On the other hand, issues like opposition to abortion are drawn directly from the Bible: Societies have an obligation to “safeguard lives,” he said. “I wish we were in a situation where we had two pro-life parties,” he added. “I started my career working for a pro-life Democratic congressperson, and he was pro-life, pro-family. That world doesn’t exist anymore.”

But opposing abortion and being vocally “pro-family” have racial implications, too. Black women are more likely to have children outside of marriage than women who are white, Hispanic, or of any other ethnicity. In 2013, 71 percent of black women who had babies were single. By comparison, roughly half of new Hispanic mothers were unwed, along with less than a third of white women. In general, single mothers are very poor—roughly 40 percent live in poverty, including 46 percent of black women and nearly 47 percent of Hispanic women. This is not the case in the rest of the developed world; a 2012 study by scholars at Duke and Stony Brook University found that the rate of poverty among single mothers in the United States is higher than that of women in 18 other affluent democracies.

Moore said that churches have an obligation to reach out to unwed mothers: “It’s hard to be pro-life without helping these women.” He framed this outreach in terms of pastoral care, rather than public policy, however—even though widespread poverty is arguably the issue that most affects single moms.

For many women, and particularly women of color, ideals of sexual purity and stable marriage might not be attainable. Since those are such a central part of Southern Baptist teachings, churches faces a difficult challenge in trying not to alienate those who don’t live up to the Biblical vision of family life. “We just need to do a better job of [framing] the Biblical good life as an attractive, winsome thing, and not a hand slapping,” Anyabwile said. “Sometimes the most difficult thing to hear in churches are those comments that are spoken from the pulpit that are cheap comments to get a laugh or to get an amen but actually are condemning. Those are easy things to say; they're not easy things to fix.”

Still, Moore and Anyabwile both insisted that these ideals are important, perhaps even more so for unwed women. “I don’t know anyone more passionate about two-parent families than a Christian single mother, white or black,” Moore said. But from this conference, it’s hard to know for sure what Southern Baptist women—single, married, black, or white—think of this issue, or any other. Over the course of a two-day program that featured close to 40 speakers, there was only one woman included in one of the main sessions.

That woman, Trillia Newbell, said she faced outright discrimination from parents of potential boyfriends and people in her neighborhood as she was growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 80s and 90s. Even after she became a Christian at 22 and joined a non-denominational church, “at times, I felt very different, set apart,” she said. “People would ask questions—things like questions about my hair.” She agreed that family life is a particular concern for black women in the church—particularly if they attend a predominantly white congregation. “One of the things that I worried about was: Would I be able to marry someone?” she said. “Would I be pursued? And if I was, would their parents accept me?”