‘Our Lord Isn’t Woke’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 24, 2021

 

If you want an illustration of how far Trumpism has fallen as a working political movement, consider this: In June, the Trumpists failed to win a presidential election in which the voters were almost exclusively conservative, white, and Evangelical.

 

Ed Litton, a moderate reformer, has been elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention — and the Reverend R. Albert Mohler has been served his mess of pottage, cold and unsalted.

 

The Reverend Mohler, the publicity-hog president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, chose the etymologically apt word “ex­cruciating” to describe the intellectual contortions of Trump apologists in 2016; in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, after a conversion experience on the road to some low-rent Damascus, he declared himself a born-again Trumpist. He made the usual binary-choice argument in the usual schoolboy fashion, treating the pro-abortion agenda and sexual radicalism of the Democratic Party as a moral get-out-of-jail-free card for the GOP, for Donald Trump, and, consequently, for himself. He is probably the only public intellectual on earth to use the words “hermeneutics” and “disequilibrium” in explaining why he was supporting Trump. But his political works were not sufficient to save him: In the four-way race for SBC president, he didn’t even make the runoff. He simply was not quick enough on his theological feet to get out in front of the Baptist parade.

 

Instead, the Trumpist banner was carried to ultimate defeat by a Georgia pastor, Mike Stone. Stone is associated with the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), a group that sprang into existence right around the time Mohler and other like-minded Christian leaders were blasting Donald Trump as a miscreant and his followers as amoral enablers. CBN has an unmistakably political character, with a steering committee peopled by Trump sycophants such as former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee, Re­publican politician Bob McEwen (who while in political exile earned his daily bread as a lobbyist for socialist strongman Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire), and Senate candidate Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who famously insisted that Trump be given a “mulligan” for his infamous conduct. CBN’s efforts are amplified by low-level talk-radio carnies such as Todd Starnes (canned by Fox News in 2019 after characterizing Democrats as worshipers of the pagan god Moloch) and by such grotesque hucksters as Jenna Ellis, one of the crackpot lawyers involved in the failed effort to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election: By their fruits ye shall know them.

 

Stone put three political considerations at the center of his campaign: critical race theory, intersectionality, and Donald Trump. Trump may have been only rarely acknowledged as an issue, but he was never far away from the conversation. Stone’s faction went so far as to issue a public statement of gratitude to the former president: “The Conservative Baptist Network is thankful for President Donald J. Trump’s strong stance against Critical Race Theory and its destructive influence upon our nation.” For Stone, secular politics and the divine vocation go hand in hand against a “left-leaning culture in America that does not em­brace the Gospel.”

 

Critical race theory and intersectionality are, according to this point of view, to be understood not as mere political ideas (or academic fads, which is closer to the truth) but as positively Luciferian conspiracies. Be­cause of the Southern Baptists’ ugly racial history — they are the Southern Baptists because their 19th-century founders could not bear to remain in communion with their northern abolitionist coreligionists — the denomination is sensitive about the question of systemic racism. As critical race theory became a right-wing political obsession, the SBC came under pressure to denounce it, along with intersectionality, and interdict its use by Baptist theologians and intellectuals. But the statement that ultimately was adopted did not satisfy the talk-radio wing of the Baptist church. Instead, it stated that “critical race theory and intersectionality have been appropriated by individuals with worldviews that are contrary to the Christian faith, resulting in ideologies and methods that contradict Scripture,” that by themselves these concepts are “insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify,” and that they “should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture.” This is far short of what was wanted in some corners. One prominent Baptist theologian insists that these are not “analytic tools” but part of a “demonic system.”

 

Starnes made the politics plain, characterizing the SBC fight as an effort “to save the nation’s largest denomination from a radical group of Never Trumpers and woke critical race theorists.” Repurposing the preferred talk-radio/Fox News narrative of “We the People” vs. “the Establishment,” Stone offered himself as the tribune of the “average Southern Baptist who sits in the pews and chairs of our churches.” Rod Martin, a member of the CBN steering council, said of Stone’s campaign: “We are fighting the denominational machinery. . . . The Baptist in the pew isn’t woke.”

 

Stone, speaking to a Georgia congregation, was more expansive: “Our Lord isn’t woke.”

 

Following the Trump 2020 model, CBN has treated Stone’s electoral loss as illegitimate. Speaking on Starnes’s program, Martin characterized Litton’s victory as the product of a “serious corruption problem,” citing a Washington Post story in which an unnamed “insider” claimed that the North American Missionary Board (NAMB), a Baptist organization with a great deal of money at its disposal, brought 150 allies, including “urban church leaders,” to the annual meeting to stack the electorate for Litton. “I had people close to NAMB brag to me that they were bringing more like 2,000 to 3,000,” Martin said, “paying their airfare, paying their hotel.”

 

The fighting is intense, but the stakes are low. While it is still the single largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention is minuscule in real terms: In any given week, more people watch an episode of Law & Order: Organized Crime than sit in Southern Baptist pews, and there are almost as many Catholics in California alone as there are Southern Baptists in all Creation. There are about 14 million nominal Southern Baptists — down by almost half a million over the past year — and only about 4.4 million churchgoing Southern Baptists.

 

While Southern Baptist preachers were major figures in the 20th century (Billy Graham) and a few hold celebrity pulpits in our time (Rick Warren), the congregation has long since lost any real position of religious or moral leadership in the United States, in which intellectually rigorous Christianity is at the moment mainly the domain of Catho­lics and Calvinists, while the apocalyptic-prophetic energy has been sapped by Kulturkampf politics and conspiracy theories, with about one in four white Protestants (and, unsurprisingly, an almost identical share of Republi­cans) endorsing the basic QAnon claim, i.e. that a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles runs world affairs. The conspiracy cults have grown so predominant that Russell Moore, formerly the head of the Southern Baptist Con­vention’s public-policy group, says he has been “talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.”

 

A moribund organization engages in a bitter fight over control of its scanty remaining resources, to the great detriment of the organization and its mission and to the material benefit of a few would-be media personalities and frustrated office-seekers.

 

Sound familiar?