Rod Martin Weighs in on the State of the SBC

Conversations That Matter

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I appreciate everyone's patience with me and generosity.

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I am still living in somewhat of a construction area, but things are coming together, so I found a little corner where I can record this podcast.

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And it is an important one. We have Rod Martin today who needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast many times before, and we're going to pick his brain about the

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Southern Baptist Convention, what he thinks is happening. He just resigned from the executive committee. And I just wanted to also say before we get to that, thank you so much for those who've said so many kind things and just helpful things about the

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American Monument documentary. You can go to Last Stand Studios on YouTube or Rumble, Last Stand Studios, American Monument, just type that in, it'll come right up.

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And it's almost two hours. It's about an hour and 50 minutes documentary on the whole monument issue.

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And it's a great resource, especially for homeschoolers. So go ahead and check that out. I appreciate all, like I said, all the kind words and generosity from, and support from everyone.

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And it's just, it's an honor to be able to be able to do this kind of thing. I just don't,

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I never thought I'd be able to make a documentary about something like that. And we have many more ideas.

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So without further ado though, here is Rod Martin. Rod, you resigned from the executive committee last week.

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What led to this decision? Well, it was honestly very frustrating and needless from my point of view.

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It was very, very troubling because a lot of people have resigned, as you know, we're getting close to 25 % of the entire executive committee having resigned in a handful of weeks.

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And some of that no doubt is to try to avoid personal liability in the coming disaster.

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But not that that will help anybody because we will all be in the crosshairs regardless, the plaintiff's lawyers are not exactly merciful types.

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But, but the reality is this is a needless and foolish thing that's been done.

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The waiver of attorney client privilege itself being, being something that no one ever does.

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We were told that this was a best practice. This is not a best practice. It's not a standard practice.

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It's just malpractice. And we were told that repeatedly by former US attorneys, by people who've led sex abuse task forces at the justice department, by everybody we brought in, even an attorney who had been nominated to the

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United States Supreme Court. So, you know, what was said to us about this by the other team is simply false.

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But the danger is not the waiver of privilege itself. It's that that almost certainly will void the liability insurance that is needed both to compensate any victims who are turned up in the investigation and also to pay the legal bills of the bivocational pastors and other relatively poor people who sacrificially serve on the

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E .C. The idea that all these people, 86 of them at a time going back 20 plus years are all abusing people is simply ludicrous.

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And as you know, Russell Moore's allegation that this is going on contain no names whatsoever.

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He makes no specific charge. He says children are being raped for heaven's sake.

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I'm not aware of the executive committee running a daycare. I don't know how that would even work. But neither does he, because he's a mandatory reporter and he has not filed a single police report.

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So, you know, 21 months after he made these baseless allegations, he still hasn't told the police a word.

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That means he's either lying or he is committing a crime. And either way, what he's done is he has lit a fire on the

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Southern Baptist Convention on his way out the door. It's just shameful. OK, so here's the question.

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Some people think I think they're in the minority, but that this was just kind of an ignorant thing that the

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EC voted on. They didn't. Maybe some of them didn't. They didn't really know what was going on. But behind this,

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I sense there's a design. This was on purpose. And then maybe there are some people that ignorantly went along.

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But do you see that? Do you see that there was a design behind all of this? This was all done on purpose to bring about what's happening right now.

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Yeah, I believe so. And in two phases with two different groups with different agendas at the annual meeting, as you're aware, the other side really wasn't allowed to speak.

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The people on the platform, by which I mostly mean the chairman, simply did not allow opposing viewpoints.

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And you'll recall that we went into the convention seeking in one instance to overturn

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Resolution 9 from 2019, which is the ridiculous thing that, again, everybody was stampeded into supporting critical race theory and intersectionality.

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Well, they had a lawyer on hand to try to make the case against Tom Astle's motion to rescind that, that rescinding a motion from a resolution from a previous annual meeting was somehow against the rules.

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Well, Robert's rules of order say plainly that it is absolutely within the rules.

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So they went out of their way to try to use the authority of a licensed attorney to overrule what the parliamentarians were saying, what the rules of order plainly say.

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But they would not allow an attorney to speak to the issue of what are the potential consequences of waiving attorney -client privilege?

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It was just, it was absurd. And on a wave of emotion, they tell everybody, oh, well, this is a best practice.

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Again, it's not even a standard practice. It's malpractice. It's horribly, horribly foolish.

