What Just Happened? Tom Ascol on Critical Theory and Intersectionality at SBC19

Founders Ministries and the Southern Baptist Convention Crisis

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and I just got through interviewing Tom Askle, who is with Founders Ministries. You can go to founders .org, that's founders .org, to check them out.

And if you're a Southern Baptist student at a seminary, you should really check them out because it might be financially lucrative for you. They offer courses that transfer into the seminaries at a lower cost, and I know students who are taking these courses.

You can also check out, if you're not a seminary student, their conferences. They just did one on biblical manhood, which looked phenomenal. I caught some of the clips from it. Would love to listen to the whole thing.

They have a podcast with Jared Longshore and Tom Askle. So they're committed to real Christian, biblical, reformed ministry. And so for those reasons, I recommend them to you. But right now, Tom Askle and I are having a discussion, which you're about to see, on the Southern Baptist Convention, and specifically Resolution 9, which Tom Askle tried to amend.

And it didn't work out. His amendment, which he presented in good faith, was not taken that way. And it's pretty shocking, to be honest with you, especially if you're not someone who's been following this, to see how he was treated on the convention floor yesterday.

There's those who are paying attention who need hope right now. I'm in that category. And I think this will help give you some hope. And there's those who need an explanation, and I've gotten messages from both.

What is going on? How did we get here? Critical race theory and intersectionality at the Southern Baptist Convention? What in the world is going on? And so hopefully both of those things happen, or at least start to happen in this interview.

We are to the point now, and Tom Askle said this, where we need to start naming names. And Tom Askle named Russell Moore in this particular video you're about to watch. These aren't Tom Askle's words.

I would go a step further and say, you know what? Some of these guys that seem like they're on the sidelines, like Al Mohler, we need to start making a little bit of a stink about it and saying, look, we need you.

We need you to help fight this. So far, that hasn't really happened, not to the extent that we would like to see it. And the denomination is being lost. But here's the encouraging thing. Here's the encouraging thing.

Even though you have Russell Moore and J .D. Greer, and even people in the seminaries that are teaching liberation theology and so forth and so on, pride comes before a fall. And right now, those in the Southern Baptist Convention who are more woke, they have the momentum and they think that they're winning because, well, they are.

They have the mechanisms that make the convention go, the schools and the RLC. But the laymen are not necessarily with them. And this could be a good thing. The farther that this is pushed, the more headlines come out about the Southern Baptist Convention going to the left, the more laymen will wake up and wonder what in the world is going on in the church that I belong to.

And the laymen were the key to reclaiming the Southern Baptist Convention during the conservative resurgence. And so this could be a good thing. To expose what's there is good. And Tom Askell will talk about this in the interview.

But we need to know where the lines are. We need to know what people are saying and where they line up. There's no room for neutrality. There's no room to stand on the fence anymore. And so this can be an encouraging thing.

We're going to take it to the pew. That's one of the reasons Judd Saul and I and Trevor Loudon and Kerry Gordon are working on the enemies within the church, not just for the Southern Baptist Convention, but this documentary is going to go out to all the conventions that are going for the social justice movement, which is not just undermining the gospel, which is the most important thing, but it is undermining the conservative political voice that evangelicals traditionally have had in this country for the last 50 years, 40, 50 years.

And this is important for theological conservatives and political conservatives. The two are tied together. And so Tom Askell and I, hopefully in our conversation, some of these things are explained. What happened at the convention this week.

And hopefully there's some hope that's given that there are things that can be done. And I'm going to just end on this before I start the interview. But there's three options. And I presented this to Tom Askell.

We can leave, which is what I did a few years ago. I decided I don't want to be part of the Southern Baptist Convention if they're going to go this way. And that's fine. There's ways to work. I'm working outside the convention and I'm trying to encourage those in and those out.

The other thing you can do is you can go along to get along, right? And just kind of keep your head down, which is what most people seem to be doing who work for the SBC. And that's, I don't think that's an option.

But the other thing that can be done, which I've been talking about a little bit, is take taking the message to the pews, right? That's the third option. Reclaiming the convention and going all out, educating pastors, helping laymen understand and mobilizing them.

Tom Askell's heart, I think, beats the same with mine on this. He sees the same things that I'm seeing, probably at a level in which that I'm not seeing them. And that's why he's a good person to interview, because he understands what's going on.

I hope you enjoy it, Tom Askell. But the Honorable Dr. Reverend Wright Tom Askell is with us. Tom, thank you so much for what you did last night. I know it's kind of maybe a rearguard action. I want to get into what you think about everything.

