SBC Voices, a poorly-read SBC pastor’s blog published a hit-piece against Tom Ascol of Founders’ Ministries yesterday. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for hit-pieces, as some ideas and idealogues need (metaphorically) hit. However, I feel that if I don’t speak up about the vapidity, insipidness, and mental emptiness of that “blog” post I would be doing a disservice to the entire blogging community.
BACKGROUND
It’s true that I have an axe to grind regarding SBC Voices. They’ve called for a boycott of Pulpit & Pen over and over again, begging and pleading with people to stop sharing our articles or listening to our ideas. They are small men, with big potluck bellies and soft hands, who have demonstrated the inability to have thoughts independent of the Southern Baptist Borg.
SBC Voices personifies group-think and an intellectual herd mentality. Dave Miller, the blog’s longstanding curator, is the Chief Sycophant of the SBC, if there were such a position. He’s also capitalized on his gold-winning suck-up-ism to accept a position of useless space-waster at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, an SBC entity that he wanted to shut down only a few years ago. Miller’s lack of basic original thinking skills has led him to claim that critics of the SBC are “Social Media Terrorists,” said that “Discernment Bloggers” are one of the greatest threats to the SBC, claimed that those who criticize Beth Moore or gay priest, Sam Allberry, are “wolves” and “dangerous,” and said that the SBC is racist for not hiring enough people of a certain skin-tone (ironically, right after he was appointed to an ERLC board as a proud Albino-American). To be perfectly blunt, I’ve claimed that Dave Miller is perhaps the best example of the type of feckless, convictionless cucks and denominational Quislings who are destroying the SBC from within.
However, I have no reason to defend Tom Ascol, either. I’ve nothing against Ascol, but he has never defended me (not once, ever). In fact, a small part of me has watched the unmitigated bashing of Ascol from nearly every segment of woke or just flat-out liberal evangelicalism and smiled just a bit, knowing that Ascol is now feeling what it’s been like to be me for the last five years. I said as much on my public figure FB page.
In fact, after I mocked fake ex-gang member (he also grew up hunting wolverines with his cousins in Alaska), Kyle J. Howard, and what Howard calls a “twans-cuwtuwal accent,” Ascol chimed in on Twitter in to say our mockery of his gang cweds was wacist “racist.”
At the time, I shook my head at Ascol, knowing that he was feeding the Outrage Monster. He fed the victimology machine, and the cogs of that Snowflake-encrusted Social Justice cyborg eventually came for him, too.
Case in point, children. Do not feed the Outrage Monster, as Ascol did that day. It will come for you, next. Starve the Outrage Monster.
COLOR ME SURPRISED
I didn’t give a trigger-warning for that heading ^^. Deal with it.
Color me surprised to see Ascol and Founders’ Ministry characterized in Safe Spaces all around the Internet this week as some kind of Social Media bully or nefarious character.
Believe me, I know Social Media terrorists (so says a bunch of people). Tom Ascol is not one. I’m the guy who called Jackie Hill Perry a “militant butch black woman” (because she is) and mocked Malibu’s Most Wanted, Kyle J. Howard. That wasn’t Ascol. That was me.
Ascol seems to be one of the most genuinely nice people I’ve ever not met. He disagrees with far more dignity than I think most deserve, and that’s one of the things that sets him apart from me.
The scuttlebutt is that Founders’ released a 3.5 minute trailer to a documentary about Social Justice, which has the SBC Elite laying bricks from their bowel movements. Seminary presidents and SBC leaders who knew they were being recorded for footage in the documentary panicked and went on a full-out sprint to get Ascol to stop the project. They were absolutely terrified of their own words.
And so, race-baiting charismatic hustler Dwight McKissic, four woke seminary presidents, and even Jacob Denhollander—who seems to worship at the Shrine of Perpetual But Useful Victimhood—all threw what can best be described as an epic hissy.
Joining the woke SBC establishment were plenty of circled wagons in the press, including the sunshine-pumping Baptist Press, Baptist News Global, multiple secular outlets, and even the Survivor Blog Women.
