C.J. Mahaney is the Calvinist founder of a network of Maryland-based churches known as Sovereign Grace Ministries, now re-organized as Sovereign Grace Churches. The original organization disintegrated amid a barrage of sex abuse scandals, and Mahaney decamped to Louisville, Kentucky, where he hangs-out with Albert the Pious, pastors another church, and mourns the wickedness of “the world.”
Mahaney’s rehabilitation following the collapse of Sovereign Grace Ministries followed the usual course: He was neither seen nor heard for a brief while, then began to make occasional appearances, and is once again a celebrated headliner. Meantime, decent people rage that he and his abusive organization skated with no penalty but some bad publicity — a nearly meaningless consequence here in the United States of Amnesia.
Just this week he was a speaker at the biennial Together for the Gospel conference, and introduced by no less than Albert Mohler his Very Self, the Mightiest Theologian Of Them All.
Before Mahaney’s appearance there was a lot of blog commentary, a petition that he be withdrawn as a speaker, a handful of protestors outside the meeting venue, all to no avail. The show, you know, must go on.
Then came Albert the Odious’ Pious’ introduction:
Mohler referred obliquely to the pushback in his introduction of Mahaney, getting laughs with the line: “I told C.J. that in getting ready to introduce him I decided I would Google to see if there was anything on the Internet about him.”
Har-har! Good one! Everybody knows there’s a lot!
Pastoral care for the hurting? No. Mohler’s snark, and that roomful of pastors who laughed, is and has always been, the truth about Christianity.
Religion is in the control business.
Bishop John Spong
What these fools with their heads stuffed with pious clichés instead of brains can’t understand is that they’ve already lost control.
I’ve openly loathed and ridiculed Albert Mohler for years, since long before the fringe Southern Baptist outsiders realized how vicious he actually is — so what I have to say will be dismissed as more of the same. Even so, it must be said: It is time for Mohler to go, to be cast into Outer Darkness and, with that uniquely Southern Baptist refusal to ever acknowledge unpleasantness, never spoken of again. He is a disgrace, utterly unfit for the company of decent people, and a Southern Baptist Convention incapable of seeing that deserves only contempt. He makes the words “I am a Southern Baptist” a badge of shame.