Rod Martin on the State of the SBC

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm John Harris. I'm joined today with Rod Martin.

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Rod Martin is one of the founders of PayPal, runs the Martin Organization on the steering committee for the

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Conservative Baptist Network, and is on the executive committee for the Southern Baptist Convention.

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And he's going to talk to us a little bit today about what's going on in the SBC and maybe why you should consider, if you're a

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Southern Baptist, staying in the denomination. So Rod, thank you so much for joining me.

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It's an honor. It's good to be here. And I'm very grateful for your job. Yeah.

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Well, I appreciate it so much. The hard work, the effort. I mean, you're a busy guy and you have dedicated yourself to the

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Southern Baptist Convention, the politics of it. You post a lot on social media.

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I know that that's the iceberg. I'm sure you're doing so much more behind the scenes. And I think some people wonder, why would you want to beat your head against a board, you know, all the time, but this is something you care about.

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And I know it can be stressful and discouraging, but I just would like to hear you and I think everyone would like to hear you talk about why this matters so much to you.

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Well, it does matter very, very much. And I can summarize that pretty easily in just pointing out that we have six seminaries that collectively educate a third of the seminary students in North America.

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That's way more than just Southern Baptists. We have 50 ,000 churches, give or take.

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There are 550 ,000 churches in America. So you do the math, a third of the seminarians coming through our six denominational seminaries means we're affecting a lot more than just us.

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And if you want all those pastors, all those music ministers, all those different people to be teaching things that you don't agree with in all of those different denominations, then, you know, walk away.

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But if it matters that we shore that up, the only way you do that is you fight for the

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SBC. And not only that, but of course, we have the largest missionary force in Evangelical Christendom.

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That matters. We don't want a bunch of people converted in India or wherever to critical race theory.

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That's a horrifying thought. It's a false gospel. It is antithetical to the gospel.

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The idea that we are merely a group of identity groups, that we are defined by our skin color, that we are nothing more than what some ideologue tells us we are, is so completely alien to the idea that the father adopts us through the redemptive work of Christ and that we are actually brothers and sisters of Christ through adoption, that we are all one in him.

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There is no Jew or Greek. There is no slave or free. That is a message of reconciliation.

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What they call racial reconciliation is the exact opposite. So these things matter.

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And Baptists are not Anglicans. Baptists are not Catholics. Baptists are not any of the denominations that have some kind of hierarchy that is impenetrable to the person in the pew.

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We actually have a system in which, however difficult it may be to get people to work it, all you have to do in Southern Baptist life to make a difference is show up in sufficient numbers at one meeting a year.

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And if we do, and by the way, this year, if we had flipped 300 votes, we would have won.

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So out of 15 ,000, we were short about 300 votes all in.

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It was a 500 vote margin. So, of course, if you take 300 from them, you know, and put them on our cap, you flipped it around.

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Mike Stone would be president and we would be appointing very different trustees of all our boards over the next year or two.

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So we were extremely close. We had record turnout, largest turnout in 25 years.

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And that's an incredibly good sign. A lot of those people were our people. And if we just pursue that relentlessly, as our prior generations did in the 80s, we demonstrated then and we can easily demonstrate now,

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I believe, that the Baptist in the pew actually has the final say on all of these matters.

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It's just a matter of will he or she actually show up at one meeting each year?

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And it's really not that complicated. It's just a lot of work. So you said, you know,

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I'm doing a lot of things off social media. You may rest assured that's true.

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And we put a lot into this. But to be fair, this was one year of organizing, largely dominated by a pandemic.

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And we almost, almost beat the entire United denominational machinery against us.

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Just wait to see what's coming. Well, I appreciate the optimism that you have in that.

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I think a lot of people would wonder, and I know I'm included in this. Is there a point of no return?

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Is there a point you say, OK, look, the denomination is too far gone.

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We need to just start something else. We need to leave. Because I don't know exactly where maybe the disagreement is or why we think differently on this.

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But I think maybe exploring that point might help people clarify their views. So is there ever a point that Rod Martin says, all right, guys, let's let it go the way it's going.

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And we're going to go do something else. Well, Cody asked me that on Facebook the other day.

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And I was tied up with 14 other things. And I didn't answer him there. But I'll just answer him here on your show.

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That's actually pretty straightforward. This is lost beyond all repair at the point that they drive enough conservative churches out of the denomination to not be able to affect the outcome of the annual meeting.

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I mean, that's honestly the answer. This is purely a turnout operation. Look, they're trying to claim in one way or another that Southern Baptists are woke, that they are embracing critical race theory and all these nutty things.

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Excuse me, no. Have you seen the vote count in November of last year?

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I mean, Baptists voted about something between 86 and 90 percent for Donald Trump.

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I mean, they are not woke. There is nothing woke about the average

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Southern Baptist. So if they will just find it within themselves to steward the, by the way, 30 billion dollars worth of assets that the

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Lord handed them, cities they did not build, fields they did not till.

