CRITICIZING YOUR OWN RACIST STRUCTURE:

Southern Baptists vote on a resolution during the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday. Reuters/USA Today Network

On Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention elected its new president--a high-stakes election that capped a day of tense infighting at the annual conference of the nation's largest Protestant denomination. Tensions were high, as a newly powerful group of ultraconservatives was angling to seize control of the SBC. But ultimately the convention rejected the ultraconservative candidate in favor of a more broadly acceptable moderate. Meanwhile, there were a number of other resolutions up for vote that reflect the issues that have been at the heart of the divides within SBC--including debates over critical race theory, or CRT, and allegations the leadership had mishandled sex abuse claims.

The SBC has been going through something like an identity crisis this year. Southern Baptists, like most white evangelicals, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, critics began to chafe at the frequently conspiracy theory-laden partisan politics within their churches. After last summer's racial unrest, many of the denomination's Black pastors--actively courted by a convention uncomfortably aware of its overwhelming whiteness and deeply racist history--began to protest the SBC's unwillingness to recognize the extent of modern-day racism. At the same time, an organized group of Southern Baptists has pushed for a second conservative resurgence to correct what it sees as a loosening of the core Southern Baptist identity.

This divide was plain when outgoing SBC president J.D. Greear kicked off the two-day conference with a fiery speech cautioning the SBC that there was a threat even more dangerous than the "curse of liberalism": hypocrisy. Greear, a moderate among white Baptists, warned against "a convention that polices itself rigorously on complementarian issues but allows female abuse victims to be mistreated and maligned" or one "that expends more energy decrying things like CRT than they have done lamenting the devastating consequences of years of racial bigotry and discrimination."

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