Tom Rush and Russell Fuller Weigh in on the SBC and Overturning of Roe v Wade

Southern Baptist Convention Drift and Conservative Frustration

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have two special guests today who have been on before. We have Dr. Tom Rush and Dr. Russell Fuller, and they have both been very vocal about the, for lack of a better term, drift that's taking place in really a bad direction at Southern Seminary.

Dr. Rush is, I believe you're still on, I should have checked this out, you're still on the trustee board or are you off of it? No, I'm still on the board. You are on, okay. Southern Seminary, correct.

Yep, okay, so you're on the trustee board. Dr. Fuller taught there for decades before just recently, and I just want to get their take on the Southern Baptist Convention. Maybe we'll talk about some of the things that just happened last week, but both of you, thank you so much for just being willing to talk about this publicly.

Yes, well, thanks, John. It's great to be with you. Thanks for having us. I just saw a social media post, I think it was a tweet from James Merritt, who declared that there is no liberal drift in the Southern Baptist Convention and that we are not going liberal.

He had congratulated Bart Barber on getting elected as president. And it's like, the idea is that they're the conservatives and those of us who feel like there is a progressive liberal drift are now being referred to as neo-fundamentalist.

And so they just changed the terminology. And I think the difference is that those of us that are true conservatives are those who have biblical convictions and are willing to stand for them. I think there's a lot of our Southern Baptist friends, I'll call them friends, that are on the more progressive liberal side.

And John, they perceive themselves as conservatives, but what they have is conservative preferences, not convictions. They would prefer, for example, that we don't press CRT. They would prefer that people not behave in a homosexual way.

They would prefer that women not be the lead pastor of a Southern Baptist church, but they don't have any courage of conviction to stand against when that drift begins to come. Well, you were just at the convention.

And you saw what happened. It seems like, I think, Conservative Baptist Network, if memory serves me, they did not win anything of the elections that they were trying to win. And of course, we saw the way that the resolutions committee and various other committees behaved on stage.

It's a discouraging thing for true convictional conservatives, theological conservatives, and political conservatives to see. What was it like being there in person? And I mean, was it even, I just saw a video, but I imagine being there, was it even more prevalent or obvious that there certainly is a drift and there certainly is corruption?

Well, yeah, there was an obvious, if you wanna talk about the temperature of the room, initially, most of the motions that were made in the first business session seemed to be coming from a more conservative perspective.

I made a motion. We had several motions. I was privileged to work with my friends at CBN to try to have some influence in the convention to make some motions that would, at least if nothing else, point out the direction that we are going.

And so it seemed like there was a good, solid contingent of conservatives at the convention. But as things progressed, it became very obvious that we were about a thousand votes short of where we needed to be to regain control of the convention.

John, the way the convention works, the only way to control it is to elect a conservative president and then get control of the committee on committees, who selects the committee on nominations, who selects the appointees to all the trustee boards.

And our trustee system is broken. And one of the things that CBN has been working to do is to try to point out the need for good governance of our entities. Obviously, with the things that have happened with the ERLC and the North American Mission Board in particular, it is critical that we give that control.

In the last two years in both Nashville and out in Anaheim this year, we've come up about a thousand votes short in the presidential election. And we came out in about that same kind of situation on all of the other issues that were voted on, such as the Sex Abuse Task Force report recommendations and the resolutions that came out and the resolutions that were not presented.

That created a whole nother set of issues. And if Southern Baptists don't wanna lose the convention, they have got to show up to the convention to vote. I'm fully convinced that the vast majority of our Southern Baptist churches are conservative.

What happens in the convention is not a reflection of where Southern Baptist churches are. It's a reflection of where our entity heads and the elites who are in the leadership positions in our convention, it's a reflection of where they are taking us and the direction that they are going.

And I think there's too much at stake just to let it go.

Yeah, okay. So you wanna keep fighting, supporting CBN's efforts. You'll be there next year, I'm assuming.

That's correct. I've already made my reservations for New Orleans next year. Gotcha.

Dr. Fuller, you were not there this year at the convention. I know you were the previous year. Is there a reason for that?

Yes, there's a couple of reasons. One is it's way too expensive to go to Anaheim. So cost was a problem. Number two, I do see the system is virtually rigged. You know, when you sign up for the Southern Baptist Convention, you do it online, they know what the numbers are.

They know the numbers that they need in order to win. They know how many convention employees or agency employees are going to show up. They, NAM with its SEND Conference, that's where they can bring in a lot of people to make sure they win.

