A Brief Response to Joel McDurmon's Rant Against Dr. Talbot
Someone recently informed me of Joel McDurmon's little Facebook rant against Dr. Talbot on March 16th. In summary, Joel took issue with Dr. Andrew Sandlin stating, "I believe Ken told me that he either left or was voted off the American Vision board because he took a stand on this issue [hyper-preterism]. I don't know the details about this, but I'm certain that's what he told me."
Joel says, "This claim is false for certain because the reason we asked Ken Talbot to resign from the AV board in 2018 had nothing to do with preterism, speaking at HP conferences, or Ken taking a 'stand' on anything."
Joel then reveals the reason for asking him to leave: because Dr. T was a "sympathizer of the Old South and confederate theologians and was going around behind my back (while yet a board member) at the time trying to undermine my ministry because of my book and articles on slavery and racism which our ministry had published."
He adds this: "Also, whether the author [Sandlin] meant it to be directly connected or not, it is worth pointing this out: we asked Talbot to resign in early July 2018, and he did so with a formal letter dated July 17th, 2018. Gary and I did not speak at that full preterist conference until the following August. You can see, therefore, that any concerns Talbot had before resigning could have had nothing to do with that part of it, either."
Joel claims that Dr. Talbot lied and "It was not the only thing Talbot did of such character."
A few things:
First, Dr. Talbot indeed became less of a fan of Joel's scholarship over time. When Gary DeMar stepped down at American Vision, Dr. T did not vote for Joel as the replacement, and he warned that Joel would ruin American Vision. Does anyone remember what happened to American Vision after Joel took over? Three and a half years later, they had to fire him for running AV into the ground, and Gary returned. Dr. T was right about Joel, which may be why Joel became so bitter with him.
Second, it's true that Dr. T did not buy the official US government's version of the so-called "Civil War." You know, the version that tells you that everyone in the South was evil and hated Africans, and everyone in the North loved the Africans so much that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for their freedom to live peaceably and equally among them. And why did Dr. T not buy that version? It's not because he was a racist. It's not because he was a kinist. It's not because he wanted the South to rise again and wanted things “back to how they were.” It was for the simple reason that Abraham Lincoln gave for the war; to preserve the Union irrespective of slavery.
Acknowledging that doesn't make a person a racist, "neo-confederate."
Do you know who else didn't buy the official story? Martin Luther King Jr's best friend and co-laborer, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy. Dr. T bought all the church deacons, which included three black men, his autobiography and made it required reading. I highly recommend it. And here's what the Rev. Abernathy had to say about their trip to the North:
Contrary to what I had always assumed, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, had been a racist society since before the Civil War. As a number of historians have pointed out, the Black Codes instituted in the Middle West in the early nineteenth century were designed to keep blacks from entering the state and settling there. Indeed some people argue that the so-called “Free Soil Movement,” which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western states, was based not so much on a love of liberty as on a hatred of blacks and a desire to keep them out of their part of the country.
Indeed Lincoln’s own attitude was by no means pure or enlightened by modern standards. While opposing slavery, he spoke out against social and political equality, denied that he wanted to give blacks the vote, said that the two races could not live on the North American continent in harmony, and suggested that the best solution to the race problem was to ship blacks back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the five Union states where the “peculiar institution” was still legal in 1863; it didn’t even free them in those parts of the South then occupied by federal troops.
That historical legacy had left Illinois with what many northerners would regard as the best of two possible worlds: a segregated society without the stigma of Jim Crow laws. How well such a society has functioned over the years can be measured by the number of major race riots in the City of Chicago since the turn of the century. No area, North or South, has produced so many. With the exception of the New York City draft riots of 1864, the Chicago uprisings may have produced the highest number of fatalities for such brief and violent confrontations. In Alabama and Mississippi the lynchings and murders were perennial, an ever-present possibility in even the smallest communities. Over the years they added up to more racial murders than occurred in the state of Illinois, but they were spread out and were therefore less spectacular. In Chicago all the hatred and frustration would build up over a long period and then explode from time to time in an orgy of mass violence and bloodletting that made headlines all over the country.
The last such explosion had occurred in the forties. In 1965 it appeared as if the time were ripe for another. It was into that world that we stepped when we got off the plane at O’Hare Airport, ready to take on the City of Chicago.
If acknowledging what one of the preeminent black civil rights leaders of the day recognized about the North makes you a racist "neo-confederate," then so be it. Dr. T was in good company. And I guess that makes me one too. Oh well.
Just for kicks, Derrick Bell, the father of Critical Race Theory, shared a similar observation:
... We didn’t learn in school that Lincoln [freed the slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation] only after all alternatives to action were gone.... The Civil War was begun to preserve the Union, not end slavery, and when Lincoln issued the Proclamation, it liberated only those slaves held “... within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States....” The order could have no legal effect in areas not then under control of the Union forces, and it specifically excluded slaveholding areas in Virginia and West Virginia which had not joined the rebellion.1
Third, Joel wrote, "Talbot may have had concerns and even discussion with GD [Gary DeMar] over preterism. I don't know. But even if so, that was never the reason he was asked to resign."
Joel doesn't understand how these two things can be true simultaneously, which is a little concerning considering that Joel wants to be a lawyer. True, Joel's issue with Dr. T started when Joel learned about Dr. T's supposed “neo-confederate” views. But that does not rule out that hyper-preterism was a concern of Dr. T's and became one of the reasons for him to resign.
I have the resignation letter. Dr. T gave three reasons for resigning. And here was reason #3,
The officers and men of my church felt that American Vision was toxic as well and I needed to resign as the Vision was not advocating anything that could be identified with Reformed Confessional thought.
Granted, hyper-preterism is not mentioned here by name, but it was precisely one of the leading "toxic" issues he had in mind because I was the church's loudest "officer" informing him of the nonsense Gary and Joel were doing at that time. Joel tries to get around this by claiming that since the hyper-preterist conference was in August, and they asked Dr. T to resign in July, "speaking at HP conferences" could not have had anything to do with his resignation. There's a little problem with lawyer Joel's argument. We knew of the hyper-preterist conference a month before Dr. T's resignation! They created the Facebook event on June 16th to advertise and invite people. And it was during those weeks that I interacted with Cindye Coates (the anti-trinitarian host), asked why American Vision was involved, and informed Dr. T about what Cindye told me.
So yes, other issues were going on. But cozying up to an anti-trinitarian hyper-preterist to promote the "joy and freedom of fulfilled eschatology" finally pushed him over the edge. Dr. T did not lie; he alluded to it in his resignation letter.
Two things can be true simultaneously, despite lawyer Joel's inability to comprehend it.
By the way, here’s a screenshot of the header of the resignation letter. It looks just like a header a racist neo-confederate would create. /sarcasm
