Culture Friday - What’s happening with the SBC?

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 16th, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday and we have a special guest. You know him from The Briefing podcast, which is on its July hiatus. You probably also know him as an author and theologian … president of Southern Seminary and a member of the WORLD board of directors—Albert Mohler.

And I didn’t want to leave off another key biographical fact: He is summer camp director—special camp for Mohler grandkids—so I appreciate your taking a moment away from that work to pick up the phone.

Good morning to you!

ALBERT MOHLER, GUEST: Well, Nick and Myrna, good to talk with you. And yes, Mary and I are enjoying some time in the summer with our kids and grandkids. And it's pretty spectacular to have little ones about.

EICHER: I have to ask about the Southern Baptist Convention. You ran for president in a three-way race this summer, and then it was a two-man runoff and you weren’t among them. Can you draw conclusions about where SBCers are that they gave the presidency to Ed Litton?

MOHLER: Well, I'm not yet sure. You know, a little distance is going to be necessary. By the time we got to the convention and kind of felt that the tenor of the times, it was clear that an establishment candidate was not going to be the choice. I could do that math. But it is interesting, it was a fairly close race, if you look between Mike Stone running as a candidate of what's known as the Conservative Baptist network. And then Ed Litton, running is kind of a continuation of some younger pastors, and it's still a close thing in the SBC. It's a big question. I want to be clear, it's not a big question of whether the SBC is going to swing into becoming a mainline Protestant denomination. That's not it. But there are some subtle issues that won't stay subtle for long.

EICHER: Issues like what, for instance? Can you say?

MOHLER: Oh, sure. I think the biggest issue is the extent to which the Southern Baptist Convention can somehow rebrand itself in the context of increasingly hostile culture. And I do not believe we can do so. I don't believe that possible. There are always issues we have to deal with. But the bottom line is that Southern Baptists and others who are going to hold to any form of biblical Christianity are going to be increasingly seen as obstacles, as impediments, as regressive in this society that is so fast secularizing, and, frankly, moving left faster than anyone could imagine. And so there are limitations, I think, to what can be done here. And I think the issues we'll undoubtedly discuss today will help to make that clear. I think convictional conservative Christians are in the predicament of being considered by the world, to be what we are not accustomed to experiencing and that is, they're looking at us as people on the wrong side of history, people on the wrong side of morality, people on the wrong side of all the revolutions that are running their course these days. And I think there are limited options. I think being true to Biblical Christianity is is the only way to justify the existence of the Southern Baptist Convention, and there will be a heavy price for that.

EICHER: You mentioned “hostile culture,” that leads to one of the issues I wanted to raise: Did you happen to see the video that went viral: the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir, performing a piece that’s subsequently been called tongue in cheek‚ but the idea that “we’re coming for your children.” Did you see that?

MOHLER: I did see it, Nick. And no, it wasn’t tongue in cheek. It was cheeky, as the British might say, but it wasn't tongue in cheek. They meant exactly what they were saying. And by the way, they have every reason to expect that they are winning this. They have every reason to expect they will have our children and our grandchildren, because they are winning in that larger cultural context. And, of course, so many Christian families and parents seem to be blissfully unaware of the fact that we are losing this because insofar as our children — and you can put just about any age on that — as they are increasingly living in a world that is defined by the cultural left, by the cultural production engines of Hollywood, and the symbolic industries of Silicon Valley. The reality is, they have reason to believe they can get to our children and they intend to.

BROWN: Interesting you say that, because I’d run across this story about the Chicago Public School system: when students return to classrooms this Fall in person, they’ll have a new item on their school supply lists: condoms! The board of education voted to make this mandatory for every public school with students as young as 5th graders. We’re talking 10 years old in some cases.

The state’s Department of Health calls the decision necessary to safeguard student health. I wonder about that definition.

MOHLER: Well, it is very interesting, Myrna, you used the word health, because that has been co-opted by the progressives, as they style themselves in our society so as to mean health defined in light of the new culture, sexual gender revolution. And so you have reproductive health, a woman's reproductive health now as a euphemism for abortion, and under the guise of sex education and the sexual "health" of children. Yes, it makes perfect sense to the experimenters with our children that they would put condoms in the hands of fifth graders.

You may know of the sex education controversy at the Dalton School, a very prestigious private school in New York City, where first graders are being told about things that I'm not even sure I should mention on this program. And in all of this as a part of health. Now, we shouldn't be really surprised by this. Because in the early 20th century, you look at the effort done to the Bolshevik Revolution, for instance, or in, in Nazi Germany, "health" became a euphemism for a vision of society. And that's exactly what we see taking place.

And I think American parents, and I'll include grandparents in this category, have to be very aware of the fact that the entire symbolic system of the society is now increasingly hostile to Biblical Christianity. And so the language used by many members of Congress, the worldview, the federal bureaucracy, the worldview of those who are not only teaching, but producing the teachers in our schools, and those who are running the schools, they're all sold out to this, this is a moral cause. And I think people, often conservative Christians fail to understand that what we face are people driven by a moral cause. They intend to revolutionize the entire world. And by the way, you have to start with the kids. It always starts with the kids.

EICHER: I want to switch gears now. I know you grew up in Florida, which has a large Cuban-American community. So I thought this might be a story that would be of special interest to you, this uprising inside Cuba. We heard, “down with the dictatorship!” We heard, “we want liberty!” This is a hard-core totalitarian state, and this uprising surprised me.

MOHLER: Yes, Nick, I did grow up with Cuban immigrants, both in Central Florida and also in South Florida where I went to high school and many of them have come fleeing the unrest that led to Castro in 1959. and thereafter. And there's a sense in which, Yes, I expected that at some point—at some point—these kind of protests would arise simply because of the absolute corruption, incompetence, and exhaustion of the communist regime now that both of the Castro's are basically off the scene. But thinking that it might happen in the last several days. No, that caught me by surprise. And this should give encouragement to us all. No one knows what the Communist Party is going to do there in Cuba. It shot his own people before. But you know, it's very interesting to have people hit the streets in numerous cities throughout Cuba, this past Sunday and cry out. "We are not afraid, we want freedom." That's the very cry that gave birth to the United States. And that's a that's a human cry we well understand and we should honor.

EICHER: Albert Mohler, host of The Briefing, president of Southern Seminary, an author and theologian and public intellectual. Enjoyed hearing from you.

BROWN: Thank you for giving us a few minutes today. Now go back and enjoy your grandkids!

MOHLER: Thank you, Nick and Myrna. Great to be with you. And now, yes, after this conversation, I turn to arranging fishing on the lake and reading a book about tractors. God bless you all.

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