It’s been a pivotal last week for the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the United States. The Southern Baptist Convention took a series of moves to the social and theological right at their annual gathering — a shift urged on by an upstart far-right movement that now appears to be in the driver’s seat.

Gathered in Orlando, Florida, Southern Baptist delegates (called “messengers”) elected a hardline conservative to be the congregation’s president, they advanced a prohibition on women serving as pastors or religious leaders, and they debated an amendment to honor right-wing martyr Charlie Kirk as part of a resolution condemning political violence.

These are all triumphs for a rising faction inside the SBC, an already very conservative evangelical denomination. The church can be broadly split up into a mainstream conservative majority (for our purposes, “moderate”) and an insurgent ultra-conservative, anti-establishment movement that has been picking up support, influence and heft within the assembly since the start of the decade.

Some of this is the culmination of a natural process. As Americans generally become less likely to affiliate with any religious denomination or organized religion, liberal and progressive religious believers leave — and more ideologically conservative and theologically traditional folks remain, leading them to dominate the work of institutions.

But in the case of the SBC, there’s another modern influence playing a role: the online right.

A bubbling ecosystem of far-right and conservative leaning influencers, creators, commentators, and podcasters is repeatedly popping up as a dividing line within the convention.

Nor is it just the Southern Baptist church, or only evangelicals, who are seeing the internet seep into theological debates. The nascent religious renewal America is experiencing — often driven by younger, conservative men finding or returning to religion — is often defined by a shift of authority and trust away from mainstream voices, establishment figures, and institutions and toward individuals in the digital media universe.

“The SBC is a perfect test case of this,” the former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge told me. “The hardliners are using social media to basically try to gin up a second conservative resurgence.”

The SBC isn’t the only denomination experiencing this, but it’s the most obvious example — and serves as a preview of what the future may be for American politics and religiosity in the next decade.

Since the start of the 2020s, the SBC has seen the gradual rise of a conservative cohort within the ranks, using internet culture and independent commentary to critique the institutional church’s moderation on a variety of social and theological issues.

They criticized the congregation’s reexamination of racial issues, of the role of women in preaching, of reforms and investigations into allegations of church abuse, and, particularly post-2020, the encroachment of “woke” thinking in an already very politically conservative evangelical denomination.

Some of this has been organic: the work of conservative pastors and firebrand preachers who would have decried this moderation in any case. But observers also see a more concerted, digital-first project driving the rightward lurch.

“This is being driven, at least in part, by social media influencers who very much want to see the SBC move in a more conservative direction. They think that anyone on their left is literally Bernie Sanders,” Burge told me. “There’s probably 10 to 15 accounts on social media that drive this narrative that the SBC is sort of drifting, they’ve become woke, they’ve become liberal.”

The influencer campaigns look much like they do in politics, with individual users sifting through speeches, syllabi from seminaries, and other materials for evidence that the SBC is being compromised by liberalism, and then blaming it for the church’s struggles with membership.

Phil Williams, a Nashville-area TV reporter, has spent the last year documenting these influencers’ slow rise within the SBC in a series of reports for his Substack, Hate Comes to Main Street, where he argues that white nationalist, nativist, and extremist rhetoric is increasingly coming straight from online influencers.

The result is a union between “dogmatic power seekers” and “characters whose controversial ideas were once seen as representing the face of hate in America,” he writes.

Central to this movement is one figure: William Wolfe, a podcaster, former Trump administration official, and director of the Center for Baptist Leadership — a think tank project from the Presbyterian-founded American Reformer publication. Wolfe has boosted fringe accounts online, spoken at far-right conferences and on extremist podcasts, and shared ultra-conservative, if not radical, views on immigration, gender, and race, while pledging to defeat the “mind virus” of “white guilt.”

“Wolfe describes this as a political project to push America farther to the right, and one of the most efficient ways of doing that, according to him, is to push the Southern Baptist Convention farther to the right,” Williams told me. “It’s very much a Christian nationalist project.”

Years ago, Wolfe did not have sway within the SBC, which included prominent leaders like Russell Moore, who actively resisted far-right influence and sought to keep the church insulated from President Trump’s MAGA movement. Fast-forward to today, Moore is out and Wolfe and his allies are increasingly capable of pushing on votes on their favored issues, like restricting female preachers and pastors, and have helped elevate a newly elected SBC president, Willy Rice, who is viewed as an ally of the Center for Baptist Leadership.

Yet various observers dispute the central claim driving the debate — that the SBC has moved to the left. Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma and an expert on conservative Christianity and American politics told me it just isn’t accurate.

“Having looked at the survey data, there’s no evidence at all that the SBC has liberalized in any kind of way, and yet that’s the message that people like William Wolfe are trumpeting: that it’s all woke now and that we have lost the gospel message,” Perry said. “They’re making it up.”

Though Wolfe and the ultra-conservative cohort don’t represent a majority of the congregation, their social media cache and rabble-rousing energy have been effective at translating internet and podcast discourse into some grassroots change, even as they still often lose votes (the Charlie Kirk amendment failed, for example, as leaders argued for more universal language). They’re often more energized and engaged than more moderate members, and are more ambitious in trying to position allies in influential positions within the church.

“They want to take charge,” Perry said. “They know politics is for power, and so that’s what they’re going to do when they finally get there.”

A key driver of his conservative resurgence is a numerical problem: the SBC has been shrinking at a rapid rate, not just because of the general trend of growing secularism in the US, but also because of theological splits and disaffiliations by autonomous churches that find the SBC drifting too radically to the right. Some of these splits and disaffiliations also stem from a challenge SBC leadership has struggled to handle over the last decade: a major sexual abuse crisis, which it was accused of covering up for decades.