But, man, I was just inspired when I saw you standing there, speaking with conviction, you and Tom Buck. I just want to thank you for being an example. I appreciate that so much. That's kind of you to say.

Resolution 9 and What Happened on the Convention Floor

There's a lot of questions that I've been getting today, and I'm hoping that we can answer some of these in this video. The first thing is, what exactly happened last night, and why is it significant?

You're talking about Resolution 9?

Yeah, specifically. Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, resolutions in the Southern Baptist Convention have no binding authority. So the convention could pass a resolution that all church doors must be painted red, and no Southern Baptist church would have to paint their church doors red.

So there's no binding authority. What the resolutions do are provide an opportunity for the convention at that time and place to express its views. And so they're not useless. And they do have some potential benefit because churches can appeal to them and say, look, man, the SBC went on record about this and calling for regenerative church membership or calling for the practice of church discipline or praying for repentance on these issues.

And so it can be useful at a church with a pastor or leadership to say, hey, we ought to pay attention to this. But absolutely no authority. So that needs to be kept in mind, and that's the context for this discussion.

But resolutions are not meaningless. So the resolution last night, I mean, there were 13 resolutions came out of committee. And usually what happens is, you know, the resolution, thank the mayor, the city, and simple things like that are just pro forma.

And those are done first. Sometimes they're bundled. And so it's easy to deal with. And then the resolutions that you can anticipate being more controversial or requiring more debate are provided at the end where you try to allocate more time.

Well, there was so much time given to some of the earlier resolutions, and it seemed like maybe the time wasn't managed as well as it could have been. By the time we get to resolution number nine on critical race theory and intersectionality, the president, J .D. Greer, said, we're going to propose to bundle resolutions nine through 13 and vote on them all together, which, you know, I was standing in the microphone and didn't want to do that.

And there were loud cries of no. And Robert's rule says that if one member protests that type of recommendation, then the chair has to abide by the protest. So that's what happened. So we said, OK, we're going to take them one by one.

But we ran out of time. So we had to allocate more time to the business session. So that was 10 minutes was given. And with the extension of time, then debate came for the resolution on critical theory and intersectionality.

Well, I've worked with several people for an amendment and tried to make it as concise and understandable as possible because you got two things working against you. Whenever a resolution comes out of committee, you've got the force of the committee.

And these are usually respected people, as they all were on this committee. They spent a lot of time going over the resolutions and in their study of the resolutions, determining which ones to bring out, which ones not to bring out, which ones to change and bring out as they've been originally submitted, and which ones that they might just write themselves.

So the convention has a predisposition to accept and affirm whatever comes out of the resolutions committee. So you've got to overcome that. And then if you're going to make amendments, you've got to overcome losing the attention and understanding of the convention because you're standing before thousands of people.

And if you're saying, you know, strike the word and put the word but and take this clause out and add this clause, it gets confusing. Right. So, you know, we went through the whole resolution and we actually came up with what I thought was a pretty good resolution.

It was like taking a camel and turning it into a racehorse. Yeah. Okay. Have we really just amended or have we redesigned? So we settled on one whereas and two resolves to recommend being added. And offered it as a friendly amendment, hoping that the committee would see it as such, not contested.

It would be accepted by the convention and added to the original resolution in the past. Right. But the committee took it as a hostile amendment or an unfriendly resolution, unfriendly amendment.

I noticed that and I want to ask you more about that. First, though, you had mentioned something earlier that it seemed like they waited till the very end and I was watching you and Tom Buck yesterday and it seemed like it was almost just jammed through a little bit.

Like, you know, I don't know if that was by design or not and maybe you don't want to comment on that, but I'm not the only one to have thought that they saved probably the something that should have taken a lot more time to discuss and explain till the end, maybe because they didn't want people to understand.

I don't know if I'm tracking right there, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, well, I mean, motives belong to God and I don't know what the motives are. I can say that it was unwise. And of course, that's a lot easier to say in retrospect than it is when you're planning things out.

But it appeared that there was a mismanagement of time. It appeared that there was at least some questionable rulings. Yeah. And the parliamentary procedure, you know, they, Mary McCarty's a brilliant parliamentarian, but everybody's fallible.

And my guess is, my guess is that there was at least one parliamentary mistake made, but I'm no expert. So that can be sorted out by people who are experts.

Yeah, well, I went back because I thought I had heard something on a hot mic last night and I wanted to make sure that I didn't mishear. And I wrote down what I heard when there was a huddle going on.

They were figuring out what they were going to do on the stage. And someone—. It didn't come from the stage.

