Albert Mohler is president of Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, the flagship training ground for the Southern Baptist Convention, which is one of the largest evangelical denominations in America, with roughly 42,000 congregations across the country and 15 million members, though Sunday attendance is estimated to be far less than that number.
Mohler and Southern released a 67-page report titled, "Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.” The report was the result of a year-long study by six-member committee into the seminary’s history, going back to its founding in 1859. Among the report’s findings: Southern's four founding faculty members all owned human beings — 50 in all — and abused them as slaves.
Mohler wrote a three-page introduction to the report, and said this: "We have been guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity. We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story. We comforted ourselves that we could know this, but since these events were so far behind us, we could move on without awkward and embarrassing investigations and conversations.”
“The founding faculty of this school—all four of them—were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery. Many of their successors on this faculty, throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, advocated segregation, the inferiority of African-Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery.”
What prompted this study? What does he make of criticism that the study should not just have stopped in 1964, but should have commented on matters of racial justice in our current moment? And has all this introspection caused Mohler to question his views on other topics, such as the ordination of women?
You can read Southern's report here.
Mohler's statement from May 2018 on the "Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention" is here.
Mohler's account of how he changed his mind about the ordination of women to positions of leadership is here.
And there is a lengthy profile of Mohler in Christianity Today from 2010 that is here, though it requires a subscription to read.
Outro music: "Difficulties - Let Them Eat Vowels" - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
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Al Mohler & The Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary