Living Out, Lynching's Legacy at the Library, and Leaving Marx

Hi, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I've been thinking about renaming it the Has the World of Social Justice Terms podcast because it certainly feels that way sometimes.

It's funny that the first podcast I did in January was about hiking and how it motivated me to go to the gym and I like getting out in the woods. And then I did my video on Southeastern and well, the rest is history.

But obviously I think this is an important topic or else I wouldn't be covering it. I'm passionate about those who especially are laymen in the church, fighting this in the pews, understanding. So I'm going to be exposing some of this stuff, but understanding how it works, the concepts that are cranking out of some of these seminaries.

And then I want to give you the tools necessary to challenge it. So this is a threat to the body of Christ. It needs to be answered. I'm grateful for those who, like Tom Buck this last week, which I'm going to be talking about, are trying to answer this in a pastoral way.

And so that's why I'm here. For this season of my life, it's a passion. Now it does have a cost. I'm really grateful for those who have encouraged me. I get a lot of encouraging emails and messages just about every day from people who have been blessed by things that I've said in the podcast.

So thank you for that. Also for those who contribute on Patreon. I mean, I have side jobs I do to try to make ends meet for my family, and to know that I can do some of this and be financially stable is really helpful.

So I can do more of it if I'm able to have that assurance. So I really appreciate those who are giving, and if you're interested, go to the info section and my Patreon account link is right there. But more than even that, I'm really appreciative for those who pray for me.

And I would ask you, please continue, if you are praying for me, just pray that I would fulfill the responsibilities I have, that God has given me, that are more fundamental. I mean, this is an important fight, and I am full throttle behind it.

We need to expose what's going on, and we need to answer it biblically. But at the same time, just like you who are watching, I have responsibilities. I have my own job. I have, I'm a student, I'm a husband, I'm a church member, I'm a citizen, and there's other things that I know that I need to be balanced in.

So I really appreciate those who are praying. If you just pray for me that I would have a balanced life, and that I would be strengthened in the fight against this stuff, because it does get weary sometimes, I'll be honest.

But thank you so much for your support. And this is exciting. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer at the beginning of this, I'm enjoying it, but it is exhausting, and there is a cost to it, but I have a lot to cover today.

There's so much that's going on, you can't cover it all, but I want to hit the high points, I want to interpret it if I can for you, expose it, interpret it, and then give you the tools. So here's where I'm going.

We're going to talk about Tom Buck and Sam Albury. If you already are familiar with that, maybe you want to skip ahead, because there's lots more I'm talking about, but it's very important. It's one of the biggest things, in my opinion, that's happened in the class between what I would say are the more orthodox folks and the social justice advocates, and it reveals.

A lot.

And after that, we're going to talk about an odd, in my opinion, seminar, library talk it was called, at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary on the legacy of lynching for pastoral ministry. Yes, I said that correctly.

I know. I don't understand it, but those who were part of it did understand it, so we need to talk about that. Why was this something that made sense to them and it doesn't to us? It seems like mission drift, right?

Now Danny Akin, the president, has made some tweets, put out some tweets in response to this, and some of them are disturbing, and I want to cover that and show you what's going.

On.

And then this may be one of the more important things I'm going to be covering, because I haven't seen anyone else so far cover this, but those who advocate social justice or who work at institutions that are advocating it are becoming very sensitive.

They do not want to be called Marxists at all, and there's a few ways they deal with.

It.

Number one, I've seen this many times, they'll shut down argument by calling us to repent. So you just need to repent, and because you disagree with me on neo-Marxism, or you said something that sounds bad, you called me a Marxist, or said that I'm advocating that, you need to repent, because that's not who I am.

Not very deep. So we can probably just disregard that. That's not someone who's open for discussion, if that's the only thing they want to do. The second thing that I've seen is those who are saying, you need five PhDs over a ten year period working in a committee to define these terms.

No you don't.

