When we looked at the 2025 performance metrics of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), I realized that what we’re seeing in their baptism metrics is very likely rebaptism at work. Rebaptism is exactly what it sounds like: Someone who’s already been baptized once doing it again. Unsurprisingly, the SBC doesn’t even want to know how many baptisms they’re bagging are just rebaptisms. Today, I’ll show you what this practice is—and why it’s such a big deal in Christianity’s cultural decline in America.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/24/2026. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! From introduction: Previous rebaptism post, 2012 conspiracy theory. Voicecasts are returning soon! The manager had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the loud neighbor, who turned out to be a super sweet young man who’s in his very first apartment. Things seem resolved so far.)
(When this post goes live on the main site, it’ll live here. Patrons get early access – thank you! From introduction: Previous rebaptism post, 2012 conspiracy theory. Voicecasts are returning soon! The manager had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the loud neighbor, who turned out to be a super sweet young man who’s in his very first apartment. Things seem resolved so far.)
SITUATION REPORT: Rebaptism may be on the rise
Baptism is a religious ritual in Christianity meant to bring a convert into the body of the Church (when capitalized, “Church” means all Christians everywhere). Rebaptism is a repeat of that ritual, done by someone who was baptized already in the past.
Rebaptism vs. baptism matters because churches don’t ever tend to tell us how many baptisms they report are actually rebaptisms. They treat all of them as brand-new conversion-related baptisms. But if most of their reported baptisms are rebaptisms, then that speaks to continued church churn, membership erosion, and lateral movement—not more effective evangelism or some grand turnaround in Christianity’s decline in secularized/secularizing countries.
When we talked recently about the 2025 baptism metrics of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), one fact stood out above all: Baptisms increased 12k in number over the previous year, but the SBC as a whole still lost almost 400k members. In fact, this situation with rising baptisms but lowered membership has been going on since 2021. (Before that, they saw declines in both metrics.)
Additionally, according to a February 2025 report from Pew Research, way more people in America leave Christianity than enter it. Alas, though, we don’t have recent stats about just what percentage of baptisms are really encore acts.
Taken together, that speaks to a rising number of rebaptisms—particularly within evangelicalism. But evangelicals themselves tend to keep mum about just how many baptisms they’re bagging from brand-new converts. Today, I’ll show you the between-the-lines admissions they’re making about just how bad their situation is.
Rebaptism means always having to say you’re sorry
Not all flavors of Christianity do rebaptism. Catholics, for example, come down very hard on the idea. A writer for Catholic Answers calls rebaptism “a grave wrong” for any Catholic. Another stresses that baptism isn’t just a ritual or symbol for Catholics, one which “imprints a spiritual mark upon the soul that remains even when the baptized person drifts from God,” making rebaptism a mark of disbelief in its transformative powers.
Oh, but evangelicals do love to get rebaptized, and they have ever since I myself was one of them. To them, it’s like redoing wedding vows: Something they can repeat whenever they seriously need to rededicate themselves to Jesus. A lapsed evangelical will often get rebaptized to mark their return to a church community. When moving laterally to a new church, they often repeat their baptisms then too. For that matter, the new church may even require rebaptism as part of their new-member onboarding process!
Evangelicals also push rebaptism for anyone whose earlier baptism(s) they deem invalid, like someone baptized as an infant or according to the wrong magic ritual.
I’ve personally been rebaptized for all three reasons!
Sidebar: Cas got born again (and again and again)
Born Catholic, of course I was baptized as an infant. That’s standard for Catholics. In their religion, adults only get baptized if they weren’t baptized as babies.
When I was 16 in the mid-1980s, I converted to the SBC at a pizza blast (a bait-and-switch 1980s-era youth evangelism event disguised as a pizza party; nowadays, they’re used more as fundraisers). Like most evangelicals, that church’s pastor didn’t think infant baptism was valid. So after my confession of faith I had to get rebaptized by being dunked. Accordingly, I came home that night with wet hair, horrifying my still-very-Catholic mother.