I'm sorry? Yeah, go ahead. Say what you're going to say, but it didn't come from the stage. It came from the mic I was standing at.

Oh, you were the one that said that was the hot mic for you. Okay.

Yeah, but it's a great—I mean, I didn't say it. It was said while I was standing there. And then my associate pastor was at the mic, and I said, man, you didn't just say it. I heard the mic kept being hot, so he said it.

Yeah, well, I agreed completely. I didn't know who said it, but what they said was something about, withdraw the resolution entirely. This convention is not prepared to deal with this. They don't understand it.

That's what I heard.

And—. Yeah, that's right. And we have appealed for a personal point of privilege, which trumps everything. But that personal point of privilege was never acknowledged. And, you know, again, time's running out.

Yeah. There's a lot of confusion. So had the personal point of privilege been recommended, that was going to be stated officially. But it's obvious this convention is not prepared to deal with this kind of high-level issue that has so many technical considerations attached to it.

Sure. And would the committee please consider withdrawing it?

But we didn't get a chance to do that. So one of the questions that I had text to me from a Southern Baptist seminary student was, um, who is the author of this? Or where did it originate from? Like, I don't know if you know the answer to that.

I'm getting the answer to that. And just kind of stay tuned because there's more to this story. Yeah, that's what I thought.

It didn't come out of a black hole. So now for those who are just kind of waking up to this social justice issue, because there's a few of people like that, Pew sitters who are wondering what in the world just happened to the convention I'm part of.

How did we get to the point where a resolution like this, and I noticed other resolutions as well that were kind of progressive sounding, even have a consideration, let alone a yes vote? I don't know if you want to give a brief history or explanation.

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and the Frankfurt School

Well, what I said earlier, you know, the resolutions committee has a default mode that is afforded to it that we're going to trust whatever comes out of it. So that's just there. You don't put people in position to handle these resolutions without a high level of trust.

So, you know, you start with that. And there have been some resolutions that have been defeated, but those are the exceptions. They're not the rule. The rule is the resolutions that come out are going to get passed.

They might be amended, but they're going to almost always get passed. The makeup of the resolutions committee. There were many people who, once the resolutions committee was announced, said, we are going to get some resolutions that are going to be in the directions that they wound up being because of the public stances of some of the folks on that committee.

And I did not expect a critical race theory intersectionality resolution. I told someone this morning that we might as well have had a resolution on the extra Calvinistic and superlapsarianism. Right.

Had about as much understanding in the room on those issues as we did intersectionality and critical race theory.

I think you're not alone. I think that's what people are thinking this morning who are waking up and looking at the news and it says what resolutions were controversial and passed. What is critical race theory?

How in the world is this even a topic of conversation? And that's one of the things that I want to try to explain to people because there's been a leftward drift for a few years now. And I was hoping maybe you could give in a nutshell an explanation for the layman, maybe, who just loves Jesus, is going to church, and loves the Southern Baptist Convention, but is confused right now.

Right. Well, a Marxist pew of the world, and I'm not trying to poison the well here, it's just a fact, comes out of a neo-Marxist school called the Frankfurt School that basically took Karl Marx's material dialectic and realized it didn't work.

Why didn't it work? It didn't work because we need to deal with the social institutions. And so through a process, we don't divide people simply on the basis of economics, the haves and the have-nots, the proletariats and the bourgeois.

Rather, people need to be divided in terms of privilege, in terms of oppressions. And so the world is still looked at with these divisions, and the critical race theory has several tenets in it, but one of the most significant is that the most important thing about you is the groups with which you identify.

And then intersectionality says yes and amen to that, and here's how you can gain status by the number of victimhoods that you can lay claim to by being a part of those groups. So if you are a Black man, then you have a victim status or a level of oppression that is greater than a white man.

If you're a Black woman, you have an oppressive status that is more than a Black man. If you're a Black lesbian, then you have a victim status that, you know, you have three, you don't have just one. And if you're a Black transgender, then you have four.

And it just goes on and on. If you're disabled, you have five. And so the number of victim statuses that you can mount up to yourself because of the groups, the oppressed groups that you can identify with, is what gives you standing in society against those who oppress you.

And there's technicalities to it, but the oppressive class is seen as those in power who may not conscientiously be prejudiced or misogynistic or homophobic, but because they're in the oppressive power, they're at the top, then they inevitably are racist, misogynistic, and homophobic.

So that's why you can look at a white male and say, in America, you're a racist because you're guilty of whiteness. When he might think, what in the world are you talking about? You know, I don't harbor those sentiments.