Intersectionality, critical race theory, feminism, these things you can define easily. Go to Wikipedia. I don't ever tell my students to use Wikipedia as a source, in fact I discourage it. But in this case, you can go to Wikipedia, and these things are readily available to be defined.

So you can figure out their meaning very easily. And then the third thing that I've seen is, and by the way, what I just mentioned, I want to talk about an email I saw from a certain professor at a certain theological institution, which was very long, in which he advocated not using these pejoratives.

Well I guess I already let the cat out of the bag. Yes, there was a professor that I read this email from, which I was like, you don't need like a team of experts to define these things. But Carl Truman, a couple weeks ago at Gospel Coalition put out an article along these lines.

You shouldn't be using Twitter to label people this or that, or say they're advocating neo-Marxism. So anyway, Carl Truman. The third thing I've seen, and this is what I'm going to be addressing more specifically, are those who want to distance themselves and say, we're not Marxists.

We're just not Marxists. You're getting it all wrong. And I'm going to specifically, I could pick other examples, but I'm going to specifically talk about something that came out, I think it was Sunday, so about a day ago, from Bruce Ashford, who's the provost at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I was actually very grateful for some of the things he said. He criticized Marxism. Danny Akin actually retreated it, which is ironic. And one of the reasons I wanted to cover this is because how can someone who just endorsed critical race theory on some level then, of course, say, yeah, Marxism is really bad.

I want to explain this because I've had a number of people ask me questions, is what's going on at Southeastern? And since I was a student there and I still have a lot of contacts in the institution, I would like to try to explain that.

And I would love it if those, you know, even Bruce Ashford, I would love it if he listened to some of this and maybe it would benefit him in some way, at least knowing what we're thinking, what those who are critical of neo-Marxism and think that that's being advocated, what we think.

Living Out, Sam Allberry, and Tom Buck’s Critique of Same-Sex Attraction Ministry

So let's start at the top. We're going to start with Sam Albury and Living Out and Tom Buck and the articles that he did at AOMN on the topic. So here's Sam Albury. He's an editor for Gospel Coalition.

This is from their website, speaker for RZIM and pastor in UK. He's the author of some books. His God Anti-Gay is one of them. As far as I know, from what I've heard, I haven't read these books, but they're okay.

They're not deviating from orthodoxy from what I understand. Here's the key thing though. He's the founding editor of Living Out, a ministry for those struggling with same-sex attraction. So Living Out is really the controversy.

Sam Albury's a controversy only insofar as he provides cover for Living Out because he, well, he's the founding editor of Living Out. So his name kind of is giving Living Out some approval here. Living Out.

What's the issue with Living Out? Well, according to Tom Buck, they endorsed Revoice and they tweeted in May of 2018, and for us US followers, there is of course the Revoice event coming in July, which we highly.

Recommend.

They later removed this tweet, but there was an endorsement there in the beginning. Revoice. I'm not going to go into it, but not good. They created a 10 point audit to help churches identify whether they were biblically inclusive to the LGBTQ plus community.

And apparently this audit was not a good thing at all. According to Al Baker, a Presbyterian evangelist, this audit was an example of mainstreaming of homosexual perversion into the church. And then they teach that a same-sex attracted individual is fixed in their orientation and that the orientation itself does not need to be mortified.

Now that's become, that's what Living Out, one of the things Living Out was about, and that's become a problem. The Gospel Coalition has put out a bunch of things on this and they just immediately think that this is an orientation that's fixed, buying into what the world's believed now for a while, but Christians had not and have not ever believed traditionally.

This is brand new. So we need to know how to respond to some of these things. And I'll give you some things to think about, but I want to survey what Tom Buck did. So here's some quotes from Living Out.

This is from some of the other editors or writers, I should say. Tom Buck gives you some more extensive quotes, but here's a few that I just picked out. Sean Doherty, I believe I'm pronouncing that okay.

He said, the couple should cease, this is a same-sex couple, they should cease the sexual aspect of their relationship, he argues, that it may be good and right for them to continue living together, especially if they have children.

