By Allan Wall
07/31/2020
Above, SBC President J.D. Greear [Tweet him] explained the right way to love Black Lives Matter
As an evangelical Christian I respect my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters in Christ and the good work they do. I hate to see them led astray, above all by their own treacherous leadership. My advice: Free your local church from the Wokeness that has infected the Southern Baptist Convention: secede! — as your forefathers did; and as many SBC congregations are already doing again.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is generally thought of as conservative because it is orthodox on questions of Baptist faith. But alas, it is now “Woke” and a fellow-traveler with the openly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. (See here, here, and here for what other VDARE.com authors have said about the SBC’s Amnesty enthusiasm.)
And, not coincidentally, SBC is declining in membership: “For the 13th consecutive year, the Southern Baptist Convention reported a drop in its membership” [Southern Baptist Convention continues statistical decline, Floyd calls for rethinking ACP process, Staff Reports, Baptist Press, June 4, 2020]. But the Wokeness disease isn’t likely to cure itself because it stems from depraved Southern Baptist higher education.
Thus Dr. Tom Buck, a Southern Baptist minister, has warned that Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) is now teaching “standpoint epistemology,” which means you can interpret the Bible the “Western way” or the “African way” [BUCK: Cancer growing in Southern Baptist Convention seminaries, Capstone Report, July 16, 2020].
“There is a cancer in our convention, and if we don’t wake up soon it’ll be too late,” Buck warned his coreligionists in a twitter thread. The cancer, Capstone reported, is “radical subjectivism” and a “Biblical hermeneutic that is culturally relativistic.”
This is being taught at @SEBTS. The school is teaching a hermeneutic based on standpoint epistemology. Hermeneutics is not static but is “dynamic“ — it changes based upon your cultural context. This view isn’t just in error, it’s flat out dangerous! @DannyAkin, what say you? pic.twitter.com/cEq5tLtcVW
— Tom Buck (@TomBuck) July 16, 2020
Meanwhile, Southern Baptists’ flagship educational institution, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, recently pink-slipped Dr. Russell Fuller after 22 years. A professor of Biblical Hebrew, Fuller literally wrote the textbook used to teach the language, so he was no lightweight.
Fuller’s son, David, revealed why the school’s provost, Matthew Hall, canned his father:
David Fuller warned there is a serious problem of radical leftist thinking at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He wrote of his father, “He [Dr. Fuller] is unafraid to take a stand for orthodoxy even if it means losing his job. He condemned publicly the wicked social justice movement that now rages among the faculty and leaders of Southern Seminary.”
[BOMBSHELL: Fired Professor’s Family Breaks Their Silence about Mohler and SBTS, April 24, 2020].
And who is Matthew Hall? Paradoxically, he’s a confessed racist:
David Fuller said, “And in a final twist of irony, he was fired by the man he opposed so forcefully from being promoted to provost for his radically liberal views, the self-avowed racist, Matt Hall.”
Hall is a self-avowed racist. He incredibly claimed on video, “I’m a racist. … I’ll struggle with racism and white supremacy till the day I die.”
Hall has reached “Peak Wokeness,” as One News Now observed [Seminary leader reaches peak wokeness: 'I am a racist', August 9, 2019].
In May, Professor Fuller divulged that SBTS is teaching critical race theory [BREAKING: Former SBC Professor breaks silence about Identity Politics at SBTS, Capstone Report, May 16, 2020].
Perhaps even more shockingly, Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, recently expelled student Ashleigh Brock, but not for denying fundamental doctrine or spreading heresy, or even a night of drunken revelry, but for pointing out BLM’s hypocrisy. And that is heresy in the new Church of Wokeness.
On June 24, Brock posted a nine-second TikTok video ridiculing BLM and its fellow travelers. It contrasts the reactions of “People when a BLACK person kills another BLACK person” (indifference) and “People when a BLACK person kills a WHITE person” (indifference), to “People when a WHITE person kills a BLACK person” (fire and outrage) [Student ousted from Christian school for TikTok ‘hate speech’ criticizing Black Lives Matter, by McKenna Dallmeyer, Campus Reform, July 1, 2020].
.@HSUTX says they are investigating a TikTok video posted by a student, which the university says is “deeply disappointing.”
Tonight on @KTXS_News — hear what other HSU students have to say about this controversial video.https://t.co/SZY1DchW0S
— Daniela Ibarra (@DanielaIbarraTV) June 24, 2020
Of course Ashleigh’s video was attacked by Left Twitter. And two days later, HSU President Eric Brentmyer addressed the university in a video.
It was a “deeply disappointing and unacceptable social media post by one of our students,” he said, which is “not reflective of the Christian values of our institution.”