Burge recently published a deep-dive of these membership changes himself, finding that the four largest drops in SBC membership have happened since 2020, the most recent being a nearly 400,000 drop in membership in 2025.

The result is a smaller and, according to the most conservative remnants, “purified” church. And it’s that dynamic that may continue to spread, because of the social media and influencer world we live in.

While the SBC case is the most obvious and apparent example of a populist right-wing capture of a religious institution, it may not be the only one in the coming years. Similar cases of content creator, influencer, and social-media driven populist reclamations are likely to pop up as two broader trends pick up steam, these researchers and academics told me.

The first is the general decline of membership in institutional and mainline churches: while the SBC has seen a dramatic shrinkage in the last few years, similar dynamics are at play with all the major Christian denominations. At the same time, those who are still joining these churches, either through conversion experiences or by sticking with churches after being raised in these congregations, may have a particularly conservative, traditional, or reactionary bend.

The second is the continued democratization of takes, analysis, and loose apologetics online and in the modern era’s fractured media ecosystem, where institutional, establishment and mainstream voices struggle to compete with new age creators. Just as the advent of mass printing helped Martin Luther and other dissenters challenge the church, the internet is making it easier to locate and organize voices challenging one’s pastor or church leader today. And in many cases, these voices will sound like other popular content on the internet.

“It’s a very Christianized version of an Andrew Tate kind of message and really not just a message, but also the medium,” Perry said. “They’re influencers and they’re trying to build a platform and an audience by saying the most based and outrageous things and the kind of people they’re attracting are these disaffected young men who are angry and very online and Christian enough to say, yes, I want traditional values and this sounds like the right thing.”

In the last 15 years, these independent voices have only grown and multiplied as new platforms have emerged, Heidi Campbell, a professor of communication at Texas A&M University, who studies the relationship between religion and digital cultures, told me.

“With new platforms — from Substacks to TikTok — we see both the rise of [independent critics], and voices that are promoting the institution,” Campbell told me. “Those [establishment voices] oftentimes are discredited as ‘PR’ and they respond to a lot of these independent voices that are emerging, whether they’re conservative or they’re progressive in these different denominations.”

That Christian influencers are on the rise is not groundbreaking, but the difference in the post-pandemic era is that they now wield tremendous influence outside mainstream religious institutions — and can come to rival institutional voices.

“People see that, hey, I can actually leverage this to have a platform. So we see people being more strategic, in whether to critique or to affirm my religious community, the religious institutions that are part of that,” Campbell said. “You have theobros, theo-blogians…these people who are kind of merging religion with conservative ideologies.”

In her research Campbell finds that there are probably equal shares of pro- and anti-institutional voices spread across different subcultures, but paired with the rise of Christian nationalist commentary, one side tends to get more disproportionate attention, coverage, and, in turn, influence.

In my own reporting, I’ve often stumbled upon commentators and influencers pushing for “traditionalism” within American Catholicism and various Protestant communities. Some of these content creators are engaged in the kind of video-first debating culture that has been popularized online since 2020, but this medium has also become one of the primary forms that young people, the religiously curious, and converts are being educated on faith.

YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are packed to the gills with pop, folk and self-taught theologians, vloggers, missionaries, critics, and pseudo-scholars who seek to explain everything from the Trinity and transubstantiation, to “how to” videos for picking the best Christian faith tradition or “retaking” your local Protestant or Catholic church/congregation.

Perry told me that, at least in the evangelical Christian world, there is a reticence among institutional or establishment figures to engage with this universe — and that this hesitance both cedes influence to these new voices, and makes it harder to recognize the ways they’re seeping into institutional debates indirectly through members.

“The advent of the Christian right influencer has indelibly shaped the way the church is headed, to where if you are a pastor, a Christian pastor who wants to have a voice in evangelicalism broadly, you write a book, but also, you have that podcast and you have that online platform, that persona — and that’s how people are listening,” Perry said.

There has been pushback: the SBC, for example, reaffirmed last week — over the objections of some members — that there is no place for nativism or racism in its congregations and their support for religious liberty. The evangelical conservative wing of Presbyterianism in America, the PCA, similarly reprimanded a right-wing influencer and pastor for charged rhetoric.

But conversations within religions often mirror conversations outside of it, and it can be hard to identify the boundaries between the two. Just as right-leaning evangelical churches are now being riven by MAGA-era culture wars, mainline Protestant churches have splintered in the past over resolutions promoting greater tolerance and inclusion for women, minorities, and LGBT members. There are liberals who drift from their faith entirely over its perceived conservatism, just as some relatively secular conservatives adopt an “evangelical” label as a political signifier.

“Social media has accelerated what was already happening, but because of the phenomenon of algorithms, COVID, and Trump, it has closed a door to where there just doesn’t seem to be opportunities to turn back,” Perry said.

That trend holds serious implications for American religiosity and politics: churches getting smaller, losing their cultural influence and ability to form consciences and regulate morality, and giving it up to figures who want to use them for political and social goals.

And America is already seeing some of this playing out: the rise of loose, isolated, and culturally weak nondenominational churches, who are free from the accumulated weight of politics and history that can drag down larger institutional churches, but also lack significant reach beyond their immediate flock. Then there are the “unchurched evangelicals” who some religious leaders view as congregations of one, and who often pick and choose beliefs that align with the culture war in their feeds.

“We’re very much a bottom-up society now, not a top-down society,” Burge told me.

There are counter-trends: Many young people have joined a faith community in recent years because they deliberately want to get away from modern online distractions.

But in a world where daily life is increasingly spent on screens, it would be naive to think we could so easily render unto TikTok the things which are Tiktok’s. Last week’s convention won’t be the last example.