Social media was abuzz this week with reaction to Southern Baptist Convention leader Al Mohler appearing on a podcast with Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.
The mere fact of them being in conversation is the most notable thing, because what they said did not break any new ground but instead amplified their existing views.
On X, one critic of Mohler said she didn’t think Mohler could sink any lower, and then he dug a basement.
Al Mohler
In case you’re not up to speed on all the players in this drama, here’s a quick review. Mohler serves as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the undisputed interpreter of theology within the SBC. Wilson created his own small denomination based in Moscow, Idaho, where he’s a pastor and runs a publishing company called Canon Press. Wilson also is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who believes America was founded as a “Christian nation,” that women should be subservient to men, that slavery wasn’t all that bad, and that the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
At one point in the conversation, Mohler explains that his theological and political opponents have “a limited vocabulary” and thus have labeled his views “the right, the far right, the old right, the new Christian right, the new radical Christian right.”
Then he declares: “Christian nationalism is in one sense just the latest label folks have for talking about any ontological truth in the public square and not to mention that which is explicitly rooted in Scripture and in Christianity.”
For his part, he thinks being called “the right” would be sufficient.
Yet as we’ve reported before, there’s “the right” and then there are extreme positions that are more and more to the right. The SBC last week took a turn even more to the right in Mohler’s attempt to codify his opposition to women serving as pastors in title or function.
Doug Wilson
He and Wilson talk about that some — as if their positions are the most natural thing in the world — but the impetus for the podcast is to promote a forthcoming book from Canon Press titled Five Views on Christian Nationalism.
We don’t know what the book says because early publicity just gives us the title and the names of the five authors: Mohler; Wilson; Joe Rigney, former president of Bethlehem Seminary with John Piper and current president at Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College; Paul Miller, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and an opponent of Christian nationalism; and R.R. Reno, a Catholic theologian and philosopher who also serves as editor of First Things.
On the podcast, Mohler and Wilson appear with Rigney and Jared Longshore, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow.
Asked why he agreed to participate in the book, Mohler replied: “I’ve been grappling with these issues ever since I was about 13 years old, and I’ve been very, very, very obsessively interested in understanding the history, understanding morality, theology, the claims of God and the claims of government, trying to figure out how all these things work. … I’ve also lived long enough to know that those who believe in biblical Christianity (need to have) an impact in the public square.”
Asked what readers should expect from Mohler’s view among the five represented in the book, he replied: “I’m a Baptist very much shaped by the Magisterial Reformation and in particular by the Geneva Tradition.” The main difference he suspects readers will find between him and Rigney and Wilson is that he comes to embrace Christian nationalism from a Baptist perspective.
He says a bunch of other stuff that’s way down in the weeds, citing “heroes” who were influential in his intellectual journey. The bottom line, though, is his critique of “radical separationism,” which he calls “a disaster.”
That kind of “radical” thought is embodied in Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he said.
“What happened in evangelicalism in the 20th century is that many began to adopt a very secular understanding of the nation and often argued that it was necessarily so,” Mohler continued. He also cites an “anti-Catholicism” he believes “drove this radical effort to try to have a complete separation of church and state. They were afraid of parochial schools.”
And then he magically connects this to his opposition to transgender identity, claiming church-state separationists “helped to encourage the transgender movement.”
He asserts, “The big jump in the 20th century among the liberals was that they jumped from separation of church and state — and that’s very problematic in itself — to a separation from church and public policy.”
“My motion is not because there’s a crisis in where Southern Baptist are today. My concern is where Southern Baptist will be.”
After this, the podcast turns to quizzing Mohler about what happened at the recent SBC annual meeting where he presented a constitutional amendment to bar women from serving in title or function as pastors.
When he arrived at Southern Seminary as a master’s-degree student in the 1980s, Mohler said, “the women preacher agenda, the egalitarian agenda, was just radically on fire. … And when I was elected president by the conservatives to confront that and correct that, wow.”
He left out the part of the story where he worked for former seminary President Honeycutt and signed on to a public letter endorsing women in ministry.
Nevertheless, when he returned as president, “things were horrible,” he said. “… I mean, this institution had gone so far to the left and it’s the reason why, one of the prime reasons why, Southern Baptist rose up.”
He added: “When I was elected president, I decided what I’ve got to do is articulate everything out loud. And here’s the thing, when you make the case for a biblical model of ministry, a biblical understanding based on the inerrancy of Scripture, you make that case to Southern Baptists, they agree with it because they can read it in the Bible.”
Then he admitted there’s no real issue in the SBC of women serving as pastors. “My motion is not because there’s a crisis in where Southern Baptist are today. My concern is where Southern Baptist will be.”
At the end of the day, Mohler said, he wants to be as successful in keeping women out of Southern Baptist pulpits as he and others have been rejecting gay Christians.
“If you’re going to apply a hermeneutic to justify a woman preacher, the same hermeneutic is there just to be picked up on the LGBTQ issues, and unsurprisingly it is.”
Related:
What if Mohler talked about women’s bodies the way he talks about himself? | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Bulletin: Debate cut short on Mohler amendment
Mohler: Women should vote but not interpret sermons on podcast
Understanding Al Mohler’s case against women | Analysis by Rick Pidcock