Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America, Part 1 ► Russell Moore

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and even inspired.

Russell Moore has become one of the foremost minds and voices in the evangelical community in the United States and now Editor in Chief of the major evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Russell has navigated the rough rapids of religious controversy in the past few years and has survived to tell the story, unafraid to enter into any social or political issue. His latest book, Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America, is critical to understanding what is happening in the American church today. I hope you’ll enjoy part one of my interview with Russell Moore. With Russell Moore. Russell Moore, what a joy to have you with us on evangelical 360.

Russell Moore

Well, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Stiller

Well, Russell, I must say that your book “Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America,” I consider a bit of a bombshell. I thought it would be a fairly gentle entry into the issues that you are facing in America, but you take it on with a fair bit of force. Why does America need an altar call?

Russell Moore

The way that I think about an alter call is the combination of both a sense of let’s take seriously what’s happening and let’s deal honestly with what’s happening, and a kind of hope for the future and a redirection. And that’s the way that, growing up in the kind of revivalistic evangelicalism that I did. There are some, obviously, there are some drawbacks to that in all kinds of ways. But there’s the weekly altar call, I think, focused us every week to reminding ourselves we’re sinners, we’re accountable, we’re standing before the judgment seat of Christ and God’s grace is everywhere and the people around us. We’re not going to give up on anybody this side of death. So I think that altar call contains both of those realities and I think we need both of them right now.

Brian Stiller

America is losing their religion, but I’m wondering if evangelicals are losing the core of their described faith, which is it? Or is it both?

Russell Moore

The sense in which I use the language of losing our religion is a double sense, and so what I see is both the losing of religion in the traditional way that we think of it, with rates of secularization not just outside the church but within the church, not just outside the church but within the church but also that sense of disillusionment and disenchantment that easily could tip itself over into cynicism and that’s one of the things that I worry about the most is a kind of hardened cynicism that can manifest itself in more than one way. It can manifest itself in the way we typically think of it, which is a that means we’re not going to have anything to do with religious institutions anymore because they’ve disappointed us. I think that’s a mistake. But there’s another kind of cynicism that says, well, let’s just play the game the way that it’s played right now, and that’s a danger. When it comes to evangelicalism, I mean, one of the problems is that the word itself is so undefined in American life right now.

I think about a couple years ago I was teaching a class on a very, very secular university and I had my friend, Tim Keller, went to be with the Lord last year, join me one day and one of the students said to him why do you want to keep the word evangelical when it has become so associated with scandal and politicization and all of these other sorts of things? And Tim’s response was to say, well, because most of us are in Asia and Africa and Latin America and elsewhere and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called. And the student said fair enough and sat down and I pondered that later and I thought you know, the most important thing that Tim said was us, and we in that conversation, to say there’s a much bigger world to gospel Christianity, and I encounter especially younger evangelical Christians. I’m hard-pressed to find one who wants to use the kind of Christian, the kind of Christianity that we hold, with that particular emphasis on the need for new birth and the authority of Scripture. There needs to be a word for that. So I’m not ready to give up evangelical just yet.

Brian Stiller

Russell, I was in another country I won’t name and there was a pastor of a small church in another religious majority country and his church was being attacked. He was being attacked and finally he went to the head of that particular religious community and described himself as being an evangelical and they thought it was some kind of sect when he described it was a part of a 600 million community worldwide. All of a sudden they understood his ideas and his faith had global presence and it changed everything.

Russell Moore

Well, that’s true. Richard Mao said one time about denominations, christ. But each denomination is almost like a monastic order, the way that the old monastic orders would take a vow to emphasize something. So the Franciscans would say we take a vow If nobody else cares about the poor. We’re going to remind the rest of the body of Christ to care about the poor, and his concept was. A similar thing happens where Presbyterians have taken a vow. We’re going to emphasize the sovereignty of God, the Lutherans. We’re going to emphasize justification by faith, the Pentecostals. We’re going to emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit, and I think evangelicalism is like that too. We’re responsible to remind the rest of the body of Christ that people come before God, not nation by nation or tribe by tribe, or nationality by nationality or family by family, but person by person. That’s an important thing to maintain and we have the responsibility to do that.

