Last week, the leaders of the Southern Baptist denomination, a large Protestant denomination, decided to have a convention. They voted down a resolution (resolution 9) that condemned Critical Race Theory. Unfortunately, no black conservatives were allowed to speak about CRT at the convention.
This is from the Tennessee Star:
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist, Dr. Carol Swain, to the newsmakers line to talk about her experience at the Southern Baptist Convention where she and other minority messengers were prevented from speaking up on Critical Race Theory.
Leahy: We are joined on the newsmaker line right now by our good friend All-Star panelist, Carol Swain. Good morning, Carol.
Swain: Good morning, Michael. How are you? I’ve missed you.
Leahy: Well, you’ve been so busy on the national airwaves every time I turned Fox News, there she is. Carol Swain, articulately making the conservative case. Carol, you were at the Southern Baptist Convention. And I guess there was a bit of skullduggery afoot there. Fill us in, please.
Swain: Yes, it is my first time attending a Southern Baptist Convention. And I arranged my life to give two days to this convention because I wanted to participate. And I was most interested in the Critical Race Theory issue and a resolution that the Conservative Baptist Network crafted and put forward.
And I am on the steering committee of that network. Our resolution was killed by the resolutions committee. And they put forth a substitute that was vaguely worded and did not mention intersexuality or Critical Race Theory itself.
[…]…then they shut down any debate about how the issue was handled.
[…]I was there to try to explain to people how dangerous Critical Race Theory is and how it manifests itself and how it is destroying churches. I never got to speak during the time of the business meeting. And they used parliamentarian rules to control what it’s about, I guess, at meetings.
But two people were allowed to speak for their resolution. One person spoke briefly against it and then someone called for the vote. And this was after someone from the stage had given this impassioned plea that we don’t want to look bad to the world and all of this stuff like that.
As a black Christian conservative, I’m very familiar with conservative black leaders like Dr. Carol Swain. She’s done several videos for Dennis Prager’s famous Prager University.
I recently watched an interview with Candace Owens, as well:
I recently heard her talk about “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington – a book I also have blogged about – on the Daily Wire Book Club podcast:
Very accomplished woman. She knows a lot about race and racism in America. She lived through it. I would think that her perspective would be valuable.
Here’s another black Christian I like, Dr. Voddie Baucham. He has a new book out called “Fault Lines”, which is amazing. I’m currently reading it, after watching some of his lectures and sermons online.
Here’s one I really liked, about homosexuality and transgenderism:
And another one, about cultural Marxism:
Here’s what Dr. Baucham had to say about the Southern Baptist convention, as reported by Capstone Report:
The Southern Baptist Convention messengers were cowards for not repudiating Critical Race Theory by name, said Dr. Voddie Baucham on the Todd Starnes Show.
“I don’t think it was so much buying in (to CRT) as much as white guilt and cowardice,” Dr. Baucham said. “It was obvious building up to the Convention that the issue at hand was Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality from two years ago and how that was going to be responded to. And when you respond to it with a Resolution that refuses to even name Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, that is an act of cowardice.”
Dr. Baucham urged conservative Christians to continue in the fight against Critical Race Theory.
“I think we continue to press the issue,” Dr. Baucham said. “I think we continue to name this for what it is and continue to expose the tenets of this ideology. I think we continue to demonstrate that this it antithetical to biblical truth.”
Dr. Baucham described Critical Race Theory as a “demonic ideology” that the Church must fight. The “hegemonic power” that these Critical Theories are fighting is, “at the end of the day, Christianity,” he said.
What I like about Voddie is that he isn’t afraid to name names. Here’s a useful quote from his new book Fault Lines, explaining some of the famous people and groups on both sides of the debate.
Why are people and groups like Thabiti Anyabwile, Tim Keller, Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, 9Marks, the Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel (T4G) being identified with Critical Social Justice on one side of the fault, and people like John MacArthur, Tom Ascol, Owen Strachan, Douglas Wilson, and the late R.C. Sproul being identified on the other? These are groups and ministries that have embraced CRT, and those are problematic. But there is a larger group that is sympathetic to it because of their desire to fight what they see as a problem of racial injustice.
—
Baucham, Voddie. Fault Lines: the Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe. Salem Books, an Imprint of Regnery Publishing, 2021; pp. 2-3.
Do you recognize any names in the group that supports Critical Race Theory? I used to read some of those people, but then I just stopped, because they were too liberal for me. I never read anything by John Piper or Max Lucado or Philip Yancey. The liberal Christians never had anything convincing to say against atheism, feminism or socialism. Like Mormons, they always seemed to appeal to emotions and mysticism. So I didn’t read their books.
