If you don’t know who Russell Moore is, you’re not missing much. He used to be a big shot in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and last year became the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. He left the SBC amid some controversy in 2020 and eventually took over at Christianity Today. He’s a Christian, along with people like David French, leftist elite society loves. He writes for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, among other establishment organs of the approved secular cultural and political narratives. To say the least, he is not a fan of the MAGA movement thinking it’s infected the Evangelical church and as he argues has created a crisis for the church. He writes of this “crisis” in a July article in The Atlantic, and since my last two pieces were about “gospel losers,” I figured it would be important to continue the theme of the biblical contrast to such anti-cultural engagement Christianity.
Like the young pastor Poythress in my previous posts, Moore believes in a personal pietistic kind of Christianity, and thinks cultural and political engagement is poison to the true mission of the church. As with other people who think like him, he is good at setting up straw men (a logical fallacy) so he can mow them down. The Christians he criticizes are caricatures in his imagination. He condemns people like me, but what he says I believe is inaccurate and untrue. The straw man strategy is an effective way to get people who already agree with you to agree with you, which is why he writes for leftist publications, and Christianity Today has lamentably become one of those. He doesn’t know any populist-nationalist (MAGA) conservative Christians like me because if he did he couldn’t write pieces like this in good faith. I’m not going to go through the paragraphs like I did in my previous posts, but give a couple examples of his straw men and false choice assertions, and argue for the biblical position. Which, by the way, can be proved without doubt by the history of the church. Here is the very first paragraph:
The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.
I will assume he’s being honest here and not using this to simply make a rhetorical point. If it is true, he needs to talk to more young Evangelicals. And beware of anyone who uses the phrase “internet conspiracy theories” to discredit others. We’ve seen the last several years how the globalist deep state elites used this to try to stifle dissent and anything against the accepted “narratives.” You can see in the last sentence he embraces a personalized pietistic faith that shouldn’t get too involved in politics. He asserts a false choice typical of such thinking: it’s either “culture-war politics” or prayer and the Bible. It is not. Here is the most egregious straw many setup:
Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age.
Really? Can you give me some proof of this, Russell? He can’t because they don’t exist except in his imagination. He uses the word nostalgia four times in the piece to make his point, which only makes it weaker. As he says, “The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous.” I wonder how dangerous it really is when nobody actually believes it! I’ll quote two more sentences that show how committed his is to a personalized pietistic Christianity.
Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.
It doesn’t surprise me that Moore accuses those Christians he disagrees with as being “authoritarians.” Since the New Left arose in the 1960s they’ve used the “authoritarian” card to discredit and try to silence Christians who dare bring their faith into the public square. Unlike the leftists, Christians are supposed to leave their faith at home, and apparently Moore agrees with them. This is especially targeted at Christians who want their Christian faith and worldview reflected in how our nation is governed. That he is using leftwing rhetoric to discredit fellow Christians is reprehensible.
Lastly, he says the answer is “a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.” He won’t get any argument from me there, but we mean something completely different by “personal faith.” The distinction of what “personal faith” is gets to the nature of the Christian faith and the heart of the issue. Pietism has been a disaster for the church and its influence in Western culture. This movement of 17th century German Lutheranism in due course influenced Evangelical Christianity in a way that divorced faith from life beyond the Christian’s personal piety. In other words, personal holiness and devotion, prayer, Bible study, church, etc. are such a priority that everything else pales in comparison. As you can see from Moore, even being concerned, or engaged in things like politics or “culture wars” distorts Christianity from what he thinks is its true purpose, personal transformation. The problem with this view is that it is not only not biblical, but an extreme distortion of the gospel. Cultural influence at every level, including politics, is baked into the gospel cake.
Christians in the first centuries of the church declaring “Jesus is Lord” was a loaded political statement. Unlike modern pietistic Christians, the ancient church knew there was no such thing as a “neutral” society. Someone had to be Lord, and it would be either Caesar or Christ. Many of these early Christians gave their lives because they understood the Christian faith was not at all just personal, but had ramifications for all of life. It wouldn’t be until the rise of the Enlightenment in the 17th century that secularism began its attack on Christian Western civilization which by the 20th century introduced the concept of neutrality, or as it is rightly called, the myth of neutrality. That Christians bought into, and still do, this myth has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West over that last sixty plus years. Secularism reigns in our day, and because it does Christians who venture into the public square declaring God’s law and word as applicable to everything are attacked as “authoritarians,” among other epithets. As long as we accept our place at the pluralistic table and keep our faith respectfully private, we can occasionally scrape up some cultural crumbs to keep us happy. Russell Moore obviously agrees with the secularists.
Jesus clearly said (Matt. 28:16-20) because he was given all authority that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. This is also the same Jesus who said we are to live on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4), and who declared that the entire Old Testament was about him (Luke 24). From the moment God called Abram out of Ur to make for himself a people (Gen. 12), the faith of His people had radical implications for all of life, both personal and societal. How could it not! Human beings live in communities, live as peoples, as nations, and some worldview, some ultimate source will be authoritative. In the West, which includes most of the world today, that source is either God in Christ revealed in His Word, or man. There is no in between, as badly as Russell Moore wants to think there is.
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