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The U .S. Justice Department has guidelines for its prosecuting attorneys that say plainly, even in the

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Biden era, that it is impermissible to ask anyone to waive attorney -client privilege.

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It's so important to the foundation of our justice system. And yet they stampeded everybody into this at the annual meeting.

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And then at the executive committee level, just kept beating the drum. Well, the messengers have said this.

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Well, the messengers have said this. Well, they have. And there were actually ways that we could reconcile what the messengers had said with doing our legal and fiduciary duties that we can't waive, that are the law.

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And, you know, we're a corporation in the state of Tennessee. The state of Tennessee has a say over how we conduct our business.

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We aren't permitted to do what we did. And the insurance is very plainly a factor, because, again, if there are victims, we need to be able to compensate them.

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That's why you have insurance. But you also need to be able to have lawyers and defend the innocent.

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There are clearly innocent people there, possibly all of them, but certainly some people who just came on the executive committee, for instance, who never had anything to do with anything.

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So so all of this was a stampede. And you're exactly right. There are two very different agendas.

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The first one is the preachers who, on the other side, were trying to get their political opponents in the

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SBC, people like Ronnie Floyd. They've gotten him to resign. They hope to replace him with some woke guy,

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Mike Stone, who was running for president. As you know, we doubled turnout at the annual meeting for many normal 25 year record, over 16000 people up from a normal 8000.

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And if 300 votes had flipped on the second ballot, Mike Stone would be president of the convention and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

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So, you know, obviously Russell Moore and others were wanting to beat him and demonizing him as some kind of sex offender.

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The irony of which is Rich, by the way, he is himself a sex abuse victim. So, you know, they don't care about sex abuse victims who aren't on their side.

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That's very, very clear. So they had people they wanted to to single out and demonize.

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And that was their agenda, partly to take power, partly for revenge, I think mostly on Russell's part.

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But the bigger issue that they got hoodwinked on is the trial lawyers advising them.

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Because from a plaintiff attorney's perspective, if you can get these people to act this foolishly, what you do is you set up a cascade effect.

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And I've talked about this a good bit. What you do is you put all of these people without insurance, bivocational pastors, secretaries, people who are in a position to to be a credible witness, but who don't have any resources.

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Without the insurance, they can't pay their lawyer. So you set up a situation where some plaintiff's lawyer who just wants to come in and take everything.

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Runs up their legal fees, they can't pay them. And then the plaintiff's lawyer says,

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OK, sign this sworn statement and we'll make it stop. And of course, they'll swear to anything at that point.

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I don't know that all of them would, but some of them will, because some always do. And you get enough people to say something like, oh, the

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SBC is a hierarchy or all of this was always a scam to avoid liability or whatever the law is.

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Lawyers want them to say. And you take that stuff to an Obama judge that wants to shut down the church anyway.

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And that's where you get your huge settlement, like the Boy Scouts just signed for almost two billion dollars.

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That won't come out of the executive committee, boys and girls. That will come out of the Florida Baptist Children's Home.

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That will come out of Guidestone, which has the pensions. That'll come out of the International Mission Board, because the whole point is to wrongfully and dishonestly contend that the most decentralized religious institution in the

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United States of America is really the Catholic Church. And you can really take anything.

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That money isn't going to go to victims. That money will go to trial lawyers. This is also sad to me because, as you mentioned, the

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Boy Scouts and of course, I was involved in Boy Scouts when I was young. And just watching what happened there was just absolutely devastating to watch.

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I mean, it's an institution that was very just a few years ago, very solid and American.

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And you just didn't think it was going anywhere. And I guess the SBC is in sort of a similar boat here.

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And, you know, I have to and I don't I don't want to go beyond what I know, you know, with ascribing motives.

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But someone like a Russell Moore, who has been in the SBC, really owes the

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SBC quite a bit for where he's at. I mean, he climbed that ladder using the SBC in our career.

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Yes. Yeah. And then to turn around and do what he's doing, it's just I don't even have words for it.

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It's so dishonoring to me. And the fact that anyone would respect someone who would do that is just ungrateful.

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It's easy to see what the plan is based on his prior act.

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You will recall, and I'm pretty sure you covered that back in, I want to say, November of last year.

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He filed a friend of the court brief, an amicus brief in the Will McCraney case.

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That's right. Which no one solicited. Nobody wanted. Just at the last minute, he files this brief.

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Well, in that brief, he gave false testimony, claiming that the

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SBC is a hierarchical institution. And everybody just scratched their heads. What on God's earth would an entity head do such a thing?

