(RNS) — In December of 2018, Albert Mohler, longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, released a report detailing and denouncing the school’s legacy “in the horrifying realities of American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racism, and even the avowal of white racial supremacy.”
In an audio clip acquired from another seminary’s archives, now-disgraced Southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson recounts his concerns about Mohler's past involvement in the society, which Patterson said was “an extremely white organization, there were not blacks in it ever.”
The founding dean of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity, Bill Leonard, was Mohler’s church history professor at Southern Seminary in the 1980s.
“Mohler’s way of reading the Bible sounds almost identical to slavery apologists in the years leading up to the Civil War and to white Christians who tried to use the Bible to justify segregation in the mid-20th century,” said Tisby, president of The Witness, a Black Christian Collective.
Cosby, whose grandfather was among the three first black people to integrate the seminary in the '50s, said that Mohler described his view of slavery in an airplane conversation in the early 2000s.
