[10]—opposed it. At the 2025 meeting in Dallas, efforts to revive the amendment failed after Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg took the unusual step of lobbying against it from the main stage, in his official capacity, arguing that strict enforcement of the confession could expose the SBC to legal risk.[11] Critics quickly noted that this claim was neither true nor, strictly speaking, relevant. Historically, the SBC has resolved church-order disputes by appeal to biblical principle, not by the minimization of legal exposure.
9. J. D. Greear, “The Southern Baptist Convention’s Defining Moment: The Law Amendment and The Great Commission Resurgence,” JDGreear.com, June 6, 2024.
The irony was difficult to miss. Iorg invoked the Executive Committee’s disastrous 2021 waiver of attorney-client privilege—and the millions in resulting legal costs—as evidence that messengers should think twice before disregarding the Executive Committee president’s recommendations. At that point, the cycle had plainly come full circle. The Cultural Engagement faction, which had risen to power precisely by way of a grassroots revolt against the recommendations of counsel and establishment institutionalists, now occupied the establishment position itself. As of 2026, even while legal bills continue to pile up from ill-fated decisions made during the height of the abuse crisis, a number of the core abuse-reform promises made by SBC leaders remain unfulfilled, with no obvious prospect of fulfillment anytime soon.
10. Jared Cornutt and Rob Collingsworth, hosts, “Kevin Ezell on Church Planting, Transparency, and the SBC,” The Baptist Review, season 2, episode 10, podcast audio, May 15, 2025, 33:39. See also “NAMB Pres. Kevin Ezell Loses $10,000 Bet Over Finding NAMB/SEND Church Plant With Female Pastor,” Protestia, May 20, 2025.
The Iron Law Returns
Meanwhile, beneath all these leadership struggles, the convention has been dealing with a quieter but more consequential weakening of the base that makes its polity meaningful. Across the roughly 2010–2025 period, in which the post-Resurgence order matured and then began to fracture, SBC membership fell from around 16,136,000 in 2010 to 12,722,266 in 2024—a loss of more than 3.4 million members.[12] The number of churches tells a more complicated story: it stood at 45,727 in 2010 and 46,876 in 2024, meaning the convention has not collapsed in raw congregational count so much as thinned in membership, density, and representativeness. Convention-level giving has softened over the same horizon: Cooperative Program receipts were $191.8 million in fiscal year 2009–10 and $186.1 million in fiscal year 2024–25, a nominal decline even before inflation is taken into account.[13] Messenger participation, meanwhile, remains strikingly thin; less than 10% of SBC churches are determining the direction of the entire Southern Baptist Convention. In 2010, Orlando drew 11,075 messengers from 4,466 churches; in 2025, Dallas drew 10,599 messengers from 3,899 churches.[14]
11. Jeff Iorg, “SBC 25 – Wednesday Afternoon,” Baptist Press, YouTube video, June 12, 2025, 51:55.
In other words, even where the shell of the convention remains large, the effective electorate remains narrow—a highly motivated sliver of churches governing in the name of tens of thousands. That dynamic is further intensified by the growth of NAMB-supported church plants that are subsidized to attend annual meetings, thereby creating a type of voting bloc.[15] Combined with other convention-adjacent ministries, the end result is an increase in the proportion of churches whose leadership class is financially, relationally, or professionally dependent on the SBC’s national machinery. When more churches are dependent upon the size and financial stability of the SBC, it’s no wonder why motions that would potentially shrink the SBC—the Law Amendment and financial transparency—didn’t pass. Theology takes a backseat to making sure the machine is well-funded. The result is not merely lower participation, but a changed participation base: less Billy Baptist, more insider Baptist.
12. Aaron Earls, “Southern Baptists’ Membership Decline Continues amid Other Areas of Growth,” Lifeway Research, April 30, 2025.
This is what makes the recent history so clarifying. It does not merely show one faction defeating another; it shows Michels’ iron law operating through successive regimes. The Moderate Institutionalists were vulnerable in part because they had not yet fully mastered the organizational weapons available to them. The conservatives who displaced them did master those weapons and used them to overthrow an existing elite. But from the standpoint of organizational sociology, the Conservative Resurgence did not abolish oligarchy. It transferred control of the machinery to new hands. Once the Resurgence succeeded, its leaders and heirs inherited the familiar incentives of institutional life: centralize decision-making, protect allied personnel, stigmatize dissent as destabilizing, manage crises through counsel and procedure, and convert what had been a movement into a durable apparatus.