So it's very difficult. This is not the 1980s. And now they know how the system works and they know how conservatives used it back in the 80s to do the conservative resurgence. And these people are, again, I think they have the system virtually rigged.

And I, to me, what the issue that I see out there, it goes back to Ed Litton. You know, I think most people in the Southern Baptist Convention, and I'm talking about the pastors in particular, knew that Ed Litton was a plagiarist.

And yet you saw very little uprising from the pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention on this. And I think that tells us that if we can't even call out Ed Litton and have him resign, and you just make people making calls to say, hey, Ed Litton needs to resign.

If we can't even get Southern Baptist pastors to do that, I'm not sure they're going to show up in New Orleans or any other place in order to do what is necessary to be done to turn the Southern Baptist Convention around.

Let me just give you a brief story on this. My son, he lives in the Bratton Rouge area and he one time went to one of the association meetings and he made a resolution. He says, why don't we publicly call on Ed Litton to resign for his plagiarism?

Well, that caused an uproar and the pastors were not too happy with him. And of course they put it off a few months saying, we need to work on this statement, this resolution, you know, and so forth. And of course I knew what they were going to do.

They were going to basically trash it and they did. And then my son went to the Louisiana State Convention, did the same thing. Of course he was ruled out of order for making that motion. It was overturned, but again, two thirds, at least two thirds of the pastors that were at the Louisiana Baptist Convention did not want to even debate the issue about Ed Litton and his plagiarism.

Now, again, Louisiana is a deep Southern state, very Southern Baptist, and yet the pastors there are not willing to stand up and say, Ed Litton, you ought to resign. And so when I see things like this, John, I'm not encouraged that we have the troops, as it were, to do what needs to be done in the Southern Baptist Convention.

So I'm not at all positive about the future of the Southern Baptist Convention. If we can't agree, as a matter of fact, our new president believes that God inspires people to commit plagiarism, like the apostle Mark, excuse me, not the apostle, but Mark, the gospel writer.

I mean, this is, we're in very serious trouble in the Southern Baptist Convention. And the fact that pastors are not crying out, showing people their sin, they're not, as it were, exposing the unfruitful works of darkness, shows you the Southern Baptist Convention, it's more than just a problem with the agency heads.

It's a problem in the pulpits, and I believe it's a problem in the pews as well.

You could say systemic, to pick one of their words. Yeah, that's correct. So you both are in different places then, and I'm glad I'm having both of you on, because we're gonna get to some areas where I think you're gonna shed light on things at Southern Seminary with Al Mohler, et cetera.

Why the Convention Is Hard to Retake

But to start off though, I really find this fascinating. Dr. Rush, is there any, since you have a different perspective on wanting to keep in and stay fighting and everything, what kind of encouraging things can you point to, or what strategy might be employed in a convention that was not previously employed that could perhaps cause a conservative victory?

Well, John, let me address one thing that my dear brother, Russell Fuller, spoke to, and that is the cost of going to the convention. And it's always kind of bothered me that we go to California to have a convention when the vast majority of Southern Baptists are in other areas of the country.

And of course, anytime you have a meeting like that, it's going to be expensive because you have to, you know, it's gotta be in a convention hall that's large enough to hold everybody. And I understand the difficulties of getting a meeting like that orchestrated, just the pragmatics of it, and those things have to be done.

What I have been suggesting, and I've had a lot of churches, small churches, and a lot of lay people contacting me and saying, you know, what can we do? And then a lot of the smaller church pastors are saying, I can't afford to go to the convention, it's too expensive.

My suggestion to them is to take their cooperative program funding, and if necessary, their mission offering funding, or the Annie Armstrong Easter offering, the Lottie Moon Christmas offering, take those funds, use that money to send your pastor and his wife to the convention.

In other words, stop giving it to the convention, use that money, give enough money to the convention so you have at least two messengers, and then use that money to send someone. Every year at the convention, there have been motions, and this has been going on for the last, I don't know, eight to 10 years maybe, but consistently, we've had a motion to make an online voting at the convention possible.

In other words, to have regional sites, or even to be able to do it from your own home computer to be able to plug in, be a messenger, and vote on the important issues of the convention. The elites that are in charge don't want that to happen.

One of the reasons they would have a convention at Anaheim is they know it's too expensive for a lot of the pastors to go, and so they can control it that way. And another thing that they do, and this was very apparent at the convention in Anaheim, and also in Nashville last year, they have learned how to use the platform as a bully pulpit, and they'll work the floor into an emotional frenzy almost, and they have complete control over what's said and who's allowed to speak.

I mean, this was very evident in the fact that a sex abuse victim, Jennifer Buck, was rebuffed at the microphone, and yet Rick Warren was given six minutes to address the convention without any opposition whatsoever.

So they know how to control that. And again, the only way to change that is to change who's in charge of the platform, and that begins with electing a conservative president. The conservative resurgence took almost 20 years.

It started in 1979. It was the mid to late 90s before we really had things turned around. It takes that long. I mean, the SPC is a huge organization, and to get a change in the trustee boards would take that many years to do it.

So it is a long fight. I don't disagree with anything Dr. Fuller has said about the concerns and the direction where the convention is going. You know, Rush Limbaugh used to talk a lot about low information voters, and that that was part of the problem in our political elections.

Well, what we have at the Southern Baptist Convention is low information voters. They don't know what's going on. They're not watching your podcast. They're not watching other podcasts. They're not reading the discernment blogs.

They're not aware of the seriousness of the problem. And then you couple that with what I think is the biggest problem within our Southern Baptist Convention with the entities is the duplicity. In other words, obviously for me, I would not want Southern Seminary, for example, to be teaching CRT.

But worse than the fact that they're teaching it is that they are denying that they're teaching it. You know, they will say, well, you know, in fact, we passed a resolution at the convention this year, essentially that said same-sex attraction is sinful.

And we have seminary presidents who will agree with that. And yet they platform people like Sam Albury, who is a champion for same-sex attraction, and that you can have that and be a Christian and there's no problem.

So it's the duplicity. You have Danny Aiken at Southeastern Seminary who says, you know, we're not woke. But yet when you look at the people that he platforms, you look at the people that are championed by that, you look at the people they invite to speak, like Kevin Smith and the things that he said at the nine marks meeting at the convention this year were horrendous in terms of his attack on Christians and so forth.

And so this is where the problem is, it's a duplicity, but the only way that we can stop it is to go to the convention in New Orleans and vote our convictions. Now, is it possible? I'm hopeful, but doubtful.

Let me put it that way. And my doubt comes from the fact that people won't rise up and do it. So a lot of people are saying, well, it's just not worth it. But consider this, the Southern Baptist Convention represents 11 of the evangelical churches in America, but our seminaries train 33 of the pastors.

33 of pastors that are getting a seminary degree are coming through our Southern Baptist Seminaries. If we lose the Southern Baptist Convention to these progressives, that's not gonna just impact the Southern Baptist Convention and the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, it's gonna have an impact in evangelical Christianity.

So that's why I think it's worth us continuing the fight.

Yeah, so one of the things you brought up, I think this is probably something we won't get to the bottom of necessarily, because I don't know if the information's there, but it's something that I wanna highlight because it's fundamental in my mind to whether or not the convention can be retaken or not.

And that is, is the convention composed of conservative churches who just don't understand what's going on, which I think you've just advocated to some extent, and that may be true. I've wrestled with this myself.

Is it just that people aren't aware? I think that would probably be the situation of the conservative resurgence initially, is you have all these seminaries pontificating modernism, and then the churches that still believe the Bible don't realize.

But we are at a different age in the sense that there's so much information easily accessible, and you have podcasts like this one. I mean, you couldn't probably during that time just jump on a podcast from your study and tell the whole world if you wanted to about what's going on at Southern Seminary or the convention.

So that, I mean, that is a difference. And what I've wondered is maybe whether that's the case or it's a combination of that and something else, which is I worry sometimes that even the listeners who are possibly listening to this podcast who are Southern Baptists are doing so in closets, are doing so with headphones on because they don't want anyone else to hear.

And the reason I'm saying that is because I will get messages, this is very frequent, from pastors or from laymen, especially in the SBC, who say things like, we just got a woke pastor from Southeastern who just replaced our pastor.

And he's saying all these things that we don't agree with it. And generally this process hits them in the face. They weren't part of it. They should have been probably, but it's not until they hear something that contradicts what they believe that they realize something's afoot.

And then there's an apprehension about confronting it. And it's easier for people to just leave their church. And if they do, they do so generally quietly and amicably, and they don't wanna make a noise.

And this is what I see happening more often than not. And so I don't know whether it's, it probably is a combination of there's probably some ignorance. There's some, there's wrong beliefs out there. So the CRT and the Me Too and all that stuff is coming in, but there's also just a lack of courage.

And that's one thing, that's the thing that I guess concerns me the most. Dr. Rush and then Dr. Fuller, do you see this lack of courage being one of the driving things or at least a problem?

