Will Baptists lead the way in the future of the American church? Jack Waters, in “The Baptist Future: America’s Last Best Hope” believes so. He accurately tells the tale of the fall of the old American Protestant establishment: for the better part of America’s history, her de facto state church was an alliance of large institutional denominations: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians. These denominations had a massive cultural influence and owned America’s top universities, most notably the Ivy Leagues. Waters then accurately recalls how the Mainline denominations fell to liberalism, and how conservative Evangelicalism tried to replace it as America’s church, but failed to build any strong institutional infrastructure. While I fundamentally disagree with Waters on what the path forward should be, I think he (perhaps unintentionally) gets one major detail right that should serve as a lesson to all of us.

America’s national churches have fallen

Protestant Christendom has fallen. The great institutions that now exist as the PCUSA, the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church were once the American equivalent of European state churches like the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, and they still retain many relics of that heritage. Even today, at the center of any given American town, you will find several incredibly beautiful historic Protestant churches that almost always belong to one of these mainline denominations. The Mainlines still have connections to America’s top universities like Duke and Princeton. The tragedy is that these denominations are now mostly (though not entirely) hijacked by liberalism and marxism. LGBT pride is the topic of Mainline sermons more frequently than justification by faith. Pride flags dangle from America’s historic Protestant cathedrals. Mainline seminary students are now pioneering new ways to use theological language to justify queer polyamory. It is understandable why Fundamentalists and Evangelicals of the 20th-century retreated from these institutions and tried to rebuild American Christianity from scratch, but they were never able to recreate what was lost. Evangelical “Bible colleges” never gained the prestige of the Ivy Leagues. Evangelical churches are infamous for their ugly architecture and unserious worship style. Evangelicals are the most underrepresented religious demographic in academia, leaving Catholics as the only remaining conservative Christian voice in higher education.

Why did Evangelicals fail to replace the Mainlines?

Waters is correct about the Evangelical failure to replace the Mainline Protestant churches but not about why that is. He blames lack of leadership in the Evangelical world, as well as the solidification of the Ivy Leagues as the top universities at the end of World War II, but I believe these details miss the bigger picture. There is a reason that the left has taken over every institution from Protestants. There is a reason why conservative Protestants have lost nearly all control over American society. There is a reason why Roman Catholicism is the last remaining bastion of conservative Christianity in Western culture (which Waters recognizes). The common theme is this: those who remain in and take over the institutions win. Those who retreat from the institutions lose. The Frankfurt school, the womb of almost all modern cultural marxism, had a very detailed plan to do a “long march through the institutions” and they were massively successful. They hijacked the universities, the media, entertainment, and most importantly, the institutional church. Conservative Protestants in the 20th century had the opposite strategy: retreatism. Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism has always been characterized by a retreat from the mainstream institutions: from public schools, from major universities, and most importantly, from the Mainline Protestant Churches. The 20th-century marxists attempted to hijack the Roman Catholic church as well and were partially successful with the rise of liberation theology and Vatican II inclusivism in the 20th-century Catholic church, but conservative Catholics remained within the Catholic church and it is now seeing a conservative resurgence. Evangelicalism tries to sell itself as not being retreatist, since in theory it aims to evangelize the culture, but it is still retreatist on an institutional level, and that is why it is doomed to fail. Evangelicals try to build new institutions from scratch rather than retaking existing ones like the Marxists did. Evangelicals evangelize individuals while Marxists evangelize institutions – and that’s why Marxists always win.

Why Baptists are succeeding

Waters correctly observes that Baptists are one of the last conservative Protestant bulwarks in American society. However this fact actually confirms the theory described above – that staying in the institutional church is the key to winning the culture. The Southern Baptist convention is one of the historic institutional Protestant churches in America, just like the Mainlines. The major difference is that, for the most part, the Southern Baptists resisted the liberal drift. They were on that trajectory in the 20th-century, but in the 1990s, they had a famous conservative resurgence and turned the SBC into the last remaining conservative heritage denomination in America (aside from the LCMS Lutherans). The cultural benefits have been tremendous. The SBC has essentially been the state church of the Deep South for generations, and since it has remained conservative, so has the Deep South. The SBC is a success story that shows the power of having a conservative Mainline Protestant denomination. It shows the importance of staying in the Mainlines and retaking them rather than giving the institutions our ancestors worked to build over to godless marxists and attempting to start from scratch. So the example of what Baptists have done shows us what the only way forward for the rest of us is: retake the other Mainlines.

