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Baptist News Global Equivocates on Hamas Terrorist Attacks

In the wake of the recent Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, nearly all mainstream media coverage has condemned the attacks as barbarism. The general expectation is that the Israeli military will respond with unrelenting force, treating the terrorists who murdered, raped, and kidnapped in the same manner that the Western world summarily extinguished the scourge of ISIS in the Middle East following their reign of terror. 

A Christian response toward terrorist organizations such as ISIS or Hamas should be a prayer that God would bring their members to immediate repentance, coupled with an imprecation that if his will is not to bring them to repentance, he would swiftly and decisively bring about their demise in a way that demonstrates his justice, for his glory. 

Leftist media and so-called progressive Christians have found it difficult, however, to make direct and unequivocal statements that condemn terrorism and recognize the validity of Israel’s right to defend itself as a nation. Baptist News Global, the faux journalistic outlet that is neither Baptist, Global, or a reliable source of news, has spent a significant amount of time equivocating for the terrorism of Hamas against Israel.

BNG has been known for its increasingly mind-numbingly heretical and downright brain-dead takes, including recent deconstructionist gems “Nature is Queer” and “Why I don’t Invite Would-Be Friends to Church”. Since the recent large-scale attack on Israel by Hamas, BNG has published several pieces that attempt to cast blame on the nation of Israel, painting the attacks by Hamas as merely another cycle in the violence of the Middle East.

BNG’s initial response by executive director Mark Wingfield, In This War, There Are No ‘Good Guys posits that everyone in the Hamas-Israel war has the same moral standing.

To hear most American media tell it, Israel is the “good guy” in this conflict and the Palestinians — particularly Hamas — are the “bad guys.” We long for easy dichotomies, but that’s simply not possible here despite what the U.S. State Department says. What Hamas has done is despicable, but what Israel has done and continues to do also is despicable.

Imagine a journalist in the midst of the West’s war against ISIS declaring in the wake of ISIS terrorists raping women and murdering children that while what ISIS has done is despicable, the victims of ISIS are not innocent. Such whataboutism flies in the face of common human decency and the standard of God’s law. A Christian doesn’t have to adopt a dispensationalist view of Israel to see the kidnapping, rape, and murder by Hamas terrorists as unequivocally evil. Wingfield quotes numerous leftist activists who support his claim that Hamas and the Israeli state are morally equivalent, including liberation theologian and former Southern Baptist chaplain at Harvard University Ashlee Wiest-Laird:

“What is happening now in Palestine/Israel is a natural outcome of 75 years of colonization and oppression.”

Rodney Kennedy, in his recent BNG piece, My Heart and Mind are in Conflict About Israel and Hamas, compares the 9/11 hijackers to the members of Hamas who attacked Israeli citizens.

“The unexpected Hamas incursion into Israel, and the resultant deaths that are yet occurring, bring to mind our own experience of 9/11. The rhetorical choices made after 9/11 included labeling the attackers as “terrorists” rather than “criminals,” designating 9/11 as a singular metonymy, implicating all “Muslims” as terrorists as well as other rhetorical tropes that felt like errors in our judgment…..I hear the same universal tendencies to label Hamas as a bunch of “terrorists” and all Muslims as terrorists as if a label solves the problem.”

Like many leftist journalists, Kennedy wants to play word games instead of plainly reporting on the fact that Hamas members, like the 9/11 hijackers, are clearly terrorists. Kennedy argues that we must attempt to understand the motivations behind what Hamas has done. According to Kennedy, Hamas attacked Israel because they themselves were victims.

“….words like “evil” and “terrorists” serve only “to shut down thought.” The hardening of the categories causes us to cede our agency to a military solution. There is, in this case, only one option: a clarion call to preemptive arms….Don’t look for a political explanation. It is a wonderfully time-saving device. If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes . … You cannot acknowledge that the terrible crimes which terrorists commit have a purpose behind them, since to ascribe purposes to such people is to recognize them as rational creatures, however desperately wrongheaded.”

