High Sounding, Emotional Rhetoric that Lacks Sufficient Biblical Grounding
My concern with the term “social justice” is this: It muddies the true meaning of justice by smuggling in the concept of rights where that concept shouldn’t apply, turning charity into what is owed, and this has implications for the gospel….
[O]ne can only understand the gospel if one understands the true meaning of justice—i.e., receiving, without bias or partiality, what one has rightfully earned, whether good or bad.
—Amy K. Hall of Stand to Reason—
Key point: Under the leadership of Dr. Russell Moore, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention is leading churches to embrace a social justice movement that sounds noble but that actually has an insufficient biblical foundation.
This article is one of several Word Foundations articles highlighting elements in the social justice movement. To access additional articles on social justice, go here. Part 1 is available here.
In the March 21, 1973 issue of The Weekly Visitor, the newsletter for Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Pastor Mark Corts contended, with evidence, “The most condemning thing about liberalism that it is not liberal.”1 The term liberal comes from a Latin word meaning free. Thus, a “liberal education” is one that freely presents and examines all sides of a question. This, we learned in last week’s post, is light years away from where higher education in America is today.
Dr. Corts wasn’t just concerned about higher education, however; he also wrote about a second entity that was presenting a one-sided point of view. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission2 was sponsoring a seminar titled “A Future for the Family.” The speakers were
Harvey Cox, professor at Harvard, Howard Clinebell, professor at Claremont School of Theology, David R. Mace, of Bowman Gray, and Wayne Oates, professor at Southern Seminary. Harvey Cox did move his family into the countryside and removed telephones from his home I understand, in the interest of family life. That’s good. But why, I ask, for a denomination which so broadly includes conservative and liberal positions, cannot a family life conference such as this include men with broader viewpoints? Why does the Christian Life commission have to be so narrow minded?3
As we mentioned last week, Dr. Corts suggested that someone who clearly upheld a biblical view of the family—a speaker like Dr. Howard Hendricks or Dr. Henry Brandt—would have provided much needed balance at this conference. No such person had been invited. Dr. Corts was right. Liberal entities aren’t really liberal in the best sense of the word.
It is time that we recognize much of modern liberalism for precisely what it is—the worst kind of narrow-mindedness. It has become the very thing it fought.
—Dr. Mark Corts—
Today the CLC Today Is the ERLC—but New Concerns Have Arisen
In 1988, the Christian Life Commission became the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (ERLC). Dr. Richard Land served as the agency’s president from 1988 to 2013. Since 2013, Dr. Russell Moore has held the ERLC’s top leadership post.
The Conservative Resurgence in the SBC, a movement that saw biblical conservatives wrest control of SBC institutions, agencies, and boards from the denomination’s progressive wing, began in earnest in 1979 and was largely successful. This sea change needed to occur! Dr. Corts’s frustration over the Christian Life Commission was very much on target. Before the ERLC replaced it, the CLC officially had become a pro-choice organization! In 1976 it released “a pamphlet stating that it is ‘impossible’ to determine ‘when in the life cycle the fetus assumes the characteristics of a person.'” You show me an organization that says no one can know when an unborn baby becomes a person, and I’ll show you one that has no business leading conferences on the family for churches and Christians!
You show me an organization that says no one can know when an unborn baby becomes a person, and I’ll show you one that has no business leading conferences on the family for churches and Christians!
Under Richard Land’s leadership, the public policy arm of the SBC became more conservative and biblical in its approach to a wide range of issues, and thus overall. However, since Dr. Moore has taken over, concern has been raised about his leadership, his politics, and his participation in a movement known as the social justice movement (also go here).
Alarmed that this movement is watering down and even replacing a strong emphasis on the gospel in and by the local church, a coalition of Christian leaders recently drafted and released a statement warning of the movement’s dangers. Dr. Moore has criticized it strongly. In addition to Dr. Moore; Timothy Keller, Al Mohler, and newly elected SBC president J. D. Greear have been cited as leaders, or at least advocates, of the social justice movement within evangelicalism. The Gospel Coalition also is heavily involved.
The Issue of Race
Russell Moore’s perspective on race has bothered many. Dr. Moore apparently loves to shame evangelical whites for “white supremacy” when race largely has become a non-issue. A non-issue? Really? someone might ask. Yes, a non-issue! That’s certainly Lorine Spratt’s perspective. Ms. Spratt is executive assistant to the pastor at First Baptist Church, Bossier City, Louisiana. This church is a large, predominantly white Southern Baptist church. Spratt, who is black, wrote an open letter to Dr. Moore calling him to task for making race an issue when it genuinely is not. “White churches are not advocating racism,” Spratt wrote, “but Dr. Moore is. He is fueling racial tensions. I view his comments as divisive and antagonistic. His words do not promote unity!” She also wrote, “Please, let it be known that Dr. Moore does not speak for me or other Black Christians who believe that great strides and fearless efforts have been made by many throughout the years to abolish racism such as William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham and many others.”
Please, let it be known that Dr. Moore does not speak for me or other Black Christians who believe that great strides and fearless efforts have been made by many throughout the years to abolish racism such as William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham and many others.
—Lorine Spratt—
This isn’t to say that the problem of racism doesn’t exist anywhere or that it shouldn’t be condemned wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head. It is to say that trying to make race an issue when it already isn’t is a racist act within itself.
My family and I are members of large, suburban, Southern Baptist Church in Tennessee. The vast majority of our members are white; yet recently, we voted to hire a an African-American to serve full-time on our church’s ministry staff. No one objected or voted no in the service I attended, and I would be shocked if anyone in any of our four Sunday morning worship services did. We also have a black organist. Race simply is a non-issue!
Shane Kastler, pastor of Heritage Baptist Church, an independent Baptist church in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is not blind to what is transpiring in the SBC or the ERLC. He writes,
The SBC is becoming more of a joke every year. Their numbers continue to dwindle, as leaders like Moore continue to steer the denomination leftward. It’s not that denouncing “white supremacy” is bad. In fact, 99.9999999 percent of the country would denounce it. It’s the fact that Moore and the SBC feel the CONSTANT need to bring the issue up, that is so annoying and distracting. Moore loves to manufacture problems that he can then “speak out against” thus making himself a hero to his fawning young supporters. And in so doing he also gets attention and ink from liberal media outlets such as the New York Times and the Huffington Post, which undoubtedly strokes his ego as well.
Additional Concerns
Of Dr. Moore, Janet Mefford of the American Family Association writes,
While it is true that Moore opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, while also advocating for religious liberty, focusing merely on those positions does not paint the entire picture. Moore, as many have noted, is a former aide to a Democrat, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, who was a Blue Dog nonetheless criticized for voting for Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker and voting with Pelosi 82 percent of the time. And Moore’s disdain for Republicans has been on display over and over again.
On a number of occasions, Moore has stressed that Christianity must stop thinking of itself as a “Moral Majority” (note another Falwell swipe) because it obscures the “strangeness” of the gospel necessary to have a prophetic voice to the culture. In his piece, “Why Politics Can’t Drive the Gospel,” he expounded on the point: “We are prophetically distant, in that we don’t become court chaplains for anybody’s political or economic faction. We’re prophetically engaged in that we see the connection between gospel and justice, just as our forebears in the abolitionist and civil rights and pro-life activist communities did. The priority of the gospel doesn’t mean that we shrug off injustice or unrighteousness, but it means we fight a different way.”
But let it be noted that even as Moore tsk-tsked the wisdom of conservatives putting too much faith in political activism, lest the gospel lose its “strangeness,” he has jetted off to the White House to advocate for both amnesty and prison reform (One wonders: Did Moore “prophetically engage” President Obama about supporting Planned Parenthood or backing the radical goals of the homosexual-activist movement? Did he “prophetically engage” the president for his apathy over the genocide of Christians in the Middle East?).
The statements quoted above actually come from one item out of a total of eight Ms. Mefford cited.
Clearing Up Potential Misunderstandings
To be clear, we who are biblical conservatives do not believe that America’s ultimate hope rests in the Republican Party; nor do we believe it resides in President Trump. Republicans have many flaws. The fact remains, however, that given biblical truth, our core convictions, the current political and cultural landscape, and the alternative, it makes sense to support the Republicans and Trump. In fact, for many of us, this decision is a no-brainer!
Seeing what the Democrat Party has become, we are compelled strongly to disavow it and its anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-American, Socialist, and even Marxist perspectives. The Democrats’ obvious effort to slander4 mainstream conservative Brett Kavanaugh5 with unproven accusations and lies in order to deny him a seat on the Supreme Court is just one manifestation of their willingness to do anything to gain power and to implement their oppressive agenda. Not that many years ago, advocating violence against those who hold an opinion different from yours would have been considered blatantly wrong. Today, it’s become mainstream Democrat thinking.
Warning: This video contains inappropriate language.
The Importance of Using Our Heads, Not Just Following Our Hearts
There’s more. We do not lack compassion for those who wish to immigrate to America—but we believe in legal immigration, not in granting citizenship to those who are violating the law when they enter. It’s not the Republicans but the Democrats who lack compassion, for they are using desperate, poor individuals and families to achieve their own political ends. It cannot be just, fair, or compassionate to grant illegal aliens citizenship while ignoring and bypassing others who are following the legal process. The Bible speaks to the issue of immigration, and much of what it says is being misrepresented today. So, on this issue and many others, we must use our heads—not simply follow our hearts.
It cannot be just, fair, or compassionate to grant illegal aliens citizenship while ignoring and bypassing others who are following the legal process.
No country without borders can remain a country. Do advocates of amnesty lock their doors at night? If so, they’re being inconsistent. We don’t want strong borders because we hate those who are trying to get into our country; we want them because we are believe in protecting citizens who already are here, and in assimilating into American culture those who become American citizens. Without this assimilation, a cultural influence that unified our country for more than two centuries, E Pluribus Unum means nothing to us anymore.
In future posts, we will consider these issues more thoroughly. In the meantime, have your antenna up. Don’t be taken in by leftists’ talk of tolerance or by social justice, feel-good rhetoric.
They’re not what they appear to be at first.
Not by a long shot!
Copyright © 2018 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
top image: Lightstock
photo credit: Dr. Russell Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
Notes:
1Mark Corts, “Straight from the Heart,” The Weekly Visitor, newsletter for Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 21, 1973.
2now the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
3Corts.
Be First to Comment