Once the most prominent theonomists still living, Joel McDurmon has become a leftist social gospel advocate far removed from his former position as a conservative firebrand. McDurmon recently met up with a white-privileged social gospel proponent largely propped up by Beth Moore and Russell Moore, who has lied about his supposed former life as a gang member in his affluent Atlanta suburb and regularly tells unsubstantiated tales of ongoing microaggressions against him by everyone from seminary leaders to pastors to the police.
If you want to see how quickly the Social Gospel has overtaken evangelicalism, look no further than Joel McDurmon, who was once a fire-breathing conservative theonomist who advocated for the stoning of homosexuals and rebellious youth. McDurmon was let go from American Vision after the organization hit a strong leftward trajectory with McDurmon at its head (American Vision appears to be recovering well in his absence and we wish it well).
McDurmon abandoned theonomy altogether after losing a 2014 debate on the subject in Phoenix, after which he quickly wrote The Bounds of Love, a mea culpa rejecting the Mosaic penologies, which are the foundation of theonomy as taught by the inventors of it, R.J. Rushdoony and Greg Bahnsen. McDurmon was then shown the door by actual theonomists who recognized his complete abandonment of the theology, even though he agonizingly retained the term while divorcing it from its original meaning.
McDurmon of 2020 is nearly the precise opposite of McDurmon in 2015. That year, he wrote a blog post entitled Social Justice is for Socialists, which read…
[Glenn Beck] said that anyone attending a church that pushes “social justice” should leave that church. These are mostly liberal churches, and therefore, again, I agree. Leave. Beck is right, “social justice” is a code phrase for socialism. It always has been. What happened next, however, conclusively proved that Glenn Beck was absolutely right about “social justice” in the churches: the most outspoken and highest profile Socialist in the Christian community blurted out in an angry tirade [link broken] against Beck
Kyle J. Howard is largely seen as the most prolific caricature of the woke social justice movement, albeit not the most prominent. His daily tweets, which seem to be the sum total of his activism, are regularly the fodder of right-thinking people when they desire comic relief.
Howard claims that white people made him fat. He was angry that the brother of a black wrongful-death victim forgave the white perpetrator. He supports Elizabeth Warren in the Democrat primary. Almost weekly, Howard tells black people it’s okay not to go to church because they’ll experience racial trauma. Howard says the GOP is a party of White Supremacy. Howard says white people like hunting because they want to exert power over innocent creatures.
It’s unclear what the two met to discuss or what projects they may be working upon together. Perhaps they just met to sip on lattes and talk about Pulpit & Pen induced trauma. In any other time, the two would seem like odd bed-fellows. But in the social gospel madness of 2020, it seems to make total sense.