Brian Stiller

Give us your working definition of evangelicals, at least in America.

Russell Moore

I would say Orthodox Christians, small o, orthodox Christians who emphasize the personal. And so there’s the emphasis upon the personal need for union with Christ. You must be born again, the personal nature of Scripture. Bible is speaking, not just in general abstractions, but the Bible is speaking to you. This is an authority over you, the need for each person within the body of Christ to carry that message personally. Now what tends to happen is what people want is to say well, we want a hard definition so that we can immediately know who’s in and who’s out of evangelicalism that doesn’t work, because evangelical is just shorthand. Evangelicalism that doesn’t work because evangelical is just shorthand. It’s just a shorthand to try to describe not an institution or a set of institutions, but a kind of revival movement. So it’s going to be fuzzy and to some degree undefined.

Brian Stiller

You come from the Southern Baptist, which is the largest evangelical denomination in the US. But how would you say the evangelical church is doing overall?

Russell Moore

Well, there are a couple of things going on there. One is, if you look at secularization rates of people who are claiming no religious affiliation, that’s been relatively stable over the last two or three years, but it’s been a dramatic rise from 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So that’s a new reality. And one of the things that makes it hard to know, numerically kind of where anything stands right now is that there’s a new kind of cultural Christianity that has emerged in the United States. So for most of the 20th century, in most parts of the country, somebody had to be nominally a Christian in order to be a regular person, had to be nominally a Christian in order to be a regular person. So you needed to be able to say I’m a Methodist, I’m a Presbyterian, I’m a Catholic, I’m a Baptist and whatever, and have a church to which you belong, even if you don’t really believe or practice anything. That kind of cultural Christianity has changed, but it’s morphed into something else, which is a kind of Christian identity that is not connected to Christian community. So you will have people who have no church connection at all but who are posting Christian memes on social media and who think of themselves not just as Christians but as evangelical Christians. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s very hard for surveys and polls to identify evangelical Christians, because you have some of the people who fit most the typical definition of evangelical, theologically and in terms of practice, who don’t want to call themselves that, and you have a lot of other people who don’t theologically or in terms of practice meet any of the qualifications of evangelical but who identify themselves that way because they think of it as a cultural or a political identity. So that makes it difficult to analyze.

And then you add to it what you’re seeing in American evangelical life is a very marked decline for the denominations. Now that’s true across the board. Almost every denomination in the United States, whether evangelical or mainline or anything else, is in decline. But what you have rising are non-denominational churches and networks, networks. And so you look at who are the real. If you want to look at it in the terms of winners and losers, who are the real winners in the decline in denominational identity? It’s non-denominational churches. And that’s actually even more the case than people know, because it’s not just the number of people who are in non-denominational churches but the number of people who think they’re in non-denominational churches. Now there are a lot of churches that are affiliated with the denomination, but no one would know that until they’re very, very close in the church. So there’s a non-denominational vibe on top of a non-denominational reality.

Brian Stiller

Russell, would the mega church fit into that as well?

Russell Moore

The mega churches that tend to be growing are non-denominational. That’s been the case for a while. There are exceptions, but for the most part and you have relative stability with what we think of as mega churches because they have resources. So I often say to people I’m not. If you’re just looking at existential sort of survival issues, I’m not worried about the mega churches that have so many resources to be able to navigate whatever challenges they have. I’m not really worried about the small churches that are already accustomed to dealing with difficulty. It’s the middle group because a lot of times you’ll see an evangelical congregation. They don’t know that they’re in crisis because the money hasn’t dried up. But you look at who’s actually giving the money and they’re in the oldest quadrant there and so you have people who are going to be in an immediate crisis that’s going to seem to them to come out of nowhere. Those are the churches I’m most concerned about.

Brian Stiller

The history of evangelicalism in North America and indeed the world was highlighted by Billy Graham as a statesman, as a great evangelist. The witness of Christ in our culture often came by way of public declaration and events and initiatives. But I’m wondering with the younger generation, is it an issue of intellectual credibility? Is it an issue of social convenience? What is at the cutting edge of the church, growth and the witness of Christ?

