All my life I heard stories about Christian martyrs and missionaries who sacrificed everything for the gospel and for truth. Here I stand, they said. Preachers would ask us, “What about you? Will you stand?” Missions conference. Apologetics conferences. TRUTH. Hills to die on. 1/

2/ But I was a Deep South Evangelical. I was an Alabama SBC Pastor. Our history was loaded with compromise with evil. How to square our aspirations with this virulent strain of subversion to the larger culture that dominated? So, I spent years researching and wrote a book.

3/ It should’ve been PhD work, but what SBC seminary was even talking about this from 2006-2012? And, I wasn’t going to study outside conservative evangelicalism, so I did my own work. I remember calling a prominent SBC ldr in 2008 to ask why we weren’t exploring lessons from...

4/ ...our massive theological and moral failures on race and culture from the past. Weren’t there lessons from then that would keep us from capitulating in the future? Years deeper into research, I called another major SBC ldr to ask same Q. Both ldrs were rather dismissive.

5/ Why look back? It’s good to defend your “way of life” when it’s a good way of life, they said. We have moved on. Things are better now. We have new issues to address. Both later began address racial issues and division after Ferguson. But, they missed the point. We all did...

6/ primary issue wasn’t “race,” per se. Racism & racialization are symptoms of a deeper issue. Deeper issue is our desire to promote, protect, defend our “way of life,” from either a personal or corporate view. Drive for provision, power, & celebrity comes from same place.

7/ So we hit 2016 and we have major evangelical leaders saying “we can’t go there!” and TRUTH and INTEGRITY. But, others ldrs run ahead with the argument, “but this will give us power so we can protect our way of life!” And there is a rift. Battle. But, the power argument wins.

8/ The “protect my/our way of life” argument wins out over TRUTH/INTEGRITY b/c it was always going to win out. That strain of thinking has always been with us. Civil War was fought over it. Jim Crow lived off of it. And we never dealt with it. We just said “we’ve moved on.”

9/ This isn’t about a vote. Or who wins an election. Don’t misread. It’s about a disposition. A frame of mind. A perspective that’s re-emerged that thinks first about to protect our position/place over how we love our neighbor and enemy sacrificially. And it manifests everywhere.

10/ It’s hard to call people to discipleship and mission when our first thought is consistently about how we can live our best life now according to provision, power, and prominence. The Wilderness Temptations weren’t just nice stories. Neither were those stories of the martyrs.

11/ And I am just as susceptible as anyone else, I’ve found. The same virulent strain runs through me. It’s why I need the Cross: ““Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me ...

12/ “... For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” Matthew 16:24-26

Indeed.