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If they will just take care of that which was given to them by prior generations by the

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Lord, then this is a no brainer. I mean, that room should be overwhelmingly conservative.

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And I can tell you why it isn't always. I mean, there are obviously people on the other side of this who really see things differently and they organize too.

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There are denominational leaders who turn out people, sometimes using cooperative program dollars, according to the

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Washington Post, to turn out people for a specific candidate who maybe that was an ideological move.

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Maybe that was just he was their friend. You can tell me, but it seems to me that there's an awful lot of built in resistance.

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Then this was true in the 80s also that we have to overcome. But if more

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Baptists and let me define that in an average year, 7 .2

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percent of our churches send even one messenger to the annual meeting. That's not 72 percent, 7 .2

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percent. So if you could even get to 14 percent or 20 percent, that room gets radically more representative of the vast majority.

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And I mean, overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists. Now, if they drive out a bunch of conservative churches, that number starts changing dramatically to the left and the built in advantage that they have organizationally starts being more and more dominant.

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And you could reach a point where it's just impossible and it's not worth the effort.

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But this is not Harvard. If we were trying to take back Harvard, we have no mechanism by which you or I could ever be appointed to the

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Board of Trustees of Harvard University. And as a practical matter, the same thing is true of Baylor University, which used to belong to the

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Baptist General Convention of Texas and through great skullduggery, the evil

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Herb Reynolds, now now rotting in hell, I'm sure, stole four point two billion dollars of church property,

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Baylor University, plus the Baylor health system from the Baptist General Convention of Texas with the full complicity of the liberals then leading the

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BGCT. And, you know, that's just wickedness. It's just wickedness. And if Baptists have stood up at the

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BGCT at the time, they could have saved those assets that were paid for by the little old lady on the next to last pew writing out a tithe check in her shaky hand out of her

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Social Security and putting it in the plate each week. But instead, they were complicit because they didn't like Paul Pressler and they didn't like Paige Patterson and they didn't like conservatives and they wanted

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Baylor to go away and do its own thing. So now Baylor is celebrating gay pride and doing all the things that we said that it would do back in the day.

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And and it's lost to us. Well, we should not lose all of these other institutions that will go on being powerful institutions, will go on educating preachers, will go on sending missionaries, but for a completely different agenda than that of New Testament Christianity.

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I think that's a compelling case. It's no one wants to lose all those assets and all the mechanisms that have been passed down for people who save, like you said, and fought for these things over a period of time.

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The thing that I think concerns a lot of conservatives right now is this has been caught kind of I've heard some people say it's been caught a little late, but as we wait for the next convention, these seminaries are continuing to churn out a students who are going to sympathize more with the social justice movement and the churches who remain in the

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SBC continue to support or fund these institutions in general. Now, I understand there's a way to try to not support them as much.

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Could you speak to that? Is there a way to try to remain influential if someone cares about that, but also not fund this machine that hates what you stand for and what the

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Bible teaches? Well, I am a strong advocate of the cooperative program. I think it's one of the greatest things that the church has ever come up with.

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It's obviously not inspired by God in the way that the New Testament is, but it is nevertheless one of the better inventions of man.

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And we're coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the cooperative program. And I would never suggest that people shouldn't give through the cooperative program.

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But if someone were compelled through conscience, for instance, to defund the

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Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which just had one of its staffers argue against the strongest anti -abortion resolution the

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SBC has ever passed and was completely AWOL in the fight for these churches in Alberta that are getting shut down and their pastors arrested, all these things.

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If somebody felt compelled morally to not fund the ERLC, it's actually pretty easy.

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You can designate giving. And it used to be that you couldn't have messengers if you did that.

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But in the infinite wisdom of Ronnie Floyd and the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force a decade ago, they redefined all of our giving in our documents.

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I reread the Constitution last night. And sure enough, if you are if your church is giving to convention ministries, maybe just Lottie Moon Christmas offering to support the

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International Mission Board, which is a wonderful thing to do. If you were to just give that way or you were to send checks to the executive committee for distribution to everybody but the

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ERLC or everybody but whoever, that actually all counts toward your

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Great Commission giving. That's a defined term. And you're still entitled to be represented and involved.

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So I think that and by the way, full disclosure, I voted for GCR. I really regret that.

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In retrospect, it was every bit as bad as everybody said it would be. But nevertheless, it is working out that I think people realize that GCR was a mistake.

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But one of the mistakes I think that it made was loosening exactly that definition in a way that a lot of people who in good conscience can't support some of these things now can utilize to their own benefit.

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They can still be very involved as Southern Baptists without funding things they can't agree with.

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And so, yes, I'm not encouraging that, but I can easily map out how you would go about it.

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OK, well, I think that's helpful for some churches. It sounds like I mean, you're not advocating this, but it sounds like you could even just give a dollar or something and still have a voice or a minimal amount and not, you know, if that was something that a church convictionally thought,

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OK, right now, I don't trust the cooperative program. You know, you got Send Network talking about the great requirement being part of the gospel.