Russell Moore

Well, there are a couple of things going on at once. I mean, one of those things is a technological revolution. So, if you think about Billy Graham, for instance, billy Graham was able to utilize new at the time, cutting-edge technologies to be able to organize crusades worldwide, to be able to speak to people over television and radio and use every medium available. Look at, though, the way that there has been a fragmentation in every part of global life when it comes to media. Taylor Swift is one of the most well, maybe the most successful musician singer in the world right now, and is only a fraction of what the Beatles were in terms of audience. Why is that the case? Were in terms of audience. Why is that the case? Because you had, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s everybody was focused on, for the most part, the same outlets of media. In a way, that is just not true now. The options and the fragmentation is everywhere. So it’s Billy Graham would not do the same thing that he did in the 1950s and carried on all the way through, were he starting out right now. That would be impossible to do. And then you add to that the fact that we’re moving into an even more uncertain time with artificial intelligence and these sorts of things, yet ahead of being a presence in the new technology that’s going to be around Finding ways to do evangelism through AI or in the metaverse and these other things that seem to most people to be almost a Blade Runner, science fiction type of stuff. But it’s very difficult to do. So you’ve got that reality here and then you add to it something else. So you asked about intellectual credibility. That usually was the case when I started in ministry.

If a young person who grew up in the church came to me and said I’m losing my faith, I’m walking away from Christ, it typically was for one of two reasons. It was either because the person is saying I can’t believe in the supernatural anymore. I can’t believe that a virgin became pregnant. I can’t believe that a dead man came back to life. I can’t believe in miracles. I can’t believe that a dead man came back to life. I can’t believe in miracles.

Or it’s because someone is saying I don’t agree with the church’s strictness on moral issues, now usually dealing with sex. I want to be free from that. Those were usually the reasons that would be given. I almost never hear either of those reasons. Now it’s almost always in terms of authenticity.

So it’s not that people have cognitive trouble with believing the Christian message, it’s that they don’t believe it’s real. What they’re saying is what a Roman Catholic man said to me after living through the sexual abuse crises in the Catholic Church, and he said I just I don’t go to mass anymore, and it’s not because I don’t believe what my church teaches. It’s that I don’t believe my church believes what my church teaches. Been the case if you look at not just the sheer number of revelations of scandal, but behind that, the suspicion that the religion itself is just a means to some other end, and what we have seen. Look at, for instance, the trajectory of the mainline. Once someone determines, well, this religious practice is a means to some end, they’re going to figure out what the end is. Even if they like it, they can pursue it without giving up a Sunday morning, and so that is, I think, where the real challenge is right now.

Brian Stiller

Let me ask you about the message itself, the popularity of Joel Osteen and the positive thinking that emerged from Robert Shuller. Thinking that emerged from Robert Shuller, in what way is that accessing people to believe or diluting the very call of Christ in the way of the cross?

Russell Moore

Well, there’s always been a temptation and a pull to a prosperity gospel of whatever sort, gospel of whatever sort. And again, if you come back to that concept of the religion being a means to an earthly end, that’s very appealing to say. If you do this, if you pray this way, if you come to these services, if you participate in these things, then God is going to give you what you really want, which is health and financial prosperity. Problem is, if people spend any time with the Bible itself, especially with the words of Jesus himself is an entrepreneurial sort of mind behind a prosperity gospel kind of Christianity that makes it very easy not just to maintain in the United States but to export all over the world. But you also have a lot of people who are saying to themselves wait, what is actually real? I mean, this is, it seems to me, the fundamental question that people are grappling with in a time when everything seems to be an illusion, so when they’re having a connection with actual historic Christianity and saying what is this? If I’m going to give my life to something, if I’m going to have a search for meaning and purpose, I want it to be in something real and something that is actually rooted. That’s where you have to have an evangelical Christianity that actually is biblically literate, historically rooted.