Retake. Don’t rebuild.

Marxists have a lot in common with viruses. Viruses aren’t living cells, so they must hijack healthy cells and turn them into virus factories. In like manner, leftists never build great institutions. They hijack institutions Christians built and turn them into leftist factories until they are hollowed out and collapse. While Marxists are evil, we must be like the Roman Empire and learn from their tactics. Unlike many conservative Protestants, Marxists are willing to stay in institutions that disagree with them with the end goal of taking them over. Marxists know that it is relatively useless and hopeless to build parallel institutions to try and rival the mainstream ones. If Marxists could take over Christian institutions, we must believe that Christians can take them back, unless we think liberals are somehow stronger than God’s people. Conservative Protestants must flock back to the Ivy Leagues. We must return to the Mainline Protestant denominations, no matter how liberalized they may be.

Adopt a crusader mindset – not a retreatist mindset

Upon reading this, I expect a visceral reaction from many. How can we go to the Mainline Churches? They’re liberal! This way of thinking is shaped by generations of fundamentalism, which is influenced by dispensationalism even in fundamentalists who are not dispensationalists. The mindset is a subconscious assumption that the enemies of God’s kingdom are going to win in the end so all we can do is distance ourselves from them. This was not the mindset of the early church, who went into the centers of pagan Roman society, and, though they got fed to the lions for centuries, gradually rose in the ranks of Imperial society. God’s people have always been placed in the centers of cultural power, like Daniel in the court of Babylon, rather than trying to build parallel societies like Evangelicals try (miserably) to do. We must abandon the retreatist mindset and adopt a crusade mindset like the marxists have. The mindset where we see liberal churches and institutions as mission fields rather than nuclear wastelands. The retreatist says “this institution is liberal, therefore I must flee from it” while the crusader says “this institution is liberal, therefore I must conquer if for God’s Kingdom”

Reconquista – the Protestant future

There is a movement of many non-denominationals getting disillusioned with contemporary ahistorical Christianity and going to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Some of them, however, are discovering “classical Protestantism” but are disappointed to find that the classical Protestant institutions (the Mainline denominations) have fallen to liberalism, meaning that classical Protestant theology is usually only found in decentralized small offshoot denominations that meet in public school cafeterias. Yet there is a movement of several thousand Mainline Protestant pastors and laymen called Operation Reconquista to retake the Protestant denominations. We have a website with a detailed plan to do so. I believe this is the only way forward for American Protestantism. Generations of faithful Protestant men gave their entire life’s earnings to the great American Mainline denominations, not expecting their children to flee from what they built and give it all to God-hating liberal “pastors” who now live off of generations of Protestant wealth.

So will Baptists lead?

Whether Baptists will lead a successful Protestant future depends on one key variable – whether or not we give up on the other Mainline denominations. If we do, then Baptists will not lead us in any way other than off a cliff and into a mess of Protestant atomization and decentralization.

However, if we collectively decide to go on a decades-long mission to reclaim our heritage, then the Southern Baptists can help show us the way since they had their own conservative resurgence. Even the American Baptist Church USA, the Northern Baptist Mainline, can help lead the way as they are by far the least hijacked of the “seven sisters” of the Mainline. Now is not the time to reinvent the wheel by rebuilding Protestant Christendom from scratch. Now is the time to band together to retake what our ancestors of a much better era built. If that is the plan, then I, a snobby Yankee Presbyterian, would be happy to let my Baptist brothers lead the charge.

Robert Ackerman is the founder of Operation Reconquista and host of Redeemed Zoomer YouTube channel.