On this episode of Polemics Report for March 9th, 2021, JD talks about the blessing of Beth Moore finally leaving the SBC and evangelical elites like David French and Russell Moore throwing faithful believers under the bus for being skeptical of the vaccine. In the patrons-only portion, JD discusses the latest instance of JD Greear mocking the Word and Southern Baptists who insist on biblical orthodoxy.
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A prominent Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader has garnered criticism for a selfie he took and posted to social media, with opponents describing the photo as a shameful act of self-promotion and an instance of “virtue twerking” – a term used to describe the most obscene and transparent cases of “virtue signaling.”
Russell Moore, the head of the Ethics and Religious and Liberty Commission (ERLC) recently took a personal hit when he was torched by the SBC’s Executive Committee for the way he runs his organization, summarized by the phrase, “thedirection of the ERLC is a significant source of division and creates a very real challenge to reversing CP [Cooperative Program] decline.”
Now, not content to merely note that he received his vaccine or perhaps show a picture of his paperwork, Russell Moore tweeted out a picture of his new prize. From inside his parked car. All alone. No one around. With the windows probably rolled up. In the image Moore wasn’t just wearing one mask but rather two – a necessary accessory if one is to properly broadcast evidence of one’s moral goodness.
This hobbit is vaccinated (round one, anyway).
Thankful for the astounding skill and speed of medical science to help rid us of this plague. pic.twitter.com/gNHelHmqfN
This is nothing surprising coming our favorite progressive Democrat. After all, there’s some virtue to signal, and it ain’t going to signal itself.
Moore also uploaded one of his WaPo articles, where he wrote last month:
We have all lost much during this pandemic. For Christians, one of the most awful aspects, apart from the deaths of those we love, is the isolation we have had from one another, along with our feelings of powerlessness to change the situation. The vaccines change that equation.
By getting vaccinated as soon as our time is called, we can actively work for what we have been praying for — churches filled with people, hugs in the church foyer, and singing loudly together the hymns we love.
This, of course, is only true for those who have been shut down like Moore’s church and other disobedient shepherds and congregations. For many, their church has been filled with people, hugs, services, and public worship this entire time, or with very brief intermission over the last year. For this reason, the vaccination has no role in determining whether not a church opens up and worships God, doing absolutely nothing to change any equation.
But if by doing so Moore can get a few eyeballs his way, signaling his virtue and ethical virtuosity with all the subtlety of a man running naked across a football field during halftime, then we expect he will do that very thing. We await the next picture of lying in bed at home, triple masked, with a newly installed particle air filter in the background that’s hashtagged #SafeAtHome and #GospelIssue.
For years we at Protestia have drawn the finger-wagging ire of many within the Southern Baptist convention over our criticism of their glorious jewel, Beth Moore. Both the well-meaning and miscreants have filled our inboxes with messages about what a nice lady she is, how much she’s taught them, and how why she doesn’t have an unkind bone in her body. From our perspective, that’s because they’re likely all calcified and fused into one big skeletal mass that frames and conceals her dark, dark heart within. We said this about her many times, and we’ll say it again:
If you can picture a crazed woman, who having managed to scuttle herself atop a Chick-fil-A rooftop, is now alternating between throwing rocks down upon irritated patrons below and urinating on them as they pass by, all while the police watch, sit back, and stand down, then congratulations, you’ve accurately comprhended the state of the Southern Baptist Convention when it comes to Beth Moore.
For years she’s been given free reign to pelt passers-by with impunity, a hollering harpy who remains unpunished and out on bail because her uncle is Russell Moo- the Police Chief and dad is the County Judge, and so long as she stays on this side of the complementarian vs. egalitarian debate, even if it’s straddling on a technicality, they’ll put up with their favorite little hellion and won’t even give her a citation.
As a result, we’ve been consistent in calling her out for varied scurrilous offenses, making eye-contact with other discerners who are watching the events unfold while making the “are you seeing this too?” connection of shared understanding.
Now, after nearly a decade of pointing the finger in her direction, documenting the shift from a bible-twisting occasional oddity to pervasively subversive spinstress, Beth Moore has finally left the SBC in worse shape than she found it, smashing all the windows on her way out. The fact that she actually had to announce that she left shows how little she thinks of everyone. Like we didn’t know she had departed years ago? We listed some of her many grievances here, but to say the SBC is better off without her is an understatement.
It would be an error to suppose though that this is somehow bad for her or that her notoriety will diminish, far from it! Right now Lifeway, the publishing arm of the SBC that is nearly bankrupt (and not just morally) is licking their chops and rubbing their greedy little paws together at all the sweet lucre they have coming their way – one last hurrah before their swiney bodies rush headlong off the cliff.
