A few years ago, former Southern Baptist Convention president JD Greear made headlines on multiple occasions where he capitulated to the postmodern sexual ethic the world has embraced by stating that he would use the preferred pronouns for “transgender” people he came in contact with.

In 2019, In a podcast episode, Greear said he takes the side of Andrew Walker, a major contributor to both the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and The Gospel Coalition (TGC), and would use the “preferred pronouns” of transgender people who came to his church.

“Personally, I lean a little bit toward generosity of spirit,” Greear said, “and that is where Andrew Walker is.”

“If a transgender person came into our church, came into my life,” Greear said, “I think my disposition would be to refer to them by their preferred pronoun. When we want to talk about gender, I will be clear to them about the truth. The question is that the battlefront you want to choose.”

Now, in a recent podcast episode, Greear seemingly doubles down stating that he would still hold Walker’s position and that he doesn’t view that as a compromise.

“In that previous episode,” Greear said, “I was hypothesizing about a situation where I’m sitting in my office with a dad and his transgender child, coming to me for clarity and so I make clear to them what the Bible says. But, if in the course of conversation I used the child’s self-referential pronoun as I talk with and about them, just to keep them in the conversation, I don’t think that would represent a capitulation or compromise of truth if someone chose to do that, assuming they’d been clear about the truth on the front end and the back end. That should never be done in a way that implies acceptance or affirmation, even for a second.”

It’s unclear how using someone’s preferred pronouns that don’t match their biological sex isn’t “acceptance or affirmation,” but Greear is adamant that it isn’t.

Greear also addressed his past usage of the word “whispers” when referring to how God talks about homosexuality in the Scriptures. In this same podcast, Greear acknowledged that it was a “confusing” phrase to use and that he did not mean to imply that the Scriptures downplayed the sin of homosexuality.

“I regret the word choice,” Greear said. “It was a rather clumsy way of making the point. The point I was trying to make — that Jesus seemed to save his ‘loudest thunder’ for religious hypocrites — that point is one that I stand by. But in the end, the language that I used to make that point probably obscured more than it illuminated, and I know that as a communicator, I bare the responsibility to speak clearly.”

While acknowledging that the word wasn’t a good choice, Greear said he still stands by the point he was trying to make, that God has a greater disdain for “religious hypocrites” than homosexuality. However, this isn’t exactly what the Scriptures teach. While Jesus certainly expressed disdain for hypocrites, homosexuality is the only sin that God ever destroyed two cities for by fire. And the text that Greear was preaching from at the time, Romans 1, makes it clear that homosexuality is not only the target of God’s ire, but it is the punishment itself—people being turned over to their own sin as punishment. Sexual immorality is the utmost rebellion against God.

But Greear acts as though these were only minor errors in phraseology, and while he acknowledged the he, as the communicator, failed to communicate clearly, what he did not do is address other similar theological failings around sexual morality. JD Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention — who denounced Southern Baptists as racists and white supremacists, called on Christians to stand up for LGBTQ rights, and has a pro-choice woman leading bible studies at his church and also says that people who are followers of Jesus will think about the “rights of immigrants” while at the ballot box — has denounced the Church as “cursed” like Meroz for not fighting for “racial justice” and “gender justice.”

Greear, complained in a sermon that Christians today, like Christians during the time of American slavery, have a “malaise” about matters of justice because, he says, it doesn’t “directly affect them.”

“Whether we’re talking about racial justice or gender justice or what have you,” he says, “tragically…there’s often been a malaise in the church…because the injustice did not directly affect those of us sitting in places of privilege. Like Meroz, it didn’t affect our tribe.”