The intimacy, fun, loyalty, companionship, and faith encouragement aspects of same-sex relationships are great and they can, of course, be a healthy environment to nurture children. Holding back from sexual intimacy doesn't spell an end to physical intimacy.

It's from Sean Doherty. Now, I'm going to ask a question. Tom Buck asked the same exact question, but would you ever, if you were a pastor, give that advice to a heterosexual couple who's struggling, perhaps?

I mean, even if they weren't struggling, would you say, yeah, just go ahead, live together, have some kind of intimacy, just make sure it's not sexual and you can raise kids in.

That environment?

Does that make any sense whatsoever? Moving on, he also offers advice to a heterosexual married couple where one or both spouse experience same-sex attraction. So someone who is homosexual, well, they experience same-sex attraction.

That's the new term. So this is what they're experiencing and they're in this heterosexual marriage. What should they do? Well, they should choose not to repress their desires. And of course, it's right to avoid situations that place us in temptation.

That is not the same as seeking to ignore or deny your feelings, which is dangerous. So how does this fit in with mortifying your flesh, which is what Paul tells us to do? This is so anti-biblical. So moving on, Ed Shaw, another writer, says, we'd be crazy to deny the good in permanent, stable, faithful, same-sex sexual relationships.

Read accounts of the gay community at the height of the AIDS epidemic and you'll be moved to tears by the self-sacrificial love of couples who devotedly nursed both loved ones and complete strangers.

That's Ed Shaw. He also confesses that his desire when he looks at a beautiful man is to become one with him, to be united with him. And he says, in a sense, you've got to suppress the sexual fantasy, but there's a beauty in this, because God made beauty.

And so you would never see someone, like a pastor, saying this about a heterosexual relationship. Oh, you're looking and you're just admiring the beauty of your red-blooded male looking at a woman and just admire that beauty and you want to become one with them.

Well, stop short. Don't fantasize, but it's a good thing. There's something positive here. And there's beauty in your—you never hear a pastor say there's beauty in your fornication.

Or your adultery.

Because, you know, look, this is what the example Tom Buck gives, but he says, let's pick another sin. Let's pick robbery. You know, what about the bank robbers who go to jail or they end up getting shot by.

The police?

And on their deathbed, the other bank robber comes and they're consoling them. And this is some—we should say that's a beautiful thing.

No, it's not.

Why is that a beautiful thing? And so, we would never say this about any other sin, but somehow there's an exception made for homosexuality and same-sex attraction. And so there's something, I think, very interesting here going on.

This is what Tom Buck says about the ministry. He says, while they admit that acting on the desires would be sin and even the attraction itself is a result of the fall, a church is not biblically inclusive if they tell a Christian who experiences same-sex attraction that they should not—that they should even seek for God to remove that desire.

He quotes Colossians 3 .5, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. And this seems to be, in my estimation, more or less the point.

God does not just look at what you do outwardly. He looks at your heart. Desires can be sinful. And in Romans 1, these kinds of desires are classified as—well, they're disordered. It reverses the order of creation.

And so there's something twisted about it. Praying that God would get rid of those things and trusting in the sufficiency of Christ and the Holy Spirit and the Word to do that work in the process of sanctification, mortifying the flesh—I mean, Jesus says that you should—I mean, he's being figurative here, but cut off your arm, cut off your hand if it causes you to sin.

So this is what Scripture calls us to do, but living out is giving a different message, and that's Tom Buck's concern. This is false teaching. Now, Tom Buck did this in a few different parts, and during this whole exchange, him and Sam Albury had their own interaction, and Sam Albury essentially says, Well, I'll check into it, Tom.

I'm going to look at these things, and I'll kind of get back to you. And by the end of the series, though, Tom Buck is like, Okay, well, until you get these things off your website, then you shouldn't probably be speaking at some of these major conferences that you're invited to speak at.

