The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Rift over Racism Divides the Southern Baptist Convention, Plus, the Fallout from Gamestop

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

The largest Protestant denomination in America is in crisis over the group’s reluctance to acknowledge systemic racism; our reporter talks with the Reverend Dwight McKissic, who considered himself a loyalist but may have reached a breaking point. Plus, our producer looks at the GameStop squeeze of last winter and tries to figure out the motives of the small investors on r/WallStreetBets. Are they out for vengeance on the Man? Are they after lulz? Or are they just trying to make a buck? New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This week, the Southern Baptist Convention is holding its annual meeting. Now, this is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and the event is going to be huge. The 2020 meeting, of course, was canceled, but this year, more than 16,000 people are expected to come to Nashville to elect a new president. The election will also be extremely contentious. Well-known members have left the group already in protest of the denomination's politics, and at the center of the rift is an essential question. How should evangelical Christians deal with systemic racism?

I spend my days and nights thinking about this split. The New Yorker's Eliza Griswold has been reporting on the Southern Baptist Convention, and she spoke recently with one of its leading pastors. Eliza, what's on the table at this meeting? Why is the election of a new president for this group so complicated and so essential? This seems to an outsider like, I don't know, a routine piece of business. So on one level, it's just, it's a fight over the role of racism inside of the Southern Baptist. But on another level, it's really a fight over the heart of the convention, over who holds the moral authority going forward.

And what we're seeing now play out is this really new reckoning within the evangelical community. And what's happening is you have a group of hardliners. This is pre-Trump, right? This is 70s and 80s Christian right. For a long time, these hardliners have been using the Bible to double down on basically misogyny and racism. You know, women must be submissive, just old school ideas of leadership and white patriarchy. And what's happening and what's pretty exciting to watch is that a new, and they're theologically conservative. I mean, these guys are no moderates. But they're standing up to the hardliners and saying, you know what, don't use the Bible anymore

to basically shore up the Republican Party. And what caused it? What was the tipping point? For those who aren't looking very closely, the most visible and vocal and vituberative talking point would be Donald Trump. But this has been happening for a much longer time. Part of it has to do with the weakening of churches in general. For the first time in history, we have less than half of Americans even going to church, who members of church. So as we see our institutions die, we see churches die, we see old categories between Democrats and Republicans break down. People no longer

adhere to the old boxes. And that is super exciting because what will be born out of that has yet to be seen. Right now, if you're looking at the right-leaning media, right-wing media, you are hearing all the time about critical race theory as if it's something that is dominant and infecting the culture in ways that we can't even begin to comprehend, that it's some sort of massive wave and influence. How did critical race theory take hold as such an enemy of the right, and how do they view what it is or isn't? Critical race theory is simply a set of tools used mostly by legal scholars since the 70s and 80s to identify structural racism. It's that simple.

But it's the latest boogeyman in a long line of academic theories that are threatening to the right, particularly the Christian right. These people are coming for your children. They're going to teach you that there is no God. You know, everyone's going to be homosexual, all this kind of like fear mongering and fear baiting. And the fear of critical race theory is really being pushed by the hardliners who are running for president of the SBC right now. They talk about CRT as basically a form of racial discrimination against white people and a secular tool that is anti-biblical and therefore evil. Here's one of the candidates, Mike Stone, in an April interview he gave to another pastor named Matthew Tarpley. When Southern Baptists were dealing with these issues using,

nothing but the Word of God led by and filled with the Holy Spirit of God. We've been making progress in these areas. But since these unbiblical ideologies were injected into the bloodstream of Southern Baptist conversation, we have seen nothing in the last nearly two years now. Nothing on this issue except increased hostility, accusations, conflict. And I think that's by design. By that, I mean by demonic design. Because these unbiblical ideologies, they are not tools of unity. They are weapons of division. What makes critical race theory different from a lot of these other basically fear-based tactics is to say that it doesn't exist, negates the experience of people of color so profoundly that it makes people on the right willing to step out of that.

Eliza, you recently spoke to Pastor Dwight McKissick. Who is he? And what is his story? What's his background. So Dwight McKizek is a pastor of a church with three to four thousand people in Arlington, Texas. And he watched, really with the election of Trump and pre-election of Trump, watched the kind of growing support for white nationalism inside of the Southern Baptist with alarm. In the process of studying the election and determining how I would vote, I discovered a group called the alt-right. And they were associated with the Republican Party, so I began to research them. What do they believe? What are they thinking? And it was apparent to me that they were a white supremacist group.

