(RNS) — Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted resolutions opposing amnesty for undocumented immigrants and women in pastoral leadership roles.
The latest resolutions follow a decades-long trend toward conservatism. A new analysis by Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman found that Christian nationalist ideas have become the “lingua franca” of the denomination.
Ammerman, a BU professor emerita of sociology of religion, analyzed 91 SBC resolutions that were adopted primarily during U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 2024, noting that “they often get more discussion on the floor than any other item of business.” Ammerman’s review found the nation’s largest Protestant denomination underwent a transformation from a “moderately progressive” organization to an increasingly conservative one.
“The evidence that the resolutions provide is very clear in terms of the kind of endorsement of the ideas of Christian nationalism that are present in the denomination,” said Ammerman, who wrote a chapter, “Southern Baptists and the Evolution of White Evangelical Politics” in a recently published book, “Understanding Christian Nationalism: Perspectives on the Political Religion of Trump’s America,” “and the way those ideas have come to be simply the lingua franca, if you will, the way the culture of this denomination has been shaped over the last generation.”
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