Charlie Dates is the prominent woke pastor of Progressive Baptist Church. A former/ present? ERLC and The Gospel Coalition contributor and definitely former SBC Executive Committee panel member, he recently left the Southern Baptist Convention on account of their failure to embrace Critical Race Theory. Notably, he attacked other Black Christians as sell-outs simply because they have not devoted their lives to fighting an artificial boogeyman, white supremacy” and well as “lambasted them for saying things like “I’m Christian before I’m Black.”
In a new post, he laments that “Black Sacred Music” is no longer being produced to capture the “black Christian experience in America” which is about the tone of their struggle against racism and white supremacy from the white man.
Bemoaning that white people in the majority culture have “appropriated it” he explains that Black Sacred Music is a “salvific instrument” and that if it is lost, Black Christians will have lost their witness in the world. Lastly, he says that the current crop of worship music is the same music of the slavers and captors, and that when Black folk sing it, rather than their own sacred black songs, they sound like the captors.
Popular mommy-blogger, podcaster, and pseudo-Christian pagan Jen Hatmaker continues to wield her platform to promote theologically perverse teachers saying theologically perverse things, this time with guest Alicia Crosby on her September 8th ‘For the Love’ podcast.
Alicia Crosby is a justice educator and equity consultant, whose job it is to “help individuals, communities, and institutions explore and unpack topics related to identity, inclusivity, journey, and intersectional equity.” She co-founded the Center for Inclusivity, an organization that “fosters important conversations across faiths, sexual orientations, and gender identities to create shared community.”
She is queer and pansexual. She refuses to go to white doctors, supports looting and cities burning of cities during BLM protests, loves the WAP song, wants the police defunded, and expressed how upset she was because she had to have a white, cis-gendered history professor. She doesn’t come across as a particularly nice person, although Hatmaker heavily promotes her, heaps praises on her, and tell her audience that they should “follow her and sit under her leadership.”
Hatmaker describes the content of the podcast:
“We are going to look at the church’s role in the wholeness of Black lives. Without mincing words, this has been a place of profound failure for the American white church, because the center of the American church remains white, straight, and cis-gendered. All kinds of people groups who fall outside of those lines have not been valued, much less centered. And this has had tragic consequences…”
If it is a profound failure for the center of the church to be white, straight, and cis-gendered, what can only be meant is that the center of the church must also be black, gay, and transgendered, at least in some way. That is the radical revision she envisions.
Hatmaker, of course, is openly supportive of all things same-sex, having an out and proud child that she has denied the gospel to, hiding it from her daughter in an abhorrent act of parenting and supposed Christian witness.
Apart from mere description, the podcast says few things of note. In one segment, Crosby describes how she was “ecumenically promiscuous” and eventually gave up on attending institutional churches and congregational settings, saying they weren’t for her, as she couldn’t function in a church with power differentials and church service where she couldn’t just turn around and start have a conversation to the person next to her in the middle of a sermon. Rather, she says she lives on the outsides of the margins, away from churches traditional church settings, and that she’s happy there.
Hatmaker “ooh’s and ‘aaah’s” through the entire discourse, murmuring “Wow. That’s right. Yeah. Hmmm. That’s good. So powerful.” to a story of a clearly false convert forsaking congregationally gathering for a church service. She comments afterward:
Like that gave me butterflies in my stomach. I’m thinking of how many people heard you walk through that, and say that in plain terms and probably felt a million pounds roll of their shoulders. The sense of duty and obligation and should…shoulding…around institutional church attendance and involvement is so high…and so just the powerful theological framework that the people of God have been in and out of buildings since the beginning is so liberating like what beautiful and wonderful thing to say.
In another segment, Hatmaker says ‘that’s good’ and ‘that’s right’ to Crosby describing “the white church” as “not a curious place” and that “it relies on absolutes – being an imperialist space – because it seeks to control what is and isn’t permissible, which is what white Christianity has done.” One of the examples of the church not being a curious space is the use of horoscopes and the practice of astrology, with Crosby chiding the white church and white Christians for suppressing their use, upset that they call it “demonic.”
Eventually, Hatmaker elaborates on her own faith journey and paints for us a picture of how she went from a Lifeway best-selling author to a wild-eyed Christ-hater (our words). Sadly, she still believes her and the God of the Bible are tight and that she has a personal relationship with Him. She’s mistaken of course, unless she’s referring to the fact that the relationship she has with God is that He personally regards her as his enemy and the object of his wrath. But Hatmaker explains:
Once I stepped into a place of spiritual curiosity I rotated so many new teachers into my life, completely different voices, totally different faith experiences, absolutely different perspectives, whole new systems of faith and theology and doctrine and interpretation…[Once that happened] I experienced absolute spiritual flourishing.
