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The most telling confession of this new report may be its silence on the history of the seminary in the years since McCall.
Mohler knows that history well, as he came there to study before McCall retired in 1982 and has called the seminary home ever since. Seminary faculty in the 1980s included professors who studied King and the faith-rooted civil rights movement, advocated for prophetic Christianity and sought to reject slaveholder religion’s separation of personal salvation from social justice in this world.
But when those voices questioned the legacy of slavery and racism at the seminary, they were accused of not believing the Bible by the self-identified leaders of what became known as the Conservative Resurgence in the Convention. Those leaders ended up pushing out the president who had resisted them and installed Mohler in 1993. During this more recent history, which the report omits, the phrase “traditional values” has replaced “white supremacy” as the socially acceptable way of defending the legacy of a Christianity that supported slavery.
All of this matters not only to Southern Baptists and others who care about the Gospel of Jesus, but also to the broader American public, because many experts believe that Christian nationalism is the primary force driving support of Donald Trump and the resurgence of white nationalism in our public life.
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