They’re still going to publish all her material. She’ll still be a vaunted “Lifeway Woman,” joining crazy-as-a-rat-in-a-coffee-can Christine Caine as an author they will push and promote. Only now, they don’t have to deal with the headache of her affiliations and association with the denomination. Now that she’s out, there is a lot more tolerance for her wayward and aberrant teaching, given that she’s no longer considered one of their own needing to be policed. This absolutely works for them.
For their part, you can basically think of Lifeway as a run-down mobile ice cream truck chugging along the highways and byways of the SBC. The kidlings come for something cold and refreshing, but all they get are a couple of half-frozen freeze pops injected with spiritual strychnine and renamed the “Beth Moore Bible Study.”
The rusting wheel wells and peeling paint known as Living Proof Ministries aside, now that Moore has broken free of the “systemically racist” SBC she will have the freedom to be more explicit in whatever little creepy heresy she has come up with in the deep recesses of that dark little mind, the controversy being a windfall for her distributor.
Within six months she will come out in full support of “women pastors” (unaffectionately called pastrixes), and another year after that she will making some sketchy softball comments about LGBT acceptance, joining Jen Hatmaker in hitching a ride to hate-Jesus town. This controversy will only add fuel to the fire, and Lifeway is there to suck in all the smoke.
Naturally, our SBC overlords and effete men will scroll through Twitter while they pass the time on the toilet, posting white knight defenses of her newly public positions as they pee sitting down. There will be no mea culpa by the ERLC elites who spend all their time hobnobbing with Democrats and polishing their monocles, acknowledging that she was getting squirrelly with the scriptures. Rather, these Top Men will emerge into the blogosphere after spending some time pinching their own cheeks so as to appear publicly flushed, sputtering, and harumphing while protesting that they weren’t there cheering her on, even as we watched them supply her rocks to hurl from their hidey-hole around back.
Beth Moore can go home, kick off her shoes, and set every room on fire for all we care. The SBC is already a smoldering building, burned over by BLM rhetoric, a sympathy for CRT, and a ruling class that wouldn’t know how to exegete 1 Timothy 2:11-15 if it were tattooed to their foreheads or carved into their arms. The SBC has a lot of problems, sure, but the last thing they need is “Auntie Beth” sticking around and kicking in all the windows.
Goodbye, good riddance, and get the hell out of here.
In what can only be considered a “look at me” formality, lady preacher and theological peabrain Beth Moore has announced that she is no longer a Southern Baptist. Apparently, she has taken gullible Southern Baptist congregations for all she could and is now moving on to even more liberal and gullible pastures.
Moore retweeted an article at Religion News Service announcing her breakup with Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention and peddler of wares from all over the spectrum of fake Christianity. She claims she no longer “identif[ies] with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.” We assume she means the orthodoxy of forbidding women from preaching (1 Tim. 2:12) and the orthodoxy of not engaging in rank false teaching (2 John 9). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that her Living Proof “ministry” lost 1.9 million dollars between 2017 and 2019.
She is a pathetic and embarrassing expositor of scripture and the poster child for what happens when churches and denominations fail to take the scriptural roles of men and women seriously.
Beth Moore leaving the SBC (assuming it sticks) is not a surprise to anyone paying attention. The SBC is not downgrading nearly as fast as she is, and now her lousy studies aren’t selling. She clearly left the orthodoxy of the Baptist Faith and Message long ago, and her recent inability to draw a moral distinction between Trump and the Democratic Party was just the latest peach on her massive tree of bad fruit.
The discernment ministers at Protestia/Pulpit and Pen called Beth Moore out years ago as not being one of us (you know, not a Christian). She is and has always been a charlatan, bilking gullible Christians out of time, money, and real teaching for years – aided and abetted by the Christ-less hucksters at Lifeway who shelved her pap alongside heaven tourism nonsense and moronic “relevant” teen devotionals. Now apparently SBC women’s ministries will be forced to rely on “menstruation is a parable of the crucifixion” Jen Wilkin for their monthly doses of feminism.
While I am no prophet, I predict that within one year, Beth Moore will come out as fully LGBTQ affirming and adopt the title of pastor for herself in whatever “church” she finds herself. Such is the nature of apostasy.
(Reformation Charlotte) Nearly two years ago, Reformation Charlotte broke the news that a Southern Baptist church in Georgia had opened its doors of membership to openly gay, practicing homosexuals. Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, GA is led by Jim Conrad who preached a sermon in August 2019 stating that his church would no longer follow the biblical mandate on human sexual morality and instead, it would affirm homosexuals and give them full membership.
