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How right-wing influencers are transforming America’s churches

The Southern Baptist Convention’s rightward drift is emblematic of a deeper problem for American Christianity

It’s been a pivotal last week for the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the United States. The Southern Baptist Convention took a series of moves to the social and theological right at their annual gathering — a shift urged on by an upstart far-right movement that now appears to be in the driver’s seat.

Gathered in Orlando, Florida, Southern Baptist delegates (called “messengers”) elected a hardline conservative to be the congregation’s president, they advanced a prohibition on women serving as pastors or religious leaders, and they debated an amendment to honor right-wing martyr Charlie Kirk as part of a resolution condemning political violence.

These are all triumphs for a rising faction inside the SBC, an already very conservative evangelical denomination. The church can be broadly split up into a mainstream conservative majority (for our purposes, “moderate”) and an insurgent ultra-conservative, anti-establishment movement that has been picking up support, influence and heft within the assembly since the start of the decade.

Some of this is the culmination of a natural process. As Americans generally become less likely to affiliate with any religious denomination or organized religion, liberal and progressive religious believers leave — and more ideologically conservative and theologically traditional folks remain, leading them to dominate the work of institutions.

But in the case of the SBC, there’s another modern influence playing a role: the online right.

A bubbling ecosystem of far-right and conservative leaning influencers, creators, commentators, and podcasters is repeatedly popping up as a dividing line within the convention.

Nor is it just the Southern Baptist church, or only evangelicals, who are seeing the internet seep into theological debates. The nascent religious renewal America is experiencing — often driven by younger, conservative men finding or returning to religion — is often defined by a shift of authority and trust away from mainstream voices, establishment figures, and institutions and toward individuals in the digital media universe.

“The SBC is a perfect test case of this,” the former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge told me. “The hardliners are using social media to basically try to gin up a second conservative resurgence.”

The SBC isn’t the only denomination experiencing this, but it’s the most obvious example — and serves as a preview of what the future may be for American politics and religiosity in the next decade.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s gradual right-wing capture

Since the start of the 2020s, the SBC has seen the gradual rise of a conservative cohort within the ranks, using internet culture and independent commentary to critique the institutional church’s moderation on a variety of social and theological issues.

They criticized the congregation’s reexamination of racial issues, of the role of women in preaching, of reforms and investigations into allegations of church abuse, and, particularly post-2020, the encroachment of “woke” thinking in an already very politically conservative evangelical denomination.

Some of this has been organic: the work of conservative pastors and firebrand preachers who would have decried this moderation in any case. But observers also see a more concerted, digital-first project driving the rightward lurch.

“This is being driven, at least in part, by social media influencers who very much want to see the SBC move in a more conservative direction. They think that anyone on their left is literally Bernie Sanders,” Burge told me. “There’s probably 10 to 15 accounts on social media that drive this narrative that the SBC is sort of drifting, they’ve become........

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