Trevor Atwood wrote a post at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the Southern Baptist entity headed up by a former Democrat political operative who has been steadily leading the SBC toward Globalism and Cultural Marxism, but is widely seen as a softer, gentler, kinder, and more popular leader. For many in the SBC, Russell Moore is the type of leader we’ve been waiting for; he’s conservative but pithy. He’s steadfast but likable. He’s a social media savvy leader of a new generation of Coolvinists and a functional post-millennialist who views every single issue he wants to talk as a “gospel issue,” convinced and convincing others that it’s the Christian’s job to redeem the culture and if possible, to be likable while doing it. Russell Moore is, in fact, not conservative or steadfast, and certainly hasn’t given us any good examples of confronting the culture without compromise. A brief comparison of Russell Moore circa 2005 or 2010 and Russell Moore 2018 is a stark example of how to lose your convictions, if not your soul. Moore’s ERLC is co-hosting a giant conference next week with The Gospel Coalition, the social justice/political organization that spins its Marxist propaganda with clever Christian catchwords that disguises its real purpose; to convince a generation of young Christians that liberation theology and social justice is the goal of Christ’s Kingdom.
Atwood’s post at the ERLC is entitled, Why My Church is Attending MLK50. Oddly enough, Atwood didn’t give the real reason – the only reason, as best as I can surmise – any Christian church would attend a conference named in honor of a man who by any reasonable standard wasn’t a Christian, and that is to signal their virtue as non-racists. In what will surely be a crowd consisting mostly of pale-skinned, skinny-jeaned suburbanites marching in with their Moleskine planners and Macbooks, this mostly well-meaning troupe of Caucasian men will be eager to hear from other well-meaning Caucasian men (and a few token black speakers, which fill a necessary quota in a conference such as this) about how they can receive absolution for the sins of their ancestors. They will be told that white guilt and white privilege are realities, they will be told that being “color blind” is racist, and they will be explained the central importance of Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory (but those terms will probably not be used explicitly). The attendees at this conference will gather to venerate a bi-sexual, sex-trafficking and Communist whoremonger who denied the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, and the Inerrancy or Inspiration of Holy Scripture. But, no one will point that out…at least not at the conference.
You might ask yourself what exactly we’re fighting for. What “justice” is being denied to the African American today? Are not the demands of Martin Luther King, Jr now being met? Are black people relegated to the back of the bus? Are they quarantined to different water fountains? Are there still poll-taxes being levied in poor, exclusively black precincts? Have laws not been emplaced from sea to shining sea that prohibit every possible form of institutionalized racism? What are the rights that Russell Moore and The Social Gospel Coalition are fighting for, exactly? What do they want to accomplish by hosting a conference named after a lost man, other than to find a new topic to coalesce around because these same limp-wristed weekend culture warriors have lost the guts to fight like men on traditional marriage and abortion? Atwood quotes King…
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in this stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”
That’s right. The real problem of the “Negro” striving for freedom is not the Klan…it’s the “white moderates” flocking into the conference with their Moleskine journals. This will be their penance. This is the evangelical form of saying ten Hail Marys. Attend this conference, prove you are not racist, feel bad about yourself, become a “useful idiot” in their cause of promoting Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory, and receive forgiveness for your sin of whiteness and privilege. To claim that the real obstacle for black freedom is white moderates might just be the dumbest thing I’ve read today (granted, it’s only 11AM), and it’s dumb for the following reasons:
- First, Atwood has not told us – and neither has Russell Moore or The Social Gospel Coalition – what freedoms we’re striving for that have not already been granted. They won’t specify in the course of the MLK50 conference, either. That’s because they can’t. In King’s day, there were specific freedoms (civil rights) that the Negro had to fight for (and thanks to White people of conviction, they received them). What King meant by “freedom,” Atwood does not mean.