Instead, I like to read people who have evidence, like Hugh Ross, Walter Bradley, Wayne Grudem, Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Behe, Michael Licona, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, Scott Klusendorf, Robert Gagnon, etc. It’s much easier for me to be bold in defending Christianity when I am ready with an answer. I’m not really interested in surrendering to the secular left just so that they will like me. I’d rather stand up to them, and win a debate against them. It’s more work, but I would rather do the work than be lazy, ignorant and cowardly.
It’s my understanding that Southern Baptist seminaries do not teach evidential apologetics at all. Just some pious fideism, that they’ve re-branded as “presuppositional apologetics”. And what do they do for evangelism? They’ve adopted the Mormon standard of speaking Bible verses, then hoping for an emotional reaction to them, i.e. – “a burning in the bosom”. Can you really expect fideists to stand up to the secular left? They’re anti-intellectual fideists.
When I look at the Bible, I see Jesus using evidence to convince his opponents. He uses evidence to confirm his theological claims. But the Southern Baptists seemed to have left the use of evidence far behind. No wonder they are capitulating to non-Christians. When you give up on truth, all that’s left is to try to get people to like you with marketing gimmicks.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
The SBC was founded on the backs of slaves, so their foundation is not good. They were wrong when it counted on slavery, Jim Crow, and abortion. They have supposedly repented of these abominations, but their real-time discernment has not been good.
They did come up with a strong abolitionist statement on abortion at this meeting, but some say it was a fluke.
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Two of my favorite pro-lifers say it will cause more harm than good.
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Yeah, but pro-life incrementalism has brought us to where we are today, and that is not a good place. (If 800K murdered babies per year is “winning,” I would hate to see what losing is.) We’ve gone from civil disobedience in front of murder mills to pretending that women who commit abortions are too dumb to know what they are doing and are somehow “victims” of abortion (they would be if they were the ones who ended up in jars). Stand outside of one of these death camps for long and you will see that is NOT the case.
The pro-life movement has a lot of blood, and money, on its hands for being pro-choice about the majority of abortions (under 20 weeks, babies who aren’t Down Syndrome, babies killed in “safe and clean” abortion mills, babies killed after a 48 hour waiting period, babies killed after an ultrasound, etc). Even heartbeat bills are pro-choice for babies being murdered before their heartbeats are discernible (usually around 8 weeks or so). I’ve had lots of saves of children younger than that.
You don’t see the other side pursuing incrementalism. Nope, they are in it to win it – all the way up to birth with no exceptions – on demand, with no apology. We are either for saving all babies in the womb or we are pro-choice for most. It’s not “all OR nothing” – it’s “all AND nothing else.” Abolition is the way that God does it – why don’t we even TRY to pursue that?!?
Also, it is MUCH easier to write an abolitionist law than a convoluted pro-life one, which has mostly exceptions. “Abortion is hereby illegal in the State of X with no exceptions, and violators will be subject to criminal homicide prosecution.” That’s pretty easy – if we were really serious. (Hint: we are NOT serious. When was the last time you heard a pastor preach a full-length sermon on abortion, other than the Crumbs for the Unborn sermons in January each year?)
You will notice that Wilberforce never wrote an abolitionist law that said only certain Black people would be protected from the slave trade. But, that’s what the pro-life movement does. And that’s because donations, salaries, and votes are all at stake if abortion is abolished – in the pro-life movement and GOP.
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I think abolitionism has saved precisely zero babies, since no one has ever implemented that policy. All the babies who were saved have been saved by incremental policies.
And all the incrementalists I know who have their wins want even more. They’re not satisfied, just effective and victorious.
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Actually, every competent sidewalker is an abolitionist. Now, if there are sidewalkers out there who cry out “Let’s choose life for your baby if he or she is Down Syndrome, or has a discernible heartbeat, or is over 20 weeks, etc,” then I would agree with you. But, I’ve never heard such a sidewalker and if I met them, I would give them the Gospel, because they clearly are not saved.
When I am out there, I try to save every single one of those babies. I don’t discriminate against the ones that are young or not handicapped or if the facility they are killed in is clean or whatever. Most of the babies God saves through me I do not even know any of the details of their ages or conditions until later. I’ve had saves of 4 weeks all of the way up to 20 weeks gestation. I don’t discriminate against most babies like the pro-life movement does. I TRY to save them all, unlike the pro-life movement. I fall short, but I pursue saves with an abolitionist mindset – that abortion is always wrong and never right. Pro-life incrementalism is actually pro-choice for most babies to be murdered.
