Much thanks is due to people like Dr. Paul Pressler, Paige Patterson, Wm. Criswell and Dr. Adrian Rogers, who, beginning in the late 60's throughout the 70's contending that the liberal drift of its seminaries and church leadership, was forcing the church on a trajectory toward distinction! Rogers was elected to the office of President of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979 and served three terms.
Members of this conservative force in the Convention conducted surveys of beginning seminary students showing 87% of them believed "that Jesus Christ is the Divine Son of God," while only 64% held to that belief by graduation! The group reasoned that liberalism among the SBC faculty and leadership strongly affected the faith of their students and were convinced that a leadership purge of such institutions was necessary to preserve the institution of the entire convention. After a long concerted effort of doing just that, the SBC began being a vibrant group of faithful Followers of Christ!
Unfortunately, over time, (nearing 50 years) anything that isn't working hard to stay conservative, will drift left and we are seeing in fissures within the SBC.
I can see the same parallels in our country from the conservative direction to the evil and corruption throughout our leaders but also our people who are content to content to vote them into office, finding the only sins worth punishing are, "intolerance, homophobia, sexism and client deniers!"
The leaders of the Conservative Resurgence didn’t manage to control the succession of leadership. I know Pressler and Patterson. Both are good men, but a little naive about what happens in organizations. I think they thought that all they needed to do was to get control initially, and the rest would take care of itself. Moreover, the SBC didn’t clean out the CBF types from the state organizations. That created a festering problem and a loss of institutions.