Performance Is The New Commitment

Philip and I had prepared this transcript from my show for everyone this morning, but before we get to it, I want to say a few words about the Southern Baptist Convention vote for Ed Litton. In short, calm down.

Calm Down

Ed Litton is the new President of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Observing some of the commentaries online and engaging with a number of friends, one might think the communists just took over the Baptists.  The more that one is involved in Republican politics, the more one is likely to think that, and therein lies the problem.  It is a problem of national importance as some now believe the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will break up.

Perhaps the Southern Baptist Convention will break apart, but I doubt it.  There were four contenders: Randy Adams, Ed Litton, Albert Mohler, and Mike Stone.  Mohler is who I would have picked if I were a Baptist.  The head of the Southern Baptists’ most prestigious seminary, Mohler has been a leading conservative in the SBC for decades.  He is neither a shrinking violet nor a liberal.  He is against critical theory, liberalism, and the wokes.  He supports the view that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and men and women live in a complementarian relationship.

Stone is a Georgia Baptist.  He was the graduation speaker at my kids’ school this year where he read from the King James Version of the Bible.  He is biblically rock solid.  He was backed by the most conservative members of the Southern Baptist Convention — some who would have backed Mohler, but they were still mad at him for not supporting Donald Trump in 2016 or thought he had not been vocal enough about critical race theory or had been too kind to people the hardcore bunch opposed.  Mohler was rejected not for his views, but for his lack of song and dance to show his views.

Adams was not really a factor, garnering only 673 out of 14,300 votes.   I have laid out the dynamics like that to make a few points.

Stone and Mohler, the two men whose conservative bona fides are not in dispute, together captured sixty percent of the first ballot.  In other words, sixty percent of the Southern Baptists meeting in Nashville this week voted for someone who is indisputably conservative, indisputably against wokeism, indisputably against critical theory, indisputable for Biblical inerrancy, and indisputably for complementarianism.

To say the Southern Baptist Convention will move left because, on the final ballot, Ed Litton got fifty-two percent of the vote is to engage in hysteria.  Of the men I talked to about this vote, overwhelmingly they voted for Litton not because Litton is liberal, but because they think Stone had both mishandled himself in several internal matters, but more importantly because Stone’s most ardent supporters turned off so many people.

A lesson from the Trump era is that only Donald Trump can behave like Donald Trump and win, but no one else can.  Even then, the public rejected Trump’s behavior in 2020.  A group of vocal and political conservatives surrounded Stone.  They convinced themselves they either will win or liberalism will win.  They have made themselves in their own minds indispensable men with whom the Southern Baptist Convention dispensed.  Some of those same men are now, despite sixty percent of the convention voting for indisputable conservatives on the first ballot, intent on breaking up the Southern Baptist Convention because they did not get their way.

The tactics were, frankly, appalling.  On social media accounts, I have seen then savage some ardently conservative men who did not back Stone. They disparaged Rev. Litton.  They willfully engaged in character assassination behind anonymous Twitter accounts. They claimed anyone not sufficiently with them was fully against them and conservatives.  They agitated as if it were both a political campaign and the world would end should they lose. They behaved as if they were running a political campaign for politicians of different parties, not an intradenominational pastoral campaign to be the head of a loose confederation of churches. The result is the Baptists rejected Stone in part because of his most ardent supporters’ behavior.

Litton’s election disrupts the media narrative.  Most of the media expected Stone’s election.  But God too has a hand in this.  God’s will is being done.  The people who now think the SBC is drifting left might want to pause, listen, and know that God is still in charge.  The Southern Baptists are not drifting left.  They will not embrace critical race theory.  They might, however, be ready to move on from making everything political and about Donald Trump.  That would not be a bad thing.  The Conservative Baptist Network, the conservative group that aggressively pushed Stone, should probably not jump to conclusions of rigged elections or liberalism as the reason Stone lost.  Maybe they should consider some of their own antics sabotaged their goals.

Regardless, grace and truth will win out even over Ed Litton, Mike Stone, Al Mohler, Randy Adams, and the rest of us. So please calm down and save the SBC split for some other year.

Performance Over Commitment

The following is a transcript from my radio show. You can listen here from noon to three every weekday.

I have mentioned in the past that we are in a spiritual crisis in this country. We're not really in a political crisis, but because we fight every fight on the political battlefield, we're fighting spiritual matters politically. We're fighting them as if they're a political issue and many are not. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, is meeting this week in Nashville for an old-school political fight about spiritual issues. Woven into this a level of postmodernism where your performance matters more than your positions.

For example, there are some men within the Southern Baptist Convention I have long admired like Mark Dever from Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. One of the stalwarts in biblical inerrancy and complementarianism in the Southern Baptist Convention. Al Mohler is another example who's running for Southern Baptist Convention President. He's the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's like the Pope for Southern Baptist. Both of these men and others are opposed to critical theory.

They are opposed to liberalism. They're opposed to egalitarianism between men and women and believe in complementarianism. They're opposed to wokeness, and yet they're not screaming, and performing, and dancing across the stage in condemnation of these things. Therefore, they are perceived now as being liberal and allowing liberalism to creep into the Southern Baptist Convention. They agree wokeness is bad. They agree that critical race theory is bad but they agree that Jesus is more important. They agree that the gospel is more important and that we should focus on preaching the gospel, not condemning these things. Christians should be known for their love and what they stand for, not for railing against the cultural issues of the day. The cultural issues of the day can sometimes distract you from the bigger issues.

