Southern Baptists vote to ban women pastors because they’ll lead to support for same-sex marriage

Delegates at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans voted to ban women pastors. The Wednesday vote on an amendment to the denomination’s constitution comes amid what The New York Times described as a crackdown by the church’s ultraconservative right wing on a “liberal drift” among some of its independent congregations.

Already this year, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has expelled five churches with female pastors. Earlier in the week, delegates in New Orleans rejected appeals by two of those churches, Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and Southern California megachurch Saddleback Church.

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While the church’s statement of beliefs already says that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” the SBC has for years allowed individual Baptist churches to make their own leadership decisions, according to the Times. An estimated 1,900 churches have women pastors.

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The amendment to the church’s constitution, introduced by Virginia pastor Mike Law ahead of the convention, threatens to further restrict the role of women. It states that Southern Baptists churches must “affirm, appoint or employ only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture,” according to the Associated Press.

The SBC will have to vote on the amendment again at its convention in Indianapolis next year for it to go into effect. But as the Times reports, the church’s ultraconservative faction is already poised to file complaints against any congregation with women in leadership roles.

Benjamin Bauer, a Michigan pastor who voted for the amendment, told the Times that churches that allow women pastors eventually “allow the marriage of homosexuals, too, and then even allowing homosexuals to serve as pastors.”

“In a culture that is unclear about the role of men and women, we have to be crystal clear,” Sarah Clatworthy, a member of Lifepoint Baptist Church in San Angelo, Texas, said. “We should leave no room for our daughters or granddaughters to have confusion on where the SBC stands.”

SBC delegates also approved a resolution this week condemning all forms of gender transition interventions, including gender-affirming healthcare, referring to them as “a futile quest to change one’s sex and as a direct assault on God’s created order.”