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This is, first of all, plainly false. Second, you know, totally discordant with all of our documents, all of our historic practice, everything about us.

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And certainly something that hurts his position as an entity head.

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Now, forget liability. He's suggesting that the EC would have authority over him if this is true.

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Why would he do such a thing? And his response was, well, the lawyers drafted this at the last minute and I only had 45 minutes to sign it and get it filed or we missed the deadline.

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Like, that's no reason to perjure yourself. That's ridiculous. You're the chief ethicist of the

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Southern Baptist Convention and you're going to sign it because you don't have time to fix a lie? What are you talking about?

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So anyway, he says, well, we sent a letter to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals telling them about the mistake.

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Well, that's not a sworn filing. That's not in the record. That's not in the case that went up to the

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U .S. Supreme Court the way his sworn filing did. So so now

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I think we see exactly what that was aimed at. That was his opening shot in setting up the rest of what's happening now.

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You know, that's conjecture. I don't know that that's exactly what he had in mind, but it sure looks like it.

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Well, you'd have to assume he's so ignorant and a level of ignorance that he obviously does not have.

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He wouldn't be in the position he has if he was that ignorant. So there's got to be another motive.

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So chief ethicist and chief lobbyist of the Southern Baptist Convention for the better part of a decade.

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And he files something like that under oath. Obviously, any plaintiff's lawyer worth their salt is going to take that as evidence that, oh, goody,

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I get to take all the assets from the Arkansas Baptist Children's Home. Now, if I if I sue the

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EC and you know how these things work, they don't ever go to trial. They get settled at a certain point.

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And that was the case with the Boy Scouts. Now, I would distinguish us from the Boy Scouts in one way. The Boy Scouts actually did it.

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The Boy Scouts had spent the last decade also setting themselves up by having gay

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Scout masters and then gay Scouts and then girls along with the boys.

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And, hey, let's put those three groups of people in a tent together at Jamboree and then pass out condoms, which they also did.

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Oh, my goodness, what happens? So, of course, they had sex abuse cases. There was no way to avoid that.

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They did it to themselves. But here, that's not the case. As you know, the Houston Chronicle was able to come up with only 700 alleged cases over a 20 year period, spread out over 50 ,000 churches.

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And none of those allegations were at an SBC entity. In fact, the only cases

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I'm aware of, maybe there are some I don't know, but the only cases I'm aware of that have anything to do with an

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SBC entity would be Jennifer Lyle's claim and Hannah Kate Williams's claim.

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Well, of course, Jennifer Lyle says she was abused by Professor David Sills at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and that that continued up to and including her time as a vice president of Lifeway.

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And Hannah Kate Williams says she was abused by her father, who was an employee of the Lifeway store at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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So if you have an abuse case against a Southern Baptist entity, it would pretty plainly be against Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Lifeway Christian Resources.

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I don't think either one of them are guilty of anything, but we have vicarious liability. And if an employee of one of those entities was guilty, then perhaps, you know, they actually have some liability, too.

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It's interesting that they didn't sue either of those entities for sex abuse. In fact,

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Jennifer Lyle didn't sue either of those entities at all. Hannah Kate sued them both for defamation, which is certainly not sex abuse.

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And they both in Jennifer Lyle's case, she sued Baptist Press for having not said that she was a sex abuse victim, basically.

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And Hannah Kate sued all those entities, but again, for defamation and for conspiracy to hide her case.

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How would you hide something she's tweeting about all day on Twitter every day for two years?

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Yeah, everything I know about her case is from Twitter, literally. So, I mean, it's nonsensical and it makes you wonder what the heck is going on here.

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Yeah, one of the things that is going on here, and I don't mean to cut you off, but as they said, the chief consultant for the task force is

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Rachel Den Hollander, who is the attorney of record for Jennifer Lyle and whose husband is getting a degree right now at Southern Seminary.

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So it just it's ridiculous to me. Well, well, the more, you know,

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I've gotten to know a little bit about the Southern Baptist Convention and, you know, far more than me, the more

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I see people's sons or relatives or friends or, you know, they working in some various capacity, even if they're not well suited for it.

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A lot of nepotism going on and a lot of various entities.

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And there's there's a lot of money that's on the line and a lot of positions at churches that have a lot of money and those churches have big budgets.

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And you can see when you look at some of these things, what a motive might be that the vultures are circling and they see they see rotten meat.