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You got the seminaries and so many of them cranking out ideas that they would, you know, conservatives consider to be abhorrent.

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They can still keep a voice while severely minimizing their giving if they want to do that.

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Not saying you advocate. Yes. If you were to read Article three of the SBC constitution, it's laid out pretty clearly.

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You know, it's it'll glaze over the eyes of most people. I understand that. But but it's not that complex.

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If you if you give X percent of undesignated receipts from your church or if you give six thousand dollars, you're entitled for each additional percentage point or six thousand dollars.

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You're entitled to another messenger up to a total of twelve. And the first two are just by being in friendly cooperation, which does not require money at all.

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So no church has to give money at all to have two messengers.

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They merely have to be in friendly cooperation. So if you have a statement of faith that is basically in line with the

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Baptist faith and message and you send a letter to your state convention saying we want to be part of things, then you are.

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And that's two messengers. If you if you want to give, you know, sixty thousand dollars to Lottie Moon, you've got twelve messengers.

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So it's these are not things I would encourage because I think on balance, our convention institutions are are much more sound than not.

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We have a couple of institutions that are clearly off the rails. But but nevertheless, in general,

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CP is the right way to do things. And and involving yourself in the convention to steward those institutions to make sure they aren't off the rails is the right way to do things.

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Nevertheless, I know I have a lot of friends who are just like we can't give to whichever thing.

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And there is a way, absolutely a way. And it was actually our current executive committee president,

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Ronnie Floyd, who engineered the constitutional changes that enable exactly that approach.

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So it's completely legit. We were sold on it pretty heavily about a decade ago. And there it is.

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Well, there's a practical consideration as well. And I thought of this when well, it's actually similar to when

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Trump was first elected, kind of being an outsider. And then where does he find people to fill the positions that agree with his agenda in the various bureaucratic agencies, et cetera?

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And in the SBC, if you got someone in there who was aggressive, they really wanted to drive out social justice stuff and all the other things that are playing the denomination.

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Let's say I know Russell Fuller had told me the other day he said and maybe this will sound dismal to some, but he said something like,

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I don't know if I can identify 10 men I know that would be capable of running the mechanisms involved.

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I went to Southeastern that is known to be one of the biggest social justice schools.

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And I think about the faculty that existed there, even those who were opposed to the agenda that the administration was pushing were completely silent from any public view about their views.

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They were they were scared. The administration was going woke, is now woke, pretty much a lot of the professors who were more woke are very emboldened to be that way.

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And those who disagreed are frankly retiring or looking for the exit door. So in that scenario, let's say you were the one who became the next, not saying you will be, but the next

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SBC president. God help us all. It's a practical consideration.

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I don't how do you put the pieces back together? I don't know how you even write the ship at that point, but maybe you have some ideas on that.

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Oh, it's it's a process. It's not an overnight thing, but it's completely doable. And, you know, in the extreme case, so we'll we'll take an historical case at Southern Seminary.

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Roy Hunnicutt was president and he was clearly just outright egalitarian and tolerating a nest of professors who were teaching higher criticism and in some cases just didn't believe the

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Bible at all. And we're pretty plain about that. And the horror stories of people who studied there in those days will curl your hair.

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You just can't believe some of the stuff that came out of that place. And, you know, the first step in an extreme case of that nature was they fired

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Roy Hunnicutt. And, you know, whatever argument one might make about Al Mohler today.

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And I am not fond of his hiring decisions of late, to be sure. But nevertheless, when

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Al first came in, he did a really thorough job of cleaning house and putting in a lot of conservative people.

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And they're out there. I mean, my goodness, we're educating thousands and thousands of seminary students every year, and many of them are rock solid.

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In fact, many of the guys coming through less than stellar seminary environments are rock solid, in some cases, because it was less than stellar.

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Iron sharpens iron. They get hit with all this gibberish and nonsense. And they say, this isn't right.

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This isn't biblical. And become quite strong. And that was well, yeah, exactly. And that was true in the in the 70s and 80s also.

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So I don't doubt that we have plenty of people to choose from. I think what we frequently lack is what you were just describing, the courage of conservative leaders to call a thing what it is and to say, you know, this is wrong and we're against this and we're not afraid of the woke mob.

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And we I think. I don't doubt that those of us who are engaged in this fight at this time have been thinking about this from the beginning and will continue to do so.

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How do you find the leaders who will stand, who will speak, who will take the actions that are needed?

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And there are a lot of people in these institutions who are absolutely solid.

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They're just not necessarily courageous in their current employment environment. Some of those people should be in a position of leadership.

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Some of them probably shouldn't be because they may lack courage. But beyond that, there are 14 million

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Southern Baptists and probably a decent number who were Southern Baptists until recently to choose from to take roles that really are consequential.

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And you see that the leaders who came out of the resurgence when things were going very well, weren't necessarily household names.