This is a concern. This is a really important issue, because this is biblical teaching that's at stake, and it could lead people into sin. So if you're not concerned about this enough to deal with it, and these aren't hard things to deal with.

These articles are fairly simple, and they're short. Then, you know, this needs to be dealt with soon. And so he's encouraging, by the end of it, he's encouraging Christians to take action, essentially.

And so here's the more concerning thing. You may think, Okay, that's bad. Well, here's what happened when Tom Buck decided to, I guess, more or less, he put in an inquiry on the website and pretended to be, I guess, like a 15-year-old boy.

He wrote a message as if he was a 15-year-old boy making this inquiry. And he's struggling with same-sex attraction. What do I do? I'm in the church. And this is the advice that they give him. This is absolutely shocking.

One of the things they said to do was to go to a website, True Freedom Trust. True Freedom Trust says, for those, it's for Christians who have same-sex attraction. It says it's good to have hugs with a same-sex friend.

Visiting, so these are some of the things they say to do. Visit naturist beaches. Visit gay bars or nightclubs without the intention of sexual intimacy.

What?

Use online chat room or a dating website app to meet other same-sex attracted people just for friendship. Share a house or going on holiday with another person. This is from England, so going on a vacation of the same sex.

Solemnize a particular same-sex friendship. This is shocking. Can you imagine any pastor saying anything close to this about a heterosexual couple? Imagine a husband who is committing adultery. Can you imagine them giving this advice?

Yeah, go to a cheating website and become friends. Don't do anything sexual. This is getting as close to the cliff as you possibly can. Jumping down halfway but not trying not to hit the ground is what this is.

That is really disturbing, and Tom Buck exposes this, and I think he does a good job. So if you're looking for more detail, I would go to aomin .org and check that out. Now, moving on, this is what happened after Tom Buck's expose on living out.

Well, the ERLC says, hey, the Gospel Coalition is coming to Indianapolis, and you know what? Sam Albury is going to be there. Now, Sam Albury, it's not Sam Albury's, what he said in his published writings that's really the issue.

The issue is Sam Albury's website and his ministry and what's being promoted there. And Sam Albury is aware of it, and he's not distancing himself from it, at least right now. I hope he does. We should pray for that.

But that's what's going on, and if he doesn't, then this is concerning. Speaking at these big Christian conferences. Here's Midwestern Seminary. Join us at the Gospel Coalition. And what do they say about Sam Albury?

He's going to address current issues surrounding living out ministries. That's going to be interesting. And this is maybe one of the more concerning ones, J .D. Greer. Now, this is the day after Tom Buck posts his last—Tom Buck is a Southern Baptist pastor, right?

The day after he posts his last article, J .D. Greer says, for those who have same-sex attraction, it is allowable to pursue same-sex romance so long as a person abstained from same-sex well sex. Albury's response reveals much-needed distinctions between friendship, intimacy, and romance.

So J .D. Greer posts his endorsement of Albury with the rainbow flag there, and it's the timing, I think, that is the issue more than anything else. It would be very surprising if he did not know, if he was not aware of what was going on in the broader evangelical world and what Tom Buck and Sam Albury's interactions were and what Tom Buck was writing on James White's website, AOMN .org.

So some folks pointed that out to Greer in the comments, but it is disturbing that this is happening. The wagons are being circled around Albury, and they probably shouldn't be. Ten years ago, Tom Buck pointed this out.

This would not be happening. If he advocated what Albury's website is advocating, he would be done. And now we have major evangelical organizations circling the wagons around Albury, whose ministry is living out, and you've just seen what is currently, even now, on their website.

So, very disturbing. You can see the fault lines are being drawn. The dust is starting to settle on some things, but there's a lot more dust that's going to be kicked up, and there's a lot of other issues in the social justice package that we need to talk about.

The Southeastern Seminary Lynching Seminar and the Politics of Confession

So, let's move on to a new topic, but not really a new topic, because it's still pertaining to social justice. Let's talk about this library talk that happened at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary on March 27th.

The title is, The Lingering Effects of Lynching on Your Ministry, an Untold Story. The person moderating it was also named James White, which I had to do a double take. It's a different James White, and there were two others that joined him, Dr. Will Willimon from Duke, and Dr. Donald G. Matthews from UNC.

One of the things that was interesting to me is that James White, I've heard his name before, and I thought, well, where have I heard that? Well, he teaches at Southeastern. So, he's teaching on the college level, and this is just kind of, I guess, a rabbit trail.

It's just a sidebar, but it shows something to me. He's the Executive Vice President at the YMCA of the Triangle. He studied at East Carolina University, and he has a Bachelor's of Arts in Sociology and Political Science.

No seminary degree. That's all he's got is a Bachelor of Arts, according to his LinkedIn. And he's part of a church, but it does not seem to be a Southern Baptist convention church. I looked it up, and so it's confusing to me why he's leading panels on these kinds of things.

I don't quite get it, and why he's teaching, I guess, at the university would be another question I have. How is this happening? But this is what's happening. So, what happened at this discussion? For that, I would really like to direct you to Enemies Within the Church, because they posted a student's reflections of the recent lynching seminar at SCBTS.

There is a student who attended this event, and what he says is... I'm going to paraphrase some things here, and read you a few quotes, I guess. This is the paraphrase. He says that this really wasn't about lynching as much as it was about Donald Trump, Fox News, modern police shootings, racism that exists today, and how lynching is just the... these are the results of this lynching legacy.

And he talks about the intimidation that students have if they wanted to disagree, that it's just not an environment where they can really do it. He talks about... I mean, the word that came into my mind was reprogramming, or reconditioning, which is what Thabiti said at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary last year.

We need to be reconditioned. But they said that what needs to happen is you need to internalize everything that we heard. So they tell stories of lynching. They have photos and things, and you've got to internalize it.

Don't try to analyze it, internalize it. Very interesting. And, of course, this is being led by a sociologist, and so that's not much of a surprise, but you would think maybe this would come from sociology, psychology.

One of the panelists expressed frustration that whites often do not talk about this history. He mentioned that often white people respond when things are discussed, I never owned slaves, I never lynched anyone, etc.

He responded that as Christians, we have to begin this discussion with confession and repentance instead of defense. There's what I was talking about earlier. Repent is the first thing. Repent, even if it's something that you didn't do, didn't participate in, no connection whatsoever, but the color of your skin is such that people that look like you at one time in the past did some things that weren't very nice.

Well, you need to repent of that. So he goes on, he talks about they never argued for the connection between police brutality and these things. One of the panelists calls himself, on the far left, a Democrat.

So that just raises questions about, is this guy for abortion? How far left are we going here? But this is a seminary, this is training pastors, this isn't just a historical forum. This is supposed to be linked to ministry somehow.

And so this seminary student who, very balanced, I just go there, go to enemieswithinthechurch .com, find a student's reflections of the recent lynching seminar at SCBTS and check that out, because I really think that he's going to give you a fuller picture.

Now here's the thing, guys. There's a melodramatic kind of element to this, and it comes out in the seminars. You've got to internalize this. You've got to let the emotions hit you, the anger that you feel when you see this picture.

I don't know if there was music with it or not, but you're hearing these stories, and it's going to make you angry to see something like a crime taking place. Your soul's going to cry for some kind of justice, right?

You're going to want to see those who carried out a crime punished. And these are crimes of the past, and that's part of the problem. And it sounds to me like they oversimplified lynching too, to an extent.

I mean, I don't want to give a whole history of lynching right now, but in the American context at least, the term lynch comes from Colonel Charles Lynch and his treatment of the Tories. The Tories, British, they're white people, British sympathizers.

And it has become now, the term lynching has a racial component in our country. But these are the stats from the NAACP, which, I mean, they got their information from the Tuskegee Institute, but 3 ,446 blacks and 1 ,297 whites from 1882 to 1968.

