Jon Reviews a Recent SBC Candidates Forum

Southern Baptist Convention Candidates Forum and the State of the Denomination

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris here to address these Southern Baptists in the audience. That's right, more content on the Southern Baptist Convention. You asked for it and I delivered.

Actually, I don't know if you asked for it. I think probably 50 percent, I'm just guessing, this is a gut feeling of my audience, is Southern Baptist. That is my guess. I could be wrong on that. It's interesting because when I get invited to speak at churches, it is rarely ever a Southern Baptist Church, but I think a lot of the pew sitters in those churches listen to this podcast.

It's just a really interesting dynamic. But the Southern Baptist Convention is coming up in June and many have asked me to talk about the candidates who are running for the presidency of the convention.

I do have some thoughts on it and I thought maybe a good way to break into this, and I may have more episodes in the future on it, but a good way to start talking about it is to go through some clips from an SBC presidential candidate forum that was just held recently.

I think that a lot of the topics, well the major topics, were brought up that people are contending over. It's interesting to see the way that these topics were handled by the three candidates. I just want to spend some time with you.

We'll probably do one episode, I'm hoping. I might summarize some things because I don't want to go more than one if I can avoid it. We'll just talk about where the candidates stand according to what they said in this public forum on critical race theory and the church to movement.

They didn't use that term but that's the popular term. And accountability and some of the things that you all who are listening to this podcast are concerned about. So let's talk about that. Let's go to that.

We're just gonna jump right into it. This is the the church that hosted FBC Keller which I believe is in Texas if I'm not mistaken. And I want to just jump to a few different things in this. I'm not going to show you the whole thing.

It is almost two hours and frankly most of it, most of you probably wouldn't find that interesting and for a variety of reasons. But let me give you the tidbits I think that you will find not just interesting but important.

Candidate Assessments and the Conservative Resurgence Legacy

So to start off the forum, the moderator asks the three candidates and there's Bart Barber in the middle who is a pastor in Texas. You have Robin Hadaway to his right, well to actually his left, our right, who is a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a former missionary.

And you have Tom Askell to the far right from our perspective who is a pastor, well probably Tom Askell doesn't need much of an introduction on this podcast because we've talked about him, but he's a pastor in Florida and the president of Founders Ministries.

And so these three are the the three that have so far been nominated and are running. Willie Rice dropped out. I think Willie Rice was probably the pick from most of the elites in the SBC convention. He's the one I think that they wanted to rally behind and I did several podcasts on Willie Rice.

And now this is just my opinion, but I think that they're kind of stuck. The Southern Baptists elites in the convention are a little bit stuck, in my opinion, with the candidates that are currently running.

I think they'll probably end up voting for Bart Barber, but it just became more obvious in this forum. He's kind of a weak candidate. And Robin Hadaway is also a little bit of a weak candidate for a variety of reasons, which we'll get into as we go through it.

I think Tom Askell came out looking not just the strongest and most competent, but the most mature and probably, and I'm trying to view this as much as I can with this comment that I'm making at least, not the rest of them, but this comment.

I'm trying to view this as much as I possibly can in a nonpartisan way. Tom Askell, just to me, seemed like he was well put together and had thought through the issues more than the other two. Robin Hadaway was constantly talking about his experience and that's really what he has.

He has experience in various committees and as a missionary and as a pastor, so he's well-rounded and he's a professor and so therefore he's got experience. You should do it for him. Bart Barber seems to be my overall impression, the kind of the status quo candidate.

Just kind of the SBC may have some some issues here and there, but nothing huge or major and as like it doesn't need to be completely reformed or anything like that. And just like I said, the one that the elites will probably rally around more.

And then of course Tom Askell has some real issues with what's going on in the convention. And so I actually think Tom Askell did a pretty good job in this forum. There are a few things that I probably I would have liked to hear him say a little differently and be stronger on and give a more of a rallying cry for and I'll talk about those things.

But overall I think I mean he had the facts in front of him. He was able to remember things and articulate things and he has a vision that seems to be, which the other two don't have much of a vision.

So if the conservatives are gonna win, I think last year was like their last chance in my mind. If that and I've said this before, this isn't new information just for those who might be watching this particular podcast.

I've said this many times. In fact a year ago I had a podcast, Eight Reasons to Leave the Southern Baptist Convention. People know where I stand on this and and the SBC. Having said that, this particular year this is this is pretty weak.

I don't know that it can be much weaker as far as the the candidates that Tom Askel would have to run against, that it is running against. It's just they're not well-known. Bart Barber was on the resolutions committee last year, which that doesn't really give him a lot of notoriety.