It doesn't matter. He's a part of this hegemonic power at the top. That's critical theory. Critical race theory looks at racial groups that way. So it is an ideology. Now, what was argued in the resolution is this is an analytical tool.

You know, people have taken it up to try to understand race relationships and disparities. Right. We'll give sociologists their due. You know, they can do that. But this comes from a neo-Marxist view of the world, and it is a worldview.

Now, you could use it without being a neo-Marxist. There's no doubt. But it comes from a neo-Marxist worldview. And that's the difficulty that I had with the resolution, is it did not identify the source from which it came, and it didn't give the messengers an opportunity to recognize, wait a minute, we're not talking about something neutral here.

No, we're talking about something that comes from a poisoned well. Right.

Yeah, exactly right. And I know you had introduced the amendments, and I know Tom Buck had spoken against the resolution itself. And his issue was, it said that critical race theory and intersectionality had been appropriated by godless individuals.

So it didn't say that it originated, but just that it could be appropriated. And so he wanted it to say that it originated, if it was going to say anything about that. And then also that it was insufficient as a tool, but he would have preferred that it said something along the lines of incapable or incompatible with Christianity.

You can't use it as a tool. And that was his argument, which I happen to empathize with. It seems to me like if we were going to replace critical race theory and intersectionality with German higher criticism or neo-Darwinian psychology, we could say the same thing and just change the words, right?

Exactly. And so that would shock people, I think, if we were going to play with words and put something like the alt-right or fascism or something else in there. But for some reason, because it's critical race theory and intersectionality, and the world right now—and I think you pointed this out—loves these terms and is using these terms, there's kind of a sense of wanting to usher them in and accept them in some way.

That's the sense I'm getting, at least. We don't want to be synchristic. I'm botching the word here. Syncretism. We don't want to engage in that. There we go. Yeah. But we want to somehow tip our hats to this in some way, and that's really concerning for those of us who know what this stuff actually is.

And so I wanted to ask you, this is the next question, is what do we do? I know it's not a binding resolution, but this signifies a leftward drift. And there's three, in my mind, and there's only three options.

I don't know if you have another one you can think of. But one is leave the SBC, which I know there's churches that are thinking about that right now. The other one is form a new strategy. So go to the pews and bring friends and try to take back the convention.

And the other one is just what a lot of folks have been doing, which is go along the get along. Do you have some recommendations for pastors and seminary students who are asking these questions?

What Churches and Pastors Should Do Next

Yeah, well, I think this is a pivotal year in the SBC. I had people texting me from day one of this convention saying, we're out. We're gone. We're not going to do this anymore. And it was sad. I've never had that many.

I don't know if I've ever had any during the convention, but I had several texts of me telling me, I can't take this anymore. And so I think that's going to happen. And certainly, every man must do according to his own conscience in that.

If you're going to stay in, however, I would say you need to wake up and you need to get educated. You need to read. You're going to have to listen. You have to learn. Just go to school on critical race theory and intersectionality.

Just do that. I mean, read Rosaria Butterfield. On intersectionality, just get her, go on YouTube. Just listen to her talk about her days as a specialist in queer theory and women's studies and radical feminism.

You can read Richard Delgado's book on critical race theory and see how he says this originates from feminism and postmodernism and the writings of Derrida. He just said, this is where it comes from. So you're going to have to, I'm talking to pastors here.

I mean, pastors are going to have to get educated. I encourage everybody to, but pastors are going to have to lead the way on this and then decide, okay, this is what we want to be as a convention. If so, then go along with it and fight for it.

If you say, no, we're not going to do that, then stand and fight against it and say, we're not going there. And anybody's going to try to take us there. It's going to be opposed, but we're going to have to fight.

And by fight, I'm not talking about being dirty. I'm not talking about being ugly. I'm not talking about being sinful in any way. I'm just talking about looking brothers in the eye and saying, you're dead wrong.

We're not going there.

Is there a time to start? I'm sorry, I cut you off there. Is there a time to start naming names? Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely.

That time is here. That time is here. And as I said, I hadn't slept much the last two days and very little last night, but I've had late night meetings, early meetings, had an early breakfast this morning or one that was early.

With a brother, we've had disagreements, talked to two other brothers in the course of the morning who were on the resolutions committee. And we had good, brief conversations, frank conversations. I've had several of those this week.

And one of the things we've got to determine is who is standing where. And we can't allow, especially our leaders, any longer to be unclear as to where they stand. So what that means in one part is we can't allow Russell Moore any longer to fail to answer simple questions from the Florida convention.

