How Mohler Pushed the Needle Left

Al Mohler’s Shifts on Homosexual Orientation and Conversion Therapy

Al Mohler changed positions on homosexual orientation and conversion therapy in 2014 and 15. He actually did a 180 on homosexual orientation, even apologizing for the previous stance he held, which was that homosexual orientation was not a legitimate category from a Christian perspective.

On conversion therapy, he started speaking out strongly against it during that same time period, whereas before he had been not an aggressive advocate of it, but he at least saw that efforts to ban it were threats to religious liberty.

And that language ceased until very recently, which I'll come to at the end of this particular podcast. It's interesting because there's another change going on. There's a lot of pivots. If you follow this for any length of time, you can start to detect who the opportunists are, because when the political winds shift, they tend to also shift their position.

Racism, Southern Baptists, and Critical Race Theory

Al Mohler did that with these two subjects. He also believes that Southern Baptists—I believe this was 2019— are guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity by ignoring racism and the stain of racism on the denomination that will never go away until Christ comes.

So I think it was 2019 when he did this panel with—I think it was North American Mission Board, but it was with Jarvis Williams and Matt Hall was there, and I believe Curtis Woods, and they talked about the stain of racism that the Southern Baptist Convention has.

And there's video of this stuff. There's evidence of all this stuff. Most of it is in the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, which I wrote. You can get it on Amazon or you can go to worldviewconversation .com and get a copy.

It's all documented there. Al Mohler also characterized the United States in 2020 as conceived in racism, and that it affected—this racism—every structure in the United States. Every structure. He connected the shootings of Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor to police racism.

He signed the SBC statement connecting George Floyd's death to systemic injustice and past oppression. Now, this is CRT stuff, guys. It might be soft CRT. It might just be certain aspects of CRT, but it's this idea that racism is normalized, it's accepted, it's systemic, and it's permeating every aspect of our culture so that there needs to be—I mean, the solution is obvious if that's true— there needs to be some kind of process of radically altering all these different institutions so that they're not racist anymore.

Even though it's not racism that's implemented in law, it's not racism that's in policy, it's just under the surface somewhere. I mean, this is critical race theory stuff. I just read for you key points of critical race theory.

And this isn't any different than what Jarvis Williams was saying, except his emotion, the way he communicates it is different, and he doesn't go to the extent Jarvis Williams does. But he insinuated the phrase Black Lives Matter is acceptable.

He did not sign the Dallas statement because it approved of white supremacy. I kid you not. There's a video of this. He opposed critical race theory in the abstract after Resolution 9, and yet he defended the motives of the resolutions committee who brought us Resolution 9.

He hired and defended Curtis Woods, Jarvis Williams, and Matthew Hall, all who pushed critical race theory pretty blatantly, aspects of it at least. He defended Danny Akin and Adam Greenway on social justice issues, yet not Founders, not Conservative Baptist Network, or John MacArthur on the same issues, social justice issues.

He approved of condemning the Southern Cross and retiring the Brodus gavel. So this idea that racism is connected to, so part and parcel to, characteristic of, and definitional to symbols and objects that honestly are used and implemented for other reasons, but they become completely trashed and only associated with racism in a critical race theory framework, which is why these things are going the way of the dodo bird.

He approved of Russell Moore's performance while Moore was pushing the needle left. I believe that was 2018. He advocated a $5 million scholarship fund limited to black students. So it was only black students could get this fund because, and this is the real reason there's a problem with this, the first half of this sentence isn't the problem, the second half is.

Scholarship Fund for Black Students and Special Debt

The reason for it is because the institution, Southern Seminary, owed a special debt, and I quote, a special debt to African American Christians. So because they owe a special debt, I mean, what do you call that?

Is that reparations? Is that affirmative action? They owe this money. This is money owed to black students. He was exposed by Russell Fuller and Tom Rush, Russell Fuller being a former professor there, Tom Rush being a trustee there, and then he insisted, this is recently, that Jennifer Lyle's relationship with, who was that, David Sills, was not consensual despite countervailing evidence, and Megan Basham did some work on this, and he just insisted without evidence that it wasn't consensual.

This was the Me Too stuff. So Alan Waller, this is how he's pushed the needle left.