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I mean, we had Adrian Rogers and we had Charles Stanley, but a lot of these guys weren't known until their courageous actions in the resurgence made them known.

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And so that's that's a lot of this, too. Mike Stone was not well known anywhere, but he nearly upended the establishment.

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And someday he will. I don't know if it'll be next year or some other year, but, you know, I have no doubt that Mike Stone will be president of the

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SBC. I have no doubt Javier Chavez will be president of the SBC someday. And, you know, both of them lost.

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But like I said, if we flipped about 300 votes, we need as the conservative movement as a whole needs to constantly platform men of courage and conviction so that they can become those leaders we we will rely on someday.

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Now, I wasn't alive during the resurgence, I guess, maybe certain aspects of the tail end of it.

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But I wouldn't have remembered that. When were you born, John? 1989. Oh, my goodness. You're a baby.

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I was born in 69. So I'm becoming old. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm becoming that very quickly.

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Well, my dad was born in 58 and he is from a long line of Southern Baptists. And he was the one that actually he left the

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Southern Baptist Convention during the kind of liberal drift. Of course, he grew up about a five minute walk from John MacArthur's church.

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So that's where he went to seminary and became a deacon there and all that. But one of the things

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I mean, he's told me stories about kind of what happened because he admired Paige Patterson and some of these guys at the time, at least the efforts they were making.

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But one of the things I know he said to me and you would maybe have a fuller view of this since you were more involved, is that there was such a disconnect between the pew and what was being taught at the seminaries that yes,

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I know there was a study that went out at the time. It ruffled a lot of feathers, people going through getting their

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MDiv and coming out atheist. And this was a big problem. And it seems like the situation is a little different today because of the political nature of the social justice movement and also the subversive nature of it, how they always claim to be so conservative, even when they're pushing things that are undermining core doctrines like the revelation of scripture and biblical justice and even the gospel itself.

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They market this in a political fashion that then pastors who don't leave the church and deny these things go and pastor a church.

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And I've seen churches flip. They become woke. The people in the church buy into the argument because it's so subversive.

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And that seems to be different than what happened during the conservative resurgence, where there was the effort to lead an effort to take back the convention for orthodoxy was so clear.

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Today, it's just not clear. I wonder if you could speak to that, what the differences might be, because I think that's one of the things some people who live through that, like Russell Fuller, think this is different.

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I don't know if we can take this one back because of the subversive nature of the argument and how fast it's spreading in the pews themselves.

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With nothing but respect for Dr. Fuller, I don't think it is quite as different as it is remembered.

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And of course, I was a very minor foot soldier at a very young age in the resurgence.

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So, you know, just to be fair, I didn't do a lot, but but I did some.

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And I grew up in a town with a Southern Baptist College, well,

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Arkansas Baptist College and Washtenaw Baptist University, which was filled with Democrats.

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So so, you know, the the chairman of the political science department was the husband of one of the women deacons at First Baptist.

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You know, back in the day when that was, you know, crazy talk. And and so, you know, I usually got a lot of that perspective from people who didn't know they shouldn't say those things to me.

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And of course, I became friends with Judge Pressler and some of these other guys at a very young age, too.

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My memory of this is a little different than some people's and certainly of the of the press that the resurgence gets much after the fact.

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And it's that the so -called moderates almost always presented themselves as conservative.

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They were the definition of conservative. And of course, they believed in inerrancy.

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And what do you mean, claiming we don't believe in inerrancy? Blah, blah, blah. We're just trying to fight off those hyper fundamentalist guys, you know, because if you're even one inch to the right of them, you are a hyper fundamentalist.

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And no, it's never never just a fundamentalist. No, it has to be hyper or ultra or whatever.

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The New York Times headline last week was, you know, Southern Baptists narrowly avert an ultra conservative takeover.

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Well, OK, that's interesting. I don't know what that would be. But this is the thing.

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It almost got me excited. You know, I thought, oh, there's an ultra conservative thing. I didn't know about this one. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

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They have always been chameleons. It has always been. Yes, we're doing this new innovative thing that you have never encountered before.

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But oh, we're conservative. We're not changing. Those guys are. They're moving to the right.

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No, we're right where we were. We're absolutely no different than we were then.

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And we're no different than you guys were before you adopted some new thing.

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And, you know, the new thing in back in the day, of course, was higher criticism. Now it's critical theory.

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The words are even almost the same. And and so, yeah, it was subversive then, too.

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They were always moving left while covering it with we're just being reasonable.

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And that's exactly what's happening now. Oh, we're just we're just being reasonable. We're just acknowledging the systemic racism of this country.

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Oh, we're just acknowledging these terrible things. And we're trying to repent of them.

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Well, I'm sorry, you can't repent of something you didn't do. You know, the the line at the

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MLK 50 Conference was that was that all white people have to repent for the assassination of Martin Luther King.

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I'm sorry, I'm 51 years old and I was born after that happened.

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I am not guilty of Martin Luther King being assassinated. That's ridiculous. My tiny grandchildren are not responsible for that.