It's unbecoming a Christian leader to be asked a question. Dr. Moore, have you changed your view of women preaching over the last 13, 14 years? And to hear him dance all around the arena and talk about children needing parents and apple pie and mom and not answer the question.

It's a straightforward question. I talked to one of his trustees today and said that the Southern Medical Convention deserves a leader who will give a straight answer to a simple, straight question. And we got to do that.

I'm going to do it as a pastor of a church that cooperates with the SBC. We're going to call for simple, straight answers to legitimate, honest questions. And if they can't give us that, then they don't need to be in the positions.

Amen.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I appreciate you saying that. I had two final questions for you to circle back about this resolution real quick. And so we've talked to those who are more maybe on the conservative side that are waking up.

I think that would characterize most of the pew sitters that have not been engaged. But there are those who are more the political junkies, maybe you could call them. And they are engaged. I might be one of those.

And some of them are to the left. And there's two arguments that have been brought up to support this. And I should say, not all of them are on the left. But one of the arguments is that, well, we can get along.

We can use critical race theory as a tool. And this was said from the convention floor yesterday, because, you know, Paul quoted philosophers who were also not Christians and had bad worldviews. What do you say to that?

Paul, Pagan Philosophers, and the "Plundering of the Egyptians" Argument

Yeah, let's go look and see how Paul quoted them. Yeah, I agree. Did Paul take on the philosophy of the Epicureans in order to assess Athens? No. Paul used them as illustrations. Paul used them as connecting points.

I mean, I just reject that argument altogether. And I'm willing to have that conversation. Yeah. If we want to look at those citations from Titus and Acts and say, OK, this justifies us setting forth this resolution.

I'm willing to have that conversation.

Yeah, yeah, that was an interesting objection. I thought it was just I was like, well, this is about a philosophy, not a person and what a person said. But anyway, categorical error there. The other one that I heard was that because these are just tools and you sort of touched on this a couple of minutes ago, but we can use these as tools and we don't have to take in the whole entire worldview in order to find something useful.

And this is the plundering of the Egyptians argument. Now, do you agree with that or do you object to that?

No, I am willing to grant the legitimacy of that. If we are very clear that these are Egyptian tools, they come from Egypt, they were fashioned in the furnaces of godlessness. OK, now, if we're not willing to say that, I want to know why not.

Why not? Are we scared? You know, why not admit what's what's the hesitation saying? This comes from the Marxist view of the world, which is godless. Amen. Now that, you know, we can use it. Look, I got a degree in sociology and I kind of like sociology, actually.

But I learned a long time ago that sociology is helpful when it can honestly enable us to assess things. And very, very often secularists can help us see things that we don't normally see because we tend to get stained glass glasses on our eyes.

You know, we see things the way we've commonly always thought about it. You get somebody that doesn't give a rip about our convictions and they say, no, you know, here's dimensions you're not looking at.

So they serve us because, man, God calls us to be realist. We live in a real world. I want to see it the way it really is. And so sometimes secularists can help us do that. So sociologists at its best, sociology at its best, might be able to help us to see things the way they really are.

But don't ever take your marching orders from a sociologist. We have a book to tell us how we ought to live. We have a book that tells us how things really are, too. So you're not going to get anything from sociology about the way the world is.

That doesn't comport with what the Bible says. I think that's what all the advocates for this resolution would say. And I'd say, yes, that's true. But don't take sociology for prescription. We have a book for that and we need to follow the book.

And the problem with critical theory is that it is not simply an analytical tool, which was said from the platform. Critical race theory is simply an analytical tool. It's the way the word, that's the way that was stated.

I mean, they emphasized every syllable of analytical. Yes. The response to that is, no, it is not. It is an ideology. It is a worldview. That's right. Is it also an analytical tool? Yeah, it is. But let's not hide the reality that this is an ideology forged in the furnace of Marxism.

Yeah. And it's being used against us in the church on a frighteningly fast basis. And it just behooves me. I keep thinking about what if we were to put German higher criticism in place. No one would want to pass that, at least at this point.

Right. So it's interesting. It seems political. And the way you were treated, I'm ashamed of what was said, that it was not taken in a friendly way, your resolution. But thank you. Thank you so much for fighting and for letting me interview you.

It sounds like you don't have much sleep, but you came on and talked to me for half an hour, which I'm really thankful for. Yeah, well, I'm glad to do it. Appreciate all you're doing, brother. All right.

Well, God bless. Have a good afternoon and get some rest. All right. All right, bye now. All right, you too.