Admittedly, I was interested in this Twitter affair from the start. That’s saying something, considering I rarely care about what stage of fire evangelicalism is in anymore. Once the dumpster has been lit, there’s no unlighting it. But there was something special about this sparring match.
IN ONE CORNER, KYLE J. HOWARD
On one side was Kyle J. Howard, a privileged white man (he’s as much white as he is black, so I’m helping him self-identify) who pretends to be an oppressed black man. He was raised by two attorney parents in an affluent Atlanta suburb, attended an award-winning grammar and high school, and has become a full-time ward of his family, living in one of their investment homes rent-free. The man is in his mid-thirties and has never been gainfully employed. The full-time student claims to be a “racial trauma counselor” but he doesn’t have a practice, a business license, credentials, or clients. The extent of his work is relegated to Twitter, where thanks to shout-outs by Beth Moore, Russell Moore, Lecrae, and other woke evangelicals, has developed quite a following of leftists who are enamored with his daily claims of oppression.
Howard, as everyone knows, is a habitual liar of such epic proportions that his name has become synonymous with fibbing. He once claimed to have worked for HeartCry Missionary Society, an assertion we debunked after reaching out to HeartCry for comment. Howard claims that he entered the Crips gang in High School, but maintained his place on the debate team and honor roll. His gang affiliation, Howard says, was secret, and not even his parents or girlfriend (and now, his wife) knew at the time he was a super-secret thug who carried a snub-nose revolver and “a razor blade under [his] tongue.” Howard, who suffers a debilitating speech impediment, claims to have been a break-out star on the “underground battle rapper” circuit, which his critics find hiwawious. When “free-styling” for his Internet audience, Howard’s eyes can be seen scrolling left-to-right on the computer screen to read his pre-written rhymes.
As Howard tells the tale, his gang let him depart in peace when he got into college. Now, when he returns to “da block,” as he calls it, they call him “Rev” and ask him for religious advice. The block where he grew up is an ultra-exclusive, posh gated community.
When we put out a $500, and then $2000, and then $3000, and now finaly a $3500 bounty on information from anyone able to corroborate his gang affiliation, Howard claimed that every member of his gang had died or is in prison, and not a soul exists who can back up his accounts. Apparently, no one in Atlanta remembers him as a popular battle rapper, either.
But the biographical tall tales of Howard don’t compare to his daily tales of micro-aggressions that grow like an old man’s fish stories. We track down his stories to disprove them when his accounts are specific enough. For example, he claimed to have been traveling along an Interstate and stopped at an IHOP, where he was instantly targeted by White Supremacists and his car was vandalized in a hate crime. Our investigative reporter tracked down the exact IHOP he was at, they reported that there was no incident, there have been no incidents of racial disharmony in the restaurant’s existence, and there was no police report filed for the damage done to his vehicle. In response, Howard claimed he was afraid to call the police because he would get shot (because he’s kinda black).
Literally no one believes any of that crap, except for perhaps the lily-white members of the Latte Mafia in Woke Evangelicalism who grew up in a neighborhood like Howard’s and haven’t been to ‘da block.’ For them, Howard has become the token oppressed negro, who endlessly entertains his plantation’s massas with stories about what life was like hunting wolverines in Alaska with his cousins.
A particularly absurd story that Howard told back in 2018 is that his wife wasn’t comfortable visiting the Southern Seminary campus because of “anti-Asian hate crimes” running rampant there, which were instigated by Donald Trump. Howard claimed that because he was black (kinda), his wife was Asian, and his kids have roughly the melanin of Tiger Woods’ white cousins, Southern Seminary was an unsafe place. We wrote an article about this, pointing out that the Michael Minger Act is a Kentucky state law that requires public colleges and universities (also at private institutions licensed by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education) to report campus crimes to their employees, students, and the public. Southern Seminary is in compliance with that law, and race-based crimes, hate crimes, or incidents of racial hatred there are zero.
But in regard to the latest fib, Howard claimed on Twitter that he could not be physically present to get his degree from Southern because he was afraid of hate crimes.
IN THE OTHER CORNER, SBTS FACULTY
What was Southern Seminary to do about this? The gang and I at Protestia chuckled and settled in with our popcorn.
The seminary has been completely prostituted in the name of wokeness, and Albert Mohler has served as Comintern Extraordinaire, promoting Critical Theorists to the highest levels of leadership while occasionally speaking against Critical Theory with low-energy conviction and a forced smile. Mohler, intent on keeping SBTS donors happy, has repeatedly spoken out of both sides of his mouth while trying to keep them distracted from what his left hand was doing (which was waving in Critical Theorists upon the SBTS faculty like head carny ushering clowns into a car at the circus).
Mohler has made some absurdly outrageous claims, including that “there is no liberal drift in the SBC,” that “no one will be teaching Critical Theory on my watch,” and my personal favorite, “there are no female pastors in the SBC.” Meanwhile, Mohler’s professors have been caught on video over and over and over again teaching textbook Critical Theory. Mohler’s response has been to delete the videos and then extend their contracts.
Ultimately, the biggest chuckle here is that Kyle J. Howard is a student of Matthew Hall, the provost of Southern Seminary who admitted to being racist on the grounds that all white people are racist. The only explanation for Mohler continuing to employ a racist at the top spot of his seminary is that he also affirms Critical Theory, in which the most racist thing of all is to claim you aren’t a racist. By virtue of claiming to be racist, Southern Seminary professors are proving that they aren’t as racist as they could be.
Our question, betwixt bites of popcorn, is who would win in this Mexican Standoff of Wokeness. Kyle J. Howard is claiming that the Flagship Institution of Wokeness in the SBC is RaCIsT. And yet, the CRT doctrines taught at Southern Seminary tacitly asserts that its professors and students are racists (so long as they are white).
The question for us was how it would be possible for Southern Seminary to deny Howard’s accusation of racism when its provost and faculty admit to being CRT-style racists.
Then, comes in Dr. Haykin. Haykin claims on The Social Gospel Coalition’s blog to have narrowly escaped Marxism when he was younger, but it seems he hasn’t escaped at all. Haykin has been at the forefront of Southern Seminary’s wokeness parade, cheering each and every single instance of Downgrade that has sullied the once-great reputation of the institution. Whether it’s showing support for Karen Swallow Prior, or poo-pooing the faggotry at Revoice and its origins at SBTS, or daily griping about the Holy Spirit’s gift of discernment and crediting it to the devil, Haykin is the cheerleader for the leftward drift that Mohler says doesn’t exist.
But would Haykin stand back and watch his institution, drenched in woke religion, be called RaCiST? Heck no.
Haykin spoke up…
We predicted among ourselves that Haykin’s comments wouldn’t survive the weekend when Mohler would inevitably tell him to apologize to Howard and repent for saying SBTS wasn’t racist and that Howard was a lying schmuck.
That’s what happened.
Profaning the word “brother” and making its religious usage absolutely meaningless, Haykin now claimed to not being saying there wasn’t racism at SBTS. He then said that he “should have said nothing,” apologized for “deeply hurting” Howard (who is literally traumatized by everything), and asked forgiveness.
I guess we know who now wins in a head-to-head battle between Kyle J. Howard and Albert Mohler’s SBTS. It’s Kyle J. Howard.
Frankly, I applaud the whole affair. I pray God destroys them both in an orgy of crocodile tears and bleeding emotional trauma. I hope they both have an underground virtue-signaling battle-off and both are dispatched by sheer exertion, trying to prove who is more victimized by one another.
It couldn’t happen to better people.
