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The Southern Baptist Convention tamped down a push from the right at its largest meeting in decades on Tuesday, electing a new president who has worked to bridge racial divides...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Southern Baptist Convention tamped down a push from the right at its largest meeting in decades on Tuesday, electing a new president who has worked to bridge racial divides in the church and defeating an effort to make an issue of critical race theory. Ed Litton, a pastor from Alabama, won 52% of the vote in a runoff against Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor backed by a new group called the Conservative Baptist Network that has sought to move the already-conservative denomination further right. Litton, who is white, was nominated by Fred Luter, the only Black pasto...

Stone had campaigned aggressively, including speaking at churches across the country and even appearing on Fox & Friends on Tuesday before the vote. And the Conservative Baptist Network had encouraged supporters to come to the meeting as voting delegates. But in the end, the message that seemed to resonate with voters was that Stone — who supported a motion to repudiate critical race theory, an academic construct for framing systemic racism that has been a target of religious and political conservatives — was a divisive choice. “We’re a family, and at times it seems like an incredib...

Southern Baptists elect Ed Litton as their president, a defeat for the hard right Sarah Pulliam Bailey © William DeShazer/For The Washington Post Rev. Ed Litton speaks during a luncheon during the Southern Baptist Convention at the Music City Center in downtown Nashville. NASHVILLE — The Southern Baptist Convention elected Ed Litton as its president on Tuesday, signaling a defeat for the hard right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Litton narrowly defeated Mike Stone, the favored candidate of the far right. For the past few years, the convention has ...

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