They got involved in right wing extremist politics, now the "largest Protestant Denomination in America" is dying.

[lees1975]

13. His "break" was a little different than leaving a mainline denomination.

Baptist churches are not connectional, they are independent and autonomous. Carter's church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, was formed by a group of members from the Plains Baptist Church, when that congregation continued to refuse to change its bylaws to allow blacks to join. It wasn't a large congregation to begin with but a number of families agreed to start Maranatha Baptist around 1970 or so, the Carters being one of them. And a Baptist congregation in that part of the country open to blacks being members was already far to the left on other theological and doctrinal issues, and not fundamentalist. While in Washington, the Carters belonged to Washington's First Baptist Church, which was dually affiiated with both the American Baptists, formerly the Triennial Convention, and Southern Baptists. But when fundamentalists took over the SBC in 1979, FBC Washington dropped its Southern Baptist affiliation and shortly after the Carters returned to Georgia, Maranatha Baptist did as well, joining the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which was interracial and friendly to women in ministry. In Carter's later years, his pastor at Maranatha was black.

So while he broke with the denomination, he remained a member of the same church, because the church broke with the denomination. The Southern Baptist denomination is not a "church" in the sense that United Methodists are, or the Catholic church is.