The Cowardice of the SBC

It blows my mind that Southern Baptist pastor and Oklahoma state senator Dusty Deevers is still scheduled to speak at Joel Webbon’s conference in two months, even as the conservative Christian world has overwhelmingly come to recognize that Webbon pushes eugenic racism and harbors at least one neo-Nazi in his church. Despite this, not a single person of prominence in the SBC has displayed the base-level courage to publicly rebuke Deevers.

Webbon’s church member and podcast co-host “Wesley Todd.”

Webbon and his allies have become so ridiculously malignant in their rhetoric that even the headliners of his last two annual conferences, Doug Wilson and James White, respectively, are frantically trying to distance themselves from him and several of the other participants of this year’s gathering. With Calvin Robinson’s licence to preach revoked by his latest of many denominations, accompanied by an excoriating letter released this week that proved he was reprimanded by his last denomination as well, Deevers is the last pastor speaking at this year’s Trashworld conference with any larger ecclesial association whatsoever.

As a member of a SBC church, I want to know why the people paid by my tithes are nowhere to be found, while this is going on. When we’re the only “denomination” that took the time to specifically codify the Christian’s duty to oppose racism into our statement of faith, how are we the only body that has nobody at the national level willing to step forward and perform what, at this point, is a layup? Why is nobody talking about how Tom Ascol’s guys, including his own son, publicly defended Webbon over harboring a neo-Nazi and disparaged those who told the truth about what’s happening at his church? They’re still proactively defending Webbon, and promoting the very people that Wilson and White are distancing themselves from, over their promotion of open white-nationalists.

Matt Williams is a member of Tom Ascol’s church and on the board of his Classical Christian school. Here he disparages, as a “low testosterone” male, Tobias Riemenschneider, the pastor who exposed that Webbon was harboring his former church member “Benjamin,” who now espouses neo-Nazi ideology. Riemenschneider claims that Benjamin was radicalized while in Webbon’s church.

Joel Ascol, via his not so pseudonymous account, which is well known as one of the most vitriolic Christian Nationalist accounts on X, defends Webbon from supposed “gossip.” He also downplays an antisemitic meme of such offense that I won’t post it here, because I fear it could get my account suspended (“free speech” X removes it if you post it). In reality, it was Webbon who first publicly spoke about a private call he had with Riemenschneider and Benjamin, though he didn’t name anyone, falsely saying that he was pressured to excommunicate Benjamin. When Riemenschneider subsequently made a video to set the record straight, it was revealed that someone on Webbon’s end secretly recorded the call and leaked it. Then it was revealed that Webbon orchestrated a social media attack against Riemenschneider by his anonymous fans.

Yesterday Ascol promoted the podcast of Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé, who, like Webbon, are acknowledged by even most of reactionary Christian media, at this point, as unrepentantly promoting and defending Christian Nationalist allies who are openly white-nationalist. Conn has himself posted several white-nationalist slogans, including the longstanding neo-Nazi phrase “No More Brother Wars.” The term “postwar consensus” is utilized by Christian Nationalists to call for a return to pre-WWII domestic and foreign policy, which was the height of eugenics-based law in the United States.

If we can kick a church out of the convention for saying that maybe, someday they’d ordain a female lead pastor, why can’t we kick a church out whose pastor is speaking at a conference hosted by someone who claims there are genetic disparities between people groups, based on “faithfulness”? It’s the exact argument for which the term “racism” was coined. Why is our “denomination” the only one with not only someone still speaking at this conference, but who is also a member of a whole lobbying group dedicated to pushing that conference’s worldview among us?

How can anyone respect supposed Christian faith-leaders who don’t have the backbone to publicly stand up to this?