J.D. Hall on the Southern Baptist Convention

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am John Harris, and for the first time, we have with us

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J .D. Hall. J .D., thank you for joining us and being willing to talk about the Southern Baptist Convention and whatever else we get into in these 15 minutes.

00:27

Yeah, excellent. My secretary said, hey, we've got a bunch of podcasts and radio show requests, and I said,

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I'm not doing it for anybody unless I know them and like them.

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And she said, John Harris, I made a short list. I like that, John Harris, we'll do that podcast.

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Well, I appreciate you've been busy. As I understand, you've been kind of involved in a new project traveling the state and in local politics.

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So how's that going for you? It's going, you know, I've I've been really, you know, pretty well exiled and canceled by evangelical, you know, cancel culture.

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So I thought, well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. So I got heavily involved in statewide politics.

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So I'm trying to do the opposite of Greg Locke. Greg Locke gets into churches to preach politics.

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So I've been getting into political events, ran for office, won for office in the

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Montana GOP. So now I get in front of political offices, excuse me, political events to preach

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Jesus. So I've been home four nights in the last four weeks, been on a nonstop speaking tour around the state.

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And the point of my talk every time is the problem is not politics. The answer is not politics.

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The problem is sin. The answer is Jesus. And I'm talking primarily about the gospel and about critical race theory and Marxism.

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So that's why I've been so busy. Well, that's great. One of the things I wanted to pick your brain on a little bit is the

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Southern Baptist Convention, because you, through Pulpit and Pen and now Protestia, were kind of you're a pioneer in a way.

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I think I use that word even online with recognizing Russell Moore as a wolf in sheep's clothing and some of the other actors who inhabit the denomination or did up until recently.

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And and and not everyone agrees with your tact or the way that you sort of present your case sometimes.

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But what they can't say, I don't believe that anyone can say this, is that you have been duped by the left at all.

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You seem to recognize the subversion when you see it. And I think people want to know, why is that?

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Why have you been right about things that years later people realize they probably call you up? I'm sure you get these calls and say, how did you know?

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And then and then as historians look back and they they look at the SBC, they're probably going to be looking at some of the work you've done early on.

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So so two things, if you could just tell us kind of how did you recognize those things in Russell Moore, et cetera?

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And then what are the high points like what's the history of the SBC going downhill? How do you see that and what's the cause of it?

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Great. And I know we're short on time. So I'll go to those answers as concisely as possible. I saw it coming for the same reason that Rod Martin did when he was on my podcast a few weeks ago.

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He got his start in politics, actually working for Mike Huckabee, which is where I got my start in politics, working for Mike Huckabee.

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And when you cut your teeth on politics, when you're 17 years old, you know, founded the college Republicans, all of that, gotten involved in campaigning.

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You know, politics, when you see it, it's not an excuse. You know what it is.

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You're vaguely familiar with it, if not intimately familiar with it. So when I began to see what was happening at the

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Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, I'm going, this isn't Christianity. This is a this is politics.

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This is not religion. This is politics. They have a Democrat leftist progressive agenda.

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So I was already familiar with their strategy, with their lexicon, with their vocabulary, and with their game plan.

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And so that's how I kind of knew from the beginning that even though these people are preaching Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and gospel, gospel, gospel, practically trademarking the term gospel, then you remember back when in 2016, everything became a gospel issue, including animal rights, environmentalism, and immigration reform.

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I'm going, these are Democrat talking points that they're calling gospel issues. So I was wise on to that from the beginning.

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When we first started talking about these things in 2011, 2012, we were told that if we criticize

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Russell Moore, this would ruin us, including conservative bloggers.

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And so real quick, James White made fun of me in 2014, for caring so much, might have been 2016, for caring so much about that Russell Moore guy who he didn't know who he was.

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And we kind of he didn't like really strongly go after us, but it was like a chortle, you know, like a chuckle, like, what is

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Russell Moore matter? What's the big deal? Well, I never heard him back then either. I think a lot of people were just kind of like, who's that?

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Yeah, well, he was on our radar again, because I knew what was going on politically. And I'm saying this is not a religious movement.

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What's happening in evangelicalism is not a religious movement. And then for one other reason, John, as a local church pastor guy who in every single podcast shares the gospel and tells people to be members in their biblical

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New Testament church, an active participatory, loving, giving, supporting members in their

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New Testament church, I've recognized that a legitimate move of God starts in the pulpit, goes to the pew, and then goes out into the world.

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And with critical race theory is the exact opposite. It started in the

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Frankfurt School, it moved to the law schools in the 1990s, in the development of CRT, now evolved into social justice through men like Jim Wallace.

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And then it is being pressed upon the church from the outside in through publishing houses through para church ministries, like nine marks, the gospel coalition, the

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ERLC, pressed upon the pulpits and then forced upon the pew. It's the exact opposite.

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So this is not a move of God sparked in the local church. It's a political movement forced upon the church.

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So between those two things, we've said, this isn't, this isn't right. This isn't legitimate.

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And if I could, John, let me address something that you said in terms of tactics. I have often equated what we do at Pulpit and Pen, Protest the

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Epilemics Report, to Thomas Paine's work in his series of articles and essays called

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America in Crisis prior to the buildup of the

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Revolutionary War. The majority of those essays, if you read America in Crisis, was just Thomas Paine trying to get the

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American colonists to understand you are already at war, whether you realize it or not.

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Most of his work was just trying to convince people this isn't about holding off the British.

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This isn't about stopping the war. The Redcoats are already here. You're already at war.

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Just wake up and realize it. So we realized that back in 2012. So the posturing, the language, the words that I've used, the harsh things that I've said on Twitter are things that you say when you are at war.

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The Bible warns against those who say peace, peace, when there is no peace in Zion.

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And a lot of people looked at our methodology over the last 10 years and said, these guys are contrarian or they're schismatic.

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They must hate the church. They're against the brethren. Why aren't they being nicer? And it's because they didn't realize that we're at war.

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And one of the most rewarding things as a polemicist that I've experienced in the last year and a half are apologies that come in daily from people saying,

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OK, we get it now. Now we understand. Now that we all know that this is an open war and evangelicalism, we understand the language that you've been using and the tactics you've been employing.

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We have been at war. We just didn't realize it. One of the things I've noticed is because I was obviously later than you have been following this for years before I even started talking about it on my podcast.

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And I was just kind of side, you know, Southeastern just kind of took me by surprise when

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I was there in like twenty seventeen and all of a sudden this stuff got kicked up. But what I've noticed is that so I at first was also treading very carefully like, hey, these are brothers.

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They're just confused. That kind of, you know, there's some bad apples in there, but like there's a lot of confusion, which is there's always some truth to there's ignorant people who go along.

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But I've I've ramped up the rhetoric like in the last year, especially and been like, hold on. If you don't know what's going on by now, then you're you're a bad actor at this point.

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Like if you can rage against Ed Liffin's plagiarism, but you said nothing about social justice since Resolution nine.

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Who are you? I mean, that's just proof that there's compromise. And I notice there's others coming up now who are saying what

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I said like two years ago, three years ago. They're kind of like, well, listen, there's a lot of deception. A lot of people are just ignorant.

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They're good brothers. It's like phases after phases of people who challenge this. And and we all want to tread carefully and kind of assume the best.

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And people people will say of men like you or I, John will say, well, you guys must have skin like a rhino.

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And you do develop scars and scar tissue loses its nerve endings.

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So there's a degree of truth to that. But we still feel the hurt. Right. Still feel the pain.

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And you've been around long enough. You've survived one polemic cycle, a polemic cycle last three years.

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So that's what I'm describing. You have a name for it. Yeah, there's a polemic cycle. And the polemic cycle is where everyone thinks you're crazy for three years until they figure out that you were right.

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And then they start quoting your words, usually without citation or proper attribution. Yeah, basically.

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And there's a lot of plagiarism in the in the discernment community as well. A lot. We dealt with that last week and we dealt with that privately where we're saying, hey, we know that you don't like pulpit and pen or Reformation Charlotte or Capstone Report, but quit stealing our crap without an

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H .T. And H .T. is not a recommendation. A hat tip is not saying we support everything these people said.

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It's just a hat tip. It's a courtesy that we give to the to the friendly atheist on patios to say this is where we got our material from.

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Right. And that happens too. Now, you're going to get heat, John, even for having a 15 minute conversation with me.

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People are going to say, why would you give that man a platform? First of all, just to clarify, I don't need a platform.

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I got plenty of platforms. So this is not like a bone that's being thrown to me.

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I'm doing this because I respect the work of John Harris. And same thing when when Rod Martin came on the podcast, people were giving him a hard time.

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How could you do that? First of all, that is cancel culture, whether it's being done by conservatives or liberals.

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What we're doing right now is having a conversation. And if you have a problem with people just having a conversation, then you're the schismatic.

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We should be able to have conversations. And I appreciate Rod Martin because he's always treated me like a human being.

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And I appreciate you, John Harris, because you've always treated me like a human being. But for the record,

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I believe the only real interaction that you and I have ever had was when I reached out to you in the very beginning, you and A .D.

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Robles on the same day. And I said, if you go down this path, you're going down, you're going to be blackballed, blacklisted.