13. See Art Toalston, “SBC 2009–10 Fiscal Year: Below Budget 6.18%; Cooperative Program Down 4.03%,” Baptist Press, October 1, 2010; Scott Barkley, “Proposed CP Allocation Budget Moves IMB to 51 Percent,” Baptist Press, February 17, 2026.
The Cultural Engagers followed the same pattern. They emerged first as reformers, then as managers, and finally as incumbents defending institutional prerogatives against the very kind of grassroots backlash that had once empowered them. Set against declining membership, thinning church participation, concentrated institutional funding, and the growing importance of insider networks, the pattern becomes unmistakable: the SBC has not escaped the iron law of oligarchy by changing tribes. It has merely demonstrated, once again, how a democratic body can repeatedly generate its own new establishment.
14. For 2010, see “Official Tally: SBC Registration 4,852,” Baptist Press, July 7, 2011; for 2025, see Diana Chandler, “2025 Dallas Messenger Registration of 10,599 Tops 2018 SBC Meeting Here,” Baptist Press, June 12, 2025.
What happens next is unlikely to be a clean resolution. More likely, absent either a genuinely successful revolt or serious structural reform, the SBC will drift into a period of increasingly contradictory governance: populist rhetoric paired with managerial decision-making; formal commitments that are selectively enforced; periodic grassroots uprisings that flare and then dissipate; leaders who alternately invoke the will of the messengers and the necessities of institutional preservation, depending on which is more useful in the moment. That kind of instability rarely produces renewal. More often it produces paralysis. And paralysis, in turn, accelerates the very trends already visible in the background: lower trust, lower participation, more church defections, weaker giving, and a smaller but increasingly insider-dominated electorate. In that sense, the real danger may not be one final dramatic revolution, but a long stagnation in which the convention becomes less representative, less effective, and less capable of commanding the loyalty of ordinary Southern Baptists even while preserving all the outward forms of denominational life.
15. “NAMB Missionaries Attend Southern Baptist Annual Meeting, Connect with SBC Family,” North American Mission Board, June 19, 2021; see also the personal account of this in Michael Clary, “More Money Than Men: The NAMB Church Planting Problem,” Christ Over All, March 11, 2026.
Toward Real Reform
A serious reform agenda, then, would have to aim not merely at changing personnel but at rebalancing the convention’s incentives toward genuine accountability. That would mean intentional efforts to maximize outsider participation and minimize insider domination: making it easier, cheaper, and more normal for ordinary churches—not just networked pastors, entity employees, funded church plants, and denominational regulars—to send messengers and shape outcomes. It would mean far greater financial transparency, especially where national entities, state conventions, and affiliated ministries overlap in ways that obscure influence, dependency, or patronage. It would mean regularly conducting and widely distributing credible opinion surveys of cooperating churches and pastors so that leaders can no longer plausibly confuse the preferences of the institutional class with the convictions of the broader SBC. And it would mean recovering the old Baptist instinct that institutions are servants, not masters: useful and necessary, yes, but always subject to correction by the churches that created them.
Anything less will likely amount to another elite reshuffle. But reforms along those lines would at least represent an attempt to break the cycle—to make the convention more representative, more transparent, and harder for any one faction of insiders to quietly capture.
And that, finally, is Michels’ deepest warning: oligarchy rarely announces itself as oligarchy. It arrives draped in the language of stewardship, expertise, unity, prudence, and institutional necessity. It flatters itself that it alone is responsible, that it alone sees the whole board, that it alone can be trusted with the machinery. Baptists, at our best, have always known better. We have believed that Christ rules his church, that institutions are temporary, that bureaucracies are servants, and that no class of managers—however credentialed, however connected, however rhetorically skilled—should be allowed to harden into an unaccountable priesthood.
If the SBC is to have a future worthy of its past, it will not be because one more set of insiders has outmaneuvered another. It will be because the churches recover the nerve to govern what they own, to discipline what they build, and to remind every would-be ruling class of a simple Baptist truth: the Convention belongs to the churches, and the churches belong to Christ.