Think about that: on the side of Albert Mohler are the liberals, feminists, and “moderates” whom he once kicked out of his institution during the Conservative Resurgence. That Coalition of the Woke, that Island of Theological Misfits, that Merry Band of Marxists—all are lockstep in perfect union against Tom Ascol for releasing a 3.5-minute trailer.
As they say up here in Montana, oofta. On the bright side, you can’t really call Tom Ascol divisive. I mean, look at all the people he’s brought together!
BUT WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE?
In Greek it’s called σκύβαλον, which is a not-so-nice way to say crap.
I read all the anti-Ascol material on the Interwebs of Outrage and found most of it to be a relatively shallow representation of straw-men or one-sided compilations of tweets from various outraged leaders.
Take, for example, Dee Parson’s claim that Founders is a “group of rabid Calvinists who have long hidden in the shadowlands of the SBC.” Parson’s words are inane and factually wrong, of course. Founders’ represents a moderate and mainstream view of Calvinism in the SBC tradition, and their theology is (supposedly) identical to that of many of the SBC leaders who layed eggs over the documentary trailer, most of whom are similarly known as Calvinists. Furthermore, Founders is hardly some kind of shadowy underworld on the Calvinist Dark-Webs; they’ve had a seat of prominence at the SBC for many years. Founders is about as mainstream in the SBC as you can get with any degree of doctrinal specificity. Heck, compare the respectability and general acceptability of Founders to the now-disbanded Arminian version, Connect316. There’s no comparison as to the level of prestige of one over the other.
But, as factually inaccurate as Dees ‘facts’ were, and as biased as her opinions might have been, she presented at least some form of ideas. She gave her version of evidence. She had complete thoughts. She tried to provide links, evidence, substantiation, and support for her ideas.
Here’s a screenshot of SBC Voices’ post, lest I link their publication and quintuple their daily readership to 5.
Let me be clear about the Ascol hit-piece at SBC Voices: That post was the most ignorant, cotton-headed, air-brained, sub-standard word salad I’ve ever seen masquerade as a “blog” post. What was written by William Thornton was not blogging. That post was more akin to a Facebook post made by a hormonal teenage girl about 9th-grade drama.
No, scratch that out. I have a 9th-grade daughter and she writes far more coherently than William Thornton in that anti-blog post. So, I mean no offense to adolescent girls.
What William Thornton wrote in whatever that was, was intellectually offensive. It would insult the intelligence of a chimpanzee with a learning disability. It could make a grapefruit dumber, if a grapefruit could read it. Beth Moore’s Botox couldn’t unwrinkle that post from its stupidity. Thornton smathered on banality in that post thicker than Jan Crouch’s and Tammy Fae’s makeup combined. William Thornton’s post is less than the flatulence that even semi-coherent ideas leave behind. Watching adolescent boys giggle in a farting contest would hurt my IQ less than reading that post at SBC Voices.
I’m not writing this as a conservative Christian. I’m not writing this as a pastor. I’m not writing this as a polemicist. I’m writing this a blogger, who finds what you see in the screenshot above to be repugnant. It’s downright vile that someone would try to pass off that tripe as a “blog.” At best, that’s a caption for a LGBTQ celebrity’s Instragram photo of someone gazing at water.
WHERE ARE THE DEBATERS OF THIS AGE?
Paul asked in 1 Corinthians 9:20, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?”
Albert Mohler promised us that the Dallas Statement would lead to “fruitful discussions.” Then, he threw a fit at ShepCon during the Q&A and refused to discuss his position. Now, he’s throwing a fit that Tom Ascol compiled video of his posse’ talking about the subject and is going to put it into a documentary.
Where’s the dang discussion we were promised? Where are people on the other side of this issue willing to have an intelligent conversation? I see nothing but a bunch of crybaby whine-bags demanding we just sit by and let them obfuscate their positions and sit upon their throne of nuance and reign over us with the scepter of whimsy.
Social Justice Warriors, GIVE US SOME INTELLIGENT IDEAS.
At least Ascol, Buice, Buck, O’Fallon and the gang have presented what can best be described as full thoughts in complete sentences. They’ve striven for intellectual rigor.
But this σκύβαλον at SBC Voices is total rubbish. They ought to be ashamed for trying to pass that off as legitimate blogging.
[Contributed by JD Hall]
