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There are other signs of change emerging from the annual meeting of thousands of Southern Baptist delegates. On Tuesday, delegates overwhelmingly elected Greear as the their next president. At 45, Greear is the denomination's youngest president in decades. He is theologically conservative and studied under Paige Patterson, the Southern Baptist conservative icon recently deposed from his seminary position because of his approach to women's issues. But he does not share all the old guard's priorities, and he has spoken about the need to increase racial diversity within the denomination. In the wake of Patterson's disgrace, women's issues have become a major topic at the meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, although Pence barely mentioned immigration in his speech on Wednesday, the delegates on the floor overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for immigration reform, affirming the dignity of immigrants, and condemning "any form of nativism."

Resolutions aren't the same thing as revolution. The denomination remains firmly committed to a "complementarian" approach to gender roles, for example, meaning that it believes women are unfit to lead churches. When I tuned in briefly to a presentation Wednesday morning by a Baptist seminary head, his assertion that "we're not going to have a female as a preaching professor, that's just not going to happen" drew sustained applause. But it's still significant that the SBC is being forced to grapple publicly with sexual abuse, domestic violence, and misogyny. The seminary head only made his comment in the first place because a woman in the audience has asked about how he was working to develop female leadership in his institution.

A breeze within the SBC sometimes foreshadows dramatic gusts throughout conservative evangelicalism. As Washington Post reporter Michelle Boorstein reminded readers on Twitter, the denomination took no official position on abortion in the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade. Then Patterson's conservative resurgence remade the denomination, and abortion became a litmus test with an enormous impact on elections, policy, and culture. The SBC's priorities are a good indication of evangelicalism more broadly. Republicans who count on white evangelical votes ought to pay attention to the vice president's cool reception this week in Dallas.

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