As the voting members of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) heads to Orlando for this year’s Annual Meeting, one thing on their mind is the fight over women in church leadership. One of their two major factions is itching for that fight to turn into a denominational civil war—again. Yes, again. They had one decades ago, but they want another. Recently, Trevin Wax, who works for the SBC’s North American Mission Board, threw his two cents into the ring. He was trying to get the flocks thinking along his faction’s lines.
Hopefully, they’ll recognize his dishonest treatment of this looming SBC issue. Hopefully, they’ll see this faction’s strategy as the purity spiral that it is. But even if they don’t, we will. This ain’t Trevin Wax’s first rodeo with dishonest reframing, and I’ve got the receipts to prove it. Today, I’ll show you my cards.
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SITUATION REPORT: Trevin Wax writes a post for Baptist Press to get the flocks ready for their next purity spiral
On May 28, Baptist Press ran an editorial by Trevin Wax. It’s titled “Considerations before the SBC Annual Meeting in 2026.” It functions as an encore to a very similar 2023 post he wrote, right down to the number of “considerations” he lists. (We’ll circle back to that 2023 post in a little while.)
In his more recent post, Wax describes “two competing impulses” in the SBC that form a tension. These “impulses” are church autonomy and confessional lockstep among member churches, which we’ll describe shortly. He thinks that in recent years the SBC has moved ever-closer to the latter, which is a claim that’s fairly well supported by the denomination’s data releases. And as it does so, its leaders find themselves getting way more friendly with the notion of kicking out churches that aren’t in lockstep.
However, Wax’s framing sounds like rhetorical sleight-of-hand. He tries to make both “impulses” seem equally valid at a time when the SBC’s official guidelines definitely don’t give that impression. He’s just trying to make the idea of kicking out churches sound more okay in a denomination that’s always paid lip service to the idea of churches being autonomous.
Then, Wax describes the SBC’s Conservative Resurgence as a sad but necessary and gentle natural process. However, it most assuredly wasn’t, as I’ll show you soon. In actuality, the Resurgence was a hostile takeover of the SBC by hyperconservative schemers who had figured out their denomination’s cheat codes.
After a brief history of the SBC kicking out member churches, Wax ends by explicitly framing the upcoming civil war he wants as a response to women in leadership. This isn’t surprising at all, given that Al Mohler’s been in the Christ-o-sphere news of late for drilling down harder on female pastors.
Overall, this post seems incredibly dishonest in its framing. Worse, Wax completely mischaracterizes the entire Conservative Resurgence itself. He gives an overwhelming impression of aching for another conservative takeover of the SBC.
And this ain’t new—not by a longshot. I’ve been documenting him for years now. As I’ll show you, he is an extremely high-control fundamentalist, Calvinist evangelical who works very hard on reframing unpalatable ideas for the flocks. This post perfectly illustrates his overall MO.
The problem he faces is simple, though: I don’t think the SBC can afford another civil war. At all. They may be polarizing further rightward lately, but the denomination’s overall health is extremely poor. They’re a lot more fragile now than they were in the wild days of the Conservative Resurgence.
Yeah, this Annual Meeting is going to be absolutely bonkernuts. I can already tell.
Everyone, meet Trevin Wax
First, let’s meet the man behind this strange OP. (OP means Original Post, but it also can mean Original Poster. So Trevin Wax is the OP who wrote our OP. In a manner of speaking, “this strange OP” could, I suppose, mean either the post or the writer of it. But I mean the post itself this time.)
According to his bio on Baptist Press, Trevin Wax is the vice president of resources and marketing for the North American Mission Board (NAMB). Additionally, he’s written numerous books about the Bible, Calvinist doctrinal stances, exhortations to personal evangelism (person-to-person recruitment), and slams on “counterfeit gospels.” His latest one is The Gospel Way Catechism, published July 2025.
He also runs a podcast for NAMB called Reconstructing Faith. Its blurb at NAMB says it’s about what “it will take to bring about renewal of the church in our generation.” Renewal doesn’t mean revival, by the way. In Calvinist Christianese, it means making more evangelicals into fervent Calvinists. His blurb at the Apple Podcasts page makes that fact crystal-clear. (The Calvinist-made American Gospel documentary implied the same thing.)
Interestingly, his blurb at Baptist Press doesn’t mention one of his most visible gigs: He writes a lot, as in a lot a lot, of posts for The Gospel Coalition (TGC). TGC is a hardline Calvinist evangelical site. I know about him from there.
