President of This Denomination Says They Must Repent and Confront Racism of Founding Fathers

Leah Marieann Klett : Jun 25, 2015
The Gospel Herald

"Racial superiority is… directly subversive of the Gospel of Christ, effectively reducing the power of His substitutionary atonement and undermining the faithful preaching of the Gospel to all persons and to all nations. To put the matter plainly, one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the Gospel of Jesus Christ." -Albert Mohler, Jr.

(Louisville, KY)—Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, has said that the denomination's founders were "heretics" in their belief that whites were superior to blacks and urged modern-day Southern Baptists to confront the racism of their founding fathers. (Photo via Gospel Herald)

In a poignant essay titled "The Heresy of Racial Superiority—the Past, and Confronting the Truth", Mohler lamented the "putrid exegesis" of the Bible that was allowed to justify racism in the past and acknowledged that "Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history."

"The ideology of racial superiority is one of the saddest and most sordid evidences of the Fall and its horrifying effects," he writes. "Throughout history, racial ideologies have been driving forces of war, of demagoguery and of dictatorships."

Heresy, he argues, is different—and far more dangerous—than error. Heresy is "the denial or corruption of a Christian doctrine that is central to the faith and essential to the Gospel." In other words, a heretic is someone who can be considered to have abandoned the faith, Mohler says, such as those who deny the Trinity.

The "deadly power" of heresy, he writes, is evident in the killing of nine worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC by 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who hoped to instigate a "race war".

"The young white man charged with the killings has not, as yet, claimed a theological rationale for his acts," Mohler writes. "Nevertheless, he has been exposed as someone whose worldview was savagely warped by the ideology of racial superiority—white superiority."

Sadly, this kind of racial superiority is not exclusive to a certain people group; in fact, its "most fertile soil" was tilled in the states of the old Confederacy, particularly among Southern Baptists.

"White superiority was claimed as a belief by both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but it was the Confederacy that made racial superiority a central purpose," he says.

Click here to also read Mohler’s opinion on the Confederate flag.