And you are correct that abolition has not been tried (except in Sanctuary cities – Lubbock, TX stopped PP from killing babies there), but that is because the pro-life movement (and GOP) have too much to lose if abortion is abolished. Check out Sean Carney’s salary sometime. Or Abby Johnson’s speaker’s fees. There is a very good reason (ka-ching!) why they oppose abolition and show little urgency. There is a very good reason why the GOP did not defund PP when they had the Presidency, House, and Senate. Oh well, maybe next time.
And don’t get me started on the apathy and cowardice of the churches, LOL!
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I am thinking about specific paws, policies, and judicial appointments. I’m an incrementalist there.
My favorite people are people who can make the case at the policy level. One of the co-authors of that article regularly gets pulled into training of legislators, so they know how to craft legislation that will survive legal challenges. I’m thinking about “effective” being “legislation that survives legal challenges”.
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I think the reason abolition has not been tried is because its a position that does not enjoy majority support, and that’s what polls show. Heartbeat bills and fetal pain bills do get passed by incrementalist pro-lifers though. And those do work.
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Also, regarding the GOP not defund this or that, that’s just factually incorrect. Trump did take action to defund abortion And Title X funding.
Most abolitionists aren’t really good at knowing about practical measures that have been taken. But I major in knowing about these measures, since I’m interested in solving the problem at the legislative layer.
You should check out the work of Marc Newman and Scott Klusendorf to get a different perspective
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Here is a list of incrementalist wins during the Trump presidency:
https://www.sba-list.org/trump-pro-life-wins
That’s put out by a serious (results focused) organization.
My understanding is that abolitionists oppose all of these pro-life legislative wins, can you confirm? I’m actually not sure if abolitionists are aware of what happens at the legislative level federally or at the state-level. What’s your experience? Are they aware of legislation that saves lives, or not?
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Here’s another serious, effective organization I really like listing out their incrementalist wins at the state level:
https://aul.org/what-we-do/state-legislation/
Again, my impression of abolitionists is that they don’t know what is going on with state level restrictions on abortion, and when I tell them, they oppose them. What’s your experience? Do they know about these incremental measures by pro-life groups? And do they oppose them?
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Oh, I’m all too aware of the approaches used by the pro-life movement and the do-nothing churches. I used to be a part of it until I realized that they have more in common with pro-choice than they do with sidewalkers and with God. And the lies they perpetuate about how stupid and “victim” women are also are ungodly. It took me a lot of years to understand how the pro-life movement built this incredible and profitable industry that thrives off of abortion remaining legal while discriminating against most unborn babies. I’ve seen it from the inside unfortunately and I cannot unsee it.
I prefer the abolitionist way of Harriet Tubman and William Wilberforce. They didn’t discriminate against certain subsets of slaves. The thought of doing such a thing would have sickened them to the core. We will never know if abolition would have worked with abortion because we will never try. I support God’s Way and unlike the pro-life movement and GOP, I am anti-murder for ALL children in the womb. I just can no longer be pro-choice for most babies like they are, and besides, that totally contradicts my sidewalk philosophy.
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Its funny that you’d accuse the incrementalists being complicit in abortion when they have all the federal and state level pro-life achievements I linked to.
It seems to me that the abortion industry and the abolitionists agree that all those incremental measures were bad and need to be repealed, right?
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You’re not going to win this argument, WK, because I tried it too. And it is really bad logic. Point to one child that any incrementalist law has saved. Just one. A woman who could not have aborted her child under the new rules by changing her behavior based on those rules had they been in place at the time of her abortion. I can point to hundreds of lives that I have personally saved. Real children, with real faces, living real lives, REALLY about to be executed, but saved at the very last minute – with not one church or pro-life law anywhere to be found helping me out.
You are correct that pro-lifers have all of the pro-life “achievements.” But, that isn’t saying anything. Every child I saved was saved because I pleaded for every single life that day (not just the Down Syndrome babies, or the babies over 20 weeks, or whatever). I used to say I was an incrementalist too, because I didn’t save all the babies that I tried to save, just a small percentage. But, here is the difference: I TRIED to save every child that day at that location. The pro-lifers don’t even try. They are using incrementalism as a means to an end – and we both know how wrong that is. And ungodly.
