By Mackenzie Grizzard | Staff Writer
In 1844, the Texas Baptist Education Society petitioned the Texas Congress to charter a Baptist university. 180 years later, Baptists are slowly becoming a minority at Baylor.
The percentage continues to drop every year, hitting 17.3% in 2024, according to the Baylor Office of Institutional Research — a decline from 26.5% in 2018.
Dr. Barry Hankins is a resident scholar of religion and American culture in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion. Authoring several books on the history of American Baptists, Hankins explains what might be causing the drop of Baptist students.
“Over the past 40 to 50 years, denominational identity has been weakening in America,” Hankins said. “People wouldn’t necessarily move to a city and say, “Well, I’m Baptist, so I need to find a Baptist church.”
Hankins cites Baylor 2012, the university’s 10-year vision and strategic plan launched in 2002 as the “shift” in Baptist identity on campus.
“When [Baylor 2012] started in 2002, the Baylor administration [and] Board of Regents really began to rebrand Baylor,” Hankins said. “So Baylor was no longer touting itself as much as a Baptist university as it was a Christian university.”
This shift in not just denominational identity, but Baylor’s overall identity could possibly be contributing to Baptist student numbers falling, according to Hankins.
“In the ’80s and ’90s, if you were a Baptist growing up in Texas, you knew of Baylor as a Baptist institution,” Hankins said. “If you were Baptist, you wanted to be a part of that.”
This new branding of the university has contributed to its primary Baptist identity beginning to phase out, Hankins said.
“Baylor is a Christian university and it comes out of Baptist tradition,” Hankins said. “But it’s much more common –– almost exclusively –– you hear Baylor being branded as a Christian university and not more narrowly as a Baptist university.”
Similarly, Hankins explains that Baylor’s R1 status and increased emphasis on research on campus could account for denominational shifts over time.
“Baylor’s got this increased emphasis on research and academics and new programs and scientific laboratories,” Hankins said. “So the Baptist component kind of becomes just another broad part of Baylor’s thing.”
Baylor’s official website says that its R1 status “affirms that the world needs a preeminent research university that is unambiguously Christian.”
“The biggest difference in Baylor academically in the past 30 years is the amount of research that takes place, the number of scientists we have with active laboratories, and the number of people in history, philosophy, English, sociology, political science, and religion that publish books and articles regularly,” Hankins said. “And this is all required of faculty at Baylor to get tenure.”
This emphasis on Christian research is one of Baylor’s core components, and what many campus labs do their best to emulate, according to Dr. Christine Limbers, who leads Baylor’s pediatric psychology lab.
“From a Christian perspective, [we] try to create science or develop science or research that’s going to enhance the lives and wellbeing of children and their families,” Limbers said. “I think that’s very much rooted in being a Christian university.”
While Baylor’s changing academic landscape is an important component to the university’s declining Baptist numbers, Hankins explains that it might relate to Baylor’s national and international reach.
“We have a bigger pool of students coming from places that were never dominated by Southern Baptists,” Hankins said. “You have this sort of recruiting emphasis now that Baylor is much more national –– it’s going after high-ranking students and it has the added value of being a Christian university.”
Regardless, Hankins insists that Baylor students are just as “devoutly religious” as they were 30 or 40 years ago, he said.
“It’s not that Baylor students are less religious than they used to be,” Hankins said. “It’s just that when they’re asked to explain how they’re religious, being Baptist is not at the top of that list anymore.”