They believed that Western society was superior. They believed that white people were God's special, chosen, significant people. And I discovered there were those in the Southern Baptist ranks who were a part of the alt-right, and so I've constructed a resolution. He decided in 2017, at this big conference they have, that he was going to call on his fellow Southern Baptist to come out against white nationalism and the alt-right. And just a little context, there was some precedent for this. In 1995, the SBC issued a formal apology for the role that slavery played from its very inception in the 1800s.

So in some ways, McKizick's resolution continued in that more recent tradition of attempting to call out racism within the SBC. I thought it would be a no-brainer. The committee would accept it

and they would vote that the SBC was totally opposed to alt-right and white supremacist's ideology. And when that resolution did not get out of committee,

man, that was just A major shocker. Twice, the vote to support this failed. So they did vote the third time. I have to voted down twice on the third round. And I think it was solely so that they wouldn't be embarrassed. They acquiesced. How did it feel to watch this going down?

I was a feeling of exasperation. It was a feeling of shock. I was stunned, actually. And Black pastor was coming to me saying, we're out. This is, you know, this is clear we're saying we feel like the other here. This can't be our home. If people have to vote twice on our dignity, this something is fundamentally flawed here. He needs to decide whether or not he's going to stay within the Southern Baptist.

So he'll do that in the coming days based on who is elected president for the Southern Baptist this state. year. I'd been a loyalist. I pinned an editorial for the Washington Post a few years ago about why I'm remaining Southern Baptist. And so I was really trying to, I've appealed to Black Pastors, don't leave, let's help make it right. But here we are again, some three years later, four years later. And the CRT is just another way of musseling the ox trying to oppose. police racial discussions. This is approved white people alone will determine what can and can be said about race within literature, Sunday school literature, from lecture stands, and to the degree you buy it to

it from your pulpit, they have will declare that anybody who says any modicum of CRT, critical race theory may be true. You're out of touch with the Baptist faith and message. that you would no longer be doctrinally in line with the Southern Baptist Convention. So this is horrible what's happening in this regard. I believe God is judging the Southern Baptist Convention. Make an issue out of CRT, something drastically wrong with that. You know, you and I have talked about when those young pastors sided with you in 2017,

you saw a new moral heart beating within the Southern Baptist. Yes. And there is a larger moral crisis. There are new forces working here where conservatives, ultra-conservatives will say, have gotten so far from the Bible that they're using culture as scripture. And on the other side, you have people who would also call themselves theologically conservative and are who are saying, in your fight of the culture wars, you guys have left the Bible behind. Does that seem right to you? I think you've described it quite well. I think the ground has shifted from the fundamentalist takeover conservative resurgent group, whatever you want to call them,

that had these hotline views on race and women, but because they could uphold the heresy of the Bible and the exclusivity of Jesus Christ and some doctors that we all would share, People sort of gave them a pass on their racial views and their views on women. But you have a generation now. This is not their grandfather's convention anymore. We will not go back. We want theological orthodoxy, theological conservatism, if you want to call it that. But we don't want misogyny and we don't want racism.

Nor do we want Christian nationalism, nor do we want some kind of fusion between the Republican Party and the Southern Baptist Convention. That's the new group that's coming up to the front, and I pray God help that group to win come Nashville next week. So we are standing at this precipice. You lead a church of three to four thousand people. Yes. Yes.

Yes. So if in the coming days, the Southern Baptist elect one of the two people who supports this kind of thinking, these hardliners, who really aren't taking racism seriously, Are you ready to leave the Southern Baptist? You know, my heart is torn. There's a side of me says, I'd rather light candles than curse darkness.

And the SBC is what it is. It sometimes seems hopeless. But there's another side of me that says, and people have been calling me this week, says, I'm needed, my position is needed, and God may be purging and cleansing in the SBC, and things you've been fighting for for years and now may be moving in the right direction, you shouldn't leave. So the only thing I can tell you, I'm torn, I'm torn at this point. Has any of this shaken your faith in any way?

It has not. If anything, it has strengthened my faith, and it has caused. caused me to appreciate the faith of my childhood that was basically by law and common culture segregated. I didn't have the option in my childhood of attending a white Southern Baptist Church, even if I wanted to. But no, it has not shaken my faith. Ironically, though, there is a black pastor who has confided in me. He, because of this, we see's position on CRT and their views and practice of race, he said it has caused him the question, is it legitimate? Is the faith legitimate? Are we reading the same Bible? How do they think like this? And it has literally shaken his faith and we're ministering to him. So I do know of a pastor who has causing him a rethink the validity