I’m sure she felt relieved when I left the SBC not long after, but her relief was short-lived: I joined a Pentecostal church soon afterward. Pentecostals don’t think infant baptism is valid, and they also don’t think that the SBC’s baptism invocation is valid. Evangelicals use the magic formula “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but Oneness Pentecostals don’t buy into the Trinity. Instead, they say “in the name of Jesus.” For a baptism to be valid, it has to have that invocation uttered over it. So I was rebaptized, this time with the correct magic formula used.
I drifted out of Pentecostalism by the end of the year, returning the next summer at 17 after my then-boyfriend Biff joined. Everyone, particularly Biff, wanted me to get baptized again to mark my return to church. That time, I refused. Three baptisms, I said, were enough for anybody. If they hadn’t taken right, then a fourth sure wouldn’t.
I still think that. But I just know there’re evangelicals out there racking up rebaptisms like Zsa Zsa Gabor racked up husbands.
Keeping rebaptism numbers hush-hush
The problem here is knowing how many baptisms represent rebaptisms and how many are first-time convert baptisms. Evangelicals don’t like to talk about those numbers! Instead, they treat all baptisms like first-timers—as SBC leader Kevin Ezell did recently:
Every baptism represents a life transformed, someone who has found forgiveness and new life in Jesus Christ.
But many of those baptisms represent only a return to church or even just a rededication to faith, not a new life. Out of all people, Ezell should know that, too. After all, 15-20 years ago, SBC leaders talked a lot about rebaptism.
A 2008 report from the SBC’s research and publishing arm, Lifeway, revealed that pastors often demanded rebaptism from Christians transferring in from churches that differed from the SBC’s theology. The more their original churches differed, the more likely SBC pastors were to demand a rebaptism!
In 2009, SBC seminary leader Danny Akin estimated that “about half of the adult baptisms we report each year are re-baptisms.” Of the rest, he said, most were young children. That tracks with a 2014 task force report, which found that the only growing demographic of baptism was children aged 5 and under.
In 2010, SBC blogger J. Ben Simpson called rebaptism “a serious problem any way you look at it.” He echoed the concerns mentioned above: That rebaptism made the SBC’s already bad baptism metrics look “even bleaker.” To fix the problem, he suggested that church leaders get more strict about rebaptism.
But they weren’t about to do that.
So through the years since I was Christian, churches continued to require rebaptism of transferring-in Christians. A 2014 paper by Jim Somerville makes clear that baptism policies didn’t change at all. And churches continued to report rebaptisms and baptisms together. The SBC in particular doesn’t even ask member churches to distinguish between them. When state-level conventions gather reports, they don’t ask either.
I don’t think anybody in SBC leadership even wants to know exact numbers about rebaptisms.
In the Wild: Recent chatter about rebaptism in the Christ-o-sphere
Most rebaptism discussions approve of correcting invalid previous baptisms. However, we’ve also seen that rebaptism also functions as a way to renew or rededicate one’s faith—and as a show of solidarity with a new church. Evangelicals themselves almost universally frown on unnecessary, non-corrective rebaptism. But it happens anyway.
In 2019, Baptists on Puritan Board spoke of rebaptism in decidedly negative terms—unless, of course, one had been baptized by sprinkling before. In Christianity, baptism always involves water, but it can be either sprinkled onto the head of the person being baptized, or the person gets dunked underwater. Most evangelicals are dunkers, not sprinklers.
On that forum, they took for granted that only valid baptisms counted. Someone validly baptized needed no further rebaptisms. So nothing had changed, really. In 2022, a writer for Desiring God completely echoed their opinions.
In 2020, a Redditor wrote: “In my experience with an SBC megachurch, I was encouraged to be baptized as often as I desired and as such I know many people who have been pressured into rebaptism multiple times.” One Christian replied that they wished they could get rebaptized to “renew” their faith, but their church doesn’t allow it. Indeed, a 2022 Got Questions post tells us that rebaptism isn’t “sinful,” but it is unnecessary. (One 2024 Substack suggests a “reaffirmation of baptism” ceremony in lieu of unnecessary rebaptism.)
In 2023, a Christianity Today article tackled rebaptism. In it, Mark Fugitt (a Baptist pastor from Missouri) suggests that people desiring rededication-style rebaptism maybe try to feel “renewed” in other ways. Interestingly, he doesn’t examine the question of people joining his church from different faith traditions.
In 2024 we find a Redditor talking about rebaptism at r/TrueChristianity. Another objects to rebaptism in 2023. (They are not a meta-joke satire group, I promise!) Both cases involve supposedly-invalid first baptisms. A 2025 blog post from a Church of Christ member presents the exact same argument for rebaptism in these cases.
Another doctrinal infighting situation that reveals the truth about Christianity
Christians won’t ever resolve this argument, any more than they’ll ever resolve any other doctrinal squabble. Without a tangible, observable, measurable sign accompanying correct baptisms (and never appearing in incorrect ones), all Christians have to bolster their opinions are Bible verses, “the original Greek and Hebrew,” mythic visions of first-century Christianity, Church Father writings, their own interpretations of all of it, and most of all how persuasively and authoritatively they can argue about it!
Unfortunately, all of that’s subjective. As my friend A Pasta Sea once noted:
Want to blow molinistic excuses for the problem of evil out of the water? Calvinists have already done the work. Want to undercut Sola Scriptura? Catholics have that covered. Want to illustrate the absurdity of the Trinity? Ask those Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to your door next Saturday. Want to show how evolutionary theory isn’t compatible with Christianity? Look no further than Answers in Genesis. What do all of these groups have in common? They all use the Bible to knock down each other’s theological systems. Not all of the arguments are that great, mind you, but my point still stands. They all show that the Bible can be an effective weapon against nearly every form of Christianity.
Christians hold the opinion that makes the most sense to them. If someone comes along who makes more sense and speaks persuasively enough, they change their minds. But it takes a lot to change their opinions of deeply-held doctrines, especially ones they consider essential tenets of their faith.
And in the case of the SBC in particular, there’s another big reason why we won’t see any changes to their treasured custom of rebaptism: Simple self-interest.
Why rebaptism doesn’t make it into SBC metrics reports
The SBC prizes baptisms above all other tangible signs of growth. When they realized they were having “a baptism drought” in 2013-2014, they just about panicked. They didn’t want to be “Baptists, just without the baptisms” (as The Atlantic playfully described them). That 2014 task force report I mentioned (relink) revealed 25% of SBC churches had reported no baptisms at all in 2012. However, that number has not improved at all over the years. The percentage of no-baptisms churches has hovered in that range for years, and in 2022 hit 43%.
In response, the SBC responds with strategies, task forces, and even struggle-session videos where SBC leaders take the blame for baptism decline.
But what is a pastor to do if nobody new joins their church? Or if newcomers are all lateral transfers from other SBC or similar churches?
Well, he can refuse to report on baptisms at all, which increasing numbers of churches are doing, to my eternal amusement! Or he can allow iffy rebaptisms to proceed. (I’m guessing pastors’ opinions on liturgical dance run along very similar lines.)
Only the second option improves a pastor’s reputation in SBC leaders’ eyes.
Don’t hate the players; hate the game
So SBC pastors play the game that the SBC’s leadership has set up for them.
When a game sets up a particular metric as a requirement for great rewards, players will adjust their strategies to win the reward. In this case, high baptisms can make a pastor sound like a superstar in the SBC. So they have no reason not to fudge baptism numbers, but every reason to fudge them. And SBC leaders are not about to discourage pastors from adding to the one metric they treasure most!
So when we hear about increased baptisms in the SBC with shrinking membership, it’s only reasonable to ask what’s going on here: Do these numbers represent new conversions and actual growth? Or are pastors just re-dunking the same people?
Evangelicals’ evangelism certainly hasn’t magically gotten more effective. SBC pastors and leaders can’t even keep their existing flocks in the sheepfold. But somehow they’re baptizing more people every year? No way. Not with this circus, and definitely not with these clowns.
NEXT UP: Religious illiteracy and a crumbling community infrastructure mark the rising secularization of America. See you soon! <3
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