Louisville seminary leader falls short in bid for Southern Baptist Convention presidency

As the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting opened Tuesday amid debates over race, women’s roles and the handling of a sex abuse crisis, a conservative Louisville Baptist leader fell short in his bid to lead the country's largest Protestant denomination.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was one of four candidates being considered for SBC president, but didn't win enough votes to head to a run-off round of voting.

That left Mohler, a conservative who helped push out liberal and moderate faculty members at the Louisville seminary when he took over in 1993, without the sway he wanted to shape an organization facing controversy and shrinking numbers.

“We face real challenges, we face some difficult issues,” Mohler said in a social media video post prior to the start of the two-day meeting in Nashville.

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The closely-watched annual gathering comes as the denomination is divided over its direction, and debating a series of controversial resolutions, including over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, women’s roles in the church and critical race theory, which examines structural racism in the United States.

Despite claiming 14 million members, the denomination has been in decline for 14 years, according to the Associated Press. Some Southern Baptists want to halt what they see as a drift toward liberalism, while others are pushing for a fundamentalism that may accelerate those declines.

“The convention appears to be much more fractured than it has ever been,” said the Rev. Dwight Moody, a retired professor of theology at Kentucky’s Georgetown College, who was attending the meeting.

The leadership race, and SBC’s debate over non-binding resolutions, are also being seen as a test of how closely the convention, long an important political force, will hew to Trump-era conservative politics, said Dewey Clayton, a University of Louisville political science professor.

On June 2, Mohler wrote that he could “offer statesmanship, a steady hand, denominational experience, theological conviction, and a calm spirit” while calling members “back to our bedrock convictions” amid an “increasingly hostile culture.”

But the Rev. Kevin Cosby, a Black graduate of the Southern Baptist seminary and senior pastor of Louisville's St. Stephen Baptist Church, said a Mohler presidency would have only solidified “the unholy wedlock between conservative politics and regressive right-wing theology.”

Yet it's still far from certain that new leadership and the gathering's debates still won't send more Black pastors to the exits, adding to several who recently left over opposition to the study of critical race theory.

By late Tuesday evening, Alabama pastor Ed Litton beat out Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who is involved with the Conservative Baptist Network and has decried critical race theory, in a runoff vote.

Moody called it a "mild rebuke" to those stoking opposition to critical race theory, which has recently become a plank in the Republican party culture war.

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The Conservative Baptist Network is worried about what they say is the leftward drift of the evangelical network of churches, while others in the convention reject this idea. The CBN is calling for a “conservative reengagement” to keep more progressive forces at bay.

Mohler, too, last year signed a statement with other seminary leaders rejecting critical race theory, while still opposing the “sin of racism.” The Southern Baptist Convention once supported slavery and in 1995 issued a statement apologizing for it. 

“We stand together in stating that we believe that advocating Critical Race Theory or Intersectionality is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message, and that such advocacy has no rightful place within an SBC seminary,” Mohler wrote in a comment accompanying the statement, according to the Baptist Press.

Mohler’s conservative views are well known. Last year, he announced and supported expelling four churches, including one in Louisville, for affirming LGBTQ people.

But after Mohler denounced President Trump in 2016 as a "sexual predator," he changed his tune ahead of the 2020 election, saying his evaluation of Trump hadn’t changed but that he had kept his promises on issues like abortion and judicial elections. 

Critics said Mohler changed his position because he was seeking the SBC presidency and had to make amends with Baptist megachurch pastors who adored the president.

Meanwhile, another controversial resolution addressed the crisis of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. It was narrowly written, saying that anyone who has committed sexual abuse “is permanently disqualified” from being a pastor.

It came amid questions over how leaders responded to the sex abuse crisis within the network of churches and debates over the scope and direction of a third-party review. 

That debate was fueled by two leaked letters signed by Russell Moore, the former head of the convention's public policy arm, which detailed the mistreatment of sexual abuse victims, the mishandling of abuse claims, intimidation and more.

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Another resolution set to be discussed denounces the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, calling it “inconsistent with faithful Christian citizenship.”

On Tuesday, outgoing president and North Carolina Pastor J.D. Greear said in a speech that “a convention perpetually at war with itself cannot complete the great commission."

Clayton said the meeting's tenor and the issues it's debating isn't likely to help it draw in more young people or people of color.

Rev. Moody said it’s unclear how the convention will look going forward, given all the divisions.

On Tuesday, he took to Twitter, tweeting, "The most consequential SBC meeting ... ever? Race, women’s ordination, sexual abuse, dramatic statistical decline, home mission strategy, another fundamentalist resurgence, and Trumpian politics. Can the SBC survive?"

The Tennessean contributed to this report. 

Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at ckenning@gannett.com