Never did Brentmyer prove that Brock said or did something biblically or doctrinally unsound or evil, or “not reflective of our institution.” Instead, he intoned “we do not want to condone behavior that questions people’s worth, their value, their dignity, or their equality.”
Of course, this is nonsense. Miss Brock merely exposed the hypocrisy of those who care about some victims but not others.
Capstone summed up the insanity:
Truth is now racist. … Apparently, truth and wit are not “Christian” values at HSU. But throwing a young student to the Woke Mob is. Whatever happened to protecting those under your care? Or tolerance? Oh well, there is a Woke Mob to please and whatever it says is racist is racist. Culture Jihad is right. This is the fruit of the Wokening of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[RACIST! Southern Baptist university cancels student for telling the truth, by Capstone Report, June 26, 2020]
For more evidence of how woke the SBC is, look no farther than J.D. Greear, SBC’s president [Tweet him], whose photo is at the top of this article.
In a video address to the entire denomination, the SBC president explained the proper way to think about BLM, its riots, and ideological agenda. Reformation Charlotte aptly explained it in the headline: SBC President Urges Christians to Ignore Facts and Statistics and Instead Chant Marxist Slogans [June 10, 2020].
After the 11-minute mark, Greear addressed BLM:
[W]e need to say it clearly as a Gospel issue: Black Lives Matter. Of course black lives matter. Our black brothers and sisters are made in the image of God. Black lives matter because Jesus died for them. Black lives are a beautiful part of God’s creation and … we would be poorer as a people without them.
[2020 SBC President’s Message Addresses Diversity, Missions, Unity, Abuse Prevention Word and Way, June 10, 2020]
OK, but what’s Greear leading up to?
“And by the way, let’s not respond by saying oh well all lives matter. Of course all lives matter,” he continued:
[Let’s spare each other the quotation of stats right now. You know if you talk to some black friends, you’ll know that they can tell you about their experiences, how some of them can be quite different from others in our country. We want rights and privileges to be extended to everybody.
What? All lives matter but really only black lives matter?
And “stats” don’t matter? What “stats” might those be?
The truth, of course, is that “Black Lives Matter” is a blood libel on white America. But Greear is saying that truth doesn’t matter, a dangerous thing for a Christian leader to say.
So how does J.D. Greear get around BLM’s Marxist opposition to the traditional family?
[T]he movement and the website has been hijacked by some political operatives whose world view and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment behind it is untrue.
“Hijacked?” BLM has been Marxist from its beginning [BLM Co-Founder Admits; “We Are Trained Marxists,” Freedom Forum, July 2, 2020].
“I do not align myself with the Black Lives Matter organization,” Greear continued, “and I think saying bold things like defund the police is unhelpful and deeply disrespectful to many public servants.”
But as a practical matter he is aligning himself with BLM.
At SBC’s annual convention in June, Greear urged SBC to “retire” the historic Broadus gavel with which it has opened meetings since 1872. The gavel is named for John A. Broadus, slave-owner who supported the Confederacy and helped found Southern Baptists Seminary [J. D. Greear Urges SBC to Retire Historic Gavel from Slaveholding Preacher, by Adelle Banks, Religion News Service, June 10, 2020].
“Here we were, a convention of nearly 48,000 independent, autonomous churches, meeting in a city that has been filled with [a] horrific history of civil rights abuses, making historic moves in the areas of diversity, abuse, and mission, using a gavel named after a Southern Baptist who owned slaves and was deeply involved in our founding,” he said.
In other words, the leader of America’s biggest Protestant denomination is demonizing his church, founded by sincere Christians who were concerned about real problems, and their country.
Why the Baptist leadership’s radical shift left? Most likely, elite Baptists yearn for respect from secular society, which they sure won’t get for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Thus, they go overboard on the race issue.
And of course, Southern Baptists — Baptist Southerners — have twice as much to prove!
All patriotic members of Southern Baptist churches should be appalled.
There’s a solution: secession.
Baptists believe in “local church autonomy,” as Greear himself said. SBC does not control the autonomous local congregations, nor does it own their local property — unlike the Episcopal church. A Southern Baptist church in Anytown, U.S.A. can secede from SBC and declare its independence.
My advice to Baptists: Get your local congregation out of the Southern Baptist Convention. Free your local church from the growing “Wokeness” infecting the Southern Baptist Convention.
Become a free congregation, responsible only to God and each other, not to woke charlatans like J.D. Greear and Eric Brentmyer.
Wouldn’t that be great?
Do it now!
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008after many years residing in Mexico. Allan’s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.