Southern Baptist membership has dropped to a 47-year low

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The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, lost another 241,032 members over the past year, according to the Annual Church Profile (ACP) compiled by Lifeway Christian Resources (an arm of the SBC).

A teenager walks away from a Christian cross (Image via Shutterstock)

The SBC is spinning this by saying that the decline is slower than in previous years… which is true but hides the fact that the previous two years each saw the greatest drop in membership in SBC history. Given those record declines in previous years, this means things are continuing to get worse for them even if not quite as rapidly.

Membership declined for the 17th straight year, dropping below 13 million for the first time since the mid-1970s. However, the less than 2% decline was the smallest in recent years.

It’s never good when you have to brag about how your popularity is fading less quickly than it used to. (In 2020, the exact same Lifeway writer wrote about how that year’s data showed the “largest single year drop in more than 100 years.”)

Couldn’t have happened to a more worthy organization.

Southern Baptist Convention membership in 2023 (via Lifeway Research)

Here are the numbers you want to hear:

In 2021, there were 13.68 million Southern Baptists.

In 2022, that number dropped to 13.2 million (a loss of 457,371 people).

In 2023, that number dropped to 12.99 million (a loss of 241,032 people). That’s where we’re at today.

The last time the SBC saw membership at this level was in 1976 when the numbers were going in the other direction and the most famous member was Jimmy Carter.

It’s all a far cry from 2003, when the SBC had a record high 16.3 million members. While the number of baptisms and in-person attendance numbers grew a bit, that doesn’t counteract the fact that fewer people want the taint of that Southern Baptist label. It won’t matter how many people get baptized if the cup is still leaking faster than they can refill it.

Some of that can be blamed on the pandemic—and the recovery since then. It would explain why weekly church attendance and baptisms are higher despite a drop in overall membership.

Some of that can be blamed on older members dying and not getting replaced by younger Baptists.

But last year, Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, said many churches were just “catching up” on their record keeping and cleaning up their membership rolls by getting rid of people “who stopped participating in an individual congregation years ago.” If those rolls were cleaned up, then why is membership still falling? (Answer: Because the problem was never paperwork.)

Nowhere in the report does it say anything about how potential members may have been turned off by the SBC’s pathetic attempts at addressing its sex abuse crisis, or downplaying sexual misconduct among former leaders, or punishing churches with women pastors, or pushing out Black pastors, or losing prominent advocates, or all the anti-LGBTQ policies. (A recent survey found that “negative religious teachings or treatment of about gay and lesbian people” was one of the top reasons people gave for why they left the religion of their childhood.)

The closest the report comes to addressing any of that comes via a questionnaire filled out by some congregation leaders.

This year, several state conventions also used the ACP to ask questions about sexual abuse prevention and response. More than half of responding Southern Baptist-affiliated congregations (58%) say they require background checks for all staff and those who work with children and students. Fewer say staff and those working with younger churchgoers have been trained in reporting sexual abuse cases (38%) or caring for survivors of sexual abuse (16%).

That… doesn’t inspire confidence. When just over half of congregations say they do background checks for people who work with minors, it’s obvious they haven’t learned a damn thing from the revelations of the past several years. Even if some of those churches are extremely small and can’t hire someone to specifically handle human resources, it’s irresponsible to just assume the volunteers or friends they bring on to work with kids are up to the task. At the very least, those churches need to create strict policies to minimize potential problems. But the numbers suggest that even training people to report abuse isn’t a high priority.

This news comes a week after the second largest Protestant denomination voted to get rid of its anti-LGBTQ policies and allow gay clergy members. And next month, the SBC will hold its annual meeting where members will propose new plans to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.

Recall that when Bart Barber, the president of the SBC, appeared on 60 Minutes in October of 2022 to defend the denomination and present a more compassionate side of the SBC, he still ended up saying he wanted to force children to have their rapists’ babies, regardless of circumstance, because he believes fetuses matter more than their mothers. It’s a barbaric stance, void of any real compassion. He also promoted “conversion therapy” (which is dangerous and ineffective) while saying that someone in a same-sex marriage could not possibly be a “good Christian.” He also denied the existence of trans people. And then he said he voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

That’s not to say the SBC’s membership decline is Barber’s fault. But when the chief representative of your religion—someone who was praised for his appearance on the show—explains how his faith teaches him that Jesus is homophobic, that his God wants to further traumatize child victims of sexual assault, and that the thrice-married racist who paid hush money to a porn star he was having an affair with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child and who remains a threat to democracy could still get his vote in the future, it’s no wonder that less media-savvy pastors aren’t keeping people—especially young people—in the pews.

That’s why it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the denomination. They may be losing members but we, as a society, aren’t losing anything of value. The faster those remaining members leave or die out, the closer we get to a nation where Southern Baptists don’t have political power.

Keep in mind that the SBC is still doing just fine. It’s like Jeff Bezos having a bad day in the stock market; no one should feel bad for him. The SBC took in $10,027,338,119 in 2023. That’s over $10 billion. It’s more than they took in in 2022. They’ll survive.

But if the numbers are a sign of a trend, then there’s reason to think Southern Baptists aren’t about to become more popular in the future. The membership decline may be slowing down but it hasn’t yet reversed. And why would it? People are starting to realize how damaging those beliefs are and they’re walking away. Maybe they’re not leaving the faith altogether, but they are discovering that their lives are perfectly fine without having to support churches that do more harm than good.

(Portions of this article were published earlier.)

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