A prominent Southern Baptist pastor has packed up his bags and taken his congregation out of the SBC, declaring, “we out,” and citing Al Mohler endorsing Trump and the letter sent by six seminary presidents rejecting Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality as his motive for leaving. The letter comes a day after the Rev. Ralph West, founder and senior pastor of The Church Without Walls in Houston, Texas, announced he was likewise cutting ties for that very same reason.
Charlie Dates is the pastor of Progressive Baptist Church, Gospel Coalition contributor, and is also an SBC Executive Committee Panel Member. Our audience may know him from saying that the SBC “Don’t Need Black Faces with White Theology/Voices/Ideas Leading the Convention,” and calling Beth Moore “one of God’s leading women in the world.”
He wrote in a fiery departure letter to RNS how for years he was trying to give the SBC a chance assume good motives, but that that they’ve all shown themselves to be a bunch of racists unable and unwilling to change their kukluxklanning ways by not supporting CRT – an unforgivable betrayal which necessitates his departure. Dates laments:
Then, last week, a final straw. On Dec. 1, all six of the SBC seminary presidents — without one Black president or counter-opinion among them — told the world that a high view of Scripture necessarily required a corresponding and total rejection of critical race theory and intersectionality.
Dates, mad as a woke scold listening to a JD Hall sermon, continues:
When did the theological architects of American slavery develop the moral character to tell the church how it should discuss and discern racism? When did those who have yet to hire multiple Black or brown faculty at their seminaries assume ethical authority on the subject of systemic injustice?
How did they, who in 2020 still don’t have a single Black denominational entity head, reject once and for all a theory that helps to frame the real race problems we face?
He writes that the SBC is promoting the belief that a high view of Scripture “must mean an adaptation of Republican politics,” and with it, the dismissal of critical race theory and intersectionality because of a fear of “liberalism.”
Dates spent the rest of the time excoriating Mohler, makes a bizarre comment about abortion, says that some black SBC pastors are mere “tokens” or “assimilators,” calls SBC seminaries “vestiges of racial animus,” says that “Black people will never gain full equality in the Southern Baptist Convention. My acknowledgment of this is not a statement of submission, but an act of defiance. The SBC’s power structure wants to maintain white dominance,” and a bunch of other things.
In short, he loves CRT and intersectionality, they say they don’t, and so he’s out of here.
The funny thing, even though those six seminary presidents penned a statement rejecting CRT, half of them don’t even know what it is. Or they’ll say they reject it like Mohler, all the while creating a $5 Million dollar slush fund for only black students and allowing professors like Jarvis Williams, Matthew Hall, and Curtis Woods to teach there, all who have been heavily influenced by CRT.
In 2019 we were told by our #BigEva overlords that nobody in the SBC embraces Critical Race Theory, with Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) even saying in an interview a few months ago that he doesn’t know any conservative evangelicals influenced by CRT, and if someone put a gun to his head and asked him to name one, he wouldn’t come out alive.
In 2020, SBC pastors are leaving the Southern Baptist Convention because of a refusal to embrace CRT and intersectionality.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
