Southern Baptists and Racial Reconciliation: Reflections on the Anniversary of a Milestone Resolution

When Southern Baptists gather in Dallas for our Annual Meeting next month, we will celebrate the centennial of two decisions that transformed our Convention. At our 1925 Annual Meeting in Memphis, Southern Baptists adopted the first edition of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), our confessional standard, and launched the Cooperative Program (CP), our unified budget for shared ministry priorities. SBC President Clint Pressley has rightly called the BF&M and the CP the “two rails” of the Southern Baptist Convention.

In this essay, I want to reflect on a different anniversary. Thirty years ago, in 1995, Southern Baptists convened in Atlanta for the sesquicentennial anniversary of the birth of the SBC. We adopted a resolution titled “On Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention.” This milestone resolution was an important acknowledgement of how much the SBC had changed since its founding. It remains both an inspiring and aspirational document for Southern Baptists in 2025.

Racism and SBC History

In 1845, almost 300 representatives from churches and associations across the South descended upon Augusta, GA, and established the Southern Baptist Convention. It was a new, regional organization that was intended to be an alternative to the various Baptist societies headquartered in the Northeast. The most notable of the latter was the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions, better known as the Triennial Convention, because delegates met every three years.

According to the SBC’s charter, the stated reason for the formation of the new Convention was “for the purpose of eliciting, combining, and directing the energies of the Baptist denomination of Christians, for the propagation of the gospel.” This statement is absolutely true, so far as it goes. Most Baptists in America had been partnering together for mission causes since 1814. Baptists in the South had honest disagreements with their northern brethren about how best to fund those causes, as well as where mission efforts should be directed. The SBC exists for the sake of fulfilling the Great Commission.

This is only half the story, however, and the missing piece is lamentable rather than laudatory. One reason that Baptists in the North and South disagreed about missions is because they disagreed about human enslavement. Their differences reflected the wider regional disagreements of the antebellum era. As a general rule, Baptists in the South approved of chattel slavery and Baptists in the North did not. More to the point, Baptists in the South believed that enslavers could be appointed as missionaries while their northern brethren believed that owning slaves morally disqualified candidates from missionary service. So, while the SBC was founded to propagate the gospel to all people, it was also founded to allow the ongoing enslavement of black people in the American South.

Slavery was officially outlawed with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution on December 6, 1865, following four years of bloody Civil War. Around the same time, black Baptists in the South began separating from white-led churches to establish their own independent congregations, associations, and eventually conventions. While Southern Baptists were often generous in supporting these initiatives financially, racial prejudice persisted in the South. White supremacy was perpetuated by custom and codified into so-called Jim Crow laws. Racialized violence was common in the region, which the white majority used to terrorize and oppress the black minority.

For well over a century, very few Southern Baptists actively opposed the racism of their region. Even worse, far too many actively promoted white supremacy. That was beginning to change, incrementally, by the 1970s and into the 1980s, mirroring wider trends in the post-Civil Rights South. By the 1990s, a generation of Southern Baptists were coming of age who had not just begrudgingly made peace with racial integration, but who actively rejected the racial prejudice of their ancestors, including the various customs and laws that promoted a culture of white supremacy. Part of this change included a growing acknowledgement that the Southern Baptist Convention had been founded in a racist context, in part for racially motivated reasons, and that racism had persisted among Southern Baptists throughout the Convention’s history.

The 1995 Resolution and Its Legacy

Richard Land, at the time president of the Christian Life Commission (now the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission), was the architect of the 1995 resolution. The text articulated a basic biblical anthropology, denounced racism, admitted the role of slavery in the founding of the SBC, acknowledged ongoing racism—both overt and implicit—throughout Southern Baptist history, and spoke to the how the gospel has implications for reconciliation among people. Words like lament, repudiate, apologize, and repent were used to describe the posture of Southern Baptists toward our racist heritage. Messengers resolved to “hereby commit ourselves to eradicate racism in all its forms from Southern Baptist life and ministry.”

By God’s grace, measurable progress has been made over the past three decades. In 2012, Fred Luter, an African American pastor in New Orleans, was elected President of the SBC. In 2020, California pastor Rolland Slade was elected chairman of the SBC Executive Committee. A growing number of African American (and other minority) Southern Baptists have served as SBC officers, worked for Convention entities, and been appointed to various trustee boards. Every SBC entity is working hard to cultivate minority leaders. Seminaries are recruiting and investing in minority students.

Though still predominantly white, today Southern Baptists are more ethnically diverse than we’ve ever been in our history. According to the Great Commission Relations and Mobilization Ethnic Research Network, since 1990, ethnic minorities among Southern Baptists have grown by over 1 million, during a period when both Anglo membership and total membership has declined. Approximately 8 in 10 new SBC congregations are comprised primarily of an ethnic minority. Around 25% of the total churches that cooperate with the SBC are composed primarily of ethnic minorities. The National African American Fellowship currently includes over 4000 SBC churches with a cumulative membership of over 400,000 believers. Overall, around 900,000 Southern Baptist church members are African Americans. (See the statistical summaries here and here.)

