What church but the SBC could plausibly serve as America’s mainline today? The erstwhile mainline abandoned God over the course of the 20th century, being now a husk with the trappings of church but with none of the spiritual substance. Competing traditions such as the Roman Church or various eastern expressions occasionally entice elite American protestants, but are too alien to the American to scale into mainline social functions, especially in the heartland – the most churched parts of the country. The niche conservative breakaway branches of the mainlines – the PCA/OPC, GMC, ACNA – are too small and fractured.

What is needed is a church that still has the gospel, and has a presence on mainstreets across the country. A church that you’d better attend if you hope to win the mayor’s race, where the football coach is also your Sunday teacher, and where people come from three counties around for your monthly food drive. A new mainline must practice a form of orthodoxy that’s as American as apple pie.

The SBC is already the functional mainline in much of the country. For years now, SBC stronghold states like Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida have topped the charts as the fastest growing states in the country – thanks, in no small part, to the way in which commonsense, low-church virtue has preserved a sort of cultural and political sanity that is increasingly seen as unique asset to national audiences.

In short, I agree with Jack Waters vision of a possible Baptist future. But securing this vision will require serious reformation of the SBC and the churches that comprise it.

Baptist Identity

First, Baptists need to grow in knowledge and love for our own particular tradition. For decades, we have soft-played our distinctives. The ubiquitous vanilla “Journey Church” in your town may very well be a Southern Baptist Church, but good luck discovering that fact. Cultural embarrassment about being Baptist runs deep, especially amongst leaders who often hail from small towns and attended small bible colleges and scrape their way to the top of the Baptist hierarchy.

We Baptists have so much to thank God for in our scrappy tradition. We have venerable educational institutions with significant history – our flagship seminary was founded by faculty from Princeton Theological Seminary, and some of our colleges (e.g., Union University in Tennessee) are the oldest educational institutions in their states. We have had a number of our ranks become presidents, governors, supreme court justices, senators and so on.

Confident and rooted, distinctly Baptist practice will look different in different places. Capitol Hill Baptist Church pitches a mix of cerebral expository preaching, confessional particularity and downright heroic recovery of traditional hymnody harkening to Sacred Harp and other early American songs. The culture and aesthetic of places like CHBC are cultivated intentionally, but still resonate as genuine and American. The melodies and poetry of their hymns evoke some forgotten past, reminding the worshipper that their ancestors likely sang much the same way when they landed on the shores of the new world. The New Hampshire Confession unites congregants under an venerable, homegrown American confession that strikes the right level of generality. In this way, aspirational churches like CHBC help to cast vision for an American Orthodoxy of sorts – an antidote for types who might otherwise become disenfranchised with pop evangelicalism and fall to the allure of more alien liturgical expressions.

On the other hand, the small country church will often have a myriad of small, unexamined practices that provide an organic continuity with centuries’ long folkways. The Sunday potluck, the church van picking up the shut-ins every Sunday, the shape note signing, the soaring language of the King James pew Bible, the food drive, the bi-vocational pastor and the vacation Bible school. These too are trappings of an American Orthodoxy, representing vestiges of the small, ordinary faithfulness that has kept the faith alive in the hollers of Appalachia even while Princeton, Duke and Brown fell; a humble faith that sustains working class congregants in communities generally wrecked by economic disruption, substance abuse and family breakdown.

There will be no Baptist future until we as Baptists learn to stop wincing about our idiosyncracies. The world does not need a 100th monograph lampooning the errors of King James Only-ism, landmarkism or teetotalling. We do need many more pages celebrating the everyday miracles that God works through small rural churches. Ivy-league sociologists and billion dollar foundations would kill to have the social impact that a random Pastor Jim has in just one day of his ministry (if you doubt me, revisit Charles Murray’s Coming Apart). God has used us, quirks and all, to carry the everyday torch of American Christianity. We must stop being ashamed of being Baptist.

Baptist Institutions

Our institutions will need to level up if we are going to function as a mainline. America’s cultural moment cries out for an organized and confident SBC. An Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) that runs to the right fights, defends basic natural law in the public square and holds elected officials accountable. A Lifeway that leverages its vast resources and distribution channels to equip an exploding renaissance in Christian education. A North American Mission Board (NAMB) that steps up to save the hundreds of  Baptists churches closing down every single year in rural America. An SBC president who uses his bully pulpit to preach the good news to everyone who will listen. SBC entities could take serious cultural ground, quickly, if they lived up to their potential. Mark Tooley is right that Protestant denominations are declining, but I think the dissatisfaction is with denominations as they are (and not denominationalism in general).

If we are being honest with ourselves, we must admit there’s a certain clubbiness in our institutions. This cozy mindset may have served us well during our Conservative Resurgence, but is too often leveraged to defend complacency and mediocrity in our organizations today. Our resistance to simple financial transparency bespeaks a bureaucracy more concerned with short term comfort than long-term trust.

Our church camp approach to organizational leadership isn’t going to cut it anymore. As the mantle of leadership has fallen to the SBC, our challenges mount. We, as the de facto leader of American Christianity, should obviously have an effective public policy arm and yet we have proven hopelessly vulnerable to capture by outside interests, whether by a sclerotic GOP establishment (during the mid 2000s) or Open Society bromides (2010-2020s). We have proven extremely slow at recognizing the machinations of Me-Too moral panics, baptised CRT and rebranded functional egalitarianism. Our richest and most powerful entity, NAMB, suffers from perpetual suspicions of grift and mismanagement and fights tooth and nail against any sunlight.

There will be no Baptist future if our institutions spend their time in court intrigue, grifting and damage control, when they should be vision casting, building, disrupting, and innovating. We need sunlight, fresh blood and a DOGE equivalent. The SBC’s work is far too important to be subsumed to the interests of an entrenched bureaucracy.

Baptist Leadership

Finally, we need to figure out how to draw men with courage, zeal and godly ambition into SBC leadership ranks, and how to form them once they arrive.

Americans – and most especially ambitious young American men – are reevaluating Christianity as they see the social wreckage wrought by late secularism. They do not know where to devote their energies, and are often very young and immature Christians. Boxed out of legacy institutions, these young men turn to disruptive new institutions or leave Protestantism altogether. This moment presents a generational opportunity, but only institutions confident enough to work with and form youthful zealots will reap any benefit.

We would do well to remember that our Conservative Resurgence was led by men who were forces of nature. At the tender age of 33 years, with no higher education experience, one Albert Mohler was dispatched to purge Southern Seminary of liberals and, as president, steer the seminary through the tumultuous fallout to the other side. It’s hard to imagine any board having the courage to try such a wild gambit today. But we need a return of this audacious spirit.

We also need a return of the thumos and erudition of a W.A. Criswell, whose broad jeremiad against the secularizing west in Whether we Live or Die became the rallying cry of the grassroots uprising that nailed the coffin shut on theological liberalism within the SBC.

There will be no Baptist future if the SBC fails to attract the very best men for leadership – men who are bigger than life, bursting with godly ambition and courage. Men who are ornery, and comfortable in the prophetic role that the SBC must take with respect to mainstream society, who do not flinch for a moment before saying that the emperor has no clothes. Men who can win a following for Christ amongst the throngs of modernity’s discontents.

Josh Abbotoy is the Executive Director of American Reformer and the CEO of RidgeRunner. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Medieval and Byzantine Studies from the Catholic University of America, and a B.A. in History from Union University.