And oh boy what I know about Trevin Wax
When I say “I know about him from there,” I mean it. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve observed of his pattern of behavior, starting with posts that focused on things he’s written:
In 2022, I reviewed his chapter contribution to the TGC book Before You Lose Your Faith. (Full series tag here.) He titled his chapter “Doubt Your Way Back to Truth.” It was more of the same attempt to label easy questions as serious ones, but here he also tried to take power over doubt itself. He set up categories of permissible doubt and impermissible doubt, with the latter leading to deconstruction and the former leading to renewed, reinvigorated faith. Obviously, he completely assumed that anybody deconstructing or deconverting cared enormously about his personal approval. (They don’t want to be salespeople. Nor even ambassadors. They want to be lords.)
In 2023, Trevin Wax pops up in a post about how evangelicals were trying to reframe church attendance as mandatory. He’d written that post in 2019, before the pandemic, but I bet he drilled down harder on this reframing after 2020.
In 2025, I wrote about his podcast. I thought it was laughable that he actually said he’d nailed what he called the “hard questions” for evangelicalism. He hadn’t. He just reframed easy, softball criticisms as “hard questions,” answered those, and then announced he’d totally won the fight against doubt and deconstruction.
That year, he also pops up in a 2025 post about Christianity’s decline. There, I cited a 2014 post by him declaring that evangelicalism wasn’t “dying,” just in decline. And really lots of people were drawn in by the power of repentance and converting—even if more were drifting away afterward. Of course, nobody said evangelicalism was dying in the first place. He was just moving the goalposts to make evangelicals seem stronger than they were.
I could name other posts to support my opinion of him, like this 2022 post about “negative world” where he actually suggests that “the younger generation” wants to be super-confrontational and political. NOPE! Millennials maybe, but not Gen Z. However, Wax might just be around the Gen Z men joining very conservative flavors of Christianity, like his own. And Calvinists do tend to be a lot more fighty.
So when I say this guy decides what his reality is going to look like every morning and then refuses to accept anything different, I speak from long experience. He writes and speaks as though he thinks if he can just set the terms for everyone else’s experience, then he can control the outward bound flow of Christians from evangelical churches. Even stranger, he thinks that if everybody just becomes Calvinist, then Christianity will be totally fixed.
What Trevin Wax misunderstands about the Conservative Resurgence
Many decades ago, Calvinists convinced the SBC’s biggest names to become literalist and inerrant in their interpretation of the Bible. These terms indicate that the Bible is literally true in every way, and makes zero errors of any kind.
It was an easy sell, too. Those big names were deeply upset about women becoming SBC pastors. Inerrancy provided a trump card to block their progress. By making their interpretation of the Bible into a perfect, divine command for all time, and then pointing to it when forbidding women leadership roles over any men, their problem was instantly solved.
Two schemers within the SBC, a lawyer named Paul Pressler and an SBC seminary student named Paige Patterson, figured out exactly how to set inerrancy so deep into the SBC’s heart that nobody could pull it out ever again. They realized that SBC denominational leadership had a very serious weakness: The president of the SBC appointed a lot of committee roles within it. So if they could capture the SBC presidency for about ten years, then their presidents could in theory get enough inerrantists into power that they could shape the entire direction of their denomination.
While they were gearing up for that first crucial election push, they toured the country selling SBC pastors on inerrancy. This persuasion campaign took about twelve years. In 1979, they got Adrian Rogers elected to the SBC’s presidency. Like a lot of their pawns at the time, he didn’t even know he was a part of the plan.
Once the schemers had gotten their important pieces onto the board, they performed a hostile takeover of the SBC. This was not the gentle, corrective, self-selecting process that Trevin Wax describes. It was brutal.
As one example, in 1994 the Resurgence lads fired Russell Dilday from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). After he refused to take early retirement, they fired this sweet old gentleman like they were afraid he’d return with a shotgun: It was a surprise vote they’d planned, and minutes afterward they’d already changed the locks on his office. Order 66 in Star Wars wasn’t executed that ruthlessly. Eventually, Paige Patterson himself would take the job in 2003. (And lose it in 2018 amid revelations that he’d bungled sex assault investigations on his campus.)
Yes, churches sure did self-select out of the SBC—almost 2000 of them in all over the 20ish years of the Resurgence. But it didn’t look anything like what Wax suggests. It wasn’t a strategic uncoupling so much as a messy, drama-filled divorce full of fighting, bad blood, and accusations. The divorce finally got finalized around 2000, after which the hardliners utterly failed to fulfill a single promise they made about denominational growth.