- No doubt, Atwood confuses “freedom” with prosperity or peace, both of which are lacking in the American Black community. The real reason for that lack of prosperity and peace includes a pervasive culture of death through abortion that is significantly higher than that in the White community (cursing the community from the womb to the tomb), an epidemic of fatherlessness and broken homes that is significantly higher than that in the White community, illiteracy rates that are far higher than in the White community, and a criminality rate that is far higher than in the White community. These things lead to poverty and turmoil. Mark my words – these real sources of the problems in the Black community won’t be addressed by the MLK50 conference; that would not bring the type of positive affirmations in the press that this branch of feel-good/look-good evangelical leaders are aiming for.
The ERLC and The Social Gospel Coalition (the two hosts for this monstrosity of a bad idea) both did their best to scuttle the electoral hopes of Judge Roy Moore, based upon claims far less sensational (and far less substantiated) than those proven moral indiscretions of Martin Luther King, Jr. They both have repeatedly moaned and groaned incessantly about the grossly immoral past of President Trump (which is unquestionably bad), but are venerating a man who had gay orgies from town to town and who denied the Christian faith (or at least denied essential Christian doctrines).
Pulpit & Pen has received many dozens of questions from concerned church members saying they have explained the problems with social justice and with the character and theology of Martin Luther King, but their pastor has ignored them and is intending to attend the conference anyway. Their primary question regarding this hell-bent desire by pastors to be wherever the cool kids are is what they do about it. After all, they have already looked their pastor in the face and said, “Why are you attending a conference designed to venerate a lost man?” And, they have already been ignored by their pastor, usually, after he gives them a list of reputable teachers who will be present at the event (as though that changes something).
I would make the following assertions:
- Attendance at MLK50 at the very least indicates that your pastor doesn’t care to research MLK’s hatred of the Bible, his lostness, or his loathable poor character. Or, worse yet, he doesn’t care.
- Attendance at MLK50 indicates that your pastor is susceptible to the growth of Social Justice and mission-drift away from the Gospel (best case scenario) or he has already become a burgeoning Social Justice warrior (worse case scenario).
Attwood agrees with King’s words above, writing, “In that paragraph, I saw myself—a white moderate. And if Dr. King was right, I was a greater stumbling block to justice than the overtly racist Ku Klux Klan. It was the white moderate pastors who called Dr. King ‘an extremist’.”
Here you have – in Attwood’s remarks – the epitome of a simple-minded man, incapable of having his own thoughts, regurgitating a peer-pressure-driven political correctness that he’s been force-fed. In Attwood’s simple mind, to call King an “extremist” is to block justice. Of course, history indicates that King was an extremist. He was an extreme idolater, an extreme sodomite, an extreme Communist and an extreme heretic. But to the doe-eyed, well-meaning but shallow-thinking registrants for this conference, even the threat of being called part of the problem is enough to get them to heil Hitler, jump through a fiery hoop, and even venerate a despicable human being like Martin Luther King. The worst of all epithets today is “racist,” and to avoid that term, evangelicals are willing to go to great lengths to exonerate themselves, even attending a conference as dumb as this one.
The final irony here is this; it’s impossible to claim that the MLK50 Conference and the social justice it’s promoting has something to do with the Gospel when the conference itself is named after someone who denied the Gospel. If Russell Moore and the Social Gospel Coalition don’t know (or care) that King explicitly denied the Christian Gospel, then why would their opinion matter regarding what is and is not a Gospel issue?
If your pastors and leaders are going (or encouraging you to go) to the MLK50 conference, it’s time to exercise Matthew 18. Take your concerns to them directly. If (and when) they dismiss you as some crazy person, be prepared to face veiled accusations of racism and then take it to two or three witnesses. When that doesn’t work, take it before the church body and demand to know whether or not your church is going to shelve the Gospel for the sake of social justice busy work. If (and when) they refuse you from taking it to the church, it’s time to leave the church and find pastors with more common sense and a higher commitment to reality.
[Editor’s Note: For more information about MLK’s moral failures, sexual perversion, bi-sexuality and sex-trafficking, click here]
