With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”
Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.’”
Because of the SBC’s size, it’s also extremely influential politically—which is where the Center for Baptist Leadership, which Wolfe created with a handful of fellow SBC members, comes in. “The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks,” he says. “We don’t want to let them do that.”
“The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks. We don’t want to let them do that.”
There are signs that Wolfe and his allies are succeeding. Earlier this month, when tens of thousands of representatives from SBC churches met in Orlando for the annual conference, the group voted in favor of codifying an official ban on women pastors (though most SBC churches already allow only male pastors), affirmed robust immigration enforcement, and acknowledged the United States’ history of “sins such as slavery, racism, abortion, injustice, and sexual immorality.”
The group also elected a new president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, who is theologically and politically conservative, and has railed against critical race theory and decried the “woke riptide” in the denomination. The Center for Baptist Leadership endorsed Rice for SBC president; Rice has appeared on Center for Baptist Leadership podcasts and at events hosted by the group. Shortly after the meeting, on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast, the group’s president, William Wolfe, hailed Rice’s victory as “the end of the SBC being steered by weaponized empathy.”
Indeed, the SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack—a major victory for Wolfe and his small but vocal group of right-wing leaders within the SBC, some of whom have ties to an ascendant movement of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists.
The Center for Baptist Leadership emerged in early 2024 from what Wolfe and his colleagues see as a dangerous departure in the SBC from the conservative values—traditional family structures, clearly defined gender roles, a belief in the infallibility of the Bible—that have grounded the denomination since its founding. Over the last decade, the SBC moved toward the center, influenced by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement to expose sexual abuse and harassment.
Wolfe and his colleagues oppose SBC leaders whom they see as “caught up in the spirit of the worldly ‘MeToo’ movement, DEI ideology, and social justice signaling,” according to the group’s website. Those misguided aims, the Center for Baptist Leadership claims, have led to a scourge of problems, including women pastors, financial secrecy, and an obsession with blaming the SBC as a whole for the sex abuse scandals in individual churches, thereby bringing “perverse, anti-Christian standards of justice to judge claims of abuse.”
But it isn’t just church matters that the SBC seeks to influence—it’s also national politics, a goal that Wolfe is well qualified to achieve. As I wrote two years ago:
Wolfe served in the first Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”
Wolfe told me he believes that SBC members would largely agree with those sentiments. “It’s something Baptists historically believe, that we should be involved in politics and we should be unashamed about bringing our Christian beliefs and presuppositions into the political square,” he said. He said he could imagine a version of a Christian America where people of other faiths held office, though he noted that some Baptist founders “thought that only Christians should be able to hold elected office.” On the issue of women voting, he declined to weigh in, stating only, “I think that the 19th amendment was duly enacted and is the law of the land.”
On X, where he has 96,000 followers, Wolfe is a firebrand, regularly arguing against religious tolerance and multiculturalism: “The idea that ‘all religions deserve equal respect’ is one of the most disastrous lies of the modern age,” he fumed last week. On the same day, in another tweet, he wrote, “Mass migration is biological warfare waged by secular globalist elites against the native Christian peoples of the West.”
In our phone call, Wolfe stressed that his tweets don’t necessarily reflect the work of the Center for Baptist Leadership. But he also reaffirmed his social media statements, calling religious pluralism a “recipe for disaster” and arguing that “there are people who want to see native Christian Western populations diminished and negatively impacted by third-world migration.” He said he saw Hungary as an example of a country that has successfully handled immigration. “Hungary is a spiritually dead country in many ways, but it’s preserved its Christian heritage,” he said. “It’s preserved its people—they’ve not allowed their people to be replaced by millions of migrants.”
Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”
When I asked Wolfe what he meant by the statement about Christians being called to arms, he said it was more general than specific. “It was just sort of a basic point of Christians have been in that situation before many times throughout the centuries,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves in a position like that again.”
Wolfe isn’t the Center for Baptist Leadership’s only powerful connection to the Christian right. The fiscal sponsor of the group is American Reformer, an online magazine founded by Josh Abbotoy, an entrepreneur who also runs a venture capital firm that aims to build a Christian techno-utopian community in rural Appalachia. Abbotoy, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the Center for Baptist Leadership, told me via email that he sees the recent votes at SBC as indicative of a sea change in how Christians are beginning to relate to the broader culture. “I think we are starting to see a shift toward a cultural insurgency model,” he wrote to me, “in which evangelical leaders strategically adjust to the reality that broader society has become less amenable to Christian values.”
Michael Clary, a Kentucky pastor and Christian nationalist who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Baptist Leadership, also sees the SBC as needing a more muscular faith. In an email to me, he bemoaned a modern, excessively passive Christian culture, in thrall to a “loser theology” that demanded that the church “retreat into pietistic ghettos while we watch the world burn.” Instead, he wrote, Christians “should bring their convictions into public life, including their votes, their advocacy, and their cultural engagement.”
And there are signs that the SBC’s ties to Christian nationalists extend beyond the Center for Baptist Leadership. Consider Al Mohler, a prominent SBC leader who has served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky since 1993. He has witnessed decades of social change, but put forth this year’s amendment to ban women pastors. He appeared last week on the podcast of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor—though not a member of the SBC—who presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. Mohler expressed frustration with what he considered a misconception that Baptist forefathers were “some kind of strict separationist when it came to Christian morality and the society.” Baptists, he said, actually had a lot in common with Christian nationalists like Wilson. “I have been calling for maximum Christian influence in the public square my whole life,” he said.
Smietana, the religion reporter, noted that the Center for Baptist Leadership’s contingent at the annual meeting, “didn’t have huge numbers.” The group’s budget isn’t publicly available because they exist under the financial umbrella of American Reformer, though Wolfe told me the organization is run “on a shoestring.” Still, Smietana said, “the group has really influenced the narrative and the public relations,” he said, through its social media presence, podcasts, and relationships its leaders have built with influential SBC members. The election of Rice and the other conservative victories, he said, “are a real win for them,” and a signal that the broader SBC may be open to their agenda.
Nathan Finn, a religion professor who leads the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, was careful not to overstate the Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence on the SBC. But he did acknowledge that it reflected a growing movement within the larger denomination toward a “populist distrust of institutions and elites.”
The amendment that Mohler proposed to officially ban women pastors hasn’t been adopted yet; SBC leaders will hold the final vote at next year’s convention in Indianapolis. For Wolfe, this year’s meeting was confirmation of Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence—and a sign to continue the crusade. “Conservative reformers in the SBC aren’t the fringe,” he tweeted. “We are the representatives of what the broad base of grassroots Southern Baptists think & want. We are the center. Time to assume it and act accordingly.”