of the entire Christian faith. That's Pastor Dwight Bickiswick of Texas talking with Eliza Griswold. Now, Eliza, if one of these hardliners is elected president at the convention this week and Dwight McKissick walks out and if other black pastors and more progressive churches leave the Southern Baptist Convention, then what? The aftershocks of what will happen in Nashville really remain to be seen. If there is an exodus of pastors of color and other churches and a hardliner wins, the economic fallout of that in terms of contributions to the convention. could be quite significant. For the past couple of years, the convention has already been losing both members and money. So continuing on that downward trend could seriously weaken its hold over American religion, over evangelicalism in America. If it turns out that there is this crisis of moral authority within the SBC, and that crisis reflects larger splits within American evangelicalism,

we're talking about nearly a hundred million Americans who are going to be wrestling with what it means to be a good person and what it means to follow Jesus in new ways that we really haven't seen since the 1980s. Eliza Griswold, thanks so much. David, thank you. You can read Eliza's piece, The Fight for the Heart of the Southern Baptist Convention at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I remember waking up one morning and seen the pre-market price. It jumped up to like 200 bucks.

I just got up and just started dancing, basically, because it's like, let's go. I can't believe this is actually working out. We're making money. Early this year in January, you might remember some pretty unusual business news. The internet takes on Wall Street. This story is stunning. The stock price for GameStop, which is a retail video game store, has been surging more than 600%. So you were literally dancing in your room?

I was for a bit, yeah. Not a lie, I was. Cody Hurdman at the time was a college freshman, and he and a few million other small investors did something unprecedented. They took a stock that Wall Street considered just about worthless, the video game retailer called GameStop,

and bought it. They bought lots of it, which sent the price soaring. Like seeing $2,000, magically overnight, basically turned into like six, seven thousand, dollars. The media used words like frenzy and madness and rebellion and TV news went absolutely biblical. Some people are calling a David and Goliath struggle to a David versus Goliath showdown. Amateur day traders, taking on some of Wall Street's most powerful hedge funds

in an epic David versus Goliath showdown. But why? What was the GameStop squeeze really all about? Our producer Alex Barron decided to dive straight in. So it's January 27th. I'm at home in Brooklyn, and my entire news feed is just GameStop, GameStop, GameStop. I am not an investment guy. I've never bought an individual share of stock in my life, but I found all of this really exciting. And so I spent $400 to buy a share of GameStop. Actually, 1.090222 shares. And it's not until I hit send on the order that I think for the first time that by buying GameStop, I maybe just joined some kind of movement. So the GameStop story seems to me like the latest,

in a long line of situations where something unusual happening online causes something really unusual to happen in the quote-unquote real world. Think about something like QAnon or on a totally different note, me too. These are movements that start online and end up totally reshaping the offline world. And it seemed to me that GameStop could be a movement like that, something that would fundamentally shake up the global financial system. So I think to myself, I should try to figure out exactly what this movement is. So I called Sheila Cole Hatcar, who writes about business for the New Yorker.

I guess let's start with like a building block of this. story, which is like, what is a short squeeze? Do you want to talk about what a short is first? Yeah. Okay. What's a short? So short selling. As a side note, I think I've had to define what short selling is in like 50% of my New Yorker stories. So here's what Sheila explains to me. There are these big time investors like hedge funds, and they were shorting GameStop. So instead of betting that a stock is going to rise in. price, you're betting that it's going to go down. And it made sense that GameStop, a brick-and-mortar retailer in the midst of a pandemic,

would go down. So some investors on the internet notice that these hedge funds are shorting GameStop, and they start buying GameStop and driving the price up. They want to create something called a short squeeze. And the higher the price goes, the more pressure it puts on the people who are short the stock, and it can lead to them having to go and buy the stock back at a really inflated price. And yes, if you have a big short position, a short squeeze is your nightmare. So potentially huge losses for the hedge funds, but also huge gains for regular investors.

And all of this is happening at a moment of convergence of a few things. So first of all, there's the pandemic. People are stuck at home and they're bored and they're looking for something to do. Second, there are all these apps that let average people like me trade stocks, commission-free. I had bought GameStop using the most popular one of those apps, which is called Robin Hood. Sheila actually just wrote a whole story about Robin Hood for the magazine. It's a fun, easy-to-use app on your phone. So Robin Hood had the effect of driving a lot of new investors into the market.

And those people, the same sorts of people who were attracted to Robin Hood, many of them were the similar sorts of people who were looking at these online message boards. The message boards. That's the third part of this convergence. What Sheila's talking about is mainly a community on Reddit called Wall Street Betts. That's the place where all these investors got together and kind of created the GameStop Squeeze. So I started spending a lot of time on Wall Street Betts. and it is not your average investment community.