Well, absolutely, John, a lack of courage. And really it's not so much a lack of courage as is it a lack of the fear of the Lord. It seems like that we're more interested in pleasing the world. As you know, as well as I do, there's an awful lot of virtue signaling going on.

And particularly with our entity heads, it's just that they want to be loved by the world and loved by God. And Jesus said, if they hated me, they're going to hate you. And so there's a lack of courage to stand up to that.

And I think it's good that some of our laymen in our churches are recognizing their woke pastor. And they're recognizing the fact that the guy comes in and that he is woke and that he is speaking in ways that are contradictory to our Baptist faith and message, in ways that are contradictory to common sense and biblical standards.

So that's a good thing, but they've got to have the courage to stand up and stand against it. And I think there's a lack of courage on the part of our pastors across the convention and also of our laymen to stand up against it.

I think there's a lack of courage in our boards. There are men on the board at Southern with me who will tell me privately that they agree with me, but they won't vote that way. They won't second a motion that I make.

I had a faculty member at Southern who wanted to meet with me privately. And I thought that to be a little bit unusual. And he said, well, I can't be seen talking to a trustee, which meant that he was fearful, obviously.

So I agreed to meet with him and I gave him confidentiality. I won't mention his name, but he thanked me for what I was doing and told me about a lot of different things that he knew, which were things I could use in a trustee meeting, except I knew that as soon as I did, the question would be, well, what faculty member told you that?

Well, I can't tell you that. Well, then they're not going to believe it. But at the end, he asked me this question. He said, Tom, what can I do? And I said, you can't do anything until you value the truth more than you do your paycheck.

In other words, until you're willing to stand up and be counted for the truth, there's nothing that you can do. And that's true across the board. Until we fear the Lord more than we fear the reaction of men, unless we love the praise of God more than the praise of men, there isn't anything we can do and we will lose the convention.

Yeah, that's my big concern. Dr. Fuller, how do we get the Nicodemuses to stand against the rest of the Pharisees?

Oh, that's very difficult. And I do believe there is a lack of courage, a lack of obedience to God's word. And again, I think, John, you said it, it's a systemic failure. The pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention, if they cannot stand up to Ed Litton, how are they going to stand up to critical race theory, the Me Too movement, these other, really the revoiced stuff, they call it B-side, but once you accept B-side, it's the same record as the A-side, so it doesn't really matter to me.

How are they going to stand up to any of these things? And the answer is they're not. And so the pastors are failing and our church leaders are failing. I was at a church down in Florida at First Baptist Dover, very faithful church down there.

And they told me they've had a lot of growth because many members at woke churches are now coming to their church because they're remaining faithful. And they had me give a talk on critical race theory.

And I had people coming all the way up from Naples, from First Baptist Naples. And I gave them the floor to speak because they could tell us the truth about what social justice and critical race theory and that religion is doing to their churches.

And so, and I just talked to a pastor out in Phoenix area, and he said the same thing, that they're getting all sorts of social justice, critical race theory, refugees from other churches coming to their church now because they're going to remain faithful.

So what we need to do, what pastors need to do is, look, if you'll be faithful, the Lord will honor this. But if you want to please the world, if you want the praise of men, if you don't want to be blackballed and all these things, you shouldn't be in the ministry anyway.

If you can't speak out against Ed Litton, you shouldn't be in the ministry. And the problem is in our churches, we have many ministers who should not be in the ministry. We have many churches that are just full of tares.

I don't think, I'm not sure there's any much wheat in them anymore. And it's a very serious situation we're in right now. I want to talk By the way, let me just say one more thing. Something Tom Rush brought up about Kevin Smith.

By the way, Tom, I hope you know, Kevin Smith is a professor, an adjunct professor at Southern Seminary, still is. And so, you know, but I'm sure Dr. Moeller will not deal with him.

Well, it's funny, I'll just He's afraid to, to be perfectly honest, Ross. That's right.

Well, let's get into Al Moeller in a minute. I just wanted to let everyone know who's listening too. One of the things, it's a perfect illustration of what you're talking about, regarding that Kevin Smith situation.

Someone reached out to me this morning and, you know, essentially I'm trying to phrase this the best way I possibly can, because I don't want to give away too much, but they wanted to let me know that privately, one of the members of Nine Marks who was on that panel is saying how embarrassed they are by that situation, how shocked they were, how just how much they are against what Kevin Smith said.

