The Southern Baptist Convention has lost more members in the last two decades than many other denominations have in total membership, according to religion data analyst Ryan Burge.
Ryan Burge
“The convention is down nearly 3.6 million members since its peak in 2006. That single figure is a bigger number than the total size of most Protestant denominations,” Burge wrote in a new Substack post in his series called “Graphs About Religion.”
“The Assemblies of God is still less than 3 million people. And the AG is twice the size of the Episcopal Church at 1.55 million. I mean, the entire Presbyterian Church of America is just over 400,000 right now. The Southern Baptist Convention lost more members than that in 2020 and 2021 and 2022. It’s like the PCA disappearing every year for three years in a row.”
Burge, a professor at Eastern Illinois University, has become the nation’s foremost interpreter of religion data. He is the author of several books and is best known for highlighting the presence of the “nones” on the American religious landscape.
The scale of losses happening in the SBC is made possible by the extraordinary size of the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination.
The SBC has been “the largest for the last 50 years and has played an outsized role in every aspect of American culture over the last half century,” he wrote. “I will never tire at marveling at just how fast the Southern Baptist Convention grew in the post-war period. The SBC was adding a million new members every four or five years. That’s just staggering growth for any organization. I mean, the SBC went from 6 million members in 1946 to 12 million by 1972. Just think about that for a second. That growth didn’t really slow down in an appreciable way through 1990. An incredible 45-year run that will never be duplicated again in the history of American Christianity.”
The only denomination that has lost more total members than the SBC is The United Methodist Church, which has experienced a recent schism in which about 25% of its congregations broke away.
The SBC has faced its own schisms, most notably the losses related to creation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Alliance of Baptists around 1990, as the “conservative resurgence” gained steam. But those losses pale in comparison to the overall attrition facing the denomination.
“It’s easy to become numb to the annual drumbeat of the numbers from the SBC’s reports but I think that’s unwise,” Burge said. “It’s a huge denomination that is losing members at a rate that we have never experienced in modern American Christianity.”
For more details about this and other data from American religion, see “Graphs About Religion.”
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