It has a really strong reputation, actually, for being semi-serious. I mean, there's a lot of joking around and inappropriate cartoons and so on being posted. But many traders I spoke to claim that they had come up with good trading ideas by reading Wall Street Betts. Just to give a rundown of what's on the front page of Wall Street Betts right now, We got a gif of a guy, like, really getting beat up going down a slide. It says my portfolio the last week be like, it's a lot of people posting, like, big losses. Loss porn. Proudly posting big losses.

Lost porn, yeah. Yeah, it's a little painful. Yeah. But I guess some people think this is entertaining, which it is on some level. Wall Street Betts describes itself as like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal. So they proudly compared themselves to 4chan, one of the most controversial sites on the internet, the place where people go to post memes and also hate speech, the site that birthed the QAnon movement. Wall Street Betts says, we're like that, but for finance. And this is one of the things that starts making me suspicious of that simple David and Goliath narrative.

I may not know a lot about investing, but I do know that internet communities are messy places. On Wall Street Betts, there are activists, there are trolls, and there are a lot of people who really aren't either of those things. So I started talking to some of them. Hey. Hey, Cody. Sorry, my settings for this or off. I was doing something else.

Let me change it's totally fine. Changed around. This is Cody Herdman again, the 19-year-old investor who was dancing in his dorm room. Cody goes to Dakota State University in South Dakota. he likes video games and metal detecting, and he plays on the school football team. Well, actually, because of COVID, our school lost most of its funding,

so they end up cutting my skull worship, which kind of sucks. So I'm just doing all my stuff on my own time. Now it's going to the gym, doing all my own running and whatnot. Sheila put us in touch. She had talked to Cody for her Robin Hood piece for the magazine. He was a regular Wall Street Betts user.

He just kind of liked the way people talked about investing there. Memes are like a second language. for Cody. I mean, as a Zoom or whatever, as someone who's, I mean, been very in the meme culture for a very long time, I mean, it was a lot more appealing to see other people that, I mean, had the same sense of humor as me, I guess, instead of just boomer ranting about stocks and words that are too picked for me to possibly understand. So late last year, Cody's on Wall Street bets, and he notices people talking about GameStop and the possibility of making a lot of money investing in it. So Cody gets very excited about this.

and he buys in. And pretty quickly, GameStop's price starts to go up. And I think I was up like $2,000. In $2,000, so like what's $2,000 to you? That sounds like a lot of money. Yeah, I mean, I've never had a ton of money at once. To me, obviously, that's a lot of money. Cody bought GameStop at an average price of around $40.

So the day it hit $350 was a big day. Cody was up like $25,000. I mean, it wasn't, I'm not a good answer. doing anything crazy. I mean, it was more of just kind of a little happy dance type thing. So, to sum up, Cody likes Wall Street bets, people on Wall Street bets like GameStop, Cody buys GameStop, Cody makes money. That story makes perfect sense to me. But that's not David versus Goliath. It doesn't sound like Cody bought GameStop to stick it to the man. It sounds like he bought GameStop because he thought he'd make money. And he did. But this is where things get really

interesting. Because after Cody invested, after he bought GameStop, his investment became a David versus Goliath story. Where did like sticking it to the hedge funds fit into like the list of reasons why you were interested in being part of the GameStop pump? Originally that wasn't really part of it, but then like when I wrote that whole piece, I guess, about how we're fighting the hedgies. I mean, to avenge our fathers type thing. I mean, that was definitely a big part of it. Cody is talking about something he posted on a Wall Street bet's comment thread the day after the stock hit the $350 mark. On January 28th, he wrote, in part, I am holding to ensure my parents can live comfortable lives at the expense of the assholes that almost cost them their lives.

This is for you, Dad. Cody explained to me that his family lost a lot of money in the financial crash. My dad got really screwed over in 08, and I do want to say, see these hedges suffer. I mean, like I said, kind of almost a spiritual successor to occupy Wall Street at this point where it's like we're instead of literary occupying it, we are going to bankrupt you. Now, Cody's just one guy, but for me, he's the kind of GameStop investor I hadn't heard about as much in all the coverage. Somebody whose reasons for participating in the GameStop squeeze were too complicated to fit a simple narrative. I found that,

other people like that too. I had my baby and I was just like, you know, I want to do something kind of exciting just for fun. I want to get involved in this. I would be lying if I said it didn't scratch a niche, but there are a lot of things that scratch a niche. I love playing video games. I love playing chess. If it doesn't have to be gambling, it doesn't have to be money oriented.