So and their personalities and the way they articulate themselves and their visions, it's just it isn't very strong. Tom Askel has the upper hand at least when you watch this in my opinion and you just listen to him speak.

Now we know once you get in that convention room it's a different story because many of the people there are essentially paid to be there. They are, I hate to put it this way, but this is just a reality.

You have a swamp in the SBC and the swamp needs to be drained and the the swamp shows up to vote and the messengers, a lot of them are from the swamp. There are bigger churches that can afford to send candidates or messengers rather and it's organizations like the IMB and NAM that have a party loyalty in a sense.

They have a loyalty to the center and so getting a conservative messengers to come and overwhelm the convention is extremely hard, if not impossible, unless you have a strong rallying cry. So this forum, if it was just based on this forum and everyone could vote online, who is a Southern Baptist, and they were forced to vote online and they had to just see this forum and then vote, I think Tom Askew would win.

There's no question in my mind, but that's just not the way this this thing works. The motivation, the momentum, the resources, and the location are all in favor of the more progressive elements of the Southern Baptist Convention.

So let's let's start here. The the candidates are asked questions about kind of who they are. We're gonna skip through some of that and then what they want to see and one of the things Bart Barber says, this is as close as he gets in my mind to, well, one of the things that, I mean, he talks about a problem at the end, but that's discernment blockers.

The problem that he sees, one of the things that would maybe appeal to conservatives, Orthodox Christians in the SBC and theological conservatives is this, and it's probably about as close as he gets.

...constitution and about strict constructionist interpretation of the US Constitution, leading us to do wonderful things like strike down Roe v. Wade, but I'm also a strict constructionist when it comes to the Constitution of the.

Southern Baptist Convention. That's pretty, that's it. That's, I think, the closest thing that I heard. There was one other thing he said that was kind of, I was like, oh that's good, like he understands that we should have localism more so in the SBC, but he had no plan to implement any kind of decentralization.

So this is the closest that you get to, I mean, I know it's kind of, it lacks. If that's all it is, it lacks, but that's the closest he gets to saying something I think that would appeal to more conservatives, that he believes that.

I don't know whether in practice he believes that or not or how that would work, but that's as close as we get. I'm not going to talk as much about Robin Hadaway, and one of the reasons is he didn't, he kind of forges this middle road where, and I don't even know if he understands to an extent all the issues going on, it's just, and the other candidates didn't interact with him as much.

So I don't think he's gonna wind up in that second vote. I just don't think so, but in the runoff. But he talks about, I'll just say, he talks about remembering the mission of the SBC. That's what he believes in, and so, and then Tom Askell says this, and this is where, this does appeal to many of us, and I think he says some true things, and I would have loved for him to go a little farther, but here's what he says.

Here's to being a pastor. I'm delighted to be a part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I love the Southern Baptist Convention, but I'm concerned about the Southern Baptist Convention. I think we need to change the direction in the way that we're going, not because we got ranked liberals among us.

I don't believe that's true, but I believe that the winds of an acidic cultural mindset has begun to creep in to some of our institutions and agencies, and it's my firm conviction, as I said all the time, that the churches of the convention own the institutions and agencies, and the institutions and agencies need to be.

Responsive to the churches. So that's the rallying cry, if there is one, for Southern Baptists to come up and vote, is that there is a problem, and it's not rank liberalism, but it's the world is coming in to the institutions and affecting them, and that the reason this is left unchecked is because the churches aren't holding them accountable, or they're not listening to churches attempting to hold them accountable, and so there's a lot of truth in this.

The only thing I would say would have been a real rallying cry, I think a stronger one, is to say, because I think Mike Stone did something very similar to this in an article, that, well, we don't really have liberals running, and the reason, let me just explain this to people who don't understand, the reason they say this kind of thing is because they're drawing a distinction.

They're saying it's not like the liberalism that affected the denomination before the conservative resurgence happened in the 70s and in the 80s. It's not the kind of liberalism that Jay Gresham Machen writes about in Christianity and liberalism, where you have people that are denying things like the sufficiency and the inerrancy of the Word of God, the really basic doctrines, too, like the deity of Christ and that kind of thing.

So they're drawing a distinction in saying, we know that the people that we have issues with in the convention, who are making the convention slide in this bad direction, are not those kind of liberals.

They're not liberals in that sense, but there's worldly problems here. They're bringing in ideas that subvert, and here's what I would say to that. Yes, but. Yes, they're not the same type of liberal in every sense of the word.

They're certainly not out there saying that they believe that the biblical text actually has errors in it, or that they're not advancing like the JEDP theory or something like that. But having said that, what we have today, in my opinion, is more dangerous and more subversive.

I think it's one of the reasons John MacArthur said that the social justice movement is the greatest threat to the gospel he'd ever seen in his lifetime, and he lived through these battles that the SBC was undergoing during the conservative resurgence.

The reason for that is because postmodernists play much more fast and loose with the truth. And J. Gresham Machen complained in his day about modernists signing statements they didn't really agree with and being subversive, but it's nothing compared to what we see today.

Today, you have people that can say one thing and say something else, hold them in diametrical opposition, and not see the contradiction, and then accuse you of being the divisive one when you point out there is a contradiction.

If you believe in standpoint theory, that completely erodes not just inerrancy, not just sufficiency, it actually erodes the very basis for revelation itself. It's so fundamental. And yet there's people going around adopting a pop version of standpoint theory, implementing it in the Southern Baptist Convention.

I talk about this in my book Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. The Caring Well Initiative is a good example of it. You have people that are advancing these things in the denomination, and yet they think that they're orthodox believers, that they haven't said anything that contradicts the statements of faith that they have to sign if they're a professor or if they work for the institution and are required to do that.

And we could give many examples of those kinds of things. And so I think what would have been a rallying cry is, I'm concerned about this direction of the Southern Baptist Convention, and we have false teachers in the denomination, and also those covering for false teachers, to the point, to the effect, that the Southern Baptist Convention is falling into a false gospel and heresy, and it is left unchecked by the denominational institutions that our churches are supposed to hold accountable.

I think that would be a much bigger rallying cry, because that's the truth of the situation. There is a false gospel, and you don't have to look any farther than our seminaries to see this. In fact, later on, Tom Askew will cite Walter Strickland.

He doesn't name names, though, in this whole thing. He just says, a professor. I happen to know is Walter Strickland. But Walter Strickland has put forward liberation theology, and he has articulated it in such a way that is actually textbook false teaching and conflation of law and grace.

But yet, one of the things that we haven't heard from a lot of the conservative leaders is that word. And, and so, and one thing, and I'm not trying to bash Tom Askew here, just so people know, I'm just, I'm saying that, I think to motivate people to come to the convention, I'm thinking politically here, they have to have a reason to pay them kind of money that it takes to get to Anaheim, because we don't have the resources on the conservative side that the other side does.

And they have to know that what they're showing up for is of great importance. And I think what he does here is he articulates something that's important, but it's not as important as what's actually formed, which is a gospel.

Walter Strickland articulates this, but so does Jarvis Williams at Southern Seminary. He completely takes critical race theory, merges, he basically infuses the works that we need for final justification.

That's his term that he uses. He takes critical race theory, racial reconciliation, and that's the Christianized version of it in his mind, and infuses that right into the gospel under the guise of the works that are necessary for final justification.

It's a false gospel. So we have people that have been corrected that will not actually retract. And so that's where I would focus is we, and name the names, here are some of the people that are promoting this.

It's left unchecked. We have a major corruption issue if people can't recognize this, see this, and oppose it. That puts a suspicion around the institutions when this kind of thing happens. And I know that this kind of thing is happening in the IMB.

I know that this kind of thing is definitely happening in NAMM. It's much harder to find those situations because it's not as publicly available, and the people who know about them are not able to come out and whistleblow without major repercussions.

And so the seminaries is where I'd probably put my focus, is here's the kind of people that are training the next generation to go out, and how do we know that we don't have false teachers going into some of these institutions like the IMB, and then going on the field and promoting some of these false teachings to people around the world, and we're exporting that, which Tom Askew actually gets into some of that.

He just doesn't call it false teaching. So my little quibble, I guess, what I'm saying is that I really agree with him. I just think, go stronger, go hard, right? Go for the jugular on this thing. That's, I think, what would really motivate people to come out.

But he's absolutely right that issues streaming in from the culture, which I think what he means by that is academia, and the media, and Hollywood, etc., there are coming into the convention. So let's go to, let's talk a little bit, we'll give you a little bit of Robin Hattaway here.

Let's see here, if I can, 18. I put the timestamps down here. Far and away the best at that. So he joined.

With both feet, and is on the associational board, and I think we found that among a lot of California churches in our Pioneer West, that they just see that our churches are the best. Now, there's always issues.