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They see something that they can use to enrich themselves. And I'm not the first one, obviously, to point this out, but that's

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I think that's my cynical side. And that's what a lot of people think is happening, is that they don't care about the

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SBC as much. Some of the people at the top, they are willing to sacrifice the SBC for their own personal gain.

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And I'm not asking you to make any necessarily point any fingers at anyone individually, but I'm just hearing that over and over from people that are in the pews who have questions about this.

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They're starting to see this as well. Do you think that's a legitimate way to look at this? Like they're this is for personal gain.

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Most of the turmoil that we're seeing. John, four years ago, I thought that was cynical.

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Today, I think that's obvious and it is really disheartening. But it's also we got to have perspective on this.

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It is a very small tail on a really big dog. I mean, there there are 50 ,000 churches out there, give or take how you count them.

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You know, 47 ,000 churches and 5 ,000 church like whatever. I don't know how they count that.

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If it's a church, it's a church. Roughly 50 ,000 of them. There are 14 million people, most of whom have no idea of anything we're talking about here.

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They are not responsible for an entity head, for example, working with his board chairman and one

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VP at his entity to get a million dollar severance package without his board even knowing it.

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That stuff happens and that's been well publicized. I'm not going to get into details, but I think it will illustrate to your audience some of the things that we're talking about here and some of the inner workings of whose relationship with whom affects what.

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And honestly, we need a great big house cleaning. And I do advocate for that house cleaning because the fact is, this is still the

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Lord's institution or group of institutions and it does matter. And if conservatives just leave, we're not going to keep it from being a giant institution.

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We've seen that with the PCUSA and tons of these things. The difference between us and the mainstream denominations a hundred years ago is that the

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Baptist in the pew can actually take it back if the Baptist in the pew is just motivated properly to do so.

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We did that in the 80s and it looks like we have to do it again. But the truth is our six seminaries educate a third of the seminary students in North America.

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We only have 11 percent of the churches. So we're educating pastors for a heck of a lot more churches than just us.

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Our missionary force is taking the gospel to the whole world. You don't want it taking a false gospel to the whole world.

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It's worth fighting for. Yeah, there are 30 billion dollars of assets at the top level. That's why they want to set up a plaintiff's law, your paradise.

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You know, there are all these assets in the state conventions. I have no way to estimate what that is. But I do know that it's a heck of a lot of widow's mites that were given faithfully to the

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Lord's work. And I don't want that work twisted to some selfish purpose or to some woke purpose or both.

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I want it restored to the trust that it should be maintained for the

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Baptist in the pew. And I don't think that's terribly hard. You know, you know, and we just talked about this in Nashville, we doubled annual meeting turnout.

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If Mike Stone had not been defamed in the national media for two weeks leading into that meeting, he'd be president and you'd be getting better appointments on every single board.

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And that's still possible. It's just a little harder now. But when you go to Anaheim in June, we can we can win that first big win and we're going to have to do it for a few years.

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But you just saw, you know, you can change out a tremendous number of board members in a very short time.

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J .D. Greer did it and we can too. All right. So let's go from the pessimism to the optimism here.

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I'll be the pessimist. So I see you're the optimist. So I I look at what's happening right now in the

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E .C. And I'm thinking they you know, they even got the E .C. That's like the first thing I think I'm like, man, they even got the

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E .C. Like that's that's the place where I thought there were still some conservative influence if there was any. They have most of the seminaries, if not all.

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They have most of the entities. It seems like maybe not all, but it just seems like they're they're controlling just about everything.

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And I've never seen such a divide between the elites, those running the show and then those in the pews.

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Because you're right about the pews. I think a lot of people in the pews are just they don't know what's going on or they're getting a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but they're not as involved.

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But they're they're so disconnected and they have lives they're living and they're not maybe as motivated as as we'd hope to come out and throw the bums out, let's say.

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So you get to Anaheim and Anaheim's in California. It seems like it's going to be a much harder uphill battle than it was last year.

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How do you like give us the like the strategy? Because I know you're you're optimistic. You think this can happen?

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How does it happen, practically speaking, to give hope to the people in the pews? Well, let's start with what just happened.

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I mean, and by the way, you're right. It's a it's a horrible loss to lose the EC. And and a year and a half ago, conservatives were 90 percent of the executive committee.

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And now, you know, we're definitely a distinct minority and becoming more so by the day. There will be more resignations, believe me.

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So so that's terrible. But at the same time, if you go back to 1979, when we had not had any of our entities in many years and starting from a much lower level, even the now we overturned that over the course of the 80s.

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I think it shows there's tremendous flexibility in Baptist church polity and a tremendous amount of hope that is completely legitimate.

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I know that L .A. is a stretch, but in the conservative resurgence years, we elected

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Bailey Smith president in Los Angeles and Anaheim's just down the road from L .A.

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We won in Las Vegas in 1989. We won in Pittsburgh. We won in Kansas City.

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We won in St. Louis twice. St. Louis, certainly not as far as L .A., but it's not exactly in the south.

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And so so, you know, we have demonstrated before the Internet that we can win away games.

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You know, once the Baptist in the pew understands that the issues really matter and what's at stake, he tends to rally.

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And we've seen it before. We can do it again, especially with the Internet. And the truth is it took longer back then because you could not get the message out in the way that you needed to, that you can today.

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So even after they appointed a decent number of people to some of these boards, a lot of those people weren't completely clear about what needed to be done today with shows like yours,

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John. I mean, we can actually inform people to a degree that was not possible before and we can see change happen much more quickly.

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We're seeing that actually from J .D. Greer's team on these boards right now. Certainly we can do as well as they can.

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Yeah, one of the big barriers seems to be financial that I don't know what the number is.

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You probably know this, but there's a certain amount of people that just show up because they're paid by entities to show up and they rely on the entities in the

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SBC for their livelihood. And so they're very more like much more likely to vote for it, kind of like with the deep state in the

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United States. They're much more likely to vote for the person that's going to let them keep their job and expand it and maybe give them more perks and benefits.

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So you already have that's kind of a given. And then the people in the pew, they have to like take off work, sacrifice time.

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And it's hotel expenses and travel expenses to go to a convention that a lot of them probably don't even want to go to in the first place because it's a battle.

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It's not relaxing. So to motivate someone to do that, is there incentive, financial incentive, a fund that's being set up and any kind of ground game strategy for Anaheim?

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There is a ground game strategy in the works. A fund to pay people's way is certainly something that would be a worthy discussion.

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I don't know of anything like that right now. I know Tom Buck did some of that last time. The truth is, we can overthink that if we're not careful.

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It is true that a lot of faithful people that you and I know don't have the money to jump on an airplane and go to California.

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I totally get it. But at the same time, I've been doing this since I was a starving college student.

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I went to my first convention as a sophomore in college and nobody paid my way. You know, and later on,

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I made a little more money. People tend to do that as they age. And so it's easier now.

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But it's not, you know, but it's never been something that I had my way pay for, except the last couple of years on the

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E .C. They paid my hotel, but I didn't let them pay for anything else. So, you know, this is something that if people are committed to, they can do.

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And we've got 14 million people and we know they're not woke.

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I mean, my goodness, 86 percent of them voted for Donald Trump twice. These are not Russell Moore's crowd.

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The crowd at the annual meeting historically is easy to gin up by a guy like Russell Moore because he's good in the pulpit and he's good at rousing a crowd.

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But you just pointed out that normal crowd is usually a home crowd. It's very heavy with the employees of entities, church planters that NAM has flown in.

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Even the Washington Post reported back in June that NAM was flying in church planters and telling them to vote for Ed Lipp, you know, which,

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OK, I'm all for NAM bringing church planters. That's that's a good thing. If we're going to plant a church, we want them to feel part of the

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SBC. We want them to be involved. That's great. But to do it for the purpose of a turnout effort.

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For a particular candidate, that's horribly, horribly wrong. And the word

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I was getting privately was that the Washington Post's number of church planters they flew in for that purpose was way, way low.

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Well, if it was even one, it was too high. So so, yes, we have that built in structural disadvantage and we did in the 80s, too.

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And we overcame it in the 80s because ultimately there's more of us than there are of them.

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You know, it's just that simple. And if we rouse them, if we make them understand this really matters, the magnitude of what's at stake,

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Baptists come out. They rally to the cause. It takes a while to wake them up.

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No question about it. But once they're awake, I mean, you'll recall that in Dallas in 1985, we had 45 ,000 people.

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It's the largest deliberative body in the history of the world. And for years we were in the 30 ,000, 40 ,000 range of messengers.

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That's a lot of folks. And yes, we can do it again. Of course we can do it. I would love to see that.

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I really would. I have to ask, though, the last pessimistic question. So if let's say it doesn't go the way that you'd like in Anaheim, hypothetically, right?

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We hope it does. But if it doesn't, is there a cutoff for Rod Martin? Is there a time in which you say, OK, it's time to stop this.

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And we need to just kind of let it wither. And we're going to go do something else. Or are you just that's not even a discussion.

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Just keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting. It's slightly more of a discussion than it was probably the last time you and I talked.

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Because because on the one hand, as I've said repeatedly, our polity allows us to, you know, the political term would be kick the bums out, you know, every single year.

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I mean, every year you've got a chance for the people in the pew to actually have a meaningful say over their leadership.

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And that's important because the SBC isn't a real denomination. It's a stewardship ministry.

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We pool money through our tithes and offerings to do things that our individual churches can't do as well, like send the world's largest missionary force and train a third of the pastors in the

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United States. That's that's a big, big thing to do. And so the only reason we have an

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SBC is to steward that money and make sure that it's spent properly.

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And that's exactly what we're going to Anaheim to do, to steward that money and make sure that the right people are actually spending it on the right things.

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So so on the one hand, yeah, it doesn't make any sense to give up on it as long as the majority of the

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Baptist in the pew are actually conservative, Orthodox, believing Christians.

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Wouldn't make any sense to give up. My fear, though, and the one thing that has changed since you and I last talked is that with this legal time bomb we're facing, they have they have stampeded the messengers without giving them any opportunity for informed consent to do something that has legal consequences that are no longer in our control.

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Unless we can get a handle on things pretty quickly. This is likely to spin out of anybody's ability to control the plaintiff's lawyers are going to have their field day.

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They don't even need a good plaintiff. They don't need anybody who's really had anything done to them.

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And by the way, I'm for the investigation. If there's any wrongdoer, we want to string them up.

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I'm completely for that. But if Russell thought there was a wrongdoer somewhere, he'd have named them or he did at least called the police.

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He's a mandatory reporter and he sat on these allegations. He says children are being raped.

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What he says he knows of it firsthand. Then call the police, call the

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Department of Justice, call the U .S. attorney. He hasn't, which tells me it ain't true.

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He needs to be investigated liability if he hasn't done that. So so if the if the messengers have been deprived of the opportunity for informed consent, if they have been stampeded into a legal action, but again, the preachers didn't understand, they just saw a way to get rid of their political opponents.

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The the lawyers understood perfectly. This is how we burn it all down and take its stuff.

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If we're facing that, then we have a very ticking clock, a very short time in which to engineer some things that can prevent that trial lawyer feeding frenzy.

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We can take care of victims and save the thing at the same time. But we have to want it.

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If we don't want it bad enough, we're going to lose it all. So you mentioned widows mites earlier.

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If there's one of the widows who has given her mites, asked you,

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Rod, what can I do? I don't have a lot of influence or a platform, but I care about this lifelong Southern Baptist.

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I want to see the gospel go out. What would you tell her? Go to Anaheim, and if you can't afford to Anaheim, talk to somebody in your church who can and get them to go and say, look,

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I've been sitting here back on the next to the last pew, writing out my tithe check for my social security and my shaky hand for years.

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And you've got to save that money. You've got to make sure it is spent for the gospel.

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We are constantly told that everything in the world is a gospel issue except the gospel. And the truth is the gospel is the gospel issue.

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These other things that they want you to do, like, you know, open borders and, you know, let's just take in everybody who can possibly vote

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Democrat or, hey, let's pretend that the Bible whispers about homosexuality.

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Or, you know, all of these Democrat platform planks that are intended to either co -opt the

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SBC into helping the Democrats perform their socialist takeover or at least shut us up so that we're out of their way while they do it.

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These things are a corrupt, alien agenda. They have nothing to do with the ministry of the church.

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And they do it in the name of depoliticizing. But I'm sorry, the slaughter of infants is not a political issue.

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It's a moral issue. The upholding of the rule of law is not a political issue.

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It's a moral issue. Religious liberty is not a political issue. It's a moral issue.

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And our rights don't come from a document or from a government. They come from almighty

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God. Duty of pastors to stand in the gap and protect the flock and proclaim the truth.

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And if the truth happens to be a political issue at a particular moment, it's not because the truth is political.

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It's because the other side of the political divide has a different religion, a religion of atheistic socialism that they are masking as a crusade against racism and other things.

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It's just not true. And you've written a great book on this. And of course, you point out and Votie Bauckham points out and the rest of us point out that critical race theory isn't even actually about race.

36:01

Critical race theory, like radical feminism, like queer theory, like all the other subsets of critical theory as a whole, are about selling

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Marxism to an American audience that did not buy class warfare.

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Because Americans all assume that someday they're going to be better off than they are and that their kids are going to be better off than them.

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So that didn't sell here. It actually didn't sell that well in Western Europe either, which is why it ended up taking root in places like Russia and Cambodia instead of here.

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But it is aimed at a very young gender studies major audience that will buy guilt and will say that people are guilty forever, no matter whether they repent, that we can categorize them based on their most superficial aspects like race.

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It is designed first to appeal to people who classical

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Marxism wouldn't appeal to. And it is deliberately aimed at eviscerating the gospel, turning the gospel on its head.

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And the people who have engineered all of this are the people who have advocated those exact things.

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They have a political agenda. It has to be stopped because the gospel is about truth.

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It is about God's moral standards. And if that happens to have a political aspect, it just does.

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And we should not shy from the truth merely because it might offend Russell Moore. Yeah, no, that was a very good word and very strong, but we needed to hear that.

37:34

And thank you very much for that. I have a lot of respect for you and I appreciate you so much. And I just encourage everyone out there, pray for Rod Martin, pray for the

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SBC and everything that's going on there. There's a lot of people that are very well -meaning that want to just they're in it for the right reasons.

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They want the gospel to go forward. They want people to be disciples of Jesus. And now they're caught up in this political firestorm.

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And it's sad. No one wants that. At least those who are well -meaning don't want it.

38:03

And so I will point out, you know, you just made me think of this, Rod, that, you know, all the crying about systemic abuse and structural oppression and institutional racism and all this stuff.

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In the SBC, pretty much all the institutions and now the executive committee and the halls of power are controlled by the left, which, you know, if they're going to keep using that, it's institutional this or systemic this.

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They're the ones in charge of the system and the institution more than anyone else. And so, I don't know, it just seems like there would be four fingers pointing back at them if they want to point a finger at conservatives in the denomination, because conservatives aren't steering the boat really right now.

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And if there's problems, it's not on them. But I digress. And nowhere is there a better example of that than Southern Seminary, which we were just talking about.

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That's right. The two most obvious cases, the most public cases, center on Southern Seminary.

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And in the debate where we were being pushed to waive attorney -client privilege, Al Mohler weighed in and said that we ought to.

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But he also weighed in and bragged that he too had hired Guidepost Solutions to look into the situation at Southern Seminary and make sure everything's kosher.

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Well, then Al, why didn't you waive attorney -client privilege? If attorney -client privilege being waived is a best practice, why didn't

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Southern do it? You had an opportunity to voluntarily do this. And of course, when I pointed that out on Twitter, I got all this blowback.

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Oh, well, the messengers didn't tell them to. No, no, no, no, no. You told the messengers that it was a best practice.

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You told the messengers that it was essential to have an honest investigation, which again is a lie.

39:50

That's not at all true. And again, even the U .S. Justice Department prohibits U .S.

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attorneys from asking anyone to waive privilege. It's in the manual. So that's just ridiculous.

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But if Al believed we should waive privilege, why hasn't he?

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Yeah, he shouldn't. I just want him to be up front and say, OK, here's why

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I didn't do it, even though I pushed the E .C. to do it. Yeah, and we know why he pushed the

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E .C. to do it. We know why several entity heads did. They're trying to defang the thing and take

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Ronnie Floyd's job. And they have succeeded in that for now and push you out. Well, and several of them have reason to want to defang it.

40:33

Obviously, the executive committee was looking into whether the E .R.

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L .C.'s overtly left wing political actions were cutting, giving to the cooperative program.

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And of course, that made Russell very uncomfortable. And a bunch of his staff quit because they figured they were going to get shut down when the truth came out.

40:54

That was plain as day. And then, of course, you have Southwestern Seminary, which fired two of its own trustees.

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You can't do that. The whole idea of sole membership is that only the SBC itself can fill or replace trustees.

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And they just can two of their own trustees and then protested when anybody said anything about it.

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So it's amazing who mostly said something about it was Ronnie Floyd. So you have entity heads who absolutely wanted rid of him.

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Ronnie was the initiator of the investigation of the E .R. L .C. Ronnie was the one pushing back on the fired trustees.

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So it's just a whole nother kettle of fish.

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We need to talk about that at some point separately. But they wanted to define the E .C.

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And I don't think they ever thought through what are the legal ramifications to us? If you push this point, does this mean that a trial lawyer suing the executive committee can take

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Al Mohler's library? And the answer is, yeah, maybe. And there's a real threat of that now that did not exist before.

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And of course, Al shouldn't be foolish enough to waive privilege, too. But he should be honest enough to explain to the world why he pushed us to do so and did not do so at Southern.

42:14

So again, yes, you are not being cynical. You're being accurate. Well, one of the things that I know we're trying, we sort of close the interview down for people.

42:24

They can only we can only handle so much right now. With everything else going on with the covid stuff.

42:31

And but, you know, what I just I had another thought as you were talking that just it's so true that when

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I started to make some videos just critiquing what I saw, I was a seminary student at Southeastern.

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That's where I got my MDiv from. I really thought this was about social justice, that this was a lot of well -meaning people.

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And there are some that were just kind of being taken in by this. And the more that time has gone on,

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I've seen something that accompanies this and it's corruption and hypocrisy at some very high levels.

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You mentioned the Southwestern Seminary and basically breaking the rules.

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But Southwestern Seminary, I think it's next month or the month that I forget, is coming soon.

43:15

They're having an apologetics conference. They have Lisa Fields coming. They have Sam Albury coming. You know that it's kind of woke what they're doing there.

43:22

And this is the same Southwestern that denied Bill Roach and Tom Askell to come and do the

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International Society of Christian Apologetics Conference. They shut it down. It was scheduled. They denied them.

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But yet they're going to have the woke people come in and do an apologetics conference. And those are the things I used to just look at exclusively.

43:41

And now I'm seeing these same people making the decisions to kind of go woke or push the needle left. They're the same people that are involved in breaking rules, corruption, hypocrisy.

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And it just seems, you know, I think of even the descriptions in Scripture of false teachers that how these two things just seem to go together quite often.

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Bad theology and bad morals or ethics. They just they accompany each other all over the place.

44:06

And I'm seeing it more clearly now. I'm sure you are, too. But I just want to make that point for those listening is that these two things are not disconnected.

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They are connected. And what's happening, you know, we do have a spiritual opponent as well.

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We have demons that are very real and they are at play as well. I don't think there's one behind every bush, but there's real evil out there.

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And and it's time we got to be serious about it in our own lives, but also in the associations that we are part of, including the

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SBC. So I just wanted to say that I'll give you the last word, Rod, whatever you want to say to everyone. Well, you're exactly right.

44:44

And the demons wish, as we are told in Scripture, to appear as angels of light. So, of course, they want to cloak this in the language of racial reconciliation and saving abuse survivors and all of these wonderful things.

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And of course, we want those things, too. I wish very much that we could get past any form of racism.

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Why on earth would we allow anyone to be judged on their most superficial characteristics when the gospel is that the father adopts us all out of all races on an equal footing, not just with each other, but with Christ himself.

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We are comparers with Christ. That is the heart of the gospel. And so so, of course, we should be against that.

45:29

And of course, we should do anything we can to help an actual victim of any sex abuse and string up their accuser or their abuser.

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I am totally behind that. But but. These wonderful goals, just like in socialism generally, the wonderful goals of equality and the wonderful goals of all of the pretty things that Marx promised.

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Are used to aggrandize the power and position of a tiny elite that tends successfully to talk the others into something they don't realize they're doing.

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And so, you know, there have been many countries taken over by socialists where where the line was, you know, they're for one, they're for one man, one vote.

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They're actually for one man, one vote, one time. And that's the situation here.

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We have to pursue these worthy goals that are absolutely mandated by scripture, but in a scriptural way.

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And critical race theory and all of the other critical theory subsets are designed to divide.

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They are designed to put enmity between brother and sister. They are designed to to take away the gospel, not advance it.

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And the handful who benefit from this in powerful positions must be changed out for people who will hold those trusts.

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Well, that's why we've got to go to Anaheim in June. That's why we've got to be vocal about this, inform ourselves, actually talk to our brothers and sisters and make a difference.

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These are the Lord's institutions, not ours. And we absolutely have to turn them back to the right.

47:18

All right, well, with that, thank you so much, Rod Martin, for giving us of your precious time to inform everyone and anywhere you want people to go to find out more about you and what you're writing or saying.

47:34

Absolutely. I'm on Facebook and Twitter, of course, but I'm also our company website is martinorganization .com.

47:42

We do some interesting things there, martinorganization .com. And I would encourage everybody to sign up for the

47:47

Conservative Baptist Network, conservativebaptistnetwork .com, where we are trying very hard to give the

47:55

SBC back to the Baptist in the pew. All right. Excellent. Thank you so much for giving us your time.