A Failure to Make a Needed Course Correction: SBC 2021, Part 1

This year’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Nashville, Tennessee, was critically important in a number of ways, but especially with regard to the election of a new president. After witnessing three years of J. D. Greear’s leadership — Greear was elected for two one-year terms beginning in 2018 and remained president an additional year because the SBC did not meet in Orlando in 2020 due to covid — many Southern Baptists believed their denomination had drifted, or even had been led, in a direction away from bedrock biblical teachings. I have written about these concerns on numerous occasions at Word Foundations.

This year, four men ran for the highest leadership position in the SBC.

• • • Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (personal website here)
    • Ed Litton, pastor of Redemption Church (formerly First Baptist Church North Mobile) in Saraland, Alabama
    • Mike Stone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Blackshear, Georgia (personal website here)

    • 

      Randy Adams, executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention (personal website here)

Al Mohler and Ed Litton were the establishment candidates while Mike Stone and Randy Adams offered conservative leadership and issued calls for reform. Stone was an insider, having served as president of the Georgia Baptist Convention and chairman of the SBC Executive Committee. Stone was endorsed by the Conservative Baptist Network, an important coalition of conservative churches, pastors, and laymen.

Randy Adams was considered more of an outsider with regard to the denomination’s inner circle of leaders. He strongly challenged the status quo. He even released a paper, SBC News, that carried reports of corruption in various SBC entities. While some believe that the publication hurt Adams, consider the price Southern Baptists will pay if the stories in in it represent the way things really are. It’s something to ponder.

After the first ballot, here was the breakdown (see item 66 on page 5 of the Wednesday SBC Bulletin):

• • • R. Albert Mohler Jr. (KY); received 3,764 votes, 26.32%;
    • Mike Stone (GA) received 5,216 votes, 36.48%;
    • Ed Litton (AL) received 4,630 votes, 32.38%;
    • Randy Adams (WA) received 673 votes, 4.71%

Thus, Ed Litton and Mike Stone went into a runoff. Here are the runoff totals.

Item One: Like J. D. Greear, Ed Litton Has Accepted the Premise of White Supremacy from Critical Race Theory

On his blog, in a post dated March 19, 2018, J. D. Greear wrote,

For those of us in the majority culture, this process has begun with  a posture of listening, not talking. The definition of a blind spot, after all, is a weakness that we don’t know that we have. Historically, the most insidious blind spots result from positions of privilege and power. If we are serious about discovering these blind spots, it means committing ourselves to uncomfortable conversations where we seek more to understand than we do to be understood.

Note the phrase “from positions of privilege and power.” This language presupposes white privilege, which is discussed on this page. An article at Capstone Report highlighting Greear’s statements and the assumptions behind them noted,

Greear has adopted the rhetoric of White Privilege on several occasions. According to the Christian Post in a story headlined “Megachurch Pastor Says White Christians Must Recognize ‘Privilege,’ Share Burdens Believers of Color Face,” the Post reported, “Megachurch pastor J.D. Greear of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, said that white Christians must offer to share the burden that believers of color face in society, in order to progress toward racial reconciliation.”

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The rhetoric of white privilege arose out of Marxism.
—Jordan Peterson—

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Jordan Peterson explained the rhetoric of white privilege arose out of Marxism. According to this conference summary, “The Marxist concepts of the ‘oppressed and the oppressor’ continued to manifest themselves in countless ways eventually leading to the coining of the phrase ‘white privilege’ by Peggy McIntosh in the late 1980s.  Eventually, the neo-Marxist concept of ‘white privilege’ evolved into social doctrine within progressive political camps.  Even more concerning is that the fallacy of ‘white privilege’ has found its way in through Reformed Christian circles and into the two largest Protestant denominations in the United States: The Southern Baptist Convention and The Presbyterian Church in America.”

Sharing Greear’s Perspective

Ed Litton, like Greear, apparently believes in the existence and oppressive influence of white privilege as well. On February 1, 2021, Litton tweeted,

When we acknowledge Black History Month in a predominantly White congregation, I am asked, Why not White History Month? My answer; “Every month is White history month.”