I tried every argument myself against the abolitionists. Every one – and they all failed logically and morally. Then I started asking myself some hard questions. I encourage you to ask yourself these questions too, and be open to some harsh truths:
1. Why do the AHA (abolitionist) memes seem so powerful and the pro-life memes so weak and wussy? Is it because pro-lifers are more worried about offending murderous women (and family and friends) than saving children?
2. Why do pro-lifers talk about all of the things we can do to help the unborn but almost never encourage sidewalking? Sidewalkers are the last hope for those children – the CPCs only save babies whose mothers walk in their front doors. The front lines are on the sidewalks and there is almost nobody there.
3. Why are so many pro-lifers outright hostile to sidewalkers? Do sidewalkers convict them of their guilt for turning a blind eye to the abortion mills in their midst and on their watch?
4. Why do the pro-life churches all have ministries for the poor and homeless but (almost) never for the poor homeless babies being ripped apart down the street from their churches? Could it be that the pro-life movement has convinced them that their obligation ends with some coins in baby bottles, diapers for the local CPC, and prayer? (It doesn’t – check your Bible.)
5. Why was I getting banned from so many pro-life website comments’ sections for saying that “abortion is murder” and “abortion is a holocaust?” Is the pro-life movement more concerned with being nice, or being Christ-like and saving lives?
6. Why do so many pro-life leaders like Lila Rose talk more about the woman involved in an abortion than the child? Why do they express such incredible outrage every rare time that a woman is killed in an abortion, but not express 2500 times that outrage for all of the babies killed in abortion that very same day?
7. Are the babies being murdered by abortion REAL to the pro-lifers and churches? Do they think that they will one day face these PEOPLE (according to the Bible) and spend an Eternity with them? How would you like to face the victims that you only tried to help in an incremental, oblique manner?
8. If abortion is murder, why would ANYONE, like every pro-life leader has, oppose abolition? If I were still a pro-lifer, I would say “give it a shot!”
9. Why is it that abolitionist bills are always shot down by the GOP? I thought that they were on our side? In Oklahoma, over 90% of the state reps are Republicans, and every abolitionist bill to my knowledge has been shot down by them. The Dimms have no power in that state – none. So, only the Republicans can stop real progress. Do you notice that in dark blue states, nothing stops the Dimms from ramming through abortion up to birth?!? That is literally painfully torturing a child to death, dismembering him or her while alive. Why are the bad guys fighting for real, and the “good” guys (us) fighting with one hand tied behind our back and wearing a blindfold? I thought that OUR movement was the righteous one? I thought that these babies were real?
10. And finally, is it possible that the abolitionists are right and I have been played by the pro-life movement and GOP, to the tune of their donations, salaries, and votes?
If the GOP and pro-life movement believed as you and I do, WK, that abortion is THE human rights atrocity of our age, wouldn’t they have pursued abolition at the state level beginning in 1973 and defied SCOTUS, just like the Dimms do every time they have power in their states? That’s how drugs and abortion and same sex “marriage” all came to be. They were not legal at the federal level but some blue states made them legal and then everyone fell into line with them. But, it’s been almost 50 years and the pro-life “movement” has not even tried – they’ve done nothing more than defeated themselves at every single step.
In my dark red state, abortion is technically illegal. But, does our Governor enforce the law? Nope. And we could have shut down the murder mills under Trump and then seen if he would have sent in the National Guard to keep them open. (My bet is that he would not have – but I am not 100% certain of that.) It’s all just a game to the GOP and pro-lifers, I fear, but that won’t be the case one day. Some people like to say “God knows my heart,” but that should terrify us, since He knows it far better than we do, and the heart is ever deceitful.
As long as the wicked fight harder for evil than we do for good, there will be no progress. And the pro-life movement, GOP, and churches are not even in the game, Brother. That’s the harsh truth. Think about what I’m saying, because it’s hard to admit that we have been played and been engaging in an ungodly approach. I tried every single argument, but in the end, I had to admit that the “mean” abolitionists were correct, and that is when I exited the pro-life movement.
(One final note: I think that Texas recently at least signed a trigger law that would outlaw abortion completely if Roe is overturned. That’s close to what I’m talking about.)
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I’ll blog on the Townhall article in a separate post and we can fight about it more. Maybe tomorrow’s post.
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The SBC has a lot of issues right now; this is just one of them. They have become quite Phariseeical with much of their ways. They are some of the biggest marriage and parenthood pushers regardless of a person’s desire or suitably for either. The prosperity gospel. TULIP Calvinism.
This is the problem with not studying the scriptures in context and in sequence. Following rules is where the Pharisees went wrong.
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