The Southern Baptist Convention elected a new leader Tuesday in Dallas amid an unprecedented conversation about gender. J.D. Greear, the pastor at The Summit, a North Carolina-based Baptist megachurch, won 69 percent of the vote at the Baptists’ annual conference. He was widely viewed as the candidate more likely to broker change because of his age—at 45, he will be the second-youngest president of a denomination that skews older—his support for transparency in cases of abuse, and his relatively inclusive stances on the positions of women and minorities in the conference. As the nation’s second-largest religious bloc, Southern Baptists wield considerable political power.