The Southern Baptist Convention is holding its annual national meeting right now in New Orleans. About 12,000 messengers are assembled to chart the direction of the convention for the next year. There are lots of issues that are being discussed these next few days that are really about a schism in the SBC between the very conservatives and the pretty conservatives.

The most public aspect of that conflict is allowing women to be pastors in Southern Baptist Churches. In the last year, Saddleback Church, in Southern California was disfellowshipped from the SBC for ordaining women. Their former pastor is the Rev. Rick Warren, who is one of the most famous evangelicals in the United States.

He’s been mounting a social media campaign the last few days, trying to make the case for a return to fellowship for Saddleback.

But really what is happening is Warren is trying to steer the SBC in a slightly less conservative direction while groups like the Conservative Baptist Network’s rallying cry is “change the direction” — which I will argue is code for this: become more conservative in the coming years.

What does polling say about Warren’s view of women serving as pastors?

I can answer that with some polling data that I collected with Paul Djupe and Andrew Lewis in March of 2020 when COVID-19 was just ramping up. We asked folks if a woman could operate in certain capacities in a church given that they had training and certification. The results here are restricted to just those who self-identify as evangelical.

Yeah —-there’s overwhelming agreement among evangelicals that women can teach Sunday School, lead morning worship and preach at a women’s conference. Even in the case of women preaching from behind the pulpit on Sunday morning there is very little resistance.

Nearly three quarters of evangelicals agree that a properly trained and certified woman can preach on Sunday morning. Just 12% disagree with that statement and 15% have no opinion.

Is this just because the young people tend to be more permissive of women in leadership than older folks?

The answer to that question is clearly, “No.”

In fact, there is no real age effect in the data.

Seventy percent of 18–35-year-old evangelicals are in favor of women preaching. Among those who are at least 64 years of age the share in favor is statistically the same: 69%. There’s no age category in which less than two-thirds of today’s evangelicals are in favor of women preaching.

But maybe this is just those pesky low attending evangelicals who are more liberal, and the high attenders are more conservative on this issue, right?

Nope. That’s not the case, either.

Among never attending evangelicals, three quarters of them are in favor of women preaching. Among those who attend services more than once a week, it’s 76%.

Let’s take one more look at this — I divided the sample into their view of the Bible as well as frequency of church attendance.

I don’t know how many ways I can show this: the support for women preaching on Sunday morning from behind the pulpit is strong among modern evangelicals. Even among those who say that the Bible is literally true and attend church every week, 74% are in favor of women preaching.

I don’t want to do any more data analysis because it’s getting pretty repetitive. I have tried to search for a segment of evangelicals where support for women preaching is lower than 65% and it’s almost impossible to find. The data is basically unequivocal on this point: a majority of evangelicals favor women serving in any and all capacities in their church.

Let me try to head off a bunch of criticism right now, because I’m sure it’s going to be fast and furious after this one.

CONTINUE READING: “Should Women Preach? Huge Majorities of Evangelical Think They Should,” by Ryan Burge at Graphs about Religion, his Substack feed.

FIRST IMAGE: The controversial ordination service at Saddleback Church, drawn from numerous social-media sources from the church and its critics.