The church began accepting unrepentant homosexuals when Conrad said that two sodomites approached him with their boys and asked him if they’d be “welcomed” in their church. Instead of giving them the gospel and speaking the truth in love to them, Conrad decided to affirm them in their sin and lead them on a path straight to Hell.
Earlier this month, it came to light that the Southern Baptist Executive Committee had finally decided to take up the case and disfellowship the congregation.
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) President J. D. Greear took aim at his conservative critics in a speech to the SBC Executive Committee on February 22 in Nashville, comparing them to Pharisees and terrorists and suggesting those dominating the conversation are acting in a “demonic” fashion.
In what seemed like a speech dedicated to defending his record and pushing back at those who might besmirch it, Greear explained that the SBC “is in a crisis that comes from the recesses of our own hearts” and that “this last year has revealed areas of weakness in our beloved convention of churches, fissures and failures, and fleshly idolatries. COVID did not produce these crises, it only exposed them.”
Greear describes how “almost immediately after I began to lead our convention, the character assassinations and false accusations and innuendoes and exaggerations began,” and that people were accusing him of wanting him to turn people into Calvinists, gut state conventions, and soften statements on homosexuality. That he was friends with Nancy Pelosi, personally privately funded by George Soros, and that he was a Marxist and card-carrying member of BLM.
Of course, none of his serious and vocal critics were accusing him of these things, but rather had other, more specific grievances and criticisms that he does not list, which is a common tactic those want to obfuscate and misrepresent what the true concerns are.
Speaking of the influence of the Pharisees, he explains how they were “full of envy, slander, deceit, and backbiting. They made up stuff about Jesus and his apostles because they challenged their authority.” Bringing this into a discussion about what has surprised him most about his time as leader, he offers:
How loud, and how dominating, and how virulent are that relatively small cacophony of voices that seems bent on sowing division and anger in our midst. In fact, there have been times I’ve got a glimpse of who’s actually behind it, and it feels like that scene in the wizard of Oz where you know Dorothy pulls back the curtain or Toto pulls back the curtain and there the Wizard of Oz is just a scrawny little old man with a huge microphone and you’re like that’s it? You’re the one that’s making all the noise…
The people who are dominating the conversation are not representing Southern Baptist People, these things are demonic.
He further laments:
I am mainly grieved for many of our entity leaders and some of you who have been slandered and lied about. It was not what I expected us to be spending our time on.
Every moment that you or me or Dr. Floyd engages in a silly argument or spends time debunking untruths is a moment I’m not focused on the Great Commission. I think we need an attitude like President George W. Bush called for in 2001: We make no distinction between those committing terrorism and those who harbor terrorists.
Greear mentions 5 of 6 times through his short address how in the 1980s they “beat the liberals” and “repudiated the leaven of the liberals” and had some “hard-won battles of the 1980s and 1990s.” He argues that now that they’ve done that, it’s time to address those sowing divisions and “repudiate the leaven of the Pharisees.”
What is lost on Greear, however, is that he keeps on pointing to the “hard-won battles” against the liberals in the 1980s and 1990s as if it’s all done and dealt with just because they were able to kick out a few people and get a Baptist Faith and Message out of it. But he doesn’t acknowledge or recognize that you need to continue to fight those battles yearly, into 2020 and beyond, lest the SBC eventually become the St. Harvey Milk’s United Episcopalian Church.
The need to “repudiate the leaven of the Pharisees” now only exists because they took the pedal off the metal. The problems of 2021 exist because people have rested on the laurels of what they and their predecessors did decades and decades ago. As a result, while SBC heads sat around high-fiving themselves while giving 2003 George Bushesque “Mission accomplished” speeches, the enemy regrouped, and over the last 20 years, liberalism and progressivism crept in and saturated much of the SBC, particularly in the leadership, resulting in misdirected targets.
Greear finishes up by explaining that the SBC needs to engage in a robust theological discussion about critical race theory and need careful, robust, “bibles-open-on-our knees” discussion about what biblical justice looks like.
But we should mourn when closet racists and neo-Confederates feel more at home in our churches than do many of our people of color. And to be sure, for the vast majority of our churches that is not true, and if that is not true of you and your church then praise God.
But I have received the emails and phone calls from people in our Southern Baptist churches who do fit that description. The reality is that if we in the SBC had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that racism and discrimination has left in our country as we have passion to decry Critical Race Theory, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.
