A Survey of 175 Years of Southern Baptist Resolutions

Sometime in the fall of 2016 I got it into my head to study the resolutions of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant, Christian organization. As a member of an SBC church and wanting to expand beyond my physics background, it seemed like a great idea. Four years, thousands of lines of code, and some 26000 words later I finally finished.

I’m incredibly grateful to the editors of Southeastern Theological Review for publishing this work and pray it will edify the body of Christ and provide context in confusing times. If you’re curious about how the focus of the SBC has changed over time, please read the article here. If you’re interested in the mathematical details, they’re available at this link. Presented here is the main figure, which details the topics identified by the machine learning algorithm employed, and the conclusion from the article.

TLDR:

In 175 years, the Southern Baptist Convention has changed considerably. Beginning as a missions organization, it has since grown into what is effectively the second largest Christian denomination in the United States. The yearly resolutions adopted by the SBC provide a means of understanding how the group’s focus and priorities have shifted, as they require a majority to be adopted and are written with the intent of public dissemination. In this analysis, all resolutions adopted by the SBC between 1845 and 2020 were collected, cleaned, and processed using data science techniques. Non-negative Matrix Factorization was then applied to identify topics in the documents, revealing several significant changes in how the language of the resolution has changed through the decades. Combined with select statements from the yearly proceedings, context for the shifts observed has been provided.

The resulting narrative is a compelling one: the SBC was originally founded as a missionary organization in order to make space for slaveholders to represent the Church abroad. In keeping with its missional goals, between 1845 and 1900 the SBC largely used the resolution to direct and support its missionary activities alongside managing administrative tasks. During this early period messengers mostly remained silent on other issues. As the organization grew and expanded three significant shifts occurred. First, between 1890 and 1940, there was a push to mechanize the SBC. This ultimately resulted in a functional move to a more representative form of governance and, through the creation of the ERLC, an institutional commitment to engage with broader moral and ethical issues. Second, around 1900, the SBC began to increasingly use its public platform to directly address social, cultural, and political issues, starting with a complete and total support for the prohibition of alcohol. Finally, following the Conservative Resurgence’s success in 1990, the SBC appears to largely have embraced unity in doctrine, grounding almost every moral position and statement present in the resolutions under the supreme authority of Scripture.