I wasn’t glued to the Southern Baptist Convention live stream last week, as I usually am each year when the annual meeting rolls around. First, I’m writing from the lobby of the MT GOP Convention, as I’m carrying the proxy vote for my state senator. So, I’m busy. Second, as far as the SBC is concerned, “It’s not my circus, so it’s not my monkeys.”
My church voted to leave the SBC because of its embrace of Social Justice after the MLK50 Conference, so I’ve little skin left in the game. After I preached, Modern Day Downgrade: A Call for Repentance to Southern Baptists and Other Evangelicals, in 2012, it became very clear that the nation’s largest Protestant denomination was going headlong into heresy. I again warned about the SBC – and in particular, its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, in a 2015 keynote sermon at Reformation Montana entitled, You Beat Me As With Roses. Again, I warned about this trajectory of the SBC in the sermon on New Calvinism at the 2017 Judge Not Conference. And then when I preached my goodbye sermon to the SBC on how Social Justice is not the Gospel, it got tens of thousands of views in its various publishing formats.
NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS, BUT…
I had a virtual screaming match with some Social Justice Contras yesterday, in a closed forum, who were trying to think up ways to save the SBC. As someone who has battled the SBC for more than a decade, as someone who their 2nd VP called “the most dangerous man in the Convention” back in 2012, as someone who has been called “the SBC wrecking ball,” as someone who has more scars than you can count from opposing the corruption in the SBC, and as someone who has verifiably cost the SBC at least 50 million dollars in donations (and proud of every penny), I’m telling you…you are not going to save the SBC.
And if you could, why would you? You don’t save giant piles of trash; you burn them down. You don’t put lipstick on pigs; you roast them. You don’t redecorate Asherah poles; you break them. God needs the SBC like Jesus needs more holes in his hands. I’d submit to you that the SBC is something you flush, not fish, from the toilet.
The fact is, the hopes that the SBC proletariat will rise up and overthrow our evangelical overlords is far-fetched. With each Southern Baptist entity independent of one another and, in fact, independent from the Convention, with the trustee selection process so laughably nepotistic, and with the resolutions committee chosen by the President, the entire Convention is designed to withstand a near-total uprising. Every single entity is made to withstand near-total opposition from SBC messengers and be immune to their resolutions.
Entity heads are all universally more progressive than Baptists in the pew, and altogether unaccountable to them. They are only accountable to trustees that they themselves chose through a process of nomination they control. The ERLC, Lifeway, NAMB, the Executive Committee, the IMB, and the seminaries are all woke. We will not overcome that, despite our numbers. They designed it that way.
THE INFAMOUS ‘CRITICAL RACE THEORY’ RESOLUTION THIS WEEK DEMONSTRATES FUTILITY OF OUR RESISTANCE
Anyone vaguely familiar with politico-economic theory knows that what is being promoted by SBC leaders over the last 36 (or so) months is Critical Theory, first developed by the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism in Germany (then Columbia University, and ultimately, back at West Berlin). Critical Theory was then tweaked by Richard Delgado, Derick Bell, and Patricia Williams in the late 1980s.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a bit of a misnomer. CRT doesn’t only apply to race, but to any so-called “identity group,” the most prominent of which is race, but others include sexual orientation, victimization, gender, and students. Critical Race Theory expounds upon the Critical Theory of the Cultural Marxists, and is responsible for the phenomenon known as “identity politics.”
The ties between Critical Race Theory and Marxism are not fanatical. Anyone asserting that we should be donning a tinfoil hat for saying so betray their own illiteracy. The claims that CRT, Cultural Marxism, Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, and Intersectionality have roots in classical Marxism are not far-fetched. The connections are factual and undeniable, and a lecture explaining their development from Karl Marx can be found here. Or, you know, read a book. In fact, these developments are not merely connected to Marxism…they are Marxism.
Thousands of us have been warning that what Southern Baptist leaders and Institutions have been promoting has a name…Critical Race Theory. Low and behold, shoved into a stack of Resolutions that were read and passed at a record pace – so quickly, most SBC messengers didn’t even have time to read, let alone research it – was a resolution endorsing the use of Critical Race Theory.
The resolution endorsing CRT included an asterisk meant to appease critics. The “asterisk,” so to speak, were several words of caution about letting CRT supplant or replace Scripture. Instead, the resolution argued, CRT could be used as a “helpful analytical tool.”
For almost two years, the Social Justice Contras – including myself and P&P – have warned ad nauseam that the SBC elite are engaging in the CRT. They denied it and called us crazy conspiracy wonks. And now, in the blink of an eye, the SBC messengers passed a resolution embracing CRT. From henceforth and forevermore, whenever we mark an SBC leader using CRT, they will wave this resolution as though it were a permission slip to embrace the ideology.
The devil is a genius.
Southern Baptist messengers, most having no idea what CRT is, had presented to them a resolution that says CRT can be used so long as it doesn’t replace Scripture. It was worded in such a way that anyone who is pro-Bible and neutral on CRT (the default position of ignorance) would enthusiastically support it.
Again, this is devilish.
THE REAL STORY ON HOW THIS HAPPENED
The resolution that promotes CRT was designed by its author to reject CRT. I wondered while driving across the Big Sky State to my meetings what kind of pinko leftists Commie was given a brownie by the ERLC to submit such a resolution.
Low and behold, the Capstone Report came across my feed and I saw that the person who submitted it was against CRT and wanted it rejected wholesale. When researching the author of the resolution and finding its original reading, I saw that he explicitly called it Marxist.
What Pastor Stephen Feinstein submitted to the Resolutions Committee can be found here. In particular, he writes…
WHEREAS, critical race theory and intersectionality are founded upon unbiblical presuppositions descended from Marxist theories and categories, and therefore are inherently opposed to the Scriptures as the true center of Christian union; and
WHEREAS, both critical race theory and intersectionality as ideologies have infiltrated some Southern Baptist churches and institutions—institutions funded by the Cooperative Program
The entire resolution properly identified CRT as Marxist and asked it be altogether rejected.
However, the Resolutions Committee altered the document to remove any reference to Marxism whatsoever, and furthermore, to embrace CRT as a helpful tool to understand race!
Is this not the dirtiest thing you’ve ever witnessed? It’s grotesque. They’ve taken Pastor Stephen Feinstein’s resolution against CRT and its explicit implications regarding Marxism, and twisted and gutted it to pass a resolution endorsing CRT while using language supposedly lauding Scriptural supremacy. The leftists at the top of the SBC actually weaponized our commitment to Scripture to rubber-stamp an ideology diametrically opposed to Scripture.
Don’t try to fix the SBC. It can’t be fixed. Leave the SBC, and rebuke it on your way out. Hand it over to Satan, that it can be taught.
