There is a revealing irony at the heart of the recent Texas Monthly article on the quiet collapse of the Southern Baptist Convention. The movement that rose to power defending “biblical authority” now finds itself haunted by a different question altogether: Who gets to tell the truth?
The article centers on Paul Pressler, the Texas judge and Baptist strategist who helped engineer the Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” beginning in 1979. Pressler and his allies believed the denomination had drifted into theological liberalism, especially in its seminaries. Through a remarkably disciplined campaign of elections, trustee appointments and institutional realignment, conservatives seized control of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The stated goal was doctrinal fidelity. The practical achievement was institutional power.
Charles Hawkins
Reading the article through Michel Foucault’s work on power and knowledge, one begins to see the controversy never was merely about theology in the abstract. It was about the construction of a regime of truth: a system determining who may speak, what counts as faithful discourse and which voices may safely be ignored.
Foucault famously argued that power does not merely repress. It produces. It creates categories, identities, habits and authorized forms of speech. In that sense, the conservative resurgence did not simply defeat moderates. It produced a new Southern Baptist subject: Vigilant against liberalism, deeply suspicious of dissent, committed to male authority and increasingly fused with the political instincts of the modern conservative movement.
The genius of the movement lay partly in its use of Baptist polity itself. Southern Baptists historically celebrated congregational freedom and distrusted centralized authority. Yet the resurgence demonstrated how decentralized systems can become extraordinarily effective instruments of discipline. No bishops were necessary. Trustees, committees, resolutions, seminaries, donor networks and convention procedures accomplished similar work.
Foucault would have recognized the pattern immediately. Modern power often functions best when it appears diffuse and voluntary.
“A church capable of defending the inerrancy of Scripture proved less capable of hearing wounded people tell the truth.”
But the article’s deepest wound emerges in its treatment of abuse allegations against Pressler himself. Those allegations do not merely complicate his legacy; they reinterpret the entire narrative. Survivors’ testimony becomes what Foucault called “subjugated knowledge”: truth long dismissed, buried or treated as dangerous to institutional stability.
That may be the article’s most devastating insight. The denomination became highly skilled at identifying doctrinal error while increasingly unable to recognize violence within its own structures. A church capable of defending the inerrancy of Scripture proved less capable of hearing wounded people tell the truth.
Institutions, like individuals, reveal themselves by what they instinctively protect.
This is not only a Baptist story. Every religious tradition faces the temptation to confuse the preservation of authority with fidelity to God. The danger is especially acute in moments of cultural anxiety. Fear of decline often produces stronger systems of control. Orthodoxy becomes inseparable from surveillance. Loyalty becomes holier than honesty.
And yet Christianity begins not with institutional triumph but with a crucified Messiah abandoned by nearly everyone around him.
The Cross is a strange judgment on all religious systems. It exposes the recurring human tendency to preserve order at the expense of truth. In the Passion narratives, the guardians of religious orthodoxy sincerely believe they are protecting the people of God. That is what makes the story frightening. Violence rarely announces itself as evil. More often it appears as necessity, prudence, order or righteousness.
The “quiet collapse” described in the article is therefore not simply demographic decline. Southern Baptists still have churches, seminaries, agencies and conventions. The machinery remains. What appears increasingly fragile is the moral credibility of the system itself.
Foucault once remarked that the real political task is not to discover absolute truth but to examine the relations between truth, power and ourselves. Religious communities might adapt that insight theologically. The question is not merely whether a church proclaims truth, but whether its practices make truthful speech possible — especially from the vulnerable.
That is finally where institutions are tested.
Not in their confidence.
But in their capacity for repentance.
Charles T. Hawkins serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church and dean of the A.C. Marble School for Theological Formation in Ocean Springs, Miss.
Related:
Stuck in the Middle with You: “The Judgment of Paul Pressler”