The Southern Baptist Convention (and for that matter the PCA) has sown the seeds of its own decline. It has prepped a generation of pastors who are trained in political liberalism through seminaries where Liberation Theology and Critical Race Theory are celebrated. The history of the decline of the Mainline churches are instructive as Liberation Theology, open support for Marxism and opposition to the Vietnam War led to a mass exodus of churchgoers.
According to Mark Tooley in 2015, “The leftward drift of Mainline Protestantism, typically disguised behind vaguely phrased sermons that utilized orthodox language with often very unorthodox meanings, was largely undetected by most actual Mainline Protestant church goers, who were uninformed about the machinations of distant seminaries and church agencies operating in their name and with their financial backing.