Kennedy compares the trajectory of Christian Nationalists in the United States to Hamas, equating Hamas’ genocidal attitudes and actions toward Israel to antisemitism in the United States, going even so far as to say that in the United States, “We have our own Nazi problem”. He then proceeds to make a comparison between the actions of Hamas toward modern Israel and those of the nation of Israel towards the surrounding pagan nations in the Promised Land.

“The condemnation of Hamas fails to accept that Hamas did not invent the notion of genocide. That has been with us from the beginning of human existence…. For instance, there is the reality that the ancient Hebrews felt commanded by “God” to destroy the Canaanites. The Deuteronomic party line: “The only good Canaanite is a dead Canaanite” can be clearly seen in Deuteronomy 7: “The Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you — and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them.”

In his piece, Here Are Some Ways to Listen to Palestinian ChristiansBNG faux journalist and stay-at-home dad Rick Pidcock makes the same tired leftist argument that both Hamas and Israel are at fault, and criticizes evangelical Christians for making the statement “we stand with Israel.” Pidcock argues that because more Hamas terrorists have been killed in the past 15 years than Israelis, the anger of Palestinians against Israel is legitimate.

“According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, during the time of 2008 through September 2023, there have been 6,407 Palestinians killed compared to 308 Israelis. Given the disparity in the numbers of deaths, it seems reasonable to wonder if there is some legitimacy to Palestinian anger even if one does not condone violence.”

Clearly, the Overton Window has shifted in Christian discourse. On September 11, 2001, I remember seeing the twin towers fall, live on television. I was sitting in a public-school American history class taught by a Marxist former University Professor. In the days that followed, the professor spent numerous hours explaining the mentality behind the terrorism that extinguished nearly 3,000 lives. He believed that America deserved what it received, and he reviled the use of the word terrorist to describe those who took planes and used them to murder civilians. The same tired old arguments persist to this day. Now, instead of merely occupying the minds of Marxists and Secularists in academia, they occupy the lecture halls of left-leaning seminaries, the pulpits of liberation theology spewing churches, and the vacuous thoughts of those at Baptist News Global who claim the title of Progressive Christian Journalists. 

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Baptist News Global Publisher Says Supporting LGBTQ Kids ‘Transitioning’ is a ‘Pro-Life’ Issue

Some things in life can’t be taken at face value, Christian Science, Grape-Nuts, and Buffalo Chicken Wings being among them. In a similar vein, The Baptist News Global (BNG) shouldn’t be taken at face value either, being neither of those three things. An unobservant reader of religious news might be surprised to know that while BNG reports on many issues related to the Southern Baptist Convention, the independent organization is not affiliated with the SBC. Further examination of the BNG reveals that what passes as “news” from BNG is really just leftist propaganda with a thin candy-coating of religiosity, like an almond bark-coated turd. Thirdly, BNG is not global. While BNG speaks to global issues on occasion, their 3-member operating team and 18-member board of directors consist of 20 members in the United States and 1 member in Romania, meaning that the leftist rag is not representative of Global Christianity or Global Baptists by any stretch of the imagination.

Much of what BNG publishes would be rejected outright by the overwhelmingly conservative Christians of Africa and Southeast Asia who recognize a downgrade when they see one. Of course, a move to broaden the diversity of the organization to include such conservative Global voices would detract from BNG’s mission as a water-carrier for the political left.

Mark Wingfield, Executive Director and Publisher of BNG takes a hard-leftist line to all news. For Wingfield, problems in the church have their roots in the evils of conservatism, “Christian Nationalism”, anti-LGBT bigotry, efforts to influence government with Christian values, and many other so-called evils of conservative Christianity. In a recent series of articles, Wingfield took aim at Christians who refuse to bow to the demonic idea that gender is fluid and children or their guardians should be able to choose their gender and alter their bodies. A “Pastoral Letter to Transgender Children” that was previously published on BNG by Pastrix Ashley Robinson and referenced in Wingfield’s article serves as a window into the demented mind of those at BNG who believe that transgenderism is God-ordained:

While I can’t pretend to understand your trans experience, I do know something about being in a body that doesn’t always fit into a box. Many people, and even some churches, think there is something wrong with my round body with lots of soft edges. But here is something I know about us in my deepest inner knowing: We were created in the image and likeness of God, even when we don’t fit into a box or a given gender.