And by the late 40s, hardly any lynchings are taking place. The last lynching would have been, I guess, 1968. But that's according to the Smithsonian. Again, I'm trying to use my leftist sources here.

I get in so big trouble depending on what source I go to. But I'm looking at their sources, all right? So I'm trying to treat this as favorably as I possibly can. There's some bad stuff that happened, guys.

There really is. I think there's a broad brush here that's saying it's all motivated on racism, it's all whites against blacks. That can't be the case because we know that there were black folks who also lynched black folks, and we also are not sure about the motivations for every single lynching and what exactly took place.

Some of this was during Reconstruction, during a time when there was a lot of lawlessness, a lot of poverty, and that's a whole historical context that needs to be talked about. But all that being said, none of that takes away the horror of lynching, the injustice that did take place at times.

It did, all right? And it's evil, and I'm no problem coming alongside anyone who calls it evil and saying, I agree with you. It's wrong to have vigilante justice. It's wrong to, and if you're going to have a racial component or any other component, here's the thing that gets at social justice.

If you're going to say, well, this person did it, and we don't have evidence, but because they're a certain color of skin, then we should punish them, I will stand all day with that person no matter what color of skin is being challenged there, and I will say that is wrong.

That is not justice. Justice does not look through a spectrum to determine what's right or wrong. And the picture we're given of lynching is that that's what was going on, and that was what was wrong.

Well, that's a good criticism of what's going on today in social justice as well. The panelists don't even seem to realize the very thing that they're complaining about, which is looking at someone, assuming they did something wrong because of the color of their skin, is the very thing they're doing.

They're doing the exact same thing. They're saying, no, they haven't killed anyone for it. Thank goodness. But they're saying, yeah, the color of your skin, if you're white, you're complicit in this in some way.

You're judging based on someone's skin tone, and that's terrible. It was terrible back then. It's terrible today. Now, let's put these numbers into perspective that I just read. This is in Chicago alone.

From the spring of 2011 to the present, to the end of 2018, over 4 ,000 murders in Chicago alone. Just Chicago. We're talking similar numbers here, and this is a modern problem going on today, affecting, well, the community that this seminar is supposed to be advocating for.

And I don't see seminars on this. But that's a current issue. Obviously, abortion. 1 ,876 black babies, on average, aborted every day in the United States. This is a current issue. Why have a talk about fighting issues from years and years ago?

I mean, something that fizzled out more or less in the 40s. The last time it happened, apparently, is 1968, and you want to fight that. Instead of fighting something that's happening right in front of us, that real pastors going to real communities are going to have to deal with.

That bothers me. It really does. So, I might as well. There's more of a complex nature to this whole lynching thing as well. It's not just a racial thing, and that's where... I'm going to give you one example of it, right?

This is from Wycliffe, Kansas. There was a murder of Walsh Thomas, 1901. There was a lynch mob that came. And Ernest Harrison, Sam Reed, and Frank Howard were lynched by a mob of black people, according to the paper in September 13th, 1901.

So, the color of your skin does not necessarily determine the evil that's in your heart. And subverting justice does not have a skin color attached to it. It's a heart condition. And that's been the point all along that we've been trying to make.

And yes, in certain points in history, certain groups oppressed other groups more than others. But it's not unique to those groups. It's not... Whiteness is not a thing. There's not a whiteness that is evil that just attaches itself to the heart of a white person growing up just because they're white.

And the same would be true of someone who's black or any other skin color. So, that's the problem with this whole thing. Now, the questions I would ask... If I was there and I was able to ask a question, here's what I would say.

Why are we talking about lynching when, by the late 40s, hardly any lynchings were taking place, according to the Smithsonian, again. And you had 3 ,699 people that were killed in Detroit alone in a 10-year period.

And 1 ,876 black babies are dying every day. And we're talking about this. Would the crimes of today affect our ministry more than the crimes of yesterday?

Wouldn't they?

