By painting himself as the poor widdle victim of a meaniepie leak, while entirely denying/ignoring the fact that the leak was about his abuse of his own wife, Tom Buck clearly hopes to escape the scrutiny that cost Paige Patterson his job–and not hinder his faction leader, Tom Ascol, from reaching the heights of SBC power.
I’m not even half surprised by any of these revelations. For years now, I’ve noted unsettling trends in this publication. Once again, then, we learn to our detriment that evangelicals cannot have authoritarianism and institutional sexism without it breeding scandals and abuse.
Toxic Christians have a lot of similar methods of easing their consciences and keeping themselves feeling smugly superior to others. In a lot of ways, we could even call their self-soothing methods substitutionary atonement for their real-life behavior. Today, let me show you what I mean.
If people have a stated morality that they’re not actually living, then they’re being inauthentic. Inauthenticity is not a symptom of sin nature. It’s just being human. For such people, the real morals by which they live can be found elsewhere. Whatever they’re living day-to-day, that is their moral code — not what comes out of their mouths.
SBC-lings like to imagine that their denomination is a loose federation of churches that govern the denomination from the bottom up. Yep, they’re all just big ol’ Jesus-ers who Jesus together — and, coincidentally, pool material resources to convert and control the whole world. The opposite is actually the case, as the EC demonstrated in spades that week.
In the various reactions to this mini-scandal that we’ve seen, possibly the worst hot takes of all come from his political enemies in evangelicalism: the Old Guard, whose members work to make the SBC even more regressive, racist, misogynistic, and cruel than it already is. Indeed, their reaction to Sermongate reveals a seriously misplaced set of priorities. Today, let’s check out their reaction — and see how they destroy their own claims to possessing a superior set of morals and ethics over all other flavors of Christianity.
Today, let me show you evangelicals’ guesses about why pastoral plagiarism happens, the reasons for it that evangelicals can’t discuss, and most importantly why they can’t discuss this truth.
Hi and welcome back! Last week, we heard about a minor scandal brewing in evangelicalism (and for once, it’s not a sex scandal). Ed Litton, the newly-elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), plagiarized a series of sermons from the previous SBC president, J.D. Greear. As one might expect, Read more
Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we took our first sneak peek at various statistics that will be formally released in the 2021 Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) (archive link here). And oh boy, their numbers were not good. Not at all, nope. But then, various SBC leaders tried their darndest, Read more
It’s fascinating to me to see how the SBC’s Dear Leaders spin-doctor their decline to the flocks, not to mention how they keep trying to reverse (or at least bottom out) their decline. And friends, they outdid themselves with a shockingly-dishonest press release about their 2020 numbers. Today, I want to show you how the SBC’s leaders misrepresented the truth about last year’s numbers with their 2021 Annual Report sneak peek.