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

The Southern Baptist Convention also condemned gender transition as “a direct assault on God’s created order.”

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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.

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.

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…

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