The Work that Remains

We should praise God for all this, yet there is still much work that remains to be done. Americans are arguably more divided about race than at any time since the Civil Rights Era. The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. The racially motivated murders of nine African American members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC in 2015. The 2016 racially motivated murder of five white law enforcement officers in Dallas. The racially charged murder of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020. The controversial deaths of Michael Brown (2014), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015), Philando Castle (2016), Breonna Taylor (2020), and especially George Floyd (2020), all of whom were unarmed African Americans fatally shot by law enforcement. The 2021 murders of eight Asian women who worked in massage parlors. The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.

We must recognize that Southern Baptists have experienced periodic tensions related to race. The MLK50 Conference in Memphis (2018), which was co-sponsored by ERLC, provoked controversy. Several more recent SBC resolutions have proved controversial, including a 2017 resolution “On the Anti-gospel of Alt-Right White Supremacy,” and especially a 2019 resolution “On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.” In 2018, Southern Seminary published a “Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” and two years later the Council of Seminary Presidents released a statement declaring “affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” Both documents were debated, especially on social media. In response to these recent tensions, a few prominent black Southern Baptist pastors have led their churches to break ties with the SBC, while others have disengaged from Convention life.

To be clear, I’m not adjudicating any of these issues in this essay. Frankly, some of them are quite complex, and race isn’t always the only (or perhaps even the primary) factor in some of the debates. I’m simply naming the tensions among us, which I think are self-evident, even if their intensity ebbs and flows. Also, we need to remember these tensions are not unique to Southern Baptists. They are simply the Southern Baptist version of tensions present throughout American society, including among American believers. We cannot be unaffected by the issues our society is debating. What matters is how we respond.

The thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 resolution is an occasion for us to offer heartfelt thanks for what God has done among us. It is also an occasion to pray that God would give us wisdom as we navigate current tensions. As a people committed to the inspiration and authority of Scripture and obedience to the Great Commission, Southern Baptists believe in gospel-motivated racial reconciliation. What Dr. Land wrote in 1995, and what Southern Baptists affirmed on that June day in Atlanta, remains true today. Our posture toward our failures is repentance. Our commitment is the gospel and its implications for racial reconciliation is unwavering. In a world that is riven with racial resentment and, at times, ongoing corporate expressions of racial injustice, we have the opportunity—and the obligation—to bear witness to a better way.

Concluding Thoughts and One More Resolution

In closing, I want to point to another resolution. This one was not controversial, and perhaps for that reason it has been mostly forgotten. But it bears remembering. In 2021, Southern Baptists approved a resolution “On the Sufficiency of Scripture for Race and Racial Reconciliation.” I had the privilege of serving as the vice chair of the Committee on Resolutions that drafted the statement and commended it to the Convention. It is a fitting complement to the historic 1995 resolution. I have reproduced it below, for our fresh consideration and firm (re-)commitment, as we seek to bear witness to the dignity of all people and the universal call to repentance and faith in King Jesus.

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WHEREAS, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17); and

WHEREAS, The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states, “All Scripture is totally true and trustworthy” (Article I); and

WHEREAS, “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27); and

WHEREAS, “From one man [God] has made every nationality to live over the whole earth” (Acts 17:26); and

WHEREAS, In his prophetic vision John saw “a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9-10); and

WHEREAS, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12); and

WHEREAS, “Through faith [we] are all sons of God in Christ Jesus … There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28); and

WHEREAS, “God … has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18); and WHEREAS, The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states, “Christians should oppose racism” (Article XV); now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15–16, 2021, affirm the sufficiency of Scripture on race and racial reconciliation; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we reaffirm our agreement with historic, biblically-faithful Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in all forms; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we reject any theory or worldview that finds the ultimate identity of human beings in ethnicity or in any other group dynamic; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we reject any theory or worldview that sees the primary problem of humanity as anything other than sin against God and the ultimate solution as anything other than redemption found only in Christ; and be it further

RESOLVED, We, therefore, reject any theory or worldview that denies that racism, oppression, or discrimination is rooted, ultimately, in anything other than sin; and be it further

RESOLVED, That, understanding we live in a fallen world, we reaffirm the 1995 Resolution On Racial Reconciliation On The 150th Anniversary Of The Southern Baptist Convention, which includes, “That we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously (Psalm 19:13) or unconsciously (Leviticus 4:27),” applying this disposition to every instance of racism; and be it finally

RESOLVED, We affirm that our reconciliation in Christ gives us the opportunity and responsibility to pursue reconciliation with others so that we can display and share the hope of the gospel with the world.

Nathan is a professor of faith and culture and directs the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University in Tigerville, S.C. He is the senior fellow for religious liberty for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is a senior fellow for the Land Center for Cultural Engagement and is a senior editor for Integration: A Journal of Faith and Learning. He also serves as teaching pastor at the First Baptist Church of Taylors, S.C.