After the disastrous Annual Southern Baptist Convention, Ed Litton’s presidency continued the course with his numerous scandals. Among these are his church’s faith statement, his past egalitarianism, and most well-known, his rampant plagiarism of other sermons commonly referred to as sermongate.
Ed Litton recently joined the Not Another Baptist Podcast to discuss food and stuff. But going out of their normal conventions, the subject of sermongate was brought up for Ed Litton to address. Ed Litton asserted that he had permission to use JD Greear’s material on his Romans series. He states that it was a mistake not to give proper credit, noting that he also doesn’t cite commentaries as well. Ed Litton insists that because he had permission, he did not plagiarize. He also downplays the level to which he copied Greear’s sermon, as it is not merely outlines but mannerism, jokes, anecdotes, illustrations etc. One can watch both sermons and see clearly who the original was.
Ed Litton has gone on SBC establishment friendly interviews in the past but he sounded much different on the subject. In the last of such interviews, he carried a much different tune.
Ed Litton then makes a bizarre analogy in which he states that a diamond miner who uncovered a diamond holds up the diamond, not the tools used to recover the diamond, crediting a seminary professor. As pointed out on social media in response to this metaphor, Ed Litton is the guy who had a is showing a diamond he did not mine. Moreover, JD Greear’s sermons should not be compared to diamonds.
Before this segment in the podcast, Ed Litton talked a big game about unity. But two things that disrupt unity in the church are sin and false teaching. Standing by sin because someone popular commits it, as most of the SBC elites are doing, is the very definition of downgrade, because we know that if Paige Patterson was a serial plagiarist, they would have thrown him under the bus for it. But the Phantom Menace, Kevin Ezell, needs Ed Litton to hold off the Conservative Baptist Network. Thus the downgrade. False teaching on the other hand is divisive by its very nature. Truth versus lie is not a false dichotomy. It is a real and necessary division. Thus why Critical Race Theory inevitably divides a church. Ed Litton makes it clear that upholding unity in the Southern Baptist Convention means upholding the 11th Commandment.
Ed Litton’s defensive posture on sermongate has softened, but it is also because the story has faded over the last month. The SBC will continue to operate with a pastor with a demonstrable pattern of being inept to teach leading the convention. And this is a public disgrace. The best time to leave the Southern Baptist Convention was yesterday. The next best time is today.