At a rowdy, often bad-tempered meeting in Nashville, The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has elected Alabama pastor Ed Litton as its next President.
Winning 52% of the vote in a runoff, he defeated Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who was backed by a new group called the Conservative Baptist Network. Prominent mainstream candidate Al Mohler Jr had been eliminated earlier.
Electing a new President who has worked to bridge racial divides in the church, at the SBC’s largest meeting in decades, is widely seen as a decisive defeat for the denomination’s insurgent right wing.
Litton, who is white, was nominated by Fred Luter, the only Black pastor to have been President of SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the US. Luter praised Litton’s commitment to racial reconciliation and said he has dealt compassionately with the issue of sexual abuse within SBC churches, another key issue for the more than 15,000 church representatives.
Stone – who supported a motion to repudiate critical race theory, an academic construct for framing systemic racism that has been a target of religious and political conservatives – was considered a divisive choice by delegates.
Following the results, Litton said: ‘We’re a family, and at times it seems like an incredibly dysfunctional family. But we love each other. My goal now is to build bridges, not walls.’
The Convention also affirmed a 1995 resolution apologising for the SBC’s history of racism and for ‘condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime’.