Robinson goes on to explain her false teaching on gender also extends to the nature of God, who she believes has multiple genders:

Speaking of gender, did you know that God has many genders? Sometimes we read stories in the Bible with God’s name as King or Father. We also read about God as Wisdom, who is a fabulous shero. When we were still getting to know God, we used the name YHWH, which is just like the breath within us. Seems like God is too big for one gender, right? I hope whenever you hear things that might make you think something is wrong with you, you will be able to wrap yourself in the wideness of God’s gender expression and great love for you.

Wingfield cites recent moves by the administration of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Attorney General Ken Paxton, as a sign of persecution of transgender children and their parents. Abbott instructed Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of credible reports of children receiving “abusive gender-transitioning procedures”, after the state’s attorney general issued a statement deeming the procedures as abusive under state law. Wingfield decries these moves as harmful persecution against the LGBTQ community. Like his leftist counterparts in secular media, Wingfield fails to explain exactly what kind of “abusive gender-transitioning procedures” Texas conservatives are attempting to outlaw.

Children that are deemed “transgender” are given puberty blockers. These puberty blockers typically lead to cross-sex hormone treatments, which cause sterilization, and are frequently followed by sex-change surgeries that mutilate or remove genitalia and breasts. Studies by the American Psychiatric Association show that 98 percent of boys and 88 percent of girls who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria will grow out of the disorder by adulthood, if they are not subjected to abusive puberty blockers. Those who are subjected to puberty blockers are much more likely to receive permanent psychological damage.

Wingfield calls moves to ban gender transitioning procedures “extreme” and “really scary”, ignoring the fact that giving children hormones and chopping off their genitals is one thousand times more extreme and scarry than simply listening to God’s prescription for sexuality in the scriptures. Wingfield even goes so far as to claim that advocating for trans-ideology is part of being truly pro-life:

“Why should you care about transgender children and their families? Because doing so is a truly pro-life position.”

Following its promotion of Transgender propaganda, Baptist News Global published an opinion piece that attempted to flip the script on conservative Baptists, by accusing pastor and potential SBC Presidential candidate Voddie Baucham of being a threat to women, children, and daughters. Author Rick Pidcock argues that Baucham’s defense of Biblical manhood and womanhood is a threat to the liberation of women and children. In defending his argument, Pidcock draws heavily on Critical Theory and accuses Baucham of promoting violence through the promotion of Biblical values:

Voddie Baucham is indeed a peddler of violent male power. But beneath that thick, hardened shell of male power is a frightened child and someone who has lost touch with the divine feminine within himself. And that’s why he promotes the abuse of children, women and daughters.

When a news publication that claims to be Christian begins to peddle critical theory, advocates for the abuse of children through puberty blockers, and publishes pieces that call for Godly men to get in touch with “the divine feminine”, that publication abandons Biblical worldview and should be considered apostate. Getting your news from Baptist News Global is equivalent to getting your scripture from the mouth of the serpent.


Editor’s Note. This article was written by Paul Brown for Protestia. Sources referenced below.

Texas officials’ new attack on transgender care called a ‘political ploy’ at the expense of children – Baptist News Global

Please pay attention to the plight of transgender children and their families – Baptist News Global

A pastoral letter to transgender children – Baptist News Global

Plagiarism is the least thing to worry about with Voddie Baucham, who is a threat to children, women and daughters – Baptist News Global

Texas investigates parents for subjecting their kids to ‘gender transition’ procedures – LifeSite (lifesitenews.com)