On 19 June, the US Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded mostly by wealthy slaveowners in the American deep south in 1845 – which grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and which was comprised of exclusively white churches until quite recently – elected as its president the Rev Fred Luter, a black pastor of a successful Southern Baptist Church (SBC) in New Orleans.
Leaders of the convention have portrayed this as a "historic" moment for a denomination that until the civil rights movement had remained lily-white. Historically, the very term "Southern Baptist" evoked not just "white", but a particular kind of white southerner: a working-class or middle-class evangelical volubly open about his or her faith, strictly conservative in personal morals, likely to be a rural or small-town resident, and by political affiliation historically a conservative Democrat but since the 1960s disproportionately counted in the Republican column. In addition, the SBC for decade after decade experienced rapid, exponential growth, reaching at one point a high of about 18 million members of its churches.
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