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That is utterly ludicrous. And when you say that an entire class of people needs to repent for something they did not do and had no part in, one of the problems with that is you cheapen the idea of repentance.

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You know, repentance is just whatever some somebody on MSNBC tells you you have to do today.

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And it has nothing to do with the actual confrontation of the sinfulness in your life.

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The the actual depravity of man that must be confronted and laid at the foot of the cross.

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So so we we cheapen it and turn it into this social gospel thing where we are actually going to solve society's problems through taxation or something, anything except the gospel.

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And you see that same tendency of the gospel coalition, where, as you know, literally everything is now defined as a gospel issue, seemingly except the gospel itself.

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The gospel reconciles all these people one to another. The gospel makes everyone everywhere, my brother or my sister, so long as they just bow to our

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Lord Jesus Christ. And it requires us to love one another, even if they have not bowed at the foot of the cross.

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So so the gospel is revolutionary and transformative. What they're doing takes us back to a pagan state where we are defined by, ironically, nationality, ethnicity, all of the things they decry.

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And of course, there's always a reason for that. You know, if you saw my if you saw my speech at the

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Great Awakening Conference, I talked about this a good bit. This is just a marketing scam.

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And I'm not saying that Pastor So -and -so now at South Succotash Baptist Church realizes this, but the people who came up with the idea of wokeness, the people who came up with the idea of critical theory generally in all of its different forms, critical race theory, radical feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, all of it.

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All of those things. That's a marketing scam because Americans wouldn't buy class warfare.

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And so they figured if we could get you to feel guilty about your immutable characteristics and pit you against one another and offer an alleged political solution, and it is always a political solution, then we can control you and we can create the exact same socialist hierarchy that we would have created through a class warfare argument if that had sold in America.

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But it didn't. So, OK, maybe that works in Russia. Maybe that works in China. Maybe that works in Campuchia.

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But it didn't work in Alabama and it didn't work in New York. So they repackaged.

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And that's all Frankfurt School Marxism really is. That's what Horkheimer and Marcuse were doing.

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That's what Gramsci was telling them to do a generation before they did it. And that's what we're now hearing in pulpits.

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It has to be rooted out. It is absolutely antithetical to the gospel. It is destructive of the church, and it will destroy the church in due time if we don't root it out.

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So again, you asked at the outset, what's the argument for staying in? The argument for staying in is these institutions are not fully subverted, but they do belong to that widow in the next to last pew.

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They do belong to Christ. And we should contend for what belongs both to the widow and to the

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Lord. What's the game plan then for Anaheim moving forward?

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This is geographically. I mean, it's going to be very expensive to get, you know, the the widow son, who is a deacon at the church, to be a messenger, to go all the way out there in the church band.

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How do you win? And I mean, it's a very practical thing. I think people want to know this last this last convention that just happened was supposed to be.

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And maybe you didn't think this, but I know I did. It was the this was going to be the high turnout.

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This was going to be after all the craziness of 2020. Conservatives are mad at what they're hearing and they're going to come out in force.

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How do you get that momentum up significantly to then win in a place as difficult to win in as Anaheim?

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It's the same problem we had anyway. If Mike Stone had won, we would be asking the same question.

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How do we reelect him? You know, so it's not a problem we hadn't already considered. And, you know, the fact of the matter is 1979, which was the first year of the resurgence.

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That's the year Adrian Rogers won. Adrian had had a bigger profile and it was easier for him to win than for Stone to win.

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But Stone was the right guy and I love him and I think he's an amazing leader. I think.

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I think if you look back over the statistics, what you'll see is that we had better than normal turnout in 1979, better turnout than that in 80, better turnout than that in 81 and then 82 and then 83 and then 84.

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And we hit the high watermark in 1985. So it's years into the resurgence.

34:18

We hit 45 ,000 messengers in 1985 at the

34:25

Dallas convention. And, you know, that convention, because that's the one where W .A. Criswell preached that amazing sermon, whether we live or die, which

34:32

I just rewatched with my staff two days ago, John, they came away from that.

34:38

Can I've shown that to them before, but they came away from that. My goodness, that could have been preached yesterday about Nashville.

34:46

And yes, it absolutely could have. The only words you have to change are higher criticism out for critical race theory and the sermons identical.

34:55

You need to go back and rewatch it. It's amazing to watch that sermon W .A.

35:00

Criswell, whether we live or die. But it took years to get to that 45 ,000, which, by the way, is the largest deliberative body in the history of mankind.

35:11

It's unbelievable that took years. And we won all along the way, but they kept bringing more.

35:20

We kept bringing more. It's the same pattern. And I don't think Anaheim is insurmountable.

35:25

I think Anaheim. First of all, I think there are a lot more conservatives in Baptist churches in California, Nevada and Arizona than people realize who are in driving distance.

35:35

And so there's that. But also there are an awful lot of Southern Baptists who fly to convention nearly every year.