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I remember that punitively punished. Do you remember that? That one for me? I do remember that.

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And I thought at the time, I think I thought, man, this this is probably true to some extent, but it sounds a little over the top.

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Like and now I realized, oh, my goodness. No, I've and I've gotten death threats. I've gotten all kinds of stuff thrown my way.

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So there's a real evil out there that and these guys that are pushing this, they're not brothers.

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And I can say that now definitively. They're not brothers who are pushing the social justice stuff. I've got a dozen full time.

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This is a compliment to you, John. I've got a dozen writers. Half of them are on paid staff, half are volunteers.

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I have two full time secretaries. I have I have a lot of people to help me do what it is that I do. But you,

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John Harris, has given me more of a break and more mental sanity, more rest than any other human being alive, because as soon as I saw you begin to push out the material that you've done on YouTube, I said, finally,

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I'm no longer alone. I can quit. So I'll let John Harris get thrown under the bus. Oh, thanks. And that's when

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I kind of backed out. And I was like, we already left the SBC at this point. So it's like not my farm, not my pig, not my problem.

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Right. I'll let John Harris deal with that. So, John, thank you for picking up that fight. Well, you're welcome.

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And for fighting it. So I don't have to, man. I can like focus on other stuff. Well, I'm where you were at that point, though.

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Now I'm kind of like, you know, the SBC is kind of, you know, kind of let it let it wither and start something else or be involved in your local church.

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That's kind of where I'm at. I know there's people who disagree. Rod Martin being one of them. I think, you know, this is still something that we can fight.

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And I want to ask you about that because we we do have just we have a few minutes. Let's talk about the history real quick of kind of the trajectory of the denomination and then where we are now or where the

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SBC, I should say, is now. You left the SBC, one of the first churches to leave. But now there's this question of, hey, could

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Ed Litton be taken out because of plagiarism? Is a conservative VP going to be the president?

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And this will this turn everything around. So what do you have to say to that? So, OK, good question.

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Can he be kicked out? And the answer is no, not really.

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There's not a means or mechanism that I'm aware of. And I've talked to Rod about this. He's the expert.

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I'm not aware of a system in which there could be a recall vote. OK, what's done is done.

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The only way he could be literally kicked out is if he was no longer a member of a Southern Baptist church.

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For that to happen, his church would have to do their actual dang job and excommunicate him for lying from the pulpit.

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All of these years, but what's the chance of a church doing that? They would not only have to demote him as pastor, they would have to remove his membership.

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The problem is, as soon as that happened, that second he would be added to the membership of a liberal

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SBC church like post haste and he would remain the president. So what's going to have to happen is the pressure is going to have to be put upon him from the outside by MSM, by mainstream media.

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The New York Times ran a post about his plagiarism yesterday. Remember, Resolution 9 was passed because Dwight McKissick got mainstream media to paint the

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SBC as racist. And so feeling the pressure of that, they came and forced

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Resolution 9 down our throat. Russell Moore lives to please the

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Washington Post. These guys are scared to death of what the world thinks of them because they don't fear

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God, they fear men. So if he's going to resign, it's going to be pressure from MSM upon them because of plagiarism.

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Now, behind the scenes, I'm doing everything we can because in the ecosystem of news, what Gideon Knox Group does is we publish the material and try to get it to go viral in social media.

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And then the mainstream press is left with no choice but to cover it. And so we're hoping that the mainstream press covers it.

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And it's kind of like God using the Assyrians to punish the Jews, where it's not as though the

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Assyrians are good guys. The MSM, they're not the good guys. But if they see a target on the back of a

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Southern Baptist president, they're not savvy and sophisticated enough to know that who's going to replace them as a

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CBN guy. So they're going to hopefully try to take out Ed Litton. And from the pressure of the pagans, this is

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God's irony, from pressure of the pagan media, he may be forced to resign of his own doing to get the pressure of the

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MSM off of his back. If that's the case, this would be an incredible sense of God's own perfect, awesome irony, and a display of his own sovereignty to see him resign and a

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CBN man take his place. That's best case scenario. Right. Would you rejoin the

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Southern Baptist Convention if that happened? No, because the Southern Baptist Convention's problems are far, far deeper than Ed Litton.

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And I preached about those in the modern day downgrade sermon in 2012, in which

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I mentioned the plagiarism of Richard Land. But the problems are much deeper than that. What institution of the

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SBC could I support? IMB, they lost hundreds of millions of dollars and had no idea what happened to it.

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That was just a couple of years ago. That's not stewardship that my church can support. NAM, NAM is so corrupt it should be broken up by the

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RICO statute. A Southern Baptist seminary, show me one that doesn't support CRT.

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The only entity I'm not familiar with that is woke is the WMU, because it's not on my radar,

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WMA, whichever one it's called these days. And I'd hate to see the material that they're pushing out. So there's not an entity of the

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SBC of any kind that I could support, except for maybe Guidestone.

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I'm not aware of a problem there, but why is that worth supporting? So there's no way that I would rejoin the

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Southern Baptist Convention. It's a pig, and no matter how much lipstick you put on it, it's still a pig.

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So be an independent Baptist church, which every SBC church is independent, and cooperate with like -minded churches to get missionaries out on the mission field.

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We don't need the CP. No institution in the history, no religious institution in the history of mankind has been reformed,

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John, that I'm aware of, not one. The reformers tried to reform the Catholic Church, didn't work.

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The Puritans tried to purify the Church of England, didn't work. The conservative resurgence tried to reform the SBC, clearly didn't work.

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Well, I was going to say, that's the one they all point to. That's to say, wait, hold on. The SBC was able to do it because of the way their denomination structured with.

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And so what happened was we had a, because liberals lies, Jay Gresham Mockham pointed out in his book,

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Liberalism and Christianity, they all signed their name to the BFNM that they didn't agree with. You have institutions like SBU in Bolivar, Missouri, they're teaching, that we're teaching annihilationism and teaching contrary to the

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BFNM, but they all signed their name on the statement that they believe it, and then you have men like Albert Moeller, who were liberals until the wind shifted and the conservative resurgence.

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Then they became conservatives. Then they played a 30 year long game before doing everything possible to undermine the good work they did by pushing professors that are teaching essentially what is

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Marxism by a different name. So the question is, did we win the conservative resurgence? I don't think so.

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Russell Fuller has the same view. What's that? No, I'm just saying Russell Fuller agrees with you.

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He's told me names of professors at seminaries who right now are, you know, like at Southeastern, who during the resurgence were on the liberal side, who are still teaching.

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Yeah, there are two streams of Christian thought since at least the Reformation. The first one is

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Puritanism. The second one is separatism. And like so, for example, Spurgeon was not a

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Puritan. Spurgeon was a nonconformist and a separatist. I would encourage people to take the stream of separatism rather than Puritanism because the

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SBC is not a denomination, no matter how much they lie about it on in their Supreme Court briefs.

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It is not a church. Jesus did not die for the SBC. He's not coming back for the SBC. It's not a church.

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It's not like the Church of Corinth that no matter how bad it is, you got to stick with it. You are free to leave it.

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There is I have five children, one of them with a learning disability. I have a wife that is hardworking and needs love and attention.

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I have a church of one hundred and twenty seven people that I have to minister to daily.

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Why would I put one more fight on my place to save an institution that is not one that was made by God, but made by men?

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I want to fight for institutions made by made by God, which is the family and the church.

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Yeah, yeah, I completely understand that. Last question, I think this will be helpful for people. Historians are looking back and they're saying, what happened to the

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SBC from 2010 to 2021? And they ask you, they say,

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Jordan Hall, tell us the story. What are the three or four like things you'd point to to say, like,

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OK, here's where you saw a dividing point or a line that was crossed that kind of downgraded it?

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Pulpit and pen would not exist had I not personally seen the North American Mission Board run roughshod disrespectfully and deceitfully against local churches in Montana.

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I had to see that with my own eyes because I could not believe the Southern Baptist Convention was not as holy and wonderful as what

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I had been raised to think as a three generations deep Southern Baptist. So I saw that NAM was so corrupt it should be broken up by the

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RICO statute. I had to see that. And then I began to just pay attention to the news articles with Russell Moore calling

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Jesus an illegal alien and saying that as he wishes, his wife was more like Hillary Clinton and Hillary being invited to the

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SBC pastor conference, but not Southern Baptist presidential contenders like Mike Huckabee and and Rand Paul.

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And so the second one would be all of the news stories that are just undeniable that we have essentially common terms running entities of the

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SBC. Another pivotal moment was reading the book that's now out of print, but you can still find it.

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If you, if you need a PDF of it, send me an email, JD at pulp and pen .org. I'll send it to you. The epic books ending

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God's money by Mary Kenny Branson. It is mind blowing and it shows you the amount of waste fraud and cover up in the

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SBC. So when these pastors get on Twitter and they say the SBC is the greatest mission tool made, you know, ever invented by God for the expansion of the great commission.

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It is not. The SBC is one of the most wasteful, poor stewardship organizations created in the mind of the devil.

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While the IMB and there are noble missionaries and fine missionaries, it is just flat, bad stewardship.

