Southern Baptist membership falls to lowest since 1973 even as attendance rises

Southern Baptist Convention membership sank in 2025 to its lowest level in more than half a century, even as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination saw meaningful increases in attendance and baptisms, according to new data from the denomination’s research arm.

Membership fell by 3% to 12.3 million, the lowest since 1973, extending a decline that has now stretched for nearly two decades, Lifeway Research reported on Tuesday. But the report also showed that weekly worship attendance rose nearly 4% to 4.5 million, and the number of baptisms increased 5% to 263,075 — the second straight year the baptism count has exceeded the levels recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic. The denomination often treats baptisms as a key spiritual vital sign, a measure of how many people are being brought into the faith.

The numbers, drawn from self-reporting by Southern Baptist congregations, paint a complex portrait of a denomination that remains the single largest body of evangelical Christians in the United States and keeps some of the most meticulous records in American religion. They also arrive at a moment when the religious landscape is shifting: the ranks of nondenominational churches — many with evangelical beliefs and Baptist-like governance — have been growing, and the share of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated, the so-called “nones,” has stalled in recent years after a decades-long rise, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey.

“We are grateful Southern Baptists continue to show growth in key metrics like baptisms, worship attendance and Bible study participation,” Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, said in a statement.

Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, said the membership decline was driven in part by church closures and by congregations updating their membership rolls — a process that can remove people who have moved away or drifted from regular participation but remained on the books. That mechanical correction, he suggested, accounts for some of the statistical drop without necessarily indicating an equivalent loss of active adherents.

But Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in religious demographics, cautioned that the raw membership loss — roughly 400,000 people — remains substantial on its own terms. “We’ve got to put that in perspective. Losing that many people is still losing a lot of people,” Burge said. He noted that the SBC is likely shedding members through a combination of exits to nondenominational congregations, departures from the faith altogether, and deaths within a denomination whose membership skews older.

“The SBC has a baby boomer problem,” Burge said. “Structurally speaking, it’s hard to outrun that demographic cliff. I just don’t think there’s anything structurally in the data that says the SBC is going to go back to where it was 20 years ago.”

The SBC was founded by a pro-slavery faction before the Civil War and has its traditional base in the South, though it now maintains a presence across North America. It remains the largest Protestant denomination in the country, partly because other large denominations have experienced even steeper declines.