At last year’s Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) conference, many were upset at the passing of Resolution 9 which solidified the denomination’s support for a neo-Marxist worldview including Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. The SBC has long departed the path of conservative, biblical ideology and has embraced — thanks to Russell Moore and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) — a philosophy of social activism primarily rooted in secular thought.
The culture of today is one that is hell-bent on the destruction of Western civilization, national sovereignty, and individualism. Evangelicals, and Southern Baptists, in particular, have embraced this worldview yet cloaked it in Christian language so as to give it the appearance of a biblical idea — though it is not. One example of this is the SBC’s Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.
This resolution asserts that these ideologies are useful in analyzing data “gaining insights” in social and racial dynamics. While the resolution does acknowledge that these ideologies have their roots in a secular worldview, conservatives are growing increasingly concerned with their validation marking them as “incompatible” with Christianity.
Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries has been leading the charge to have this resolution rescinded at the next meeting in Orlando in June. However, those Southern Baptists who adopted the resolution plan to double down on support for it.
A Q&A article came out in the Baptist Press — the SBC’s propaganda outlet — yesterday which was written by members the 2019 Resolutions Committee which downplayed the concerns that conservatives have over the Resolution. In the article, they answer the question, “Why the mention of analytical tools?” in reference to the Resolution legitimizing the use of neo-Marxist philosophy as useful. They write,
We used analytical tools to distinguish between the worldview of CRT/I’s creators and the concepts that are used from these theories by some Christians. We share the concerns about the foundation, worldview and various applications of CRT/I. However, not every observation from these theories is wrong, sinful or unhelpful.
In limited ways, insights from these theories may show us “what is” when it comes to the social dynamics people experience and help us see more robustly the nature of — as one SBC leader has described it — “racial injustice and systemic wrongs” throughout our cultural landscape. We don’t believe that a willingness to listen and learn undermines the Gospel. We are firmly committed to relying only on biblical theology for understanding “how things ought to be” and to trust only in the sufficiency of the Gospel to bring about God’s redemptive plan in our world.
But the problem is that these “theories” themselves cannot be separated from the worldview of the creators of these philosophies because they are grounded squarely in a denial of the Christian worldview. These theories — in and of themselves — deny such biblical concepts as individual responsibility and instead place the guilt of sin on systems, groups of people, and classes rather than on the one who committed the sin.
Critical Race Theory cannot, in any way, be considered biblical and must be rejected by Southern Baptists if they wish to remain true to the Scriptures and further, those who embrace such worldviews ought to be placed under church discipline and purged from the ranks of Christianity. There are no two ways about it. If the SBC does not rescind this resolution, they may as well announce their apostasy publicly like any other liberal denomination. And those who brought this resolution to the table for consideration ought to be fired from their seminaries and disqualified as pastors in SBC churches.