When we acknowledge Black History Month in a predominantly White Congregation, I am asked, Why not White History Month? My answer; "Every month is White history month."

— Ed Litton (@EdLitton) February 1, 2021

It appears that Ed’s wife, Kathy, shares Ed’s thinking along these lines. On June 17, 2021, Danté Stewart (Stew) tweeted, “If your praise of Black culture and people is only extended to conservative Black people who agree with you, you are anti-Black. That’s it. You don’t even love the people who agree with you—they’re only weapons to protect your privilege and power.”

If your praise of Black culture and people is only extended to conservative Black people who agree with you, you are anti-Black. That’s it. You don’t even love the people who agree with you—they’re only weapons to protect your privilege and power.

— Danté Stewart (Stew) (@stewartdantec) June 17, 2021

Note that this copy of Stewart’s tweet indicates Kyle J. Howard liked it.

Howard is a black evangelical leader who tweeted this earlier this year:

https://twitter.com/KyleJamesHoward/status/1390666669899534338?s=20

It is difficult to believe that Kyle Howard and his family are victims of racial discrimination at SBTS, but I don’t want to get sidetracked on that. Note who else liked Danté Stewart’s tweet: Kathy Litton, Ed’s wife.

Kathy Litton’s perspective is vitally important. She is involved at the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB). In fact, there is a question about whether NAMB influenced the SBC presidential election, tilting it in Ed Litton’s favor. In an article published just before the convention, Washington Post reported,¹

One insider said NAMB has been pouring money into getting urban church leaders to the annual meeting to get enough votes to secure the presidency for Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor who has promoted work on racial reconciliation. Litton’s wife, Kathy, heads NAMB’s ministry for wives. A NAMB spokesman said it will send 150 church planters to the meeting this year.

Of course, this raises serious questions and concerns. It is one thing for individuals and churches to encourage support for a particular candidate for president of the SBC, but it is quite another for an agency of the SBC itself to do the same.

SBC President Ed Litton: CRT Is a “Distraction”

So, Ed Litton, newly elected president of the Southern Baptist convention, apparently has embraced CRT’s tenets. In this MSNBC interview, he even connects the teachings of the Bible with being “woke.” Here is the seminal portion of what he said.²

Biblical principles and truths absolutely do foster harmony and peace among people of all races and ethnicities, especially within the church, the body of Christ. However, biblical teachings are not “woke.” Being woke actually is antithetical to Scripture.

This interview also is enlightening. Can Ed Litton really be so blind as to not understand that CRT has invaded Southern Baptist seminaries? Yet he claims it is a distraction, and he clearly wants to avoid a debate about it.

Conservatives Have Not Been Heard

Ed’s statements are very problematic, especially given the fact that more than 1300 Southern Baptists submitted a “Resolution on the Incompatibility of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality with The Baptist Faith and Message” to the Resolutions Committee. Did the committee honor the requests of these hundreds of Baptists? No. Instead it crafted a substitute resolution (Resolution 2) and offered it to the convention instead.

Resolution 2 doesn’t even mention CRT or intersectionality by name. Go to page 7 of the Tuesday, June 15, 2021 Daily Bulletin to read Resolution 2 and to pages 15-19 of the same publication to see a list of the hundreds of names of those who submitted the resolution that called out CRT by name. A distraction? Apparently a great many Southern Baptists genuinely wanted to address CRT and intersectionality (CRT/I) directly. They wanted to reject them because they are false and unbiblical ideologies. Remember that CRT/I had been specifically named and affirmed as analytical tools in Resolution 9 at the convention in Birmingham in 2019.

No one favors racism, but Southern Baptists have repeatedly passed resolutions against it and apologized for institutional racism in the denomination’s past. Kevin Apperson, pastor of North Las Vegas Baptist Church in North Las Vegas, Nevada, spoke against Resolution 2 because he objected to its not addressing by name the issues that desperately needed to be addressed. James Merritt, pastor of Cross Pointe Church in Duluth, Georgia, and chairman of the Resolutions Committee, responded in palpable anger.

