Thabiti Anyabwile’s non-specific apology to non-specific people for non-specific things has accomplished its purpose; it has signaled his virtue as an introspective man and caused his ideological opponents to graciously bow to his humility. We wrote about his faux apology in the articles, Please Do Not Dignify Thabiti’s Unmanly Apology and ‘Thabiti Anyabwile’ Offers Apology to ‘White Evangelicals’ Before Pulling Back. However, we would suggest that if Thabiti is truly apologetic for gaslighting a sensitive debate on race, he’ll change his name back to Ron Burns.
Anyabwile, sounding more and more like a liberation theologian than an orthodox Christian, has spoken of Police officers as our enemies. He was included in a panel of other black social justice advocates, most of whom openly reject Christ, as co-belligerents in the black social justice agenda. He stuck up for his brother, who violently assaulted a police officer. Thabiti Anyabwile has promoted Black Lives Matter and other radical, fringe elements in the Black Nationalist Movement. Anyabwile praised the Black Panthers on a day when five police officers were gunned down.
And surely if we can all agree that White Nationalism is a sin, we can agree together that Black Nationalism is a sin. Right? Division is division, after all.
If Anyabwile is truly sorry for his rhetoric and the hurtfulness of [whatever it is he apologized for], he should change his name back to Ron Burns, so as to distance himself from his racist, angry, militant, radical past.
As we wrote in the 2016 post, The Black History of Ron Simmons and Ron Burns: Thabiti Anyabwile Advocates for Bernie Sanders, we explained that Thabiti Anyabwile is not Burns’s given name and neither is it a remnant of his past as a Muslim (for the record, Burns was born into a Christian family).
What many people do not know is that Burns chose the name Thabiti Anyabwile when he was radicalized during college, in order to identify with the militant Black Nationalist movement. One wonders why, if he was converted to Christianity and isn’t a decades-long change agent within evangelicalism, he didn’t change his name back to the one his mother gave him.
As we quoted Burns in the aforementioned post back in 2016, he wrote in Reviving the Black Church…
I left the Black Church of my youth and converted to Islam during college. I became zealous for Islam and a staunch critic of the Black Church. I welcomed much of the criticisms of radicals, Afrocentrists, and groups like the Nation of Islam. I cut my teeth on the writing and speaking of men like Molefi Kete Asante, Na’im Akbar, Wade Noble, Louis Farrakhan.
To continue from that article…
After college, Thabiti Anyabwile got married and took a job as a community organizer at a non-profit. He was a respected man at work and in his community but something wasn’t right with his life…Islam. Anyabwile, after wrestling with his faith, came to reject Islam and embrace Christianity. However, even after having become a professional Christian minister, Anyabwile kept his Black Nationalist Muslim name.
The Capitol Hill Baptist Church has now deleted the post, but the Wayback Machine still has Burns’ original bio at a cached version of the website and it acknowledges that Burns’ new name was reflective of his Muslim faith. But Thabiti, as he’s written many times, considered Islam just a part of his Black Nationalist identity. He chose the faith because it was not white. This is why Burns credits Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam with his ideological transformation. And yet, Burns still carries the name.
According to the old Capitol Hill Baptist Church website, carrying on with his fake name (Thabiti Anyabwile) was something that Burns did even after he left Islam, and prior to becoming a Christian. Anyabwile held onto his name because it had far more to do with racial militancy than religion.
To this day, Ron Burns is still a militant racialist: an angry and caustic community organizer with a real disdain for traditional Christians who will not adopt Critical Race Theory and Identity Politics.
For the Black Nationalist known as Thabiti Anyabwile, true repentance would be a return to his Christian name:Ron Burns.