35:42

That's not that's not shocking. The other team will definitely be there in in some degree of force, but they will have the same logistical problem that we do.

35:51

There is an upper limit on what they can do. And I'm sure there is on us. But I don't think we found it yet.

35:58

So we're going to organize like crazy. And I think that we're going to have a really good year. And again, if we don't, we'll come back in Charlotte.

36:06

Oh, by the way, if we do, we'll also come back in Charlotte. I will stand up and take as many punches in the face as it takes to win.

36:13

I'm not going to stop. I respect that immensely. One of the things that I've wondered if it's possible and you probably already considered it, is there a way for churches, maybe churches who aren't even in the convention, but are in general sympathy with conservative

36:29

Baptist network? Is there a plan going forward to kind of go around some of the

36:38

SBC compromised establishments, kind of like the

36:43

Freedom Center at Liberty University is kind of outpacing the ERLC right now, which isn't hard.

36:49

But yes, I'm helping by the Freedom Center is doing an amazing job. And as you know,

36:54

Ryan is a member of our steering council at CBN. That's right. Yeah. So that's happening there that you already see these kind of organic things bubbling up.

37:03

Is there a way for CBN to say, OK, look, we want to take back the Southern Baptist Convention. We want to take back the Southern Baptist Convention for orthodoxy.

37:09

But at the same time, we recognized there's a big cultural battle going on here.

37:15

It's not just the SBC. And we will, I don't know, have I don't if you want to talk about missionaries, but at least host conferences or do do things that people that aren't

37:25

Southern Baptist can participate in to kind of be that shadow government almost. I hate to use that word, but I hope you understand what

37:32

I'm getting at. Something that a mechanism that's in place, even if after five years, some of the concerns that people like myself have are realized and doesn't go the way you're saying

37:42

CBN still there and it can do something. Is there any thought about doing that?

37:49

Oh, well, we're going to have a bunch of events over the next year. We're in early planning stages on a number of things that I think you're really going to like.

37:59

And this first year was really tough. First of all, we started from zero and immediately got hit by the pandemic.

38:07

So fundraising plans for some things that I had pushed pretty hard for kind of went completely awry very early in the process.

38:15

And we still had, you know, 25 year record setting turnout at the convention and nearly won everything.

38:23

And by the way, we won more than we lost. We got we got someone I fought very hard for on to the credentials committee, which matters.

38:32

There are five convention offices, two of those we didn't endorse in.

38:38

But the guy that we wanted won three of those. We we endorsed in and one of those one.

38:45

We passed the strongest pro strongest anti -abortion pro abolition resolution in the history of the

38:53

SBC. I think that abortion is increasingly going to be an issue in the

38:58

SBC, because, again, the ERLC stood up and opposed that resolution even after we amended it to meet their complaint.

39:09

You know, they said, well, this resolution is a little too strong because it prohibits, you know, things like sonogram laws or banning partial birth abortion or whatever.

39:19

And I see the value in all those things. Those are first of all, if a woman sees a sonogram, the odds of her actually aborting her child go to nearly zero.

39:27

So, of course, that matters. Of course, if Texas can pass a law that bans abortion after the 12th week, it's not what

39:34

I want, but it's a heck of a lot better than what I have. You know, these are good things. But I actually want to abolish it.

39:41

It's actually evil and wrong. And I would go further. I would contend with my friends

39:47

Ted Cruz and Micah could be in Newt Gingrich that the Constitution already bans abortion in the due process clause of the 14th

39:55

Amendment, which prohibits the taking of life without due process of law. What due process does an infant get?

40:03

So so if we just understand that life begins at conception, which is scientifically obvious.

40:10

I mean, everybody tells us to follow the science. We'll follow the science on life. This is not complex.

40:16

You had a choice going into this. You don't need a choice to murder someone who's inconvenient.

40:26

I mean, my goodness, by that logic, if I become inconvenient, you could just kill me, John. And no problem.

40:31

No recourse. What is the difference between me and Owen? And by the way, viability will put me in a forest for two weeks.

40:38

And I'm not very viable either. You know, this is these arguments are just they're inhuman. They are wicked.

40:45

And they are all aimed at confusing people who haven't thought through just how terrible they really are.

40:53

So, of course, Southern Baptist should be for abolishing abortion just as they should have been for abolishing slavery.

41:00

And I tweeted a couple of times to massive opposition that, you know, these guys claim that they would have had the courage to be for abolitionism back in the 1840s.

41:12

They don't even have the courage to be for abolishing the slaughter of infants. So, you know, their their moral authority here is just gone.

41:21

And and if they think that we're going to just pretend we didn't notice, they're very mistaken.

41:28

They have adopted the Democrat platform more or less whole because they have shifted their focus to things that are that are perhaps less

41:39

Trumpian. The fact that that pro -life is a Trumpian thing to some of them just floors me.

41:46

But, you know, they have they have become so adamant in their Trump hate in some cases that they have literally thrown out a few million babies with the bathwater.

41:58

And we are not going to let up on that. Donald Trump might die today, but a million babies will die this year.

42:05

And we're going to fight for them so that the next million doesn't. Yeah, it's

42:11

I thought that was an amazing moment when I saw the opposition to that, because there's a statement on against racism in some form, some way.

42:21

Just about every year. But when that came up, it was, well, you know, we already have a statement on abortion.

42:27

We don't need you. Wait a minute. Like you can't do it. You have hit the most remarkable thing

42:34

I can remember hearing in my entire life as a Southern Baptist for James Merritt, former president of the convention, this year's chairman of the

42:42

Resolutions Committee, to stand up and tell us that the committee declined a resolution on abortion because, as you just said, our position on abortion is clear.

42:54

The convention has spoken to it many times. We don't need to speak to that again while we're actually asked to adopt another statement on racism, slavery, et cetera, which we've been talking about pretty much every year since 1995.

43:09

Well, I don't mind if we condemn slavery for the next 100 years straight. That's fine by me.

43:15

But we're not going to address an immediate moral and humanitarian crisis at the same time.

43:23

Slavery ended in this country. Oh, not just before I was born. I mean, we're talking about more than a century and a half ago.

43:32

Now, if they wanted to condemn human trafficking, that would be current. If they wanted to condemn the race based slavery in Muslim countries, where right this minute there are twice as many black slaves as there were in 1865 in the world.

43:48

I mean, but we don't pass those resolutions. We pass resolutions about something that ended more than a century and a half ago and are told we don't need to speak to a moral crisis that exists today.

44:02

Whether again, you know, slavery in Mauritania and Libya, they're open air slave markets in Libya.

44:09

You did not hear our resolutions committee care. You and there are babies being murdered as James Meredith speaking.

44:16

But we don't need to speak to that. There is truly a moral crisis in the senior leadership of the

44:22

SBC, and it must be addressed. And that's why we keep going. Well, Trevor Loudon, a communist kind of expert, said that the issue is never the issue.

44:32

The issue is always the revolution. It's always about how do you progress the ball towards some kind of egalitarian utopia,

44:40

I guess, ideal, even though they'll probably say that that's not what they're doing. When you hear, you know, appeals to Revelation seven and we're a

44:47

Revelation seven seminary or whatever, that's kind of what I see them doing. That's something Jesus does.

44:52

And they're saying that they can, through some diversity measure, make that happen here on this earth at their seminary or church.

44:59

I was exploring last night kind of the different, you know, Peter Jones, one ism, two ism familiar with that, but he takes

45:06

Romans one and he looks at, OK, there's really two religions, there's there's two ism Christianity and then there's one ism, you reduce everything down to one thing.

45:14

And the people in the SBC that are running the show, it seems like to me are part of a different religion.

45:20

Just like Machen talked about the liberals of his day, progressives being of a different religion, they're really not

45:27

Christians. That's what I see these people as. I mean, and it sounds like you're on the same page with me on that, that they are looking at reality in a fundamentally different way.

45:36

They're reducing everything down to, I don't know, some abstract equity or inclusion, diversity, something like that.

45:43

And everything's got to be pushed through this to evaluate whether it's worthy or not worthy or valuable or not valuable.

45:50

And that's just not the scriptures that we have. They're not compatible with that. It just it will destroy the scripture if you apply that metric to the teaching of God's word.

46:01

So the thing is, I see it, you see it. How do you get a bunch of Southern Baptist people?

46:08

I mean, is there a plan to get the people in the pews, get the pitchforks and the fire?

46:14

You know, it's figurative, of course, but them to see it in the same way, to realize their denominational leadership.

46:20

These aren't people advocating Christianity at this point, at least not in any effective way, and they need to be rooted out.

46:27

I mean, if you can tap into that, I just don't know how it happens. I thought this year would have been the year.

46:32

So is there any plan like something we don't know about yet that's being worked on or is it just keep doing what you're doing and pray the

46:40

Lord opens eyes? Well, this year almost was the year. And like I said, we won more than we lost.

46:47

That wouldn't have happened, obviously, if we hadn't shown up in mass. So so we are much further down the road than I think anybody would have predicted a year ago, for starters.

46:59

Second, I do want to stress that there are vastly more godly people in denominational leadership in the

47:09

SBC than not. I can't stress that enough. But the other team very clearly is multiplying itself.

47:18

It reproduces very quickly. And, you know, through hiring, through appointments, through firing some good people.

47:26

And and we know several. And, you know, this is not something you can just let go forever.

47:34

Now, at the same time, I want to stress it had been going for a heck of a long time in nineteen seventy nine.

47:41

The SBC was much further gone in nineteen seventy nine when the resurgence began than it is today.

47:47

So so I'm not saying you lose hope even if they make some more progress, because, again, the point at which we really lose this is where the conservative churches just bow out and give it to them.

48:01

And I'm just not willing to just hand them the keys to the car. We're going to fight for those keys.

