Al Mohler says Southern Baptists should repent of homophobia for teaching homosexuality is a choice. In 2011 video, Mohler declares Southern Baptists have lied about homosexuality.
SBC Presidential candidate Al Mohler said that Southern Baptists should repent of homophobia and that the SBC has lied about homosexuality. Mohler’s comments were made in a word salad response to a question from Southern Baptist Peter Lumpkins at the 2011 SBC Annual Meeting.
The video of the exchange demonstrates Al Mohler’s Third Way synthesis of Christian teaching with secular teachings about homosexuality.
Lumpkins queried if Mohler said what he was quoted as saying in a Christian Science Monitor article titled, Evangelical Christian Shift on Gays published March 24, 2011. Lumpkins specifically asked about these quotes from Mohler, “We’ve lied about the nature of homosexuality and have practiced what can only be described as a form of homophobia.”
Also, “Further Merritt alleges you said, ‘We’ve used the choice language when it is clear that sexual orientation is a deep inner struggle and not merely a matter of choice.”
Lumpkins then asked Mohler, for specifics about “How Southern Baptists have lied about homosexuality…and practiced homophobia.”
Mohler’s response is telling. First, he admitted to making those comments.
“Thank you for the question my brother, and I am glad to tell you that I was asked that question and I made those segments,” Mohler said. “They’re not alleged statements. They’re actual statements.”
Mohler pointed to his over 200 articles penned against the sin of homosexuality and justified his comments on the grounds that the church must “minister to a very militant community of homosexuals and also a large number of persons in our church…who are struggling with this.”
Mohler continued, “The reality is that we as Christian churches have not done well on this issue.”
Then Mohler does a Third Way dialectical dance fusing together the biblical teachings with secular views on the origins of homosexual attraction.
“Evangelicals have failed to take the liberal trajectory of lying about homosexuality and its sinfulness,” Mohler said. “We know that the Bible clearly declares – not only in isolated verses but in the totality of its comprehensive presentation – the fact that homosexuality not only is not God’s best for us, as some try to say, but it is sin.”
Mohler then pointed toward Romans 1.
However, Mohler then claims evangelicals have not told the truth about homosexuality.
“But we as evangelicals have a very sad history in dealing with this issue,” he continued. “We have told not the truth, but we have told about half the truth. We’ve told the biblical truth, and that’s important, but we haven’t applied it in the biblical way.”
What is the evangelical shortcoming on homosexuality? Teaching that it is a choice, Mohler said.
According to Mohler, “We have said to people that homosexuality is just a choice. It’s clear that it’s more than a choice. That doesn’t mean it’s any less sinful, but it does mean it’s not something people can just turn on and turn off.”
Then Mohler concluded with an appeal to the Gospel as the only release from homosexual sins.
Mohler said, “We are not a gospel people unless we understand that only the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ gives a homosexual person any hope of release from homosexuality.”
It is a synthesis of biblical teaching and sociological assumptions about the roots of homosexuality delivered with an emotional appeal while shaming Southern Baptists.
And just a reminder about the current state of the Southern Baptist Convention:
