Although Southern Baptists have rejected a constitutional amendment against female pastors, that doesn’t mean they’re changing their views on the role of ladies within the church.

At the recent annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, quite a few motions were made as regards to women. The Conversation asked Susan Shawa gender and sexuality scholar who studies Southern Baptist women to elucidate the election and other developments within the country's largest Protestant denomination.

The Southern Baptist Convention has rejected a proposal that explicitly stated that only men might be pastors. Does this mean that the SBC is changing and becoming more accepting of ladies in leadership positions?

Absolutely not. The day before the vote on the proposed constitutional amendment of the denomination to exclude churches with women in pastoral roles, the Convention expelled the First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, for its position that girls can function pastors. The vote was not even close, 6,759 to 563.

How many female pastors are there currently within the SBC? Could you furthermore mght share a bit concerning the history of resistance to women in leadership positions?

There is somewhere between 1,000 To 1,800 Women who function pastors in Southern Baptist churches. Few, if any, of those women are senior pastors. Instead, they’re assistant pastors, youth or children's pastors, women's pastors, or other varieties of pastors, all of whom work under the supervision of a male senior pastor.

The SBC adopted a Resolution of 1984 Rejection of ladies as leading pastors.

While resolutions are usually not binding on local churches, the proposed constitutional amendment would have defined a church as cooperating with the SBC provided that it “[a]confirms, appoints, or employs only men as pastors or elders of any kind, as directed by the Holy Scriptures.”

To change its bylaws, the convention must first approve any proposed change at an annual meeting after which confirm it with a final vote at the next annual meeting. That vote requires a two-thirds majority for the change to turn out to be a part of the bylaws. The women pastors amendment was set to pass in 2023, but failed this 12 months since it received only 61% of the vote.

Some of those against the change argued that the assembly had already spoken on the problem, had mechanisms in place to deal with churches with women pastors, and subsequently didn’t need to alter its structure. Nothing on this argument suggests support for girls, and in reality, opponents of the change often reiterated their support for the denomination's stance against women pastors.

For many Southern Baptists, the exclusion of ladies from the position of senior pastors isn’t an obstacle to their participation in other pastoral roles who wouldn’t have the supervisory authority of the senior pastor or require ordination. That was definitely the language of the initiators of the 1984 resolution, and the try and exclude churches where women hold pastoral roles apart from senior pastor, as they recently did in Alexandria, Virginia, goes beyond the intent of the sooner resolution.

Southern Baptists also place great importance on what they call “the autonomy of the local church.” This deeply held Baptist belief implies that each local church is self-governing and isn’t controlled in any way by the SBC. By increasingly excluding women from pastoral roles, the SBC could have been perceived as encroaching on the autonomy of the local church.

In 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention refused to readmit Saddleback Church to its ranks after it was expelled from the church earlier that 12 months for appointing female ministers. What do you think that this vote will change?

I don't think the vote will change anything. Saddleback's pastors weren’t senior pastorsthey were ordained, and the church affirmed the flexibility of ladies to assume any pastoral role. We can see from this 12 months's expulsion of First Baptist Alexandria that the SBC will proceed to purge churches that endorse women in any pastoral roles.

The only thing this 12 months's vote has shown us is that a major minority of “Messengers” – as Southern Baptists call the delegates to the SBC's annual convention – don’t want to interfere within the structure of the convention.

At the identical time, the SBC has voted against in vitro fertilization. Could you explain this vote and the SBC's historical views on the personification of the fetus?

This resolution expands Southern Baptists' opposition to any procedure that kills fetuses or embryos. The resolution sympathizes with infertile couples but argues that the method is ultimately the “destruction of embryonic human life” because embryos are sometimes stored and destroyed after successful implantation.

In the Seventies, before the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC within the Eighties and early Nineties, generally against abortion on demandbut additionally they anxious about government interference in women's decision-making about their very own bodies.

In the Eighties, the Convention made a pointy turn to the fitting with the aim of Abortion banned again. The language of the SBC modified from “fetal life” to “preborn” or “unborn” individuals. Now we see the SBC speaking of embryos as fully-fledged people and calls for “the government to prevent actions that are incompatible with the dignity and worth of every human being, and this necessarily includes frozen human embryos.”

What else was necessary about this meeting?

Despite the pressure that has been placed on the SBC in recent times to do something about its Problem of sexual abusehas the Convention repeatedly failed to make significant progress, especially on the long-awaited database to trace perpetrators. This 12 months, too, the Messengers voted to pass several abuse reforms, but survivors were disillusioned how little change actually takes place. Significant changes all the time appear to fail as a consequence of concerns about insurance and liability.

Taken together, the vote against the constitutional amendment, the resolution against artificial insemination, and the inaction on sexual abuse reform underscore that the religion community's ultra-conservative views on women remain unchanged.