Another question I want to ask is, if we're going to talk about how the past affects pastoral ministry, wouldn't it be just as important to talk about the pastoral ramifications of slave insurrections or the English Civil War or the legacy of organized crime during Prohibition?

Pick your historical topic and then figure out a way to connect it. I mean, we just opened a can of worms. We can do anything now, if that's the case, right? It all affects ministry. Do you believe, and this is what I'd ask, that there should be panels on these historical events as well?

If they don't, then I want to know why. Why not? Don't those things affect? Aren't they connected, if this is connected? And this is another question I'd ask. You'd have to be very brave to ask this question.

And the reason I'd only ask this is to expose the racialism, the critical race theory that's driving this. What is the legacy of black lynchings like Ernest, Harrison, Sam Reed, and Frank Howard's? So there's a crime that happened.

What's the legacy of that? Is there a legacy of that? What is the legacy of the white people that were lynched? There were white people also who were lynched. So what's that legacy? How do these things apply to our pastoral ministry?

Now, if they downplay it, if they were going to say, Oh, of course, those are smaller numbers. It didn't happen as often. Well, then they're exposing themselves, I think, in that case, because they're picking and choosing the sins that they want to promote and say, these are the sins that are affecting pastoral ministry.

Now, of course, certain sins are going to affect things more. But like I already pointed out, there are sins right in front of us that are happening every day, which we should probably be focused on. It drives me a little nuts, I guess, to see us shadowboxing, fighting things that fizzled out years ago instead of focusing on the evil in front of us today.

So there's my two cents on that. Now, Danny Akin also gave his two cents on this. So I want you to see that. Again, go to Enemies Within the Church. Give them a donation while you're there, by the way, if you're going there to look at this student reflection.

I'm very grateful for students like this who will write something anonymously, even if they're afraid that there'll be blowback to them, but they're willing to get the information out there. I really appreciate that.

It really confirms some of the things I said, too. There's another student from inside saying this. Danny Akin's reaction. He says, during the lynching century, 18th lynching century, so the whole century is just colored by this lynching.

1882 to 1968, an estimated 3 ,466 African Americans were brutally lynched in America. Today, more African Americans are killed by abortion every four days. Abortion is the American Holocaust. Now, we need to commend this.

I commend it. I'm commending it to you. I'm thankful. I don't like the first part of that tweet necessarily because it seems ridiculous to have a panel on this for the reasons I just laid out. But he's actually shining a light on a real problem.

And, unfortunately, if he's endorsing it, he's saying that, yeah, the police brutality is a legacy of lynching. Well, whatever that is. Now, at least he's going a step farther, and he's saying, yeah, you know what?

Abortion is the real problem here. So I can live with that to some extent, even though I don't like the first part of this. But then this happens, and this is very interesting to me. Someone named Kyle J. Howard, who I've had a little bit of interaction with, enough to be blocked, he says, so someone else sent me this, he says, I'm sure Danny Akin means well with this post.

I have never met him, but I've only heard good things. With that said, tweets like this is why I wrote the piece below regarding the pro-life community's tendency to appropriate black death pain for its cause.

Now, what was the piece? I'm going to get into what Danny Akin's reaction here is, because this is what gets concerning. Kyle J. Howard's piece is called Moral Credibility and Ethnic Diversity in the Pro-Life Movement.

And here's what he argues. I'm going to give you a couple of quotes. He says, I know what it means to me to be an evangelical pro-life person, but I am often left wondering what it means for many of my fellow pro-life advocates who are white.

For many black pro-life advocates, here's a key quote. Black abortion stats can seem to be a form of tokenized information that is used to serve an agenda that limits itself to black life before exiting the womb.

I'm going to read that again. Tokenized information that is used to serve an agenda that limits itself to black life before exiting the womb. So he's saying, you're not really pro-life. You're just, you're being someone who tokenizes.

You're just, you know, trying to claim that you're not racist because you're concerned about black babies, but you're really not that concerned because you're not concerned about police shootings and other things that affect the black community.