How Captiol Hill Baptist Church and 9 Marks Helped Evangelicalism Go Woke

Editor’s Note: This post began as a series of tweets on Twitter.
We received several requests to make it into a post so what you see below is our best effort to reproduce the Twitter series here.

To see how 9 Marks and Capitol Hill Baptist have become a woke pipeline you start with the Captiol Hill Baptist Church (CapBap) Pastoral Internship Program which, because of the relationship between CapBap and 9 Marks (“integrated auxillary”), becomes a feeder program for new 9 Marks writers.

Thabiti Anyabwile is the first product of this system to take a look at.

In recent years Anyabwile has become a figure of regular controversy, particularly through his writing at his Gospel Coalition Blog. Two articles that provide ready examples can be found here:

“On Abortion and Racism: Why There Is a Greater Evil in This Election” – where Anyabwile claims that the anti-abortion movement is a product of idolatry.

“We Await Repentance for Assassinating Dr. King” – where Anyabwile claims that all White people are complicit in MLK’s assassination.

How about John Onwuchekwa?

John O made headlines in 2020 for announcing his church’s departure from the Southern Baptist Convention due to the SBC’s ongoing racism. His departure came after his church received a $175,000 grant paid from SBC missions giving.

Isaac Adams’, author of Talking About Race, a book Together for the Gospel put in conference attendees hands at their last-ever conference, which is the latest publishing attempt to make a run at installing CRT/I-friendliness in evangelical churches, this time with the anger dialed down and empathy dialed up. You can see how high-profile evangelicals have been praising the book as well as how the book repeats common woke talking points here. A thorough analysis of Talking About Race‘s content can be found here as well.

K. Edward Copeland, another product of the CapBap internship program, created no small controversy in 2020 when he published “Why I Hate August“, a piece that equated Kyle Rittenhouse with church-shooter Dylan Roof. Interestingly, at the time of this writing, “Why I Hate August” did not return as a search result on the TGC website, nor did it when searching by Copeland’s name or when using Rittenhouse as a search term.

There is also the emerging PJ Tibayan, a big fan of Jonathan Giboney but not so much of the strategy of voting to oppose abortion – which sounds like Thabiti’s “idolatry of anti-abortion.”

You catch Tibayan along with Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman at this 9 Marks event in 2022 if you are interested.

Here is one more name to look for in the future: Wait until Bobby Jamieson, an associate pastor at CapBap, finds some situation that he feels presents a moral imperative for him to publicly address race, CRT/I, etc comprehensively.

Jamieson’s article for TGC on responding to injustice only gave a small taste of his woke commitments. The full presentation will be a wonder to behold.

Little wonder, considering the radical embrace of Critical Race Theory & Intersectionality demonstrated by Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman, the two men who sit at the top of the 9 Marks organization chart and who have helped shape the culture of CapBap. Take a listen to this 2018 talk where Dever confesses he wants to provoke anger by asking Leeman about single issue (i.e. anti-abortion) voting as a point of racial division. Leeman’s answer? A faithful Christian could not vote for, say, a Nazi or White Supremacists, but could potentially vote for a pro-abortionist who had other strengths.

You can also see the problems at 9 Marks (and CapBap) in the Twitter likes of 9 Marks Board Member Matt Martens – here you can find a quick sample of his support for the worst despisers of evangelical Christianity and its most thoughtless critics. Martens also likes comments from those who oppose the anti-abortion movement.

As our own review of a recent book born of the 9 Marks / TGC partnership notes, the legacy of 9 Marks, Mark Dever, and, as we have seen above, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, is being re-written at breakneck pace before our eyes – moving from Healthy Church to Heated Conflict over the neo-racism of CRT/I ideology.

It is an honest and open shame.