Last year, The Gospel Coalition published an article referring to Kyle Rittenhouse as a “mass shooter” and compared him to the actual racist mass shooter, Dylan Roof. Several, including Reformation Charlotte, called on The Gospel Coalition to remove the slanderous article and issue an apology to Kyle Rittenhouse.
As of today, they still have not done so.
However, The Gospel Coalition did “update” their article in an attempt to appease those who are calling on them to repent. The article, titled Why I Hate August which was written by K. Edward Copeland, originally referred to Kyle Rittenhouse as an “armed mass shooter” and lambasted him for defending himself despite the clear video evidence at the time that he did nothing wrong.
The original wording is as follows (and can be seen archived at this link):
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When armed mass shooters (Kyle Rittenhouse, Dylan Roof, etc.) are apprehended without incident, and unarmed black people are killed out of fear that they might be armed, we have a more insidious problem than “a few bad apples.” This thing is cultural, pervasive, and abominable.
Last night, The Gospel Coalition silently issued an “update” to their article, which can be read at the bottom of the original link, which states:
UPDATE 11/24/21: Subsequent information has revealed that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife. Also, an earlier version of this article referred to Kyle Rittenhouse as a “mass” shooter. I regret these editorial oversights. Collin Hansen, editor in chief, The Gospel Coalition
The new wording of the paragraph in question now reads:
When armed shooters (Kyle Rittenhouse, Dylan Roof, etc.) are apprehended without incident, and unarmed black people are killed out of fear that they might be armed, we have a more insidious problem than “a few bad apples.” This thing is cultural, pervasive, and abominable.
So, instead of retracting the perpetuated lie by The Gospel Coalition that Kyle Rittenhouse did something wrong, they simply and silently removed the word “mass” from between the words “armed” and “shooters.” Of course, this changes absolutely nothing and the entire article still implicates Kyle Rittenhouse and accuses him of wrongdoing. It also still implies that Kyle Rittenhouse is, like Dylan Roof, a White supremacist who acted maliciously to perpetuate a system of injustice against Black people
This is not an apology or a retraction and what The Gospel Coalition and its editor, Collin Hansen is doing is attempting to deflect. They know that they’re wrong, so they’re simply trying to appease rather than repent.
