Calls Mount For Evangelical Publication To Retract Article Likening Kyle Rittenhouse To ‘Mass Shooter’

Calls are mounting for evangelical publication The Gospel Coalition to address a piece that called Kyle Rittenhouse an “armed mass shooter,” like the Charleston church shooter.

On Friday afternoon, Kyle Rittenhouse — an eighteen-year-old who killed two men and injured a third while defending himself during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin — was cleared of multiple murder charges. Since the August 2020 incident, left-leaning journalists, politicians, and celebrities have used the Rittenhouse case as evidence that the United States and its institutions are irreparably and systemically racist.

Among these voices was The Gospel Coalition — which, before the onset of COVID-19, the death of George Floyd, and the most recent presidential election, largely had a reputation for upholding conservative theological convictions grounded in the Reformed tradition. Amid the tumult of 2020, however, The Gospel Coalition accelerated its surrender to “wokeness” — more regularly publishing content that borrows progressive terminology like “systemic racism” and “microaggression.”

In this context, K. Edward Copeland — a council member of The Gospel Coalition and an Illinois-based pastor — published an article called “Why I Hate August” that joined the Left in arguing that Rittenhouse benefited from an implicit form of privilege:

Kyle Rittenhouse killed people in the middle of the street (on camera and in front of witnesses) and then, smoking rifle at his side, casually strolled past law enforcement. He didn’t run away. He didn’t hide. He showed no fear. He assumed there was something about his person that would allow him to approach law enforcement with a visible semi-automatic weapon that had just taken lives — and live to tell about it. More than a few witnesses pointed out that he had just shot several people. Yet he was able to leave the scene and the state.

Copeland placed Rittenhouse in the same category as the Charleston church shooter — a white supremacist who murdered nine African American churchgoers during a 2015 service in Charleston, South Carolina:

When armed mass shooters (Kyle Rittenhouse, [Charleston church shooter], etc.) are apprehended without incident, and unarmed black people are killed out of fear that they might be armed, we have a more insidious problem than “a few bad apples.” This thing is cultural, pervasive, and abominable.

Per Daily Wire policy, the Charleston church shooter will not be named, and quotes containing his name have been altered to read: [Charleston church shooter].

Despite Rittenhouse’s acquittal, Copeland’s assertion has neither been removed nor addressed by The

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