And it was just, you know, they were deer in the headlights. They just couldn't say anything. It was just so offensive what he said that, but here's the thing. When you look at the video, you have two pastors.

I forget the first guy, but then Matt Chandler's the second. They talk for over 10 minutes at least. I mean, they talk for a while and they affirm passively what Kevin Smith said. They affirm his analysis.

And no one, even in that time period, thinks to say to the room, you know what? We wouldn't phrase things the way Kevin Smith just phrased them, or we appreciate it. Not even a slight pushback. And even now they could make a statement.

They could go out there and say, you know, this has gone mainstream. You have the Occupy Democrats using this statement to bludgeon the other pastors of the SBC. We do not agree with this. We actually are embarrassed.

They could say what they're saying supposedly, privately, allegedly out loud, but they're not gonna do it. And they're not doing it. And to me, that illustrates what you're saying, Dr. Fuller, that these people all claim to be conservative, which is what Tom Rush, you said at the beginning, that there's so many people claim to be conservative.

And then when it comes time to actually show me some of that conviction and strength and it's gone, where did it go? But privately, you can't attack them because they'll tell you they're on your side.

And it's like, I don't know what to do with that. That's just cowardly.

So Oh, and let me tell you this about Kevin Smith. Yeah. If you go back, and perhaps it's on Southern Seminary's website, but if you go back to the year 2016, the day of the election, which would have been to be probably what the first Tuesday in November of 2016, Kevin Smith was the preacher in chapel at Southern Seminary.

And he went on a long screed, basically saying, if you vote for Donald Trump, you're a racist. So this is not the first time he's done this. And in my 22 years teaching at Southern Seminary, I walked out of chapel one time, usually when we had a liberal chapel speaker, I wanted to hear what he was gonna say.

But when I heard Kevin Smith just basically calling, if you voted for Donald Trump today, or if you're gonna vote for Donald Trump today, you're basically a racist and all these types of things. That was the one seminary chapel I walked out of in 22 years at Southern Seminary.

It was so bad. So this is not the first time he's done stuff like this. And again, Mueller has no problem with it really. Oh, and let me tell you another story about this. Two days later, after Trump was declared president, Matt Hall's wife was sitting beside my wife and she said to my wife, boy, it's a very dark day.

And my wife goes, what happened? I didn't hear about this. Trump got elected. This is the way they were. And this is the way they are. And it's just pitiful. It's just pitiful. Well, I wanna A total lack of course.

I remember when I taught at Southern Seminary in the hallways, all the professors, oh, we need to do this, we need to do that. And then you get in a meeting and all of a sudden they're hiding under their desk.

So people talk one way in the hall, you get into the meeting where things have to be done. And it's amazing how people will change. Tom, you know all about this.

Well, you know, John, it's this business of pastors not having any courage to stand up for what they really believe. And they'll say privately one thing, but publicly they won't stand against it. This is not new.

I have said for years that the vast majority of pastors are sissies. They're cowards. Because we can just eliminate all these issues, the woke issue and the sex abuse task force issue and all that kind of stuff.

Just set that aside for a minute. Pastors have lost their courage to stand up against tyrants in the church for fear of losing their job. In other words, they won't speak the truth. Back in the day, there were many of us who would preach against the Masonic Lodge, for example.

But I had pastors that said, oh, I'd never say anything negative about that in a sermon because I might lose my job. When you're more concerned about your job than you are standing for God's truth, you have a serious problem.

You probably should resign from the ministry. I remember Dr. Patterson saying one time, and I don't remember if he gave any timeframe on it, but essentially he said, if you're a pastor and you've never been fired, you're probably not preaching the truth.

Al Mohler, CRT, and Seminary Control

Yeah, true.

So I wanted to ask you about Al Mohler because Mohler is now, you saw what he said in the convention floor, and now he's the conservative champion again for opposing Rick Warren and women pastors. And what do you make of this since Dr. Rush, you're a trustee at Southern Seminary?

And then, well, yeah, let's start with you and then Dr. Fuller, we can get your take since you've known Al Mohler for years.

Well, I want to be as charitable as I can. I've tried to maintain a positive relationship with Dr. Mohler because I felt like that's the best way for me to have an opportunity to make a difference at Southern.

And we would certainly, I think most of us agree with the positions that Dr. Mohler took on women pastors and on equal protection for the unborn. I mean, he made the strongest statements of anyone on those two positions.

Seems like maybe he's trying to recast himself as the conservative champion now. I almost thought maybe he's got some fear that the CBN is going to be successful and is going to cause the convention to turn back to the right, at least to some degree.