California pastor friend of mine said there's always foxes in the vineyards, these little things that crop up that you have to take care of, but that's just how it is in church life, because of people's sin.

But I believe that Southern Baptists are the ones that really lead the charge for evangelism and church planning,.

Especially, you know. That's kind of the general rhetoric you're gonna get from Robin Hattaway. It's very, like I said, moderate, middle of the, I don't know how to even, it reminds me a little bit of Fred Thompson.

I remember when he ran, what was that, 2008? And it was just, he lacked that fire in the belly, people said, and it feels a little bit like that. It's just, it lacks, it's like, if things are going so well, and you just have a little, you know, it's downplaying.

It's like, yeah, we have scuffles now and then, but you know, we're the best. We're doing well. And it's, meanwhile, the house is on fire. That's the reality. And so, let's see, let me show you what Tom Askell says about this.

He does a great job.

Around the world, and again, like these brothers, you know, I've been at places around the world. I've seen the impact that Southern Baptist Missions has had. I've seen the impact that American Christianity has had, both good and ill.

We export to the rest of the world what we do here. And if we're not doing it well here, it's not going to go well for the rest of the world. God's just positioned us that way. So, my desire would be to see the Southern Baptist Convention become healthier, to back up and evaluate who we are, who we say we are, and what we are really committed to being.

And there's a lot of issues that we just, we need to face. They're not going away. And if we just pretend that everything's okay, and let's just keep moving forward the way we've been doing.

Things, it's not going to go well for us. And again, you know, the issue here, there's a number of them. There's corruption issues, but there's false teaching, and that's the issue. I mean, he's talking about it.

He definitely is mentioning the issues and saying that these are being exported, and that's a big problem. But, you know, at the core of it, we have false teaching going on. That's the real issue, the dangerous one.

We don't want to export false teaching. Now, he gives some examples. He puts some meat on the bones here, and then I, and Bart Barber kind of contradicts him on the issues surrounding or that are affecting the denomination.

What we're looking for there is.

Simply that we would be able to tell, should they sit at that convention. But the other criteria, and I see I'm out of time, but I already gave you 30 seconds back, so I'll take that away. So I would just say that it's the situation where the Credentials Committee is just that convention.

Further Credentials Committee deliberation, that's another story.

Good. Thank you. We'll have another question about the committee in just a.

Moment. Thank you, Brother Tom. Yeah, well, philosophy is important. It's not as important as theology, but as has been said, it's the handmaiden. Just so you.

Know, the question is, essentially, I'm summarizing, but how can you have such a big denomination which, with so many varieties of philosophy of ministries, people doing things differently in the denomination, how do you keep the denomination together?

So here's what Tom Askell says. Theology, and so not just.

Any philosophy works, and we need to acknowledge that. The churches of the SBC agree to cooperate on certain things, not everything, and so my church isn't going to do everything the same way that Bart's church is going to do it.

That's okay. He's in Texas, I'm in Florida. We should acknowledge that. But we do need to come to terms with some of the problems that we are facing now are because of philosophies that have come in from the world, which the Apostle Paul warns us against in Colossians 2, 8, and 9, and look at how those philosophies have begun to erode the foundation of our cooperative unity, and I'm deeply.

Concerned about that. So just as you're hearing this, you have philosophies coming in that are eroding the foundation of our cooperative unity. That sounds like really serious stuff. So what are those philosophies, and how are they doing that?

And essentially, I mean essentially, this is, there's, I almost want to say this is false teaching without saying it's false teaching, but it's, I think he's being very careful, and he's choosing his words, but that's, we know in this podcast, if you follow this for any length of time, the issues affecting the Southern Baptist Convention.

Broadly speaking, you can say critical race theory, you can say feminism is affecting the domination, you could say even to some extent a soft peddling of LGBTQ, you could say that there's a problem with pragmatism and evangelism and outreach, there's issues of corruption and character.

Now, if you dig into the weeds more, what you're gonna find though is the doctrines that are being attacked are the very idea that there's objective truth itself, and so that erodes doctrines of inerrancy and sufficiency, the justice of God, and how he, his law, how it's articulated in his law, and how that is being attacked by the social justice movement directly.

We could talk about the view of reality that Scripture assumes, and then the ideology that comes in from social justice movement, which reduces people down to their oppressor or oppressed categories, and kind of dehumanizes them based on those things.