We find in the Southern Baptist, the Presbyterians, the Republican party, the Democratic party, and generally, in America these days that everyone thinks every hill is a hill to die on. If every hill is a hill to die on, guess what? You're dead. I find in my personal experience within the evangelical movement in this country and within politics in this country, that the people who tend to be most dogmatic about things that are not first-order things have something deeply wrong in their life.

What are first-order issues?

First-order things within Christianity for example are the belief in the inerrancy of scripture, belief in the resurrection, and the belief in the virgin birth. If you can't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, it gives you the license to remove from scripture things you don’t like. Essentially, you get to play god and create your own religion.

For example, there are progressive Christians who call themselves Red Letter Christians. Red Letter Christians are people who only believe the red letters because that's supposedly what Jesus said. Did you know there were no punctuations or quotation marks in the original manuscripts and in the translated letters? We don't really know which parts were literally Jesus. In fact, based on just a sound biblical interpretation, the odds are John 3:16, "For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son", was actually John, not Jesus. That's probably something Jesus did not say. It's something John wrote.

You’ve got to focus on first-order issues, but nowadays people want to be dogmatic about the second and third-order things. “How was creation formed? Was it six phases? Was it six days? By God, you better say days or else you a heretic! “

People do this in politics as well. Is critical race theory a first-order issue? Some of you will say yes. I would say it's a very big issue, but it's not a first-order thing. A first-order issue is the structure of the constitution, federalism, the role of the states, the role of the federal government. Critical race theory certainly impacts that, but it's not that.

So many Republicans right now are exclusively focused on critical race theory and cultural issues, they have forgotten about economic issues. The Biden administration is screwing up the economy and we're all over here focused exclusively on critical theory. There are a plethora of issues not worth dying over.

In my experience, the people who make every hill a hill to die on are the people who have something wrong in life. Whether it is at work or at home, something is out of control in their life. Therefore, they plant their flag on their beliefs, and everything around their beliefs are not allowed to shift. So for example, within the church, we see people becoming extremely dogmatic about things that do not affect people's salvation. I suspect many of those people are having issues at home or at work. And anyone who is not completely in agreement with them is somehow a squish, a trader, or a lib. They make ancillary things first-order things and it never ends well. Along the way, you lose grace because if you show grace to someone who's not fighting as hard as you, then you yourself may not be dogmatically committed to the cause. It becomes a problem.

Chip Roy

We see this in politics now. Chip Roy, Congressman from Texas has voted with Donald Trump around 95% of the time, but he's not a 100% Donald Trump cheerleader. Because of this, people may try to primary him. They will do so not because he didn't support Trump's agenda and not because he didn't vote for Donald Trump, but because he's not Trumpy be enough. He said that what Trump did on January 6th was impeachable though he did not vote for impeachment ultimately. But there are plenty who won't forgive him for that. The Wall Street Journal did a big profile on him, but there are some people who want to plant their flag and say, you're either with Donald Trump or you're against Donald Trump. You can't have a nuanced opinion of Donald Trump. You've got to be like the horny Chihuahua and hump his leg at all times or else you're not sufficiently committed to Donald Trump. It is the most bizarre thing to watch.

This is all about performance. Performance is what matters to more people now than commitment and that's a problem because it causes people to do insane things. One of the hallmark transitionary points of modernism to post-modernism is in modernism, you take someone's word and their stated commitment as a statement of fact. If I say I'm against critical race theory, I'm against critical race theory and you presume my commitment until I do something to show you otherwise. With postmodernism, it's not enough to say I'm opposed to it. You must dance around the stage burning critical race theory to the ground. You must do a Kabuki theater dance. You must do a performance. It is a song and dance routine in post-modernity. This is why you see protesters protesting everything these days. You need to understand that. The reason that protesters protest everything right now is because in post-modernity, performance is more than commitment. Performance is more than where you stand. So someone can be against racism, but unless they're burning down Kenosha, Wisconsin, are you really against racism?

We should be able to take people's statements as truth, but because there is now “your truth” and “my truth” instead of the truth, performance must be coupled with commitment. If you don't perform sufficiently for the crowd, how do we know you're really committed to what you say you believe in? The problem we see across the country is the same problem in religion at the Southern Baptist meeting, and it is the same problem in politics. I would suggest that not every hill can be a hill to die on and that there are lots of people who perform and aren't great at it. For example, look at pro-lifers. For years, Republican politicians have told pro-lifers they are against Planned Parenthood and they love babies. For years, those same Republicans funded Planned Parenthood and never fought to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood.

So they performed, they showed up and they kissed the babies. The real performance that mattered was their votes. People don't care about votes anymore. They care about performance. You see them on stage and they rail against the left. They scream at the left. They scream about Democrats. They have no Democratic friends. Pay no attention to their voting record. It's what they say on stages. It's their dog and pony show that matters. And so people get played. People can get played so easily at this point by performance. The silver tongue liar outperforms the truth-teller because the silver tongue liar is willing to whore himself out on the stage and perform so that you believe him even when he's lying to you. Many people lack the discernment to understand the quiet man who speaks truth is more powerful than the silver tongue liar who dances on stage. The crowd goes with the silver-tongued liar. They go with Barabbas instead of Jesus.

It is post-modernity. And it is impacting us across the country in every aspect of this country. It is people who want to be entertained in this shallow and vapid culture. But in this shallow and vapid culture, conservatives are actually making real gains and the media and the left are starting to notice. Naturally, the left is screaming racism. In this post-modern society, where everyone is fixated on what Washington does, and everyone is fixated on the performance of their favorite politician, behind the scenes working hard in small towns, conservatives are making some real inroads to change the hearts and minds of the American public on things like critical race theory. The left is starting to realize they're losing, and they're starting to scream through the media.