Baptists are among the largest Protestant families in the world, with global estimates usually running near a hundred million once the many independent and unaffiliated congregations are included. Precision is impossible by design: a tradition in which every congregation is autonomous and many belong to no convention cannot be counted properly.
The United States holds the centre of gravity, and the American story is inseparable from race. Baptists grew explosively on the frontier and among enslaved people, and the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 in an explicit split over whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries; it formally apologised for that origin in 1995. The historically Black Baptist conventions, the National Baptist Convention USA and its offshoots, the Progressive National Baptist Convention among them, are large bodies in their own right and were the institutional base of much of the civil rights movement.
The SBC is now in sustained decline, having fallen from a peak above sixteen million members in the mid-2000s to figures in the twelve-to-thirteen-million range, with baptisms down over the same period. Its current internal disputes are public: the role of women in ministry, on which it has moved to exclude churches with women pastors, and the handling of sexual abuse, after a 2022 independent investigation found that convention leaders had maintained a private list of accused ministers while resisting calls for a public database.
Growth is elsewhere, Nigeria, India, Brazil and across sub-Saharan Africa, where Baptist unions are large and expanding. As with much of world Protestantism, the numbers and the institutional wealth are no longer in the same place.