I'm great at finding things to become obsessive about. I think like the progressive left really tried to pick up on this and paint it as like the working class rising up. And it wasn't any of that. It was not political. That's Sarah Henry, also a GameStop investor, also a Wall Street Betts user, although... I hate Wall Street Beds. I think the people there are awful.

They are awful people. They are absolutely awful people. And if you just simply like zen out your mind and go like, I'm not going to pay attention to any of that. I just want you to say this is what I think is going to happen with gold and silver commodities in the next six months. why I am playing long. Here's my due diligence. Getting involved in GameStop definitely paid off for Sarah.

So my initial investment was $6,000. My total winnings were about $28,000. So I came out of the whole thing with $22,000 in net profit. By the way, if you're wondering why it sounds like Sarah's camping, it's because she kind of is. She lives in an RV that she drives around Europe and she makes money investing. And the way she described her decision to invest in GameStop, it stuck with me. My initial buy-in was just simply based on the fact that this felt like a thing that was going to happen. And it did.

It felt like something was going to happen, and it did. That maybe sounds like a really arbitrary reason to do anything. But it's also maybe the closest to anyone I talked to came to expressing why I bought GameStop. on January 27th. I mean, look, a lot of what happens online can seem deeply weird, and it can feel comforting to try to say that there's some simple

ideology behind it. A bunch of people wanted to take down Wall Street banks, so they got together on this subreddit and decided to buy a bunch of GameStop. But that story doesn't capture why every one of us participated in this movement, especially not at first. I think in many, many aspects of life,

and especially in many aspects, of online life, ideology is a retroactive fit. I ran this theory by Andrew Morantz. Andrew is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and he wrote a book about online communities called Anti-Social. I think this is true of everyone that, like, it's about the rocket ship emojis. It's about the like memes.

That is like honestly how most of us form our decisions. And then to say, like, I did this because of the financial crash. It's like, okay, maybe to some extent you did. Like, really, was that really your primary motivation? Like, it just seems like that's not actually how life works. When we talked, Andrew had just come across a quote from the literary critic Lionel Trilling from his book, The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950. And it's exactly about this aspect of the internet.

I just read this, like, this morning. But it says, ideology is not acquired by thought, as he put it, but by breathing the haunted air. It is a strange, submerged life of habit and semi-habit. in which to ideas we attach strong passions, but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences. Now, if you followed the GameStop story at the time, you know that there are many other chapters here. Robin Hood and a couple of other platforms

eventually started limiting users' ability to buy GameStop stock. Politicians got angry. Congress held hearings. And some people started to wonder if maybe the whole squeeze might have been manipulated by those same rich traders that Wall Street bets people thought they were sticking it to. things on the internet. Never as simple as you want them to be. At any rate, there are a lot more of us in the market now than there were before. In addition to the Robin Hood app, there's Fidelity, e-trade,

other platforms that let people like me trade stock, commission-free, and Wall Street bets has gone from around 2 million subscribers at the beginning of the year to around 10 million now. So whether or not I'm part of an ideological movement, I'm definitely part of a financial movement. I asked Sheila Cole Hattcar about this, what's been called the democratization of finance. Would you anticipate that GameStop is going to be the last convulsion like this that we're going to see, driven by this new flood of retail investors? I think what the GameStop thing proved is that how easy it is for something like this to happen. All it takes is a little bit of momentum to build on one of these websites or on some other,

platform. So in fact, I think we should be expecting to see many more episodes like this. And in fact, I think it's going to be happening a lot more. I think now that all these tools are in everyone's hands, it's going to shake things up. As for me, I ended up selling my 1.09-0222-2 shares of GameStop. I took a loss of $155. I was too late to the game. But I'm not going to stay. But I'm not going to Stop investing. There are other opportunities like GameStop. Just in the last month, retail investors have driven up the price of AMC movie theaters more than 500%. I mean, with so many new people in the market, who knows what could happen?

Yeah, basically, I'm now invested like $40,000 into like half meme stocks, half ETS. I would totally do it again, maybe even three times a year now. We're not talking about a short squeeze anymore. This is now a fight. It's now a revolution because all of Wall Street Betts is here. So, I mean, there's still a very, very large amount of people in this where it should work out if things go our way. That story came from Alex Barron, a producer on our program, and you can read Sheila Colhattcar on Robin Hood Investors and much more about the world of business at New Yorker.com. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening and have a great week. We also want to say a special thank you this week to WNYC's Emily Miner.

best of luck emily we'll miss you the new yorker radio hour is a co-production of w nyc studios and the new yorker our theme music was composed and performed by merrill garbus of tune arts with additional music by alexis quadrado the new yorker radio hour is supported in part by the charina endowment fund