Incurable Southern Baptist demographic shrinking disease

Doomed by demographics, The [Southern] Baptists Shrink in numbers, writes historian Andrew Michael Manis in the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life's thrice-yearly journal Religion in the News.
The standard Southern Baptist cure for this five-decade-old wasting disease is "increased doses of fervor and evangelistic aggressiveness," Manis explains this week. This year the SBC is calling it the Great Commission Resurgence and it is driven by desperation this time rather than optimism.
The SBC isn't attempting to reverse a declining growth rate, as it had been for five decades. It is trying to reverse real shrinkage in numbers and forecasts of additional, future shrinkage. An effort taht is foredoomed by the SBC demand that everyone recruited to the denomination accept not only Biblical inerrancy, but also the arguably homophobic, sexist Southern Baptist brand of inerrancy.
There is ample survey data which demonstrates that as a result Southern Baptists are drawing from a "diminishing pool" of potential new members, Manis argues. Specifically:

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that less than 30 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or born-again (excluding those Catholics who self-identify that way). For its part, the Pew Forum's 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey put evangelicals at 26.3 percent of the population. Either way, more than two-thirds of Americans are unlikely to accept Southern Baptists' understanding of the Bible.


The Landscape Survey's questions on belief make this sufficiently clear. Only 27 percent of the national total said they believed that "there is only ONE true way to interpret the teachings of my religion." Only 24 percent of Americans believe their religion is the "one true faith leading to eternal life." And only 33 percent believed that "the scriptures are the Word of God, literally true, word for word."

Of course SBC evangelism is full of the conviction that those who disagree can be brought into the tent. Sadly, that isn't what happens. As Manis explains:

The vast majority of converts to SBC churches are Bible-believing cultural conservatives when they arrive. According to a 1993 study by the SBC's North American Mission Board, only 1 out of 9 described themselves as ever having been "unchurched."

National survey data also says there is no growing pool of such potential recruits who are somehow being overlooked.
Quite the opposite:

... he 2008 ARIS, the non-denominationals are the only segment of the American religious community that has experienced significant growth over the past two decades.


Southern Baptists believe that right theology trumps sociology. The fundamentalist takeover of the 1980s was predicated on a bet that inerrancy would be a prophylactic against numerical decline.

It wasn't protective. The SBC has the shrinking disease conservatives regarded with such contempt in mainstream, liberal protestant denominations.
Whether written on the wall, or elsewhere, the story told by competent, unbiased analysis of the now abundant demographic data is the same. Down the now well-established path of resurgent evangelism on behalf of inerrancy lies accelerating decline.