I’m aghast at how Trevin Wax frames the Resurgence.
But he’s doing it for a reason.
You see, he wants another one. And he’s not the only SBC hardliner who does. He’s been itching for this fight for years.
The tension grows between church autonomy and top-down authoritarian control over member churches
Since 2000, the Resurgence lads probably thought they were done with warring for control of the SBC. They even installed a new official SBC doctrinal statement, which they called the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (or BFM2k, or just BFM). It clearly laid out inerrancy and defined the SBC’s position on various culture war issues—notably women in leadership over men.
But they sure weren’t done. Not by a longshot.
See, the SBC prides itself on church autonomy. That means that individual church leaders have, in theory, a lot of leeway about exactly what they preach and teach. A church that technically isn’t in complete agreement with the SBC’s doctrinal stances should, in theory, be able to contribute to its denominational projects. In particular, these projects include evangelism, church planting, missionary support, and seminaries.
The policy has a very earthly purpose as well. Whenever the SBC mother ship doesn’t want to take responsibility for something a member church does, they point to church autonomy.
However, the Trevin Waxes of the SBC don’t like knowing that some SBC church somewhere isn’t in complete agreement with their BFM. In particular, they don’t like knowing that a lot of SBC member churches are fine with women in leadership roles over men. Many even have women as their lead pastors.
So the hardliners are caught in a difficult bind. Officially, they shouldn’t care what member churches do. But oh, they care. They want to make it so that no SBC member church can ever even think about hiring a woman to lead even one man in any capacity. Officially, that would make the SBC a “confessional identity” denomination. It wouldn’t be a “church autonomy” one anymore. (However, that shift might open the SBC up to the same liabilities that the Catholic Church faces these days. After all, they’re still dragging their feet about their sex abuse crisis.)
Trevin Wax has been hard at work trying to convince SBC church leaders to be okay with doctrinal lockstep
Subtitle: Dysfunctional authoritarians should fear heathen nerds with databases
In that way, it makes sense that Trevin Wax wrote a post about the growing number of times the SBC mother ship has disciplined and even booted out member churches for various reasons. He wants it to sound like a sensible thing to do. Like it’s a wise process that keeps the SBC squeaky-clean. Like yes, of course a confessional identity matters more than church autonomy.
For the next civil war to work, Trevin Wax needs the SBC to be focused on doctrinal lockstep. More than that, though, he needs members to be okay with a lot of purity testing and casting-out of the impure. That’s what his faction has in store for the Annual Meeting this weekend.
And he’s been priming that pump for ages. Remember his 2023 post I mentioned (relink)? It wasn’t nearly as polished as the 2026 version, but it covered much the same ground.
In it, he dishonestly presents a bunch of non-starter differences in member churches that nobody in the SBC cares about, like letting people who were baptized as infants participate in Communion, or exactly how they should approach religious liberty, or even how powerful the pastors are in relation to their church elders.
I’ve never seen anyone in SBC leadership make those issues dealbreakers. And he even admits that nobody cares if a member church handles those issues in different ways than others might like. Rather, he’s saying that the SBC was okay with those differences, even if now they need to not be okay with doctrinal drift from the BFM. And as he does in the 2026 post, he also tries to make the casting-out of dissenting churches into a more normal, expected part of SBC business.
The SBC can’t afford the fight the hardliners want
Indeed, the SBC’s hardliner faction braces for another set of big fights about the same things they fought about 40 years ago. But this time around, the SBC is in a far more fragile state. I don’t think they can afford another big civil war.
Every member church that self-selects out (or gets kicked out!) takes with it all of its money and membership counts. The SBC’s membership is already in freefall. Its leaders don’t even know how to stop the bleed (or really, why exactly it’s happening). Back then, they were still growing despite the losses. Losing 2000 churches across about 20 years was rough, yes. But the SBC absorbed those losses pretty well. They grew consistently in membership over those years, with a net loss of members only in 1998 (162k). That year, they also saw their only net loss of churches (17) during this civil war.
The situation is completely different in 2026. They’re stretched way thinner. They’ve got almost 4M fewer members, they’ve lost churches consistently since 2022, and baptisms are nowhere near fully rebounded. Worse, they’re struggling to maintain donations.
No, I don’t think they could come anywhere near that absorption now. So it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the next couple of years.
NEXT UP: Speaking of the SBC’s 2026 Annual Meeting, this year’s battle of the factions is already heating up beautifully. We’ll cover their biggest squabbles next time. See you soon! <3
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