In case you missed it, JD Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention addressed the Southern Baptist Executive Committee last night with a sermon decrying “white supremacy” and all those who oppose Critical Race Theory. If you can stomach it, the sermon can be watched here and begins around the 51-minute mark.

During the sermon, Greear decried his critics who accused him of being liberal and then gave a rundown of his conservative credentials; he said that he believes homosexuality is a sin and that homosexuals left a packet on his doorstep of pamphlets of people who have committed suicide because of his anti-homosexuality position. Yet, in 2019, Greear preached a sermon on Romans 1 and concluded that God believes other sins — such as boasting — are more egregious than homosexuality.

Greear then went into a tirade against people who believe that Critical Race Theory, a secular Marxist ideology that is opposed to the gospel, and labeled them as “Pharisees” and called them “demonic.”

“We should mourn when closet racists and neo-Confederates feel more at home in our churches than do many of our people of color,” he said. “The reality is that if we in the SBC had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that racism and discrimination has left in our country as we have passion to decry CRT, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Of course, those “neo-Confederates” he is referring to would be the most vocal anti-Marxist critics in the denomination. Those would include men like Tom Ascol and Tom Buck, even Voddie Baucham. And, of course, it would include the countless journalists out there covering the stories including Reformation Charlotte, Capstone Report, Worldview Conversations, and Protestia, among many others.

If Greear were after unity, he’d denounce the heresy that is swarming the denomination and call for unity around the truth. Instead, Greear labels those who defend biblical doctrine as “pharisees” and calls on the denomination to repudiate them.

“Brothers and sisters, in the 1980s, we repudiated the leaven of the liberals, a leaven that threatened to poison the gospel,” he said. “Are we now going to repudiate the leaven of the Pharisees, which can choke out the gospel just as easily?”

Greear also demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of Jesus’ issue with the Pharisees when said that the Pharisees in the New Testament had correct doctrine, but that their problem was that they opposed Jesus. The Scriptures, however, do not teach that the Pharisees had correct doctrine — Jesus’ problem with them is that they were false teachers, just like those who push Critical Race Theory.