We could talk about the fact that the gospel is being merged with works righteousness, and there's a social justice infused law that now is being merged with the gospel and called various things, racial reconciliation has been one of the most popular things, and of course then the corruption is people who are unqualified to be in the positions they're in, running whole institutions that have authority over churches, and so not to mention issues of egalitarianism and attacking the very Word of God, and again that's attacking the law of God, but attacking the the rules that God has set forth as some as if somehow they're unjust, or they're wrong, or the created order is actually oppressive in some way.

These are the things affecting the Southern Baptist Convention, and so I think you know this is what he's talking about, and.

He does put some meat on the bones here. Now we have churches that say that it's their ministry philosophy to ordain women. It's their ministry philosophy to affirm organizations that say that they're caring for homosexual Christians and that that's a good way to live.

Well that's not right. I don't think our tent is that big. If it's that big, then we've got problems, and we need to look at the.

Stakes and go back and say, no, here are our boundaries. Now what he's saying is true. Actually, the other day I was looking up a church, and I was not looking for anything negative. I wasn't even out there trying to find dirt on anything.

I was just looking at a church in South Carolina, and it's on the Southern Baptist Convention's website as being a Southern Baptist Church, and they had several women pastors there, and I sent it to a few people, and I just was like, you know, kind of like double-check me on this, and sure enough, yeah, I was totally accurate, but they're just not in favor of the portions of the Baptist Faith and Message that talk about women's and pastoral roles.

They're still with the Southern Baptist Convention. I don't know how much money they give to the SBC, but this kind of stuff is happening. There's no doubt. Here and there you'll get stories about it, and so how do you deal with a church?

How do you cooperate with a church that believes that, and it is not in accordance with the Baptist Faith and Message, is the real question. Now here's how Bart Barber responds to this.

Yeah, the great news is we have a statement of faith that already addresses those issues. We have parameters of fellowship within the Southern Baptist Convention. Not only do we have parameters of fellowship in the Baptist Faith and Message, we also have a way that we set those parameters, and it's that the messenger body of the convention votes to decide what the parameters of fellowship are within the Southern Baptist Convention.

I think we've done a good job, so really all these churches, they're not accountable to just my opinion or the opinion of me and a few friends. They're accountable to what the messenger body has voted, what somebody's persuaded the messenger body to adopt as parameters of fellowship within our convention.

I think we've done a good job of differentiating between preferences and doctrine, and I think it's important that we keep that level of differentiation in mind when we make.

Those decisions. So you have, all right, so on one hand you have the house is burning down. There's bad things happening. We need to figure out how to address these bad things happening. On the other hand, you have, we've done a good job.

Things are going rather well. Messengers have the final say, and we do have parameters, and we we have good news. He said the good news is we have these parameters. And so we have them, but if they're ignored, if you have parameters that say one thing and then people just ignore it, and what's the mechanism for enforcing those things or identifying churches that are out of step with those things, or professors at a seminary perhaps?

See, that's the issue. So Bart, this is a guy, in my mind already, you have Bart Barber and Robin Hathaway that are just not, they're not up for the task, and it could be a combination of things, or it could be one of really two things.

Either they just don't understand what's going on in their own denomination. They're somewhat oblivious to it, or they do know what's going on, and they're in favor of some of the things that are going on, or they don't view the thing going on as a big deal.

So you have a combination of those two things, or one or the other, and to me that's just a disqualification at that point. If you can't articulate very firmly that there's a major issues in the Southern Baptist Convention, of which I've mentioned some, you can't put meat on those bones and get specific about where you see some of those issues, then how in the world are you gonna address them once you become the president of the denomination?

You're not gonna gain more discernment just because you became president, and you're not gonna gain more backbone just because you became president. So I would say, already in my mind, Tom Askell is the only one that even is approaching some of these issues, and even then I think it's, I would say articulate some of these things stronger, but he's actually seeing there's a problem, and he wants to do something about it, and he knows kind of where it is.

There's a guy who's qualified to do something. He's met the preliminary qualifications for running the institution that's in crisis. So we have a question, and this is a big one, I'll probably just play this for a little while, on critical race theory, and the candidates have to respond.

I'm only, I'm just gonna play it for you, and then I'll comment as we go. Talking about this.

Issue, it's on the news, so what is CRT? Is it manifesting in churches or organizations, including the SBC, and if any, what, if anything, should the SBC and its president do about it? So we go from Bart to Tom, and then Robin, and then if you all have clarification questions for each other, we can do that.

No, no, we have the order, the order here for question two goes Bart, and then Tom, and then Robin. Sorry about that. So Bart, what is CRT? What should, what if.

Anything, should we do about it? So all you have to know about CRT to be ready to walk away from it is that it proposes some ideas of what justice is that are at odds with the Judeo-Christian idea of justice that's passed down into American jurisprudence.

I think it's important to ask what is CRT, not only for yourself, but also for the other people you're talking with about it. I'm interested in truth, and I conducted a poll to try to figure out whether we were actually talking past each other.

1 ,500 people responded to my poll. Only 63 out of 1 ,500 said that they affirmed critical race theory. Half of those were people who were not Southern Baptists, so you had fewer than, fewer than 40 who were, who were Southern Baptists who said they affirmed critical race theory, and of those people, only four agreed with the statement that said white people are racist just by virtue of being white.

Okay, only four out of 1 ,500, but I've had people tell me that that was what critical race theory was. It was the idea that white people are guilty just by virtue of being white, but a lot of people who affirmed critical race theory deny that.

I've had people tell me that anything that you do to try to include black churches or Hispanic churches or Asian churches in the Southern Baptist Convention is racist and is critical race theory. You can do all you want to to include small churches or large churches.

You can do all you want to to try to include rural churches or urban churches. You can do all you want to to include all these other groups, but if you try to include black churches or Hispanic churches or Asian American churches, they say that's racist, that's critical race theory, you can't do that.

I don't buy that. I don't think we have to espouse secular ideologies just to be kind and welcoming to churches that are on the fringe in the Southern Baptist Convention. I think we ought to work to try to build our fellowship stronger and stronger and to invite more and more people to come in to be a part of this great family of churches, and I think that's the president's role in helping to show the difference between critical race theory and just not being a jerk or just not caring about people who are on the fringe but trying to.

Bring people in. Okay, so this is disqualifying on so many levels, but let's start here, and let me just give you kind of my summary here. The SBC doesn't have a critical race theory problem because he did a poll and people said they didn't believe critical race theory, and then he builds a straw man.

He can't define CRT, but some people say it's just, it's this. Some people say it's this. People who actually believe in CRT disagree with some of the definitions of people who think they know what CRT is, and because there's so much confusion, then we shouldn't use this.

We shouldn't cater to the people on the fringe. We shouldn't use this controversy to stop reaching out to minority congregations, and of course, here's the thing. The straw man is, number one, no one is reaching out.

No one is saying you shouldn't reach out to minority congregations or include them. Who is saying that? Show me who's saying that. No one's saying that. The issue, so that is a complete straw man. The issue is the motivation behind why we supposedly reach out or include, not just mine, it's not even minority congregations, it's diversifying churches and institutions.

Why do we do that? And that there is, to some extent, some reach out to to churches that are diverse in those ways or different than the white Southern Baptist churches, and so we want them in. It's the motive for it.

Do we do it because we think we could partner better for the sharing of the gospel, and it's churches in a location, and it can reach this people group, and there's a mission strategy of some kind here, or is it because, well, hey, we're a bunch of racists, or the legacy of racism is upon us if we don't do this?

See, that's a very different motivation, and with all the racial reconciliation rhetoric that's been going on for the last, really, eight years, the impression is given that it's the legacy of racism that has led to the the whiteness or the white majority in the Southern Baptist Convention, and so we have to do all these social justice things to try to get these other churches and these other people involved in the denomination.

That's what people have complained about. It's not, they haven't complained about, it's CRT if you want to partner with an Asian American church or something. No, who's saying this? No one's saying this, so that's a straw man, and he said then, though, at the end, that it's the president's job to basically define CRT and then explain to everyone what the difference is between CRT and then the misnomers about what people think CRT is, so it's not just hating white people, right, and he's got to explain the differences, but then he can't even define what CRT is, so it's just fail all the way around.

He can't even do the very job he's saying that this president ought to be able to do because he can't define it, and I think Tom Askell's answer here was out of the park. Any clarification that either of you...

Okay, we're not gonna do the Tom Askell's answer first. Tom Askell's gonna kind of cross-examine them, but we're gonna get.

There. Tony, do you want from Bart? Anybody? Yeah, Bart, do you think that it's.

Possible that those folks that are saying, no, we don't believe in critical race theory really don't think they are, but could have well imbibed the ideas of critical race theory as just being a part of this culture where it is so.

Preeminent? I think the only way that we're gonna know that for sure is if we can agree on a definition. I appreciated what you said in your interview. Well, I'm supposed to address my remarks to the moderator.

I insisted on that, and I've already broken it. Sorry about that. I appreciated what Tom had to say a few days ago in his interview where he said, you know, we may find out that our differences are not nearly as great as we think maybe they are.