From my perspective, what’s really ironic about all of this is:
About four years ago, when I began to make some noise in our conservative baptist congregation about UR, the pastor caught wind of it, and rather than speaking to me directly about it, launched into a four week sermon series against his straw man version of universalism. You can imagine how that went. I remember on one of the two of those four weeks I actually attended, he had the audacity to bring up the issue of why the conservative baptist denomination came about. He said that it was due to a rift in missiology with the American Baptists (Northern Baptists at the time). They felt that the Northern Baptists had become too liberal with the universalistic views they held which was destroying what they felt should have been the proper motive for mission work! (Gotta save those souls from hell, you know)
Now, I researched this some time later, because I smelled a rat (among several). Sure enough, the rift was actually over something other than universalism. IIRC, it was simply over how missions were done; no mention of liberal theology or universalism. But now with this having come up for Bob, I know for sure what our pastor said about this was bunk, because the American Baptist church, if it was ever universalist, clearly isn’t now!