A Black Baptist pastor called out some Southern Baptists at their recent meeting, telling them that they have become “political whores” for former President Donald Trump.
Speaking at the recent Southern Baptist Convention in Anaheim, Calif. Pastor Kevin Smith, the teaching pastor at Family Church in Palm Beach, Florida and former executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware, called out the racism within the denomination, which he says has gotten worse over the past decade.
Smith said some Southern Baptists “lost their minds” when Barack Obama was elected president. He said Southern Baptists became “unloving to Black people beginning in 2012 with the killing of Trayvon Martin.”
“I don’t mean agree about politics or policy or nothing,” Smith continued. “I just mean giving a darn that somebody else is hurting who is supposed to be your brother or sister in Christ, and I think some Southern Baptists just bent over and became political whores with this whole Trump stuff.”
Protestia, a news website associated with the Fellowship Baptist Church in Sidney, Montana, lashed out at Smith, calling him a “hypocrite”.
“As far as becoming political whores and bending over so the bad orange man could impregnate us with racial ideologies, this is not the winsomeness that he was insisting we emulate during his later conference talk that he gave in front of the whole convention, making him quite the hypocrite,” the outlet wrote.
According to Newsweek, this is not the first time someone has raised concerns about racism among Southern Baptists. At their annual meeting in 2017, leaders initially rejected a resolution condemning white supremacy sparking outrage among Black members.
Southern Baptists once prominently taught the “curse of Ham” theory, which claims that God, through Noah “ordained descendants of Africa to be subservient to Anglos” and “provided a theological justification for slavery and segregation,” according to the resolution.
