Why did Liberals and Leftists allow Conservatives to seize control of the American church back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s uncontested? Especially the highly influential Southern Baptist Convention.

Paul Pressler was an infamous pedophile who worked around the clock to infiltrate and monitor seminaries around the country, marginalizing and snuffing out more progressive would-be pastors in the cradle. He maintained a network of other pedophiles in the SBC, numbering in the tens of thousands of congregations, whom he protected with his connections as a prominent judge and activist. The man spent 40 years grooming fundamentalist fanatics for political positions throughout the South and beyond in both state and federal government. He had the ears of Reagan and HW Bush themselves.

His politically aggressive brand of Christianity was a synthesis of his grandfather’s belief in a Classical Liberal Jeffersonian White-Supremacist Republic with the Cross. And it spread beyond the Baptist world into Catholicism, Mormonism, and other varieties.

What I’m wondering is why Leftists and Liberals have never taken the ideological fight into the churches themselves? They seem to have just kinda shrugged and abandoned Christianity to the Conservatives. Nevermind the fact that many Americans are willing to kill and die for the faith, and by extension any ideologies they associate with the faith.

The American left seems to forget over and over that religion is as malleable as any other idea. In the 1940s and 1960s, there really was a growing moderate-to-progressive theological current inside the Southern Baptist Convention, especially in the seminaries and denominational agencies. It was not usually “liberal” in the modern secularist sense. Most of these people were still orthodox Christians by ordinary standards. But they were open to historical-critical approaches to the Bible, academic freedom in seminaries, questioning strict biblical literalism/inerrancy, ecumenical cooperation, and eventually more moderate positions on race, women, and politics.

To conservatives like Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, that looked like the first stage of the same theological drift that had transformed many northern “mainline” Protestant denominations that the modern right loves to disparage. They believed the SBC was headed toward modernism unless it was stopped. And there WERE concrete flashpoints before the famous “Conservative Resurgence” of the late 1970s:

The SBC seminaries increasingly used modern biblical scholarship after World War II. Some professors questioned traditional readings of Genesis and other biblical texts. The 1961 and 1962 Ralph Elliott controversy became a major denominational crisis after Elliott published a book treating parts of Genesis in non-literal ways. Some faculty and leaders were influenced by neo-orthodoxy rather than strict fundamentalism.
What we see today is essentially the flowering American equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood’s reform movement back in the early 20th century. Which gave the world hits like Hamas, Islamic Action Front, and the Freedom & Justice Party. It’s a lot closer in development and aims than the common comparisons to Wahhabism and its adherents.