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They spend money like drunken sailors, not just NAM, but the IMB, all of those entities do.

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We can't even find out the salaries of our, of our entity heads in the SBC.

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That's not transparency. Why would you give to something like that? And then fourth and finally being personally called for my cancelization, boycott, blacklist, et cetera.

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Sam Albury saying he would rather people quote read hardcore porn or rather watch soft core porn, soft core porn, to be fair, then read pulpit and pin.

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Uh, we're, that's when I, you know, it was just fully recognized. We are not dealing with errant brethren who need to be corrected.

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We're dealing with the enemy and this Ed Litton thing is the perfect demonstration of it. I, if you don't hear anything else

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I've said in this short little podcast or segment with John Harris here, this conservatives on Twitter, stop arguing that plagiarism is a sin.

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Stop giving your 12 point explanations from the Bible about why plagiarism is theft.

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Stop it. The liberals know it's theft. They don't care because they're godless.

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Don't waste your time in argumentation, arguing with fools, lest it be difficult to tell the twain apart.

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They know it's a sin. We're not dealing with errant brethren. Many of these men, particularly the leaders are working for the other team wise up to that and realize that we're at war.

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Yeah. That's a good word on that because I'm not on Twitter now because I wanted sanity.

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And so I got off. No, I was part of it. Uh, but I have seen a few of those threads where they're like super long and I'm like, it's just stealing.

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Like everyone knows, you just watch one of the clips and there's like seven of them now. Oh, I've seen them say

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Spurgeon was a plagiarist and was a plagiarist. My favorite argument comes from Bart Barber who said that plagiarism doesn't violate the

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Baptist faith and message as that as though the Baptist faith and message was given as an excuse for sin rather than as an explanation for orthodoxy.

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The writers of the Southern Baptist convention, excuse me, the aught, the founders of the SBC, John Dagg, the, the proto

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Southern Baptist, Basil Manley Jr. And Sr. James Pettigrew Boyce.

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Um, these men, including Spurgeon, had he been around all would have been anathematized and accursed by the leaders of the modern

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Southern Baptist convention. And that goes back to my 2012 sermon modern day downgrade.

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Yeah, they are. I mean, and they are now, they are now. So that's true. Well on the race thing. Yeah. Yeah.

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There are a bunch of slave holding racist bigots, but aren't we all? Yeah. So, well,

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I appreciate you giving me some of your time. I know, um, people, uh, have some, some people have wanted me to do this to have you on to talk about some of these things.

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And I just, um, uh, you know, I'll tell this to everyone. I called you a year ago and I don't,

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I don't think I, I don't know if I apologize. I can't remember, but I at least said, look, you were right about some things that I didn't see.

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And I just want to give you credit for that. And I want to just say it again publicly here. Like I want to give you credit for being right about so many things that you sort of could tell the motivations of some of these guys based on their actions.

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And now everyone's seeing it. And, uh, so thank you, John, your podcast.

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I'm going to give you the last word, but I have this rule that I don't do it. I don't do an interview of any kind politics or, um, or religion without taking a moment to share the gospel.

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Do you mind if I do that? Please do it. Please do it. Yes. The good news is the gospel starts with the bad news. And that is that there is nothing that we can accomplish of our own, no merit that we can achieve of our own doing that can make up for the great sin that we have committed against God, a sin that requires a ransom to be paid to satisfy the eternal righteous standards of a

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Holy God. That means we're all damned, unless there's some good news, but the good news is

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God, the father, sin, his son, Christ, Jesus, the second person of the Holy Trinity into the world, concede to the

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Holy ghost, born of a virgin. He lived a life. We should have lived vicariously in the place of those who would believe in him.

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He died on the cross vicariously in the place of those who would believe in him, propitiating in himself, the full wrath of God as a substitutionary atonement in our place.

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He died vicariously in the stead of sinners who would believe and proving that his deity was real and his sacrifice was accepted.

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He rose again from the dead. If you believe that message, you should repent of your sins and be baptized in the name of the father, son, and Holy ghost.

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The only way that you can do that because that's an ordinance of the local church is in a biblical new

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Testament church, no matter how upset at the church you get, you have to sojourn with people you have to sojourn with, find a biblical church, a church doing its best.

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Use the gift of discernment to edify that church, serve, love, and give sacrificially.

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Thanks for your time, John, and letting me share that message. Hey, thank you, JD. I appreciate that.

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And if anyone has any questions about that, I'm sure they can reach out to you. They can also reach out to me. I'll be happy to introduce you to Jesus.

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If you're looking for a church, discerningchristians .com, you can go, there's a whole database there of churches who've taken a stand against social justice.