48:09

And it's not a power thing. You know, I don't have any ambition to be the president of anything, maybe president of the

48:15

United States someday, but not president of the SBC. I don't have any I don't have any ambition here.

48:21

I'm a layman. I'm trying to recruit more and more layman, because honestly, when the layman stand up, this problem gets solved.

48:29

And that was true in the 80s, too. It's not that we don't need the preachers, but the lay people see it very clearly and not simply in the sense of simplistically, but simply in the sense of I had someone argue to me the other day that we should put a certain pastor on the credentials committee because he would understand the theological nuance of the woman pastor issue at Saddleback Church.

48:56

And it occurred to me as I was listening to this argument that what I need is someone who will not see the theological nuance of that and will instead see that there's an argument in first Timothy two from creation order and that it's actually totally simple.

49:12

It's completely straightforward. So, again, lay people are key to this. And there is a plan.

49:18

The plan is to organize. The plan is to reach the Baptist in the pew to educate him or her about the exact same revolution that is being attempted in the country as a whole.

49:33

And not just this country, not just the SBC, not just the PCA, not just all these other denominations, not just the church period, not just our schools, not just our colleges, not just our government, but other countries and other governments.

49:47

This is a global assault by the left on Western civilization itself.

49:56

And I stress that when we say Western civilization, we're borrowing too much from the

50:02

Enlightenment humanists. We used to have a word for this. It was called Christendom. We are fighting for the soul of Christendom.

50:10

And honestly, John, I have to say I am honored that God would allow our generation to get to stand in such a fight, win or lose.

50:20

The fact that he would trust us with this moment is an honor and it's glorious.

50:25

And I don't expect to benefit at all from it. But I do hope to please my master. Oh, amen.

50:31

Amen to that. Practical things. Last real question here. What can we expect or and I'm thinking of, you know, is there going to be a big fund created to let you let's get these conservative messengers to Anaheim?

50:45

That wasn't in place last time. You said you want to communicate with the people in the pews.

50:50

Is there going to be like the starting of a newsletter or a a training center?

50:56

Or these are the kind of practical things I was asking about. What can we expect going forward to to try to achieve these objectives?

51:05

We're discussing all of those things and more. I don't know how practical the messenger fund will prove to be.

51:12

But I think it's a great idea. And you saw Tom Buck doing that on a small scale in the weeks leading up.

51:19

I think that's a really good idea, because like you say, there are an extraordinary number of people who would go if they could just afford it.

51:27

I know Mike Stone and Randy Adams were both for I'm not sure if they were the same version or slightly different versions of remote voting.

51:36

That's obviously not going to happen this year. But there are some interesting aspects of that.

51:42

I think the ballot security issues on that are a little disconcerting. And I also think it's much better if people can actually get to one place and meet each other and meet their leaders and so forth.

51:53

And I think you lose that with remote locations. But still, I think that's an idea that's likely to be coming in the near future, which would help with the financial side.

52:03

And it would also increase the number of just normal Baptists who could participate directly.

52:09

But in the near future, yes, there will be much more Internet effort. There will be much more direct organizing on the ground without lockdowns.

52:19

This gets a lot easier. And and so all of the things you said and many more are coming.

52:25

And the biggest thing is just not quitting. I mean, honestly, we just have to stand.

52:32

The other team will. The question is, will we have the courage to do likewise? They are fighting from a minority position.

52:40

And I don't mean a racial minority. I mean, an ideological minority. They do not represent the

52:47

Baptist in the pew. We absolutely do. And so, you know, if if we're going to let a handful of self -proclaimed elites dominate 14 million

52:59

Southern Baptists, well, that's not something I want to be a part of.

53:05

I want to speak up for the little guy. I'm just a poor kid from Arkansas. I've done well in life.

53:10

But but that's because we live in a wonderful country that is based on Christian beliefs that allows for people to rise if they if they work hard and they put in the effort, we went from zero to twenty five million users at PayPal in two and one half years.

53:30

I assure you that was a much larger organizing effort than anything we will be able to do or try to do in the

53:37

SBC. And, you know, it is not impossible. It is not even impractical.

53:43

It's merely reaching enough people and helping them understand the importance of holding precious what the

53:51

Lord has given us to steward for this brief moment. Well, Rod, you are someone that I respect.

53:58

You're someone to be commended. And I will say a true Southerner as well with your optimism, a Southern trait

54:04

I've learned. So, well, thank you for lending us your time and just giving us your thoughts on this.

54:11

I know you're a busy guy, but I think it's good to hear. And I did want people to hear your side of it, because I know you're very active in promoting people staying in the convention and trying to keep pushing for the truth.

54:26

And it was much different than my eight reasons to leave the SBC video. I put out a few days ago and I want people to hear your side of it, your perspective, and so I appreciate you giving it to us.

54:37

Thank you. Well, I'm very grateful for you, John. Keep fighting. All right. God bless you. Have a good one.