And I mean one of the problems that we have right now is there was a New Testament prof who said in a book and I think about it all the time when he said we have in our churches Bible quoters but not Bible readers, bible quoters but not Bible readers, and that immediately resonated with me not in any one tribe, I mean. We’ve seen that for a long time in the kind of Christianity that you’re describing here, sort of slogans from Bible let no weapon formed against you prosper, that sort of thing. But it also happens in the more theologically rigorous sorts of communities that know the Bible in terms of pulling from the Bible to make arguments about contemporary controversies, but who don’t actually know the storyline of Scripture. And that, I think, is a real challenge. And the good news, as I see it, is that when I’m talking to 20-something Christians on college campuses and everywhere else, the questions they’re asking are very different from the questions they would have been asking 15 years ago.

15 years ago it would have been how do I understand the relationship of predestination to free will, for instance? Now what they’re starting with. Now what they’re starting with. How do I pray, how do I actually read the Bible, when my attention span has been so atrophied in all kinds of ways because of the technological and media environment that we’re in right now? Well, I see that as a good sign, because people are recognizing this is a genuine challenge, but they’re also recognizing that they want to seek after that kind of life.

Brian Stiller

You understand that, generation after generation, they will take what their parents believed and they will attempt to make sense of it, at least within their own culture, their own language and their own level of belief. And so often the word is deconstruction. People are deconstructing their faith. But as a theologian, when you see the younger generation both in a deconstructive and a reconstructive mood of what they believe, what guidance would you give them theologically, as they are attempting to refine their faith over against what they inherited from the previous generation?

Russell Moore

Well, the first thing would be to ask someone what he or she means by deconstruction, because the word has become so porous. Some people mean by deconstruction losing the faith altogether. Some people mean I’m re-examining how much of what I’ve inherited is real and how much of it was just assumption and there’s everything in between. So I think the best analogy that I can think of I was having a conversation with Yuval Levin, a friend of mine who’s a he’s a political scientist, philosopher context the difference between childish, juvenile or mature. This is when you, when you have a childish response. If you think about when you’re a child, relating to your parents, you think that everything that your parents say to you or or do is default, right and and you, you accept it at complete face value. There’s a juvenile sort of response where an adolescent will say everything that my parents did was wrong. And then there’s a maturity that comes about later that starts to say much of what my parents did was actually right and good and true. Here are some things that they did that I don’t want to repeat, that I can see weren’t good or true. That’s a mature response.

And I think the same thing is true when we’re dealing with a theological legacy which is to do what the Bible’s always told us to do test everything, hold fast to that which is good. But what has to happen is we have to always be on guard against our particular vulnerabilities. So there are some people who are more vulnerable to a gullibility sort of a naive acceptance of anything put in front of them. Some people are more vulnerable to a kind of cynicism and suspicion and rejection of everything. You have to kind of know that about yourself in order to guard against it and in order to look afresh at what the Scripture is teaching.

And I think that there’s a tendency sometimes for people to say, because what I have experienced is not good or not Christ-like or not truthful, then that means that the message of Scripture itself is to be rejected. But if you look at the New Testament itself, there is no idealized picture of the church. In the New Testament Jesus says before his crucifixion here are the kinds of things that are going to happen. I’m telling you this ahead of time so that you won’t be surprised.

Brian Stiller

Russell Moore, thank you so much for your time, your generosity, your ideas, for the leadership that you offer to so many of us. We’re grateful for the time you’ve given us and the wisdom you’ve shared with us, and we look forward to further conversations. Thank you so much, thank you.

Russell Moore

Thanks for having me.

Brian Stiller

Thank you for listening to part one of my interview with Russell Moore. To listen to part two, just search and subscribe to evangelical 360 on YouTube. If you have found this valuable, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a like. We would appreciate it if you would share it with your friends and colleagues as well. You’ll find links in the show notes of this episode for anything we’ve discussed today. If you haven’t signed up yet to receive my free Dispatches from the Global Village, it’s an opportunity to join me and meet leaders in many different countries around the world. It’s also a wonderful way to stay in touch with upcoming episodes and guests. Just go to brianstiller.com. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

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