We’re now 25 years out from the Conservative Resurgence movement of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Hardliners’ ultraconservative, extremely political hijacking of the denomination has had lasting effects on not only the SBC’s members themselves, but also on evangelicalism as a whole. Those effects are not positive, however. And I think those hardliners know it, because they’ve ensured that notes from one of the biggest and earliest post-Resurgence initiatives is just gathering dust in Nashville.
Today, I want to show you the roots of the Conservative Resurgence, why it has backfired so hard on the SBC, and why its hardliners can’t drop it either way. Along the way, we’ll check out the Old Guard’s ongoing and increasingly obvious attempt to prevent people from seeing what a failtrain they really are.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 8/12/2025. They’re both available now! Sorry, no audio recording today—it’s been way too hot! But hopefully the heatwave will break in time for Friday. Thank you so much for understanding; this summer has been just awful.)
SITUATION REPORT: The complete failure of the Conservative Resurgence is still the SBC’s best-kept secret
About a year ago, we talked about the Conservative Resurgence, that two-decade culture-war battle that hijacked the entire denomination and turned it ultraconservative and extremely politicized forever after. Though its schemers’ campaigning began in 1967, it officially kicked off in 1979 with the election of their first pawn, Adrian Rogers, as SBC President. It finished, more or less, by 2000. That year, the SBC adopted a creed called the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (or BFM2K).
With that, the hardliners figured they’d settled everything.
The supporters of the Conservative Resurgence went on to become the SBC’s hardliner faction (which I call the Old Guard). They wield enormous power within the denomination even now. Unfortunately for them, a number of indicators reveal that the Conservative Resurgence completely failed in every way. It did not bring about a glorious revitalization of the SBC. It did not increase baptisms or make Southern Baptists more evangelism-minded. And it did not inspire Southern Baptists to be less hypocritical. In fact, at the movement’s beginning least one of its architects allegedly already led a disgusting double life as a sex abuser.
Additionally, for years the Old Guard has been doing its level best to block the release of a large set of recordings made by the SBC’s “Great Commission Resurgence Task Force” (GCRTF). The GCRTF was a direct outgrowth of the Conservative Resurgence. This group met between 2009 and 2010. It comprised 23 members, featuring Old Guard heavyweights like Al Mohler and Ronnie Floyd—and J.D. Greear, who became a leader in the Old Guard’s enemy faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives. During their meetings, they hammered out suggestions for persuading SBC members to evangelize more often.
All we really know about these meetings is that only two suggestions they made were ever taken seriously—and both seem to have been fulfilled by happenstance. It failed so hard the SBC had to bury it.
And they’re still trying to keep it buried.
Last year, we exposed the evaluation task force’s damning report on the Great Commission Resurgence. Now, we’re about to see another serious flaw in the Conservative Resurgence itself.
A well-kept secret within the SBC
The Old Guard’s leaders have made every attempt possible to prevent anyone from seeing those recordings. In 2023, in fact, SBC president Bart Barber (of the Pretend Progressives) set up a task force meant to evaluate just what the GCRTF had accomplished—because until then, nobody had done that. The Wayback Machine contains the PDF they made of their recommendations, “Penetrating the Lostness.” (Yes, really. They’re worse at picking titles than I am.) Without that archive, it’d be gone from the internet—the original link is now dead.
Aside from their recommendations, we don’t know anything about what the meetings accomplished. Nor do we know what was said or done during them. So this team, called the Great Commission Resurgence Evaluation Task Force (again—yes, really), wanted to figure that out.
But they couldn’t.
The Old Guard stonewalled the evaluation team’s efforts. Al Mohler and Taffey Hall (an Old Guard made man and an Old Guard hire of his, respectively) refused to grant the team access to the task force’s 90 hours of audio recordings of their meetings. They said the files were sealed for 15 years (starting in 2010). So those files would be unsealed on June 16, 2025—and not one single day earlier.
In the end, the evaluation team had to write their report (link) without these important resources.
Well, June 16 has come and gone. Today, we’ll check out what we can about the recordings—and see if they make the Conservative Resurgence look better or worse in retrospect.
The secret recordings finally got unsealed, sort of
True to Mohler and Hall’s word, on June 16, 2025 the recordings of the GCRTF were unsealed. According to Biblical Recorder, it was quite the gala occasion: 20 of the 23 people from that original committee were present. That crowd included Ronnie Floyd himself—a powerful kingmaker within the Old Guard faction, and the chair of the GCRTF itself. He said this unsealing was “an unprecedented moment.”
But the occasion came and went in evangelicalism without fanfare. Worse, though, the SBC clearly doesn’t want anyone getting ahold of these files. According to the SBC library site, their collection includes:
- 57 CDs of audio recordings of the GCRTF’s meetings
- a printout of the committee’s 2010 report to the SBC (“Penetrating the Lostness“) and a DVD recording of its presentation to the Annual Meeting attendees in 2010 (but I doubt it’s really that important; you can check out the highlights of it here)
- some printed blog entries from their now-dead website, pray4gcr.com (which you can find somewhat archived here)
That’s it. Somehow, the task force failed to turn over any other documents. The library says it has “no minutes, agendas, programs, notes, outlines, or correspondence” related to one of the most important meetings of the entire Conservative Resurgence.
OH. I almost forgot the funniest part of this entire story: If you want to get your hands on any of the sparse materials the library has, you’ll have to personally haul your cookies to their physical building in Nashville. They haven’t digitized a single bit of it, and don’t appear to have any plans for doing so. Of course, you can also order copies of the CDs—for $25/CD for video and $15@ for audio. Obviously, it’s way more convenient to just duplicate CDs over and over again than to digitize something once and put it online. (/s)
The lack of fallout of these recordings
I love SBC drama, but I’m not sure I love it that much. I’m not sure anybody loves it that much. Not even its own mother would love it that much.
Indeed, beyond a sparse few articles in the Christ-o-sphere about the unsealing of the documents, it doesn’t look like anybody has actually checked out these recordings in any detail—or sent money to have duplicates made. There’s one publicity photo (local archive) of someone from Baptist Paper listening to a recording. It’s the only engagement I’ve seen with anything from the library’s collection. Otherwise, it seems like nobody’s really touched them.
But I’m the hopeful sort. Maybe someone’s listening to the recordings right now and will release transcripts at some point.
It’s funny that the Old Guard claims it’s the most “biblical” and Jesusy group in the world—and yet they can’t bear to have their own official SBC business aired publicly. I didn’t even begin thinking there’s legitimately something to hide in the GCRTF meetings until these guys pulled out the stops to memory-hole the entire initiative. Perhaps they’re just hiding what a make-work committee it really was. Or maybe they don’t want us to know just how much they argued about everything.
Whatever it is, it’s got to be devastating to the Old Guard—or they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. Not even vampires avoid sunlight this desperately. But they must. While they preached up a storm about inerrancy and biblical purity, their actual behavior (and that of the SBC’s numerous sexual predators, like Resurgence architect Paul Pressler allegedly was) told a whole other story. The Conservative Resurgence was about power—nothing more. Inerrancy itself was nowhere near as important as having a trump card that could force everyone to obey hardliners’ demands.
The Conservative Resurgence has a lot to hide
I’m hardly the first person who ever suspected that the Conservative Resurgence helped doom the SBC to decline. People have been saying that since at least 2013. Thom Rainer, who came up with the very name “Great Commission Resurgence” as a response to it, wrote a damning paper about the movement’s failure in 2005. His son Sam wrote another in 2024. The newly-unsealed audio recordings likely only confirm those opinions.
The failure of the Conservative Resurgence matters enormously to evangelicals as a whole. The SBC is a vast corporation with a huge number of sub-entities and departments, all jockeying for money and attention. Without money, the SBC’s operations grind to a halt. So its leaders may talk a very big game about wanting to Jesus the Jesus-Jesus perfectly and fervently, but ultimately they are in it for resources.
This movement was supposed to bring their end of Christianity out of its slump. That’s how its creators sold it to Southern Baptist pastors. That’s how they forced inerrancy to be a mandatory belief for Southern Baptist flocks.
And it just didn’t do anything that was promised.
Sure, no evangelicals ever want to engage with seriously bad news in anything but the most ethereally Jesusy of terms. At least, not openly in front of the flocks. And I can’t blame them.
That said, in terms of business decisions, the Conservative Resurgence was a disaster.
The business side of the SBC post-Conservative Resurgence
Customer churn (how many stop patronizing the company) is through the roof.
The SBC’s membership has fallen from its peak of 16.3M members in 2010 to just 12.7M in 2024. For a voluntary-membership model like the SBC uses, 3.6M customers lost is horrific news.
During the Conservative Resurgence, SBC hardliners could be blasé about 1900 churches disaffiliating over it—taking with them their donations. The hardliners talk a big game about driving away dissenting churches now, but in just one year, 2022, the SBC lost 1200 churches alone. They’re finally starting to lose more churches than they start every year. They can’t afford these losses now.
ARPU (average revenue per user) has dropped steadily.
The SBC counts on a certain level of support from members and affiliated churches. They aren’t getting it anymore. Churches’ giving to SBC mission funds fell from about 10% of their income in the 1980s to under 5% by 2024. Overall trends indicate other donations are stagnant or falling as well. Individual tithing has always been a sore point for church leaders, but it seems like that’s on the downturn too.
Customer acquisition continues to plummet.
The SBC has known for many years that its acquisition metrics have been tanking. Though baptism rates have rebounded somewhat since the pandemic, their baptism ratio (baptisms per active members, currently at 1:51 as of 2024) only looks less disastrous because membership has dropped so much.
A hopelessly tainted brand.
For years now, I’ve noticed that many SBC-affiliated churches don’t advertise that affiliation. Wartburg Watch has tracked that “identity crisis” since at least 2014. These churches’ signs, names, and websites don’t mention SBC membership. Their pastors don’t talk up the affiliation, either. So their flocks don’t even realize that they are a Southern Baptist Convention church.
However, if they found out, they’d be upset because the SBC is a tainted brand. SBC leaders have known their brand is tainted since at least 2011. Of course, evangelicalism itself suffers the same way.
The hardliners want another Conservative Resurgence
So the Conservative Resurgence was a flop. Its first major derivative initiative, the Great Commission Resurgence, was an even bigger flop. The SBC’s leaders know both of these facts very well, and they’re really not happy about normies and pew-warmers discovering them.
But don’t imagine anything will change just because of that.
The hardliners are in this battle to win it. Various ultraconservative SBC splinter groups like the Center for Baptist Leadership and the Conservative Baptist Network have formed in the past five years, all yearning to be the winners of their hoped-for Battle Royale. They’re already wondering if they need a do-over—a second Conservative Resurgence.
First and foremost, they want to pass an amendment to the Baptist Faith and Message that forbids women to be pastors. They also want to quash any attempts at fixing the SBC’s overwhelming racism problem, as well as end any lingering sex abuse reforms—both of which they believe are resolved merely by embracing hardline evangelical beliefs.
It’s interesting, though, that this time they’re not making grand promises of revival and revitalization. At most, they frame the Pretend Progressives as a massive distraction from evangelism—which means they don’t really care what happens after a customer is acquired or how safe churches are. Instead, they’re pitching discipleship, an authoritarian power structure granting leaders unlimited power over the flocks, as the key to retention. In other words, they know they’ll only emerge from this decline if they clamp down on their followers with all their might.
But the SBC can’t change course now
Because the hardliners are the power behind the throne still, it doesn’t matter how many skirmishes their enemy faction (which I’ve called the Pretend Progressives) win. Ultimately, as the evaluation task force found out last year, the hardliners still steer the ship.
The way that those hardliners have set up the SBC, it rewards their faction with entrenched power and leadership, a total lack of real accountability, and still-viable shielding for hypocrites. No wonder they fight tooth and nail to keep their power!
But changing those systemic flaws will likely only drive away the hardliners, while not guaranteeing more moderate or progressive evangelicals return or join up. There’s really nothing SBC leaders can do except continue to try to thread the needle between mollifying their outraged hardliners while persuading the rest that reforms are totally coming Any Day Now™.
Bottom line: The SBC’s leaders have seemingly buried their Great Commission Resurgence’s failure, which pointed in turn to the failures of the entire Conservative Resurgence. But the denomination’s Titanic is about to hit the iceberg. They can’t do anything about it, so instead of doing anything tangible they’re pretending they’re cruising in the Bahamas.
NEXT UP: The Argument from “But But But ChatGPT Says My God is Totes for Realsies!” See you soon! <3
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