“If I were going to design a plan to bring the whole thing down, all of Christendom, how would you do it? Make ‘em ‘woke.’ It will eat itself from the inside. If I were the old-school angry atheist … I’d start making ‘woke’ pastors,” contended Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, co-founders of New Discourses and authors of “How to Have Impossible Conversations,” in a recent interview with Sovereign Nations.

The new documentary “By What Standard?” attempts to inform members of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, of the dangers of a leftist philosophy known as “Critical Theory.”

“If I were going to design a plan to bring the whole thing down, all of Christendom, how would you do it? Make ‘em ‘woke.’ It will eat itself from the inside. If I were the old-school angry atheist … I’d start making ‘woke’ pastors,” contended Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, co-founders of New Discourses and authors of “How to Have Impossible Conversations,” in a recent interview with Sovereign Nations.

“By What Standard?”, created by the well-known organization Founders Ministries, headed by Pastor Tom Ascol, documents this simmering controversy within the SBC step by step so viewers can quickly understand the backstory. The 90-minute feature addresses two sensitive issues.

The first is the role of women in the church and whether “critical feminist theory” is a good solution. The second is racial reconciliation in the church and “critical race theory.” (Find further information on the critical theory debate within the SBC here and here.) The SBC recently affirmed critical theory as a useful “analytical tool,” but the documentary shows it is derived completely from a Marxist, materialist worldview — a worldview Ascol rightly calls “godless.”

‘By What Standard?’ Unpacks Critical Feminist Theory

In part one, the Founders Ministries team addresses the effects of feminist theory on the SBC. Nowadays, Christians are often charged with misogyny and bigotry, necessitating a practical explanation of their theology about sex and the sexes.

For instance, the church reserves pastoral offices for men not only as a matter of biblical teaching, but also to protect women, not deprive them. In the church, the pastoral office and preaching ministry is akin to being in front-line, infantry combat, and thus is unsuitable for women. Josh Buice, founder of the G3 Conference, makes this point in the documentary, saying, “I think that when we talk about the abuse of women, I would go on record as stating that if we ask a woman to do something spiritually that God did not intend her to do … that’s abusive.” According to Buice, placing a woman in a pastoral role makes her a primary target both spiritually and politically.

The film also argues the church loses when it encourages and prods women to act in the roles biblically reserved for men. Summer White Jaeger of the Sheologians blog and podcast says that if you get women “acting like men, you weaken the church substantially. I think a lot of women, especially in this generation, [have] been raised to believe that if we don’t try to do everything that a man does, that we’re not reaching our full potential. … Ultimately that message is, ‘Your full potential is to be a man.’”

Leading advocates for the opposite view influenced by feminism include William Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and the well-known Beth Moore, founder of Living Proof Ministries. They maintain that reserving Sunday preaching for men has directly contributed to the SBC’s widely publicized sexual abuse scandals. In other words, Buice and others have done just the opposite of protecting women by not allowing them to preach on a Sunday morning or become pastors.

“This whole sexual abuse thing is the judgement of God on Southern Baptists because once you devalue a woman to say that she cannot preach on the Lord’s Day … you tell men it’s okay to abuse her,” McKissic says. Moore adds, “Complementarian theology [the idea that men and women are equal but different] became such a high core value that it inadvertently, by proof of what we have seen — look at the fruit of what happened [in the sexual abuse scandals] — became elevated above the safety and well-being of many women.”

Read More