I don't know if that's the case or not. I think that it sort of, Al's pretty good about judging the temperature of the room. And I think sometimes when he speaks, he speaks based on what he thinks the reaction is going to be of those that he's talking to.

If he's talking to the guys that are woke, he's probably going to sound a little bit more woke. If he's talking to you and Russell and I, he's probably going to sound less woke. He absolutely categorically denies that Southern Seminary is teaching CRT.

And it is. Categorically denies it. And I mean, all you have to do to prove it is read the book that he commissioned that was edited by Jarvis Williams and Jones removes. This book is full of CRT terminology and concepts.

And then of course, Williams has written a new book that's come out now and here's that book. And it is absolutely chock full of CRT terminology and concepts. And yet we're going to say that we're not teaching CRT.

I know enemies within the church has Jarvis Williams class notes up on their website. Anybody can go and pull those down and you read what's being taught in the classrooms. It's CRT.

You as a trustee, can you, I don't know what extent you can get class notes or I mean, you might have access to things that we don't or do you not? You have the same access we do.

Well, I pretty much the same access you do. I mean, what's interesting is that the trustees are told very little and the trustee meetings have been shoved down to one day's worth of meetings. They don't want the trustees on the campus any longer than they have to have us there.

And unfortunately, many of the people on the board, in fact, I'd say the vast majority of them there are in such a jaw dropping all of Dr. Moeller that they're not about to stand against him on anything.

I mean, it's even rare that anything is questioned. We know very little about the finances of the seminary. We have absolutely no control over the faculty. Before I came on the board a number of years ago, Dr. Moeller orchestrated it to do away with tenure so that trustees would no longer be involved with the removal or firing of a seminar for us.

In other words, there was when Dr. Fuller and Dr. Orrick were fired a couple of years ago, there was literally nothing that we as trustees could do. Now I objected, you could object to it, but there's no control.

So the trustees now, the only person that works for the trustees is the president of the seminary. And everyone else works for the president. He has complete hire and fire control over the entire seminary.

So if the trustees want to do something, the only person that they can hold accountable is the president himself.

So there's not much hope for big changes coming from the trustee boards at these institutions.

A trustee board could change all of those rules. Okay. It could change all of those rules, but you'd have to have a majority, really almost a super majority of trustees who feel like the change needs to be made.

That's what happened in the conservative resurgence. We elected conservative presidents who got conservatives put on the trustee board, men that they knew would stand for the truth and do something about the problem.

Without that happening, nothing is going to change.

Dr. Fuller, I have just an inkling that you might give a more aggressive answer here. Maybe, I don't know. About Al Mueller. Do you think he's changing his positions or this is who he's always been? Or I mean, could he be the guy CBN runs next year?

Who knows? I mean, I doubt that, but I doubt it.

I do think Al is repositioning himself. He wants to be the most conservative of the seminaries in order to attract students. Moreover, I think he's very sensitive to the criticism that he flip-flops all the time.

And I think he's getting close to retirement. He's thinking about his legacy and he wants to look like he's been a principled conservative all these years, where in essence, he flip-flops is what he does.

Even on this issue, let's say of women preachers, as you know, back in the 80s until the very last moment, he was championing women in the pulpit back in the 80s. He took out a full page article in the Louisville Courier Journal here in town, going against the Southern Baptist Convention at the time because they were saying that the pastorate was only for men.

He was totally against this. Now, today, what you got to watch out for when Dr. Mohler speaks one way, you've got to look at where he's speaking a different way. For instance, he's really leading the Me Too movement in the Southern Baptist Convention right now.

If you read the guidepost recommendations and their summary of what happened and so forth, Al Mohler is seen as a hero there because he is confirming Jennifer Lyle's story. He is really pushing Me Too stuff big time in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Well, most people who are pushing Me Too stuff are also pushing egalitarianism, that women can be pastors as well. As a matter of fact, in the last, it was the last semester I was there at Southern Seminary.

It was at the, I think it was the first seminary, the first sermon in chapel that year. He did one on women in ministry, saying again, women should not be in ministry. But then in the last 10, 15 minutes, he started the Me Too stuff where women must be heard.

And if she says something, we must, you know, must always basically go with her side of the story and so forth. Here's the thing, after that meeting, we had a faculty meeting and Denny Burke gets up and says, have we changed our position on women?

Because it was so confusing that even Denny Burke asked that and of course, Mohler went off on him in rage. I was clear what I said, you know. But again, he was double talking. And even though he sounded very strong on the floor, be very careful.