This was inexcusable, especially since, as Rev. Merritt observed, the world was watching. Hear the eye-opening exchange in this clip from the convention, courtesy of Jon Harris and his podcast, Conversations That Matter.

After playing a video clip of this exchange on his podcast, Jon Harris described how disgusting, offensive, and manipulative Merritt’s response was.

Oh, the Irony!

I want to add to Jon Harris’s observations by noting the irony of what J. D. Greear said when he interrupted Merritt to rebuke messengers for their lack of respect for the one speaking. “Wait a minute, James,” said Greear. Then the SBC president told the messengers he wanted to remind them “that when one messenger is speaking, other messengers should not be shouting over the top of him. You can get to a microphone and have your turn to speak, but let’s respect one another, and honor.”

After this admonition from Greear, Merritt resumed his tirade of disrespect for Kevin Apperson and everyone else who supported what he said — and a lot of messengers did.

A great many Southern Baptists (even if they didn’t make up a majority of messengers to this convention) came to Nashville hoping the SBC would repudiate CRT and intersectionality. Ed Litton was narrowly elected president of the SBC against the backdrop of this reality. It is more than a little disappointing that Rev. Litton still believes CRT is “a distraction.”

Item Two: Like J. D. Greear, Ed Litton Apparently Does Not See Voting for Democrats (and Consequently Voting for Their Anti-Christian Policies) as a Problem for Members of God’s Family

A Capstone Report article dated June 21, 2019 and carrying the headline “Southern Baptist Convention welcomes abortion voting Democrats into the fold” declared,

Can there be unity with voters who support sinful abortion promoting politicians? The Southern Baptist Convention promotes welcoming those ‘who don’t vote like us,’ and President J.D. Greear criticizes evangelicals for being a ‘Stooge’ of one political party (the Republican Party.) What does all of this mean? It looks like voter suppression at the least, and an attempt to have conservative Southern Baptists voting for a Democrat in 2020.

Yet, as we have discussed in a previous post, complete political neutrality for Christians is impossible, especially on issues like the definition of marriage and infanticide. Do I need to remind Southern Baptists that man-woman marriage reflects Christ’s relationship with the church, or that infanticide is the deliberate taking of innocent life in flagrant violation of the Sixth Commandment? The article at Capstone Report continues:

A theme emerged at this year’s Southern Baptist Convention. It is unity. We can be united around the Gospel, the elites say. What they really mean is that the SBC should ignore sinful and/or incorrect doctrine so that the denomination’s decline reverses, errr, I mean insert something more pious.

Well, how do we make disciples by ignoring so many fundamental issues? Politics and women preachers are the center of today’s Southern Baptist disagreements. However, the Southern Baptist leadership wants the SBC to look at politics as a non-critical issue.

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Politics and women preachers are the center of today’s Southern Baptist disagreements. However, the Southern Baptist leadership wants the SBC to look at politics as a non-critical issue.
—Capstone Report—

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“There are deep wounds in my community, and we are seeking together to shrink the divide. It requires that we engage people who don’t look like us, who don’t vote like us, who don’t think like us, but they love a Savior like us,” Ed Litton said at the SBC Pastor’s Conference 2019 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Can someone love the Savior and not follow his Word? The Bible condemns abortion. Yet, if someone votes for the Party of Infanticide (something condemned by Scripture and church history), are they following the Savior?

How do we love Jesus?

Keep his commandments: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

It is beyond me that SBC leaders Greear, Litton, and others apparently are willing consider voting for Democrats a non-issue, regardless of what color skin an individual has. The Democrat party is anti-God, pro-abortion, and even pro-infanticide [go here, here, and here]). This is a discipleship issue! This does not mean Christians necessarily must support the Republicans, but it must mean rejecting the platform and the agenda of